Quotes from Jonathan Demme

I get creeped out by Francis Bacon's paintings, and I can't say exactly why. They're all really disturbing, and there is an almost nimbus-like quality behind some of his frightening characters and stuff.

I like seeing the cameras because it helps visualize how the music people and the movie people teamed up.

When you're filming, if you can't capture the relationships and interplay, that magical thing that transpires between musicians during a performance, then you're not going to have a deeply interesting film. It's vital.

As much as I love acoustic Neil Young - and I do deeply - I may be more passionate about the electric. Luckily it's not a contest, and we never have to make that choice. But Neil Young on an electric guitar - I feel like I've never seen or heard anything like it.

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.

I'm of Neil Young's generation. Neil Young's songs have spoken to what it's like to be at least a white male of his generation over the years. Endlessly, he's sung about the stuff that I really care about. He's put into words the feelings that hit you at different transitional moments in life.

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.

If you're doing a music film, you've got to be singing about something.

Documentaries - my God, there is so much going on in our country and in the world today that every time you open the newspaper or turn on the radio or watch the news on TV there is another documentary subject. We're getting the headlines for a second, shaped by corporate delivery most of the time, but what's really the story there?

When I saw Justin in 'The Social Network', I became deeply obsessed with the desire to work with him and reached out to Justin. When we met, we talked about a couple of things I was working on that did not come to fruition, but it gave us a meeting.

I was a Talking Heads fan from the very beginning.

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

When we finished 'Stop Making Sense,' we went right to the San Francisco Film Festival for the world premiere, and people swarmed the stage and started dancing before the first song was even finished.

I remember the Neil Young brand hitting me very hard immediately. He wasn't an acquired taste. I loved him immediately.

They're out there, this appalling idea that there are companies that profit - not just profit but profit enormously - through war.

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

The occupied territories and the movement of settlements - moving people today off of their property and claiming it - is illegal.

I felt from time to time that shooting live music is the most purely cinematic thing you can do. Ideally, the cinema is becoming one with the music. There is little artifice involved. There's no acting. I love it.

I often find myself feeling that filming music is somehow the purest form of filmmaking. This crazed collision of sound and images, the intense collaboration, these incredibly cinematic performances. And for the nights you're filming, a non-player like me gets to feel somehow part of the band.

I've always followed my enthusiasm. Whether the pictures have turned out good or not is one thing - but I've always had a lot of enthusiasm for the project at hand.

'Neil Young Heart of Gold', that was a valentine to Nashville and country music in the Grand Ole Opry tradition and Hank Williams.

When my generation, those early days of television - I know I've been thinking about this lately - my two flashes of me as a little boy. One, I'm standing in front of the radio freaking out that Nat King Cole's singing 'Lady of Spain', just this stuff coming out of the radio, and Guy Williams singing 'Wild Horses' coming out of the radio.

I've been making films since the '70s and trying to develop that best possible fiction-film style that I feel is the most expressive. At a certain point, I felt I was winding up making the same film stylistically and I found that boring.