One of filmmaker Jonathan Demme's favorite movies is Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, in which a film director decides to turn to more serious fare only to discover that the populace is better served by his trademark light entertainment.

In his own way, Demme is following in Sullivan's footsteps with The Truth About Charlie, a remake of Stanley Donen's Charade (1963) and a return to breezy storytelling after a decade-plus stretch of making deadly serious films.

"Doing The Truth About Charlie was definitely a conscious move to do something that wasn't as deeply personal and as heavy as my three previous pictures," the 58-year-old filmmaker, wearing a goatee and fedora, said over coffee recently. "I wanted to kind of take a vacation from stuff that I cared enormously about. I wanted to kind of have some light cinematic fun."

Playfulness used to be a hallmark of Demme's work, from his early days directing for exploitation maestro Roger Corman (Caged Heat, Crazy Mama) through such character-driven comedy-dramas as Melvin and Howard (1980), Something Wild (1986) and Married to the Mob (1988).

Lambs' a breakthrough

Then came the landmark serial-killer thriller The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which won Oscars for him and co-stars Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, and the earnest AIDS drama Philadelphia (1993), which sent Tom Hanks up to the Oscars podium. His last feature was his adaptation of Toni Morrison's Beloved (1998), a dense three-hour film that fared better with critics than audiences.

Still, Demme's change of pace doesn't reflect a change of heart toward those films.

"Beloved was the chance of a lifetime to make a picture of a book that's so profound to me and to many, and I still can't believe that the Walt Disney corporation gave us the money to make that film exactly the way we felt it should be made," he said.

"And before that Philadelphia was a chance to make a picture that addressed homophobia and AIDS discrimination head on. Nobody else got to make a movie like that yet except me, and I'm so grateful for that. The Silence of the Lambs was just a great chance to make a really intense movie."

Choosing a remake for his first film in four years might seem an odd move, but Demme had a specific inspiration: He wanted to take a movie that had been set in early '60s Paris and film it in the style of the French new wave filmmakers who were thriving at the time, such as Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda, who has a bit part in Charlie.

A defining moment

Truffaut's 1960 gangster classic Shoot the Piano Player was a special influence on Demme, if only for its scene in which a henchman proclaims that if he's lying, may his mother be struck dead - at which point the movie cuts to an old woman keeling over.

"That was a defining moment in my moviegoing life," Demme said. "It was like, `You can do that?! I thought this movie was kind of serious.' So [Charlie] was the chance to do kind of a thank-you . . . "

But if the past is shining on Charlie, it's also throwing shadows. Charade, after all, is loved mostly for the charms of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, who float the movie past its creaky plot points.

Demme has inherited the story - which centers on the relationship between a woman who discovers that her just-murdered husband had multiple identities and the dashing stranger who may have ulterior motives in helping her - but not the stars, to whom Charlie actors Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton now are destined to be compared.

"For people who have a special place in their heart for Charade or for Cary Grant - and who doesn't? - I guess our movie's haunted a little bit by these ghosts," Demme said. "That didn't occur to me at the time. I knew I didn't want to try to duplicate the other Charade or get into a contest with [it]."

For example, he said, instead of casting a Grant-like actor such as George Clooney, he chose the earthier Wahlberg.

"Mark would say, `Are you sure you want me to play the Cary Grant part?'" Demme said. "And I'd say, `Yeah, absolutely because we're going to turn it on its head.' And he'd say, `Yeah, but me? Cary Grant?' I'd say, `Yes, Mark, that's the whole point here. You're the anti-Cary Grant.' He goes, `OK, but I sure hope you know what you're doing.'"

Newton said a key distinction between the original film's stars and the new ones is "they were icons. We're actors, just actors."

Meanwhile, Newton, who played the crazed title character of Beloved, got to work with Demme in a loose, lighthearted atmosphere. Much of Charlie was shot on hand-held cameras, in part because Paris apparently requires filming permits only if the camera is stationary.

"Sometimes he would come not knowing what he was going to do, but that being very intentional," she said. "The people in the streets didn't know they were actually taking part in a movie. It just felt very uncontrolled, which was exciting."

Aside from giving Demme the chance to try out some new filming techniques, Charlie also allowed him to revisit a favorite situation: a female protagonist trying to sort out her world.

"I feel like women are much more interesting than men, and I think men are really interesting too," Demme said. "But you take a woman and give her a big fat problem and surround her with a bunch of men who aren't that interested in helping her [solve] her problem -- I love that story."

Back to the well

So it's not surprising that for his next feature, Demme is looking to reteam with Foster on either an offbeat, '50s-style science fiction movie or a crime drama. Demme said he's particularly energized by the younger generation of filmmakers.

"I do feel that we're experiencing a very real golden age of American filmmaking now, the likes of which we haven't seen since the '70s," Demme said. "Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Miguel Arteta, the Hughes brothers, Doug Liman - I just think there are so many gifted young filmmakers, and what's interesting is they're making pictures that don't conform to Hollywood formulas."

To Paul Thomas Anderson, at least, Demme was a guiding light. The younger director sang his elder's praises while promoting Boogie Nights in 1997, and the two have since become friends and even collaborators; Demme thanks Anderson in the Charlie end credits.

"There was a moment when PTA was going to write the script, and we went off to Paris together while Magnolia was awaiting release," Demme said. "We kind of did an outline of The Truth About Charlie together. We didn't put anything on paper, but we `what-if, what-if, what-ifed' our way all over Paris, and he just gave me an ocean of ideas to bring to the making of this movie."

Anderson said he especially appreciates Demme's gifts as a "humanist."

"He loves people so much, obviously, and he loves faces," Anderson said. "He seems to give everyone their due, their moment, their great spot - the actors and the people that he collaborates with."

Demme said he's technically and creatively at the top of his game. What's changed is his sensibility since he became a parent.

"I want to be a filmmaker who tries to take a more measured, imaginative approach to what our kids get to see," Demme said. "At the moment I just don't believe personally in depicting gun play as something that's exciting or gratifying, or a viable means to an end.

"Doesn't that sound like such a fuddy-duddy? It's pathetic, but it's just the way I feel."