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Oscar-winner Demme sees extended Katrina project
(Reuters)
Updated: 2007-06-17 09:29
SILVER SPRING, Maryland (Reuters) - Filmmaker Jonathan Demme has put the struggle of New Orleans' poor to reclaim their hurricane-wracked neighborhoods on television and the big screen. But he's not done yet. The Oscar-winning director of Hollywood blockbusters including "The Silence of the Lambs" said he plans several more projects on the New Orleans residents shown in "New Home Movies From the Lower Ninth Ward." He intends to make individual "portrait features" on several of the residents, and a 10- to 15-hour work showing how their lives intertwined after Hurricane Katrina. "This can't go unrecorded," Demme said at the Silverdocs film festival just outside Washington, where the feature version of "New Home Movies" had its premiere on Thursday. "I'm going to keep milking this for a long, long time." The Katrina movie was filmed over a year on a shoestring, with two "home-movie" cameras and a rented car. A major theme is residents of the poor, mostly black Ninth Ward battling against what they saw as efforts to keep them out of the flooded ruins and to build a "boutique city" that would make developers rich. Demme said he was inspired by a conversation with New Orleans musician and friend Cyril Neville. "He said, 'it's a fight for the culture."' The residents struggled to preserve traditions and restore services such as mail that would help them reclaim their neighborhoods. "Because of these amazing heroes, at least on one level, they beat the powers for a second. They did get back in the neighborhoods," Demme said. "Enough have come back that (U.S. President George W.) Bush ain't going to get it." Demme, who received the festival's Guggenheim award in honor of pioneering documentary filmmaker Charles Guggenheim, spoke at a Silverdocs symposium on Thursday honoring his documentary contributions. The work includes "The Agronomist," about slain Haitian democracy advocate Jean Dominique, and the groundbreaking Talking Hands concert film "Stop Making Sense." LIFE WRITES YOUR SCRIPT Contrasting the documentary process with fiction movies, Demme said, "Life writes your script when you do these documentaries." "Instead of trying to make fiction real, I was trying to find what was dramatic and entertaining about reality," he said. Besides social or political documentaries such as "The Agronomist" and "Mandela," Demme also has made several innovative concert movies. "Stop Making Sense" put the moviegoer in the audience's seat for a performance made memorable by singer David Byrne's oversized powder-blue "big suit." Demme has also filmed concerts by British cult singer Robyn Hitchcock in a New York storefront and by Neil Young. "You can't compete with a live concert, except in one way. You can get the audience up on stage," Demme said of his technique. Demme's next project is about Jimmy Carter, filmed while the former U.S. president was promoting a Middle East book. The tour erupted into controversy over passages Carter wrote that some saw as sympathetic to Palestinian suicide bombings, and the storm created an obvious focal point for a movie. "If you trust your subject, I don't think you'll ever go wrong," Demme said. |
