October 27, 2002 - NY Times
The Happy Hipster of Film By DAVID EDELSTEIN
In Jonathan Demme's giddy new romantic thriller, "The Truth About Charlie,"
the camera careers around the streets of Paris as if drunk on the city's
color, sound and humanity. Now and then it loiters over a face: a street
vendor, a musician, an exuberant young girl, an old woman with an enigmatic
smile. There seem to be no extras, only characters from movies yet to be
made.
The film is based on Stanley Donen's "Charade" (1963), treasured mostly
for scenes of Audrey Hepburn purring over the mystery man played by Cary
Grant in his last gasp of Cary Grant-ness. Mr. Demme's version, which features
Thandie Newton, Mark Wahlberg and a swarm of international actors, has
an overflowing spirit of its own. It is a testament to its director's omnivorous
humanism: Mr. Demme tries to cram in the maximum amount of life per square
inch of movie screen.
At 57, he looks closer to 25, and is still in the throes of a youthful
infatuation with movies, music and multiculturalism that has made him a
hipster hero to a generation of filmmakers and film-lovers — a sort of
rock 'n' roll Jean Renoir.
He is a director of impassioned documentaries; a champion of Haitian
art, music and political reform; a friend to rock stars and avant-garde
artists; the maker of the most rapturous rock movie, the Talking Heads'
concert film, "Stop Making Sense" (1984), and an Oscar winner for "The
Silence of the Lambs" (1991).
When he bounds out of the editing room of his rambling Rockland County-based
production company, Clinica Estetico, he's wearing a faded T-shirt with
the logo of the synth-pop group Book of Love. It could be the emblem for
his work. It's not that his movies are sappy; it's that they're open, porous.
In a medium that attracts overcontrolling personalities, Mr. Demme lives
to let go.
"I love putting the movie in the hands of the actors," he says. "I am
so in awe of what they do."
It would be easy to inject something flip here about Mr. Demme's apparently
bottomless bonhomie. But the fruits of his aesthetic are hard to deride.
His humanism is manifest in works as disparate as "Melvin and Howard" (1980),
a sympathetic meditation on the American dream of getting rich quick; "Something
Wild" (1986), a screwball comedy that edges overpoweringly into violence;
and "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991), a serial-killer picture grounded
in sorrow.
"The Silence of the Lambs" made his name in Hollywood, but it is a mark
of his ambivalence about its brutality that he was unwilling to sign onto
"Hannibal" (2001), the Grand Guignol circus that was its sequel. He didn't
see "Hannibal" — or the recent "Red Dragon," an adaptation of the first
Thomas Harris novel to feature Hannibal Lecter. He speaks of the young
F.B.I. agent Clarice Starling (played in "Silence" by Jodie Foster) the
way one might of a family member who has met with a terrible accident.
"If you can be in love with fictional characters, I'm in love with Clarice
Starling," he says. "And I was really heartbroken to see what became of
her during that passage of her life in 'Hannibal.' I have a funny feeling
that Tom Harris may feel like our culture has become so corrupt that someone
with Clarice's qualities is doomed to fall from grace.
"There was no way I could go along on that journey."
Instead, he made the more buoyantly life-affirming "Truth About Charlie,"
which opened on Friday. He was inspired, he says, by a screening of the
"Charade" DVD for his staff on "movie night" — a weekly ritual in which
the phones are turned off and the filmmakers become film students. It hit
him that a remake would be a terrific vehicle for Ms. Newton, who had played
the demonic title wraith of his 1998 film, "Beloved."
"I was determined to work with Thandie again," says Mr. Demme, seeming
to relish the opportunity to gush. "She's a magical person. She's fearless;
she's incredibly imaginative; and she's very, very, very, very smart. She's
a charming, funny, deep young woman, and there are no boundaries on her
gifts as an actress. She has only played period roles or outsiders, and
I was searching for a good contemporary part. I wasn't thinking `Audrey
Hepburn and Cary Grant.' I was thinking `Thandie.' "
He was also, he adds, thinking "woman in jeopardy," "delightfully convoluted
mystery" and "the new Paris," which hasn't been seen — or heard — in an
American movie.
"It's the most musically diverse city on earth, with musicians from
all over the Francophone world," he says. "I got so excited thinking of
all the performers playing instruments you've never heard of we could gather
together in a recording studio."
THERE was another reason "Charlie" appealed to Mr. Demme. In the 80's,
his feature films had a larky mood, a loose frame and a fondness for kitschy
Americana. But in the next decade they grew weightier and more deliberate.
There was the AIDS drama "Philadelphia" (1993), with its plea for tolerance,
made on the heels of gay protests over the transvestite psychopath of "The
Silence of the Lambs," and then the long, portentous "Beloved," starring
Oprah Winfrey and based on Toni Morrison's novel about the aftermath of
slavery, which was a box office dud.
Mr. Demme says he believes that the film's studio, Disney, pulled "Beloved"
too hastily from theaters, but admits that the movie, a co-production of
Ms. Winfrey's Harpo Films, had an element of "This is good for you, take
your medicine."
"We might have scared people off," he says.
"The Truth About Charlie" offered the chance to go back to the spirit
of the French New Wave and the rambunctious works of Jean-Luc Godard and
François Truffaut. "It's the kind of film you want to make when
you come out of film school," says Mr. Demme, who adds that he never went
to film school.
"But I was getting off on the movies of Wong Kar-Wai and Tom Tykwer's
'Run Lola Run,' which breaks all these rules you learn never to break.
It's full of shaky camera, jump cuts, unmotivated pans, unmotivated tracking
away from your subject. It works because it's startling — and not just
for cinéastes."
It reminded him, he says, of the first commandment of Roger Corman,
the B-movie mogul who gave Mr. Demme his first work as a director: "He'd
say, `Don't forget the viewer's eyeballs. That's the primary organ involved
in the cinema experience.' "
To cater to those eyeballs, Mr. Demme says he was lucky to find the
"wacky" Parisian camera operator Pierre Morel, who would come to him on
the set every morning and say, "What kind of crazy shots are we going to
do today, boss?"
Mr. Morel "had an incredible, intuitive relationship with the actors,"
says Mr. Demme. "He'd creep right up and dance with them. We'd do one take
where he'd just play and shoot whatever he wanted. Then we'd put an `earwig'
in his ear so I could watch the monitor and whisper stuff to him. It was
like I was riffing on the bass line he was laying down.
"It was such a joyful challenge," he adds. "When I watch the picture
I think, `Look at that Pierre Morel!' "
Carol Littleton, the editor on "The Truth About Charlie," says that
Mr. Demme took the same freewheeling approach in the cutting room. "He
never wants actors to seem as if they're saying lines," she says. "We used
things that other directors would consider mistakes. The last scene with
Mark and Thandie: there was a take where Thandie goofed up her lines and
laughed hilariously, and Jonathan said: `Oh! That, that, that! How can
we use that?'
"So we reconstructed the scene to have Mark say `I love you,' and Thandie
laugh wildly, as if to say, `Do you expect me to believe that?'
"There's also a shot of Mark sitting holding a package that was never
intended to be used. He was just waiting to hear `Action!' but he looked
so sweet and open and funny that we had to put it in the movie."
Mr. Demme's longtime cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto, says that serendipity
is the rule on Mr. Demme's films, not the exception. "Part of the mission
is to fly by the seat of our pants and take our inspiration from the actors
and locations," he says. "Jonathan will see someone on the street and go,
`That guy has character! Get his name! Get his number!' "
Other faces that show up in Mr. Demme's films are from his vast circle
of acquaintances, business associates and creative influences — so that
watching his movies is like looking through a scrapbook of his life. In
"The Truth About Charlie" Mr. Demme not only salutes Truffaut's "Shoot
the Piano Player" (1960) with an excerpt; he brings in its star, Charles
Aznavour, to serenade the lovers.
"Shoot the Piano Player," he says, was one of the first movies he reviewed
for the student newspaper at the University of Florida at Gainesville in
1965, after he flunked out of pre-veterinary chemistry classes. Rather
than slink back to Long Island (he was born in Rockville Centre), he stayed
in Florida and became a critic so that he could se movies free of charge.
"I remember the moment when a gangster tailing Aznavour tells a cop,
`If I'm lying may my mother fall dead' — and Truffaut cuts to the old lady
clutching her chest and collapsing on the floor and then goes back to the
scene," Mr. Demme recalls. "I mean, talk about movie magic! It was my introduction
to a whole other dimension of movies."
TWO years later, while working as a publicist, Mr. Demme had the job
of escorting Truffaut around New York while he was promoting his Hitchcockian
thriller "The Bride Wore Black" (1967). At the end of the week Mr. Demme
asked Mr. Truffaut to autograph his 1967 book of interviews with Alfred
Hitchcock.
"You've got to see this," says Mr. Demme. "This is so unbelievable."
He pulls the well-worn copy off a shelf in his library and opens to the
inscription, which reads: "Pour John Demme, before his first film, and
with mes amitiés. François Truffaut."
"I said, 'Um, François, I'm not interested in making my own movies,'
and he said, `Oh yes you are.' "
There is a moment in the credits of "Charlie" when the camera pans over
a piece of marble. "That's Truffaut's grave," says Mr. Demme. "It's got
a little red ribbon that says `Merci' on it."
There are many other cameos in the movie, both live and posthumous.
A photo of a dead stamp dealer is of the late Kenneth Utt, Mr. Demme's
baggy-eyed producer. (His widow is played by the director Agnès
Varda.) In one scene, a mysterious woman and a teenage girl dump some ashes
off the side of a bridge. The woman is the legendary Turkish-born actress
Magali Noel, the girl Mr. Demme's daughter, Ramona, now 14.
The ashes are of Marshall Lewis, the gregarious cinéaste who
ran the Bleecker Street Cinema in the 1960's and died in 1999. He was a
guru to Mr. Demme, who would drive up from Miami for long weekends of moviegoing.
"Marshall would take Truffaut and Godard behind the screen so they could
watch the audience watching their movies," says Mr. Demme. "Then he disappeared
— until Barbet Schroeder bumped into him on a nude beach north of San Francisco.
He wound up doing special projects for our company, and was an honorary
uncle to my kids. I thought scattering his ashes on screen was a lovely,
fitting end for a great cinephile."
It is no wonder that a director who prizes every face that appears in
his movies has a difficult time seeing his characters killed or injured.
Every death in "The Truth About Charlie" is presented as tragic, even those
of its more menacing characters. The last time Mr. Demme used gunplay for
laughs was in his broad Mafia farce, "Married to the Mob" (1988).
"The next movie I made that had guns was 'Silence of the Lambs,' and
that exchange of gunfire at the end between Jodie and the killer, Jame
Gumb, is clumsy, and blunt, and brutal. It was presented in such a way
to make absolutely sure that the audience wouldn't cheer because that gun
went off and killed Jame Gumb.
"The little boy in me can still find pleasure in excitingly presented
gunplay in movies, so I'm not judging anybody else's use of guns," he says.
"But it's tricky. If guns in our culture are a problem — and I think they
are — is using them so much and making gunplay so entertaining part of
that problem? It's certainly not part of the solution."
Will audiences feel cheated by the lack of an action payoff in "Charlie"?
Mr. Demme concedes that it's possible. "There's another Roger Corman rule,"
he says, "that your hero is only as strong as your villain. But villains
aren't interesting to me. I want to reveal the unexpected humanity that
people can identify with."
Mr. Demme says he hopes audiences will be sufficiently enchanted by
the affectionate embrace of "The Truth About Charlie" to suspend their
blood lust. The love on display for every member of tis huge ensemble is
his idea of family values.
Those family values are firmly in place at his company, Clinica Estetico,
where the atmosphere is exuberantly informal and the three children from
his marriage to the artist and set designer Joanne Howard come and go.
(In addition to Ramona, there is Brooklyn 12, and Josephine, 7.) He speaks
of talented young directors as if they're nephews and nieces, and bubbles
about a "golden age" from the likes of Alexander Payne, Paul Thomas Anderson,
Wes Anderson, Miguel Arteta, the Hughes brothers, Todd Haynes, Todd Solondz,
Rob Schmidt and Kasi Lemmons.
"His movies are the most fun to work on for everyone," says Mr. Fujimoto,
"from the people who drive the trucks to the producers to the actors. They
are the least pressure-packed. Anybody on the crew who has a suggestion,
Jonathan says, `Hey, let's hear it.' "
It's almost as if Mr. Demme, a believer in a spirit world and in the
notion of karma, couldn't bear the thought of bad feelings infusing the
celluloid.
But there wouldn't be bad feelings, says Mr. Fujimoto. "It couldn't
happen. He would stop shooting."
October 25, 2002 - Austin Chronicle
The Oscar-winning director takes a trip to the city of lights, love,
Tati, and Truffaut
Mr. Demme's Holiday BY MARJORIE BAUMGARTEN
Jonathan Demme seems like a director who takes enthusiastically to the
promotional circuit. He accepts the chores involved with selling a film
as an inherent part of the job. But more to the point, Demme is a person
who enjoys people in all their many manifestations, who enjoys making connections
with people and the locales to which he travels. You can imagine that wherever
he is, he is there with vim and joie de vivre, even if it's inside a hotel
interview suite being questioned by college journalists-in-training, slightly
scary Silence of the Lambs freaks, or jaded old entertainment-beat pros
looking for a current sound bite from an erstwhile Oscar winner.
But when the Austin Film Festival and Austin Film Society brought Demme
and his traveling crew came to Austin earlier this month to present The
Truth About Charlie at the Paramount Theatre, it was like they had come
home. Demme has been to Austin several times over the years, beginning
in the late Seventies (and including pre-production here on his Talking
Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense, in the Eighties). He has lots of
first-hand knowledge of the Austin filmmaking scene (he was probably the
first to select and present a package of Austin-made film shorts to New
York audiences in 1981), and has also been a longtime fan of our cornucopia
of music, food, and people. On the stage of the Paramount during the post-screening
Q&A, Demme completely won over the audience with his openness, charm,
and good humor. The highlight of the evening, however, came later, at the
afterparty at Antone's. Ray Benson and his band were pounding out their
patented Texas Swing, while Demme and his traveling group were dancing
the night away in between chatting with one and all. The band broke into
the old Marty Robbins standard "El Paso," and, before you knew it, Demme
sat down dead-center on the apron of the stage and started swaying and
singing along with the music. He knew all the words, had no inhibitions,
and looked, for all intents and purposes, like a man who might never find
greater happiness than he had at that particular moment. And don't be surprised
if you see Ray Benson, one of the newfound joys of Demme's life, pop up
in some future movie. Demme's path through Hollywood has never traveled
a direct line.
His new movie, The Truth About Charlie, is a remake of Stanley Donen's
thriller Charade. Demme discussed with me the process of making this film
in an interview published in our Oct. 4 issue (Something Wild). We talked
some more while he was in town, although in addition to discussing the
movie, we spoke in more general ways about his career and approach to filmmaking.
Demme has made studio films and documentaries, directed some TV and numerous
music videos. He cut his chops as a director under the tutelage of exploitation
king Roger Corman, and has gone on to work with everyone from Oprah Winfrey
to Tom Hanks. His constant -- an immense compassion for his characters
and their predicaments -- is evident in Charlie. In fact, particles from
his entire career are on display in this new work, beginning with the film's
opening shot -- a half-naked woman getting dressed after sex, no doubt
a holdover from the Corman school of reeling in viewers as assuredly as
possible. But like a good Jean Renoir movie, The Truth About Charlie has
no hateful characters -- not even the villains. Every character has his
or her reasons for behaving as they do. It's the untangling of their motivations
that provides the movie's thrill.
Austin Chronicle: When we talked recently about the genesis of The Truth
About Charlie, you described your desire to create a contemporary vehicle
for Thandie Newton. Looking at your career as a whole, you've created so
many great roles for women: The Silence of the Lambs, Married to the Mob,
Beloved, and Crazy Mama, to name a few. Has this been a conscious choice
on your part?
Jonathan Demme: I guess my antenna is definitely out. I'm much more
receptive to stories with women as central characters. And maybe that's
a response to as a kid not being interested in that -- seeking war movies
and Westerns and just anything with guys in it and the stuff you'd watch
on television, Maverick and Cheyenne when you're my age, just guy, guy,
guy, guy, guy, guy. Maybe it's being glutted with male-driven movies as
a child consumer. Then, as you grow up, you start paying more attention
to the relative quality of behavior of the two genders, and you start admiring
the female gender more and more and more, and recognizing that women do
indeed have numerous obstacles that are placed in their way. This is so
doctrinaire, but we do live in a patriarchal society still in many ways,
and even if it isn't, a lot of men still think it is, and even some women
think it is. Anyway, the jams that women get themselves into always have
an opportunity to have an extra dimension of conflict, whether it's Jodie
[Foster] fighting her way through all these overbearing, pompous men or
crazy killers to save another woman in The Silence of the Lambs, or whether
it's here: Thandie being confronted with all these guys that really want
something out of her, and even though they are responsive to her decency
and what have you, they're undeterred. They're going to keep lying to her
and manipulating her, and Thandie is driven more and more to bond and find
interesting support relationships with women. I like that kind of subtext.
I don't think it's anything that's like, "Oh, that movie was about women
bonding or anything," but I like it, it just interests me and inspires
me.
AC: For me, one of the first adjectives that comes to mind when describing
your work is the word "American," whether you're telling such distinctly
American stories as Melvin and Howard or Beloved, or tapping into the American
zeitgeist in films like Philadelphia, Something Wild, or Citizens Band.
Your films are also so full of American kitsch and iconography and music.
So I'm wondering what it was like for you to shoot in Paris?
JD: It was awesome. It's the city where so many of my favorite movies
were filmed. And I shot for the first time in CinemaScope. You'll see,
this is a blatant cry for help to the New Wave -- homages everywhere --
thefts everywhere -- oh, my god. I have been a French movie nut since I
was little and my parents took me to Mr. Hulot's Holiday, and then the
New Wave and the Sixties. I started going to them when I was a young man
and grew up with the French New Wave in New York and saw every movie that
came. So this is a chance for me to totally regurgitate my 30-year love
of French cinema. And there is no effort to try to capture Stanley Donen's
incredibly elegant Hitchcockian thing from Charade. This is completely
hand-held, ragged, New-Wave whatever.
The crews over there are phenomenal. They're really engaged and it was
a really young crew. A lot of enthusiasm. I actually learned a little bit
of French. And drank a lot of wine after work with the crew. Oh boy, that
was an education. I though Napa Valley was it.
AC: Music selection is always so essential to the construct of your
movies. You've even made a couple of music documentaries: Talking Heads
in Stop Making Sense and Robyn Hitchcock in Storefront Hitchcock. The soundtrack
for The Truth About Charlie is an outstanding blend of music from all over
the world, and the music also provides a constancy and urgency that helps
propel the narrative. Since Henry Mancini's music for Charade is so classic
and memorable, it must have been hard to devise a soundtrack that diverged
from it so radically.
JD: Mancini's score was great. In it, literally every musical cue was
a variation of the same theme played in a different way. But in Charlie,
you never hear the same thing twice. We went nuts with the music. It's
a crazed, completely out-of-control soundtrack with 40 different songs
and a ton of [composer] Rachel Portman's music. So, it's different. We
used a lot of rai music on the soundtrack and all sorts of different stuff
because Paris is the hotbed of world music. All the big Middle Eastern
bands record there, and the West African bands record there. For the scoring
sessions, Rachel Portman brought in all these amazing players with their
weird and exotic instruments and stuff. It's a very United Nations soundtrack.
AC: In our previous interview, you discussed your reasons for wanting
to remake Charade. What is your response, however, to the people who are
fearful about your decision to remake such a beloved classic?
JD: It's very funny because what you're going to see is -- and this
isn't a qualitative thing -- but it's such a remake of Charade on the one
hand, but so much of it is not blue but red. The picture's the same, it's
just very, very different. There are new characters, and a lot of the story
of Charade that took place in the background of the original is now up
front in this movie. There are parts of Charlie that wind up very much
the way they went in the first one. There are things that wind up completely
different than they did in the original. For those who are familiar with
the original, that's cool, too, because the whole point of Charade is to
keep the audience guessing. So if you saw Charade in the past and liked
it, part of the fun when watching The Truth About Charlie will be guessing
if it's gonna work out the same way or if certain characters are still
guilty.
AC: Throughout your career you've worked with many of the same people
from project to project. You've told me that you had been working with
Thandie Newton for a while on Beloved before you realized that she had
become a friend to your children. And cameraman Tak Fujimoto has shot the
majority of your films.
JD: You work with people you can depend on, right? This community can
be a communal love fest. I am in love with Tak Fujimoto, and this is how
we get to see each other and spend time together. We make pictures together.
AC: Has having children and a family changed your approach to filmmaking
in any way?
JD: Oh my, yes. Starting to have kids at the age of 44 -- it was kind
of an unexpected thing. I'm no longer the "anything goes" type of filmmaker.
I'm more conscious of the impact of content on young viewers. I'm also
cynical of the ratings system. When I started in the business [in the Seventies
with the Roger Corman productions], we were bold young people who didn't
have a clue.
AC: I've become increasingly interested in your role as a producer for
other directors' projects in recent years. Your name has been attached
to some of the freshest films of the last decade: Household Saints, Devil
in a Blue Dress, That Thing You Do!, Ulee's Gold ...
JD: That's a thing of the past now. There was a time when my company
Clinica Estetico was in the business of producing movies that I and also
other directors would make. And that was exciting. I produced Tom Hanks'
movie, That Thing You Do!, Carl Franklin's Devil in a Blue Dress, I was
one of the producers on Ulee's Gold, Miami Blues, and stuff -- and that's
gratifying and that was fun, but it also sucked an enormous amount of the
company's energy and also my energy into other people's pictures. I felt
like I wanted, for better or for worse, to devote my energies on trying
to get movies I wanted to do off the ground. So I split up with partners
in the company. They went and formed a new company called Magnet, and The
Truth About Charlie was the last movie we did together. And Adaptation,
the new film by Spike Jonze that's about to be released, is the other last
movie we did together with a different director.
AC: Does not producing mean you're consequently going to be directing
with more frequency?
JD: I hope so. I would like to do that. And I always seem to have a
documentary going on as well. If I'm not doing a feature film, I'll be
able to focus that much more on whatever documentary is at hand. I'm just
finishing up this one now about a Haitian radio journalist named Jean Leopold
Dominique who was a brilliant radio personality, courageous, fabulous human
rights crusader, and he was assassinated two years ago on the steps of
his radio station with the day's editorial in his hand. Magnificent guy.
Because I knew of him from an earlier documentary I had made called Haiti
Dreams of Democracy, when he was in exile in the early Nineties in New
York I contacted him and he agreed to sit for a bunch of video testimonials.
So I got from him his life story, the story of Haiti, the story of U.S.
involvement in Haiti, but never did anything with it. So when he was killed,
I was able to take his story and shoot some new material. So that's almost
finished. I'm hoping that I might be able to bring that down here in March
and show it in Austin at SXSW.
It's tough with documentaries. You make them because you're passionate
about the subject matter. But you never find an audience. It does make
me realize -- and this isn't good or bad -- that I really am a filmmaker.
It amazes me that I do that in my life. I make films, and the proof of
that is the documentaries more than the attempts at mainstream movies,
or what have you. That's a slightly different kind of pursuit in a way.
Ultimately, it's impossible to know how other folks are going to respond
to it. That's the freaky thing about being a director: You must do only
what really turns you on and pray that it's going to turn someone else
on. |