Quotes from Jonathan Demme

All of us who lived outside of New Orleans were horrified and heartbroken by what we saw when Katrina hit, the floods that followed the hurricane that happened.

Maybe that's where the new art comes in - to somehow have your eye on the marketplace and harness your art to come up with something you can be proud of creatively.

I only work with actors who take full responsibility for their characters.

Tak Fujimoto and I, when we started getting enough of a budget where we could afford the right lenses - 'cause we started out doing low-budget pictures together - we started experimenting with this subjective camera thing. And we kind of fell in love with the idea of using that as our close-up.

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.

The media has not done a great job in fulfilling their role - journalism's role in a democracy is to provide information on profoundly important subjects so we're an informed citizenry.

I adore film, and I adore music.

Everything I've made - it doesn't mean they've all been good - but everything I've made so far, big or little, fiction or documentary, has been something that I've been really enthusiastic about.

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'll tell you - what I can tell you is that I know when I saw 'Zodiac' and then again when I saw 'No Country For Old Men,' there was a moment in each of my viewing experiences where I went, 'Dammit, this is scarier than 'Silence Of The Lambs.''

It's such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It's hard for fiction to compete with that.