DAVID THOMPSON: Moving on to Citizens Band - which I suppose is your first major movie - how did that come about?
JONATHAN DEMME: It came about, on the one hand, because I was friends with the producer's wife. Sheree Latimer had been in the Corman movies, and she was a very good actress. We had a group of people who knew each other and hung out together. Then Sheree married Freddie Fields, a movie producer, and she was constantly putting in a good word for me. Freddie was searching for a director for Citizens Band, so Sheree showed him Fighting Mad, which was also a rural film with some family scenes in it. So I think that's how I got to his attention.
     More critically, the script for Citizens Band was turned down by dozens of directors; they had sent it to all the good directors, and everybody had passed on it. At a certain point, Sheree's campaigning for me finally got me a meeting and I think that Freddie, who, as an agent - as a super-agent of people like Steve McQueen, Barbara Streisand and Judy Garland, to name but a few - had gotten used to power and the exercise of power in his work. When he met me, I came on like a very pleasant person (which I try to be most of the time) and also I was someone looking for a real opportunity to get out of the Corman mode and do a studio movie; I think he'd found someone who he thought was very controllable. So he picked me for it.
     We made the film and I was getting more and more excited by this idea of less editing, of editing in the camera - as so many of the films that I'd admired over the years had done, without my even realizing it.
     In fact, I met Bernardo Bertolucci just before I started directing Caged Heat. The one question he asked this new director - me - about the movie was: 'Are you going to use a lot of long takes?' - actually, he said 'long shots,' but I wasn't sure if he meant wide shots, or what have you. I said, 'Well, what do you mean?' and he said, 'You know, are you going to design shots that won't require any editing?' I thought to myself, 'God, I would love to try for that,' but it's a very scary thing as a director, especially when you're starting out, to dare to do that, because if the shots don't work, then you're going to be in trouble in the cutting room. I tried a little bit of that stuff on Caged Heat, very much motivated by Bernardo's question, because I respect that so much in other filmmakers' work, and I wanted it to be part of my work one day. But I wasn't going to rush it.

The film had a very good critical reception, but not a great public one.
It was an unqualified disaster at the box office - one of the most poorly received movies, in terms of business, released that year. People stayed away in droves, as the saying goes. In some theatres, only two people showed up its first weekend. The movie was quickly yanked.
     One of the things that I loved about the script of Citizens Band was that it in no way relied on action, which was very happy-making for me because that was one of my least favourite kinds of scenes to do. The more I directed, the more I was interested in character and behaviour. So this was amazing: a script with no action scenes, which was unlikely because with CBs you'd think it would be chock-full of the kind of scenes that made Smokey and the Bandit such an enormous hit. There were no cop encounters, no car chases. It was just these terrific characters talking to each other on their CB radios for an hour and a half. And perhaps that's the problem with the movie - you've either got to be open to that or not, and if you're not open to it, there's the slimmest of chances that you're going to enjoy the picture. But, if you are open to it, I think the script is so witty and the cast is so wonderful that you're in for a surprising movie experience , because the very thing that would seem to put you off - no action, all talk - is an enormous strength and value.

I guess you were particularly pleased with the casting of the film.
Yes. Because it was the first movie I did for a proper studio, Citizens Band was the first time I had the budget to work with, for argument's sake, the better actors. I exploited that opportunity to the maximum and feel that we were lucky in getting a great, great cast together for that movie.

But the ensuing year was pretty tough for you, wasn't it?
Each time you do a film you hope to expand your area of possible employers, you hope that someone else somewhere will see and like your film, and maybe you'll start getting scripts from another source. That had been happening a tiny little bit. I had been getting feelers at the time of Citizens Band, but not many. Afterwards, because it had been critically well received, despite being a miserable flop at the box office, I'd hoped that it would expand my contacts. But no one sent me anything. Then I'd go to my agent, because I was about to lose my apartment and was, literally, flat broke, and I'd say, 'OK, OK, we couldn't get any series TV, what about the game shows? Maybe I can bring a little something...' 'No, no, no.' Finally I was saying, 'OK, the "Evening News", anything.'
     But luckily Peter Falk, somehow or other, saw Citizens Band and liked it and invited me to come and do an episode of "Columbo." It was absolutely a life-saver: it saved the apartment, it gave me a little bit of confidence back, and it was terrific working with Peter Falk.

Your next film, Last Embrace - wasn't that a script that had done the rounds?
No, that had made less rounds, although it probably would have eventually made as many rounds as Citizens Band. There were some people who had liked Citizens Band, some producer who knew it, so they sent Last Embrace to me and I loved the idea of doing a film that had the potential of being an Alfred Hitchcock-style thriller. By that I mean that kind of Hitchcockian sense of suspense and complexity of character, as well as narrative.
     Also, I very much likes that it gave me an opportunity in an entertainment vein, to reveal something extraordinary about history. In this instance, it was the existence of a string of whore-houses supplied by white slavers and run by people within the Jewish church. Nobody knew about this. It was just part of the organized corruption that many people of different faiths had been able to do in New York, and this was strong stuff. I also felt that, if we could get Roy Scheider for it, it would be great. I had liked him a lot in some of his previous movies and thought that he could be the Bogart of the 1980s.
     We went to work on the script. It was a flawed script, and we tried very hard to fix it. More than anything the experience helped me realize: don't go into a movie unless you believe in the script, because if you don't believe it, how can anyone else believe it?
     In the end, it's a movie that I consider - and I'm not alone in this - deeply, deeply flawed in many ways, although I also think it has some values. But I did it because I love that kind of picture, and I hate the idea of doing films that are similar. I think it's important, creatively, to do something as different as possible from what you did the last time. It keeps you from falling into certain ways that seem to work and then doing them over and over again.

What about Melvin and Howard and the casting discussions on that?
I felt that Paul Le Mat would be a really fantastic Melvin. I had had a great time working with him on Citizens Band and thought that Paul had an unusually intense ability to communicate the ideas of the script to the other actors - in character, of course - and, by extension, to the audience. Paul had a kind of guileless, sincere innocence about him, an unspoiltness as an actor and as a person, and I felt that it would be wonderful to bring that to the part of Melvin.
     My sense of Melvin - on the basis of Bo Goldman's script - was that he was a beautiful naif, in the best sense of the word. So it was very important for me to have Paul in the part. I also wanted to hire Roberts Blossom, who plays Le Mat's father in Citizens Band, to play Howard Hughes. Because Hughes was such an inscrutable character in popular American mythology - you almost have to call it that even though he existed - I felt it would be good to have an actor who nobody had any preconceptions about. So I was very keen on Roberts Blossom. Meanwhile, Universal wanted Jason Robards to play the part. A deal was struck: they said you can have Le Mat, if you'll go with Jason Robards. And it worked out very well indeed. I'm delighted that it happened that way. I think that Jason was beautiful in the part, and also was a wonderful man to work with.

You must have been pleased with the Oscar nominations.
I thought that everybody's work was absolutely outstanding: Bo Goldman's script, Jason Robards's performance, Mary Steenburgen's performance, which was amazing. If, indeed, there is any logic to what Oscars are all about, then they certainly deserved the nominations. But it was surprising that such an outside, off-the-wall kind of movie could receive three Oscar nominations. I loved that.

The game-show sequence in Melvin and Howard is very closely based, I believe, on a real game show.
It was "Let's Make a Deal" - a gigantically successful popular show. The host was a fellow named Monty Hall. When Bo Goldman wrote the screenplay he tried to base it as much as possible on fact, so he wrote "Let's Make a Deal" and Monty Hall into the script. "Let's Make a Deal" had gone off the air about a year before we started shooting. Monty Hall was then a real-estate entrepeneur, a multi-millionaire and didn't need TV, but apparently he missed it because when we contacted him about playing himself in the movie, he said, 'Yes, absolutely.'
     This sequence was going to be the first scene that we were scheduled to shoot in the movie. About a week before we were supposed to shoot it, Monty finally got around to reading the script and there were some things that he took exception to, so he pulled out. We had to scramble in about a week's time and come up with an idea for a show that would achieve the same thing as "Let's Make a Deal." We had to get a set together for whatever that would be, and we had to cast somebody - a brand-new character. I was thrilled in retrospect that it happened. Our great production designer Toby Rafelson was poised to do anything, and we decided to make a show that was a combination of "Let's Make a Deal" and "The Gong Show." On "The Gong Show" you had to do a talent act, whereas on "Let's Make a Deal" you just had to wear a funny costume - so it gave us a chance to do both. Bob Ridgely, who plays Mr. Love, our game-show host, was a friend of mine with a great improvisational gift, and we literally improvised an enormous amount of the show. I was very happy with the way it turned out.

What particularly strikes me about that sequence is not only the tackiness of the whole show, but also the pleasure and real spirit behind the poeple involved. There seems to be something there that's become your strength: your sympathy for people in Middle America.
In the kind of society that we have in America, there are an enormous amount of people whose dreams are flung in their face every day - in the media, when they drive to work or when they're looking for a job. The ability to make that leap and get in touch with them is incredibly difficult. If you go to any of these game shows where people can literally have their life changed for them - absurdly enough, by picking the right gate, or what have you - it's difficult not to feel tremendous sympathy for that situation and really hope that someone is going to get a shot at improving things.