David Byrne pays loving tribute to Jonathan Demme
The Talking Heads frontman remembers his friend Jonathan Demme, the great filmmaker who directed the near perfect Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense
One thing is clear following the recent death of Jonathan Demme: the filmmaker was deeply loved. He passed away on Wednesday morning, age 73, from oesophageal cancer, and since the news broke, the internet has been full of stories of his kindness, generosity and joy for life.
Demme got his start, as many of the great filmmakers who emerged in the late-60s and 70s did, making exploitation films for Roger Corman. While many of these pictures have not aged well thanks to their slapdash storytelling and sexist attitudes to their female characters, Demme’s efforts still sing.
His first directing gig was on 1974’s Caged Heat, which was part of a cycle of women-in-prison films produced by Corman’s company New World. While it contains all of the tawdry elements one would expect from such a picture, Demme’s keen eye for kitsch details and his deep love and respect for his kickass female characters means the film comes off as almost feminist in retrospect.
Demme clearly learned a lot from his mentor Corman, who would often turn up in cameos in Demme’s pictures. “I was friends with Jonathan Demme for over 40 years,” said Corman on Twitter. “His greatness as a filmmaker is only exceeded by his greatness as a human being.”
Jodie Foster won her second best actress Oscar playing Clarice Starling in Demme’s most celebrated film, Silence of the Lambs, and she had some wonderful words for her director on that 1991 horror: “I am heart-broken to lose a friend, a mentor, a guy so singular and dynamic you’d have to design a hurricane to contain him,” she said in her statement. “Jonathan was as quirky as his comedies and as deep as his dramas. He was pure energy, the unstoppable cheerleader for anyone creative. Just as passionate about music as he was about art, he was and will always be a champion of the soul. JD, most beloved, something wild, brother of love, director of the lambs. Love that guy. Love him so much.”
Demme’s career was hugely eclectic. After his start on the cheap B-movies with Corman, he went on to have one of the most unpredictable and rewarding careers in Hollywood. He made fizzy comedies (Citizen’s Band aka Handle with Care), screwball thrillers (Something Wild, Married to the Mob), moving dramas (Beloved, Philadelphia), oddball indies (Melvin and Howard, Rachel Getting Married), and inventive reinterpretations of classic films (The Manchurian Candidate, Charade remake The Truth about Charlie), all the while demonstrating an irrepressible visual style and a compassion for his characters.
Beyond the huge critical and commercial success of Silence of the Lambs, Demme is perhaps best known, however, for his genius at capturing live musical performances. His joyous concert docs include films for Robyn Hitchcock (Storefront Hitchcock), Neil Young (Heart of Gold, Trunk Show, Journeys) and Justin Timberlake (Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids), but the best of the lot, and for our money the best concert doc of all time, was his Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense.
Filmed in 1984 while Demme was having a rough time on studio project Swing Shift, it’s a film full of creativity that takes clear joy in showing David Byrne and his band performing their art. It begins with Byrne alone on an empty stage with a guitar and a boombox singing Psycho Killer, and with each subsequent track an element is added on stage – a new band member, a new instrument, a new stage prop – until a full, rioutus party is taking place.
In addition to all the tributes to Demme over the last few days, Byrne chimed in with his memories of working with him on Stop Making Sense. “I met Jonathan in the ‘80s when Talking Heads were touring a show that he would eventually film and turn into Stop Making Sense,” Byrne wrote. “While touring, I thought the show had turned out well and might hold up as a movie, and a mutual friend introduced us.”
Byrne was already a fan of Demme’s work: “I loved his films Melvin and Howard and Citizens Band (aka Handle with Care). From those movies alone, one could sense his love of ordinary people. That love surfaces and is manifest over and over throughout his career.”
Byrne also writes how Demme was a huge music lover: “That’s obvious in his films too – many of which are jam-packed with songs by the often obscure artists he loved. He’d find ways to slip a reggae artist’s song or a Haitian recording into a narrative film in ways that were often joyous and unexpected.”
He also reveals that Demme "was also incredibly generous during the editing and mixing. He and producer Gary Goetzman made us in the band feel included; they wanted to hear what we had to say. That inclusion was hugely inspirational for me. Though I had directed music videos before, this mentoring of Jonathan’s emboldened me to try making a feature film."
Byrne's full eulogy for Jonathan Demme can be found on Byrne's website. Watch a clip from Stop Making Sense below, and read why we think it's "the Citizen Kane of concert movies" here.