Jonathan Demme, the Kindest of Strangers
Photo: Cindy Ord/Getty
On Wednesday morning, at the age of 73, the incomparable Jonathan Demme passed away from complications related to esophageal cancer. At his passing, Demme is perhaps best known as the Academy Award-winning filmmaker of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), one of only three movies ever to win the “Big Five”: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Screenplay.
Others consider his greatest legacy to be his groundbreaking stewardship of Philadelphia (1993), the Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington-starring drama that challenged the world to reconsider its relationship with HIV/AIDS. Then there is the film he made with Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense (1984), an electrifying and spicy-fun tour documentary that redefined concert films for the MTV generation and brought the director to public fame.
Demme’s journeyman career, which was buoyed equally by unflagging productivity, peerless creative flexibility and his incomparable generosity of spirit, made him among the most eclectic artists in modern cinema. But I knew Demme, albeit briefly, as the filmmaker who defined kindness to me.
When I first met Demme at the Austin Film Festival in 2013, he was visiting to screen “Jonathan Demme Presents: Made in Texas,” a series of short films he had first showcased at the Collective for Living Cinema in October 1981. Louis Black, the co-founder of SXSW and the independent newspaper The Austin Chronicle, for which I’m now a writer, was a close friend of Demme’s, having introduced the filmmaker to the shorts in the first place
By coincidence, Black was also my classmate at the University of Texas, and he generously invited me to the AFF event. Demme spoke with fanatic admiration about the program, which featured films like Invasion of the Aluminum People and Speed of Light (both 1980), to an enthralled audience including Richard Linklater and Paul Thomas Anderson. Afterward, Black took me to meet these legendary filmmakers.
While it was an honor to speak with Linklater and Anderson both (with any luck, I will only have happy reasons to write about those encounters), the opportunity to meet Demme was physically breathtaking, overwhelming in fact, and I told Black so. Standing just above average height with a tousled pompadour of silver hair, a wide smile, and a red hoodie, Demme looked unintimidating enough, but I knew better.
I knew that he had directed Rachel Getting Married, an astonishingly humanistic indie (featuring Anne Hathaway’s most accomplished performance) which in 2008 had become central in my decision to become a film critic. I also knew that he had optioned and produced Adaptation (2002), which I regularly describe as one of my “5 island films,” as in “Which movies would you take to a desert island to watch before you die of starvation?”
By this time, I had interviewed dozens of filmmakers with mixed results, the most high-profile failure being when Marlon Wayans mocked my sweater on local television in San Francisco (“That is some Harry Potter looking shit.”) So I moved quietly towards the exit, telling Black I’d see him in class. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, and guided me to Demme.