The Silence of the Lambs director,who has died aged 73, was an artist of brilliance and intuition as well as a master craftsman of great character dramasThe colossally talented and productive Jonathan Demme never assumed or wanted the status of an auteur, or in fact his one consciously cinephile project,The Truth approximately Charlie in 2002 – a remake of the 1960s caper Charade with nods to Truffaut – was not much liked. But Demme was a ceaselessly inventive and creative film-maker, a storyteller of bold and muscular force; a director who was plugged into the energies of commercial Hollywood cinema and who had imbibed the work ethic and the play ethic of his early mentor and producer Roger Corman.
From Corman he learnt the values of populism and crowd-pleasing, and simply getting movies made on an industrial basis,and he developed this ethos which he endowed with something of the indie original wave spirit, morphing into 1980s brashness. He created cult hits like Melvin and Howard, and Something Wild and Married to the Mob. But his career ascended to yet greater heights with some of the biggest hits of the 1990s: prominently Philadelphia,the HIV-Aids drama starring Tom Hanks — and of course the stone-cold grand guignol classic, The Silence of the Lambs, and in 1991. This was the film which got him his best director Oscar: the hugely lucrative and award-garlanded version of Thomas Harris’s macabre novel approximately the serial killer Hannibal the Cannibal. Related: Oliver Burkeman talks to Jonathan Demme approximately his original film starring former president Jimmy Carter Related: Transcript of the Guardian interview with Jonathan Demme at BFI Southbank,London Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com