Jonathan Demme

I also feel that the only thing more gratifying than working with someone who you've worked well with is working with someone new and coming up with something great.

I didn't go to film school so my learning was done out in public and showed up on the screen.

Especially after the Twin Towers, we're so terrified of 'Arabic' people. And talk about stereotypical negative portrayals of people of certain groups, if you look at the portrayal of Arabic people in Hollywood films, it's just appalling. They've always been just the easiest of targets - along with native Africans and what have you.

Nothing beats a live performance. Nothing.

I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.

Extraordinary people are the Green Berets and the Navy Seals and the Olympic athletes - these are the ones who can face these extraordinary physical challenges and be triumphant.

That is - the use of the subjective camera is an idea that's been around in movies for a long, long time. And it's an idea that was seized on very notably by Sam Fuller and by Alfred Hitchcock in two different very kind of - otherwise very different styles of filmmaking.

When Silence of the Lambs did well commercially it was more than anything. My partner Ed Saxon and I were just so relieved that finally we had made a movie that had made some money!

It was so easy for me to see that Anthony would be a superb Dr. Lecter because he had been such an amazing good doctor in 'The Elephant Man'. He had been as believable a doctor as you can imagine, and he was good.

In 'Heart of Gold' at one point, there were 23 players on the stage with him. And part of what's magic about Neil is the way he interacts with the other musicians.

There's that rule: Don't show any of the other cameras. Why? Do you think the viewer doesn't think we filmed this?

I had had no aspirations to be a filmmaker or a writer.