Right now, Jonathan Demme is one of the secret weapons of American cinema. Although his best two movies to date, Citizens Band (AKA Handle With Care, 1977) and Melvin and Howard (1980), were hailed for bringing the heartiness and sensitivity of a homegrown Jean Renoir into latter-day American film comedy, they failed to score at the box office. Conceived as a classy exploitation film at the height of the CB craze, Citizens Band offered a witty, affectionate view of radio freaks who create alter egos over the airwaves. But it didn't win over the mass audience. Released again under the title Handle With Care, it didn't do any better, despite a warm reception at the New York Film Festival. Melvin and Howard, another festival favorite, was praised wherever it played for its poetic, comic vision of the American dream as embodied by Melvin Dummar (Paul LeMat), the gas station manager named as one of Howard Hughes's heirs in the disputed "Mormon will." Unfortunately, the film never received a broad national release, even after Mary Steenburgen (who played Melvin's first wife) and writer Bo Goldman won Academy Awards.

All this malign neglect may vanish when Demme's next movie, Swing Shift, opens in February. It features Demme's biggest name cast so far -- Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Christine Lahti, and Fred Ward and Ed Harris from The Right Stuff -- in a story of women finding love and strength on the home-front assembly line during World War II. Demme is confident that the movie will be everything an audience could want: sexy, humorous, and touching.

When Dwight McDonald wrote that Francois Truffaut "has a peculiar knack for presenting mise-en-scene that is neither bigger than life (Welles, Resnais) nor smaller than life (Bresson, Olmi) but exactly life-size...he also raises the commonplace to poetry," he might also have been describing Demme.

In this interview, Demme discusses his start as a Roger Corman protege, his botched suspense movie, The Last Embrace (1979), and his recent artistic success. --Michael Sragow

AMERICAN FILM: According to legend, you got your start in the movie industry when your father showed Joseph E. Levine a favorable review of his film Zulu that you'd written for the Coral Gable Times.
JONATHAN DEMME: That's no legend. I was born on Long Island, but my family moved to Miami when I was still a little kid; I went to the University of Florida at Gainesville, hoping to become a veterinarian, but I couldn't hack the science courses I needed. I started writing movie reviews for the college paper, and, as you know, when you start seeing movies for free, there's no going back. After I dropped out, I started reviewing for a local suburban weekly, and I did review Zulu, and my father did show it to Joe Levine, and he did give me a job, and the rest is "show-biz history." Levine liked the fact that I had widely praised Zulu; he also liked the fact that he was doing a showmanlike thing by giving me a job at Avco Embassy's publicity department in New York.
     When I moved to Manhattan in the mid-sixties, I was doing all sorts of things: movie and music reviews, publicity, selling films for Pathe Contemporary's theatrical wing. I made my first movie, a short called Good Morning, Steve -- a story so simple you barely noticed it: just a way of making a movie. Around that time, Al Viola, the brother of my close friend and collaborator, Joe Viola, set up an office in London to try to get American filmmakers involved in British films -- which were very hot at the time. Although we never got a foothold there, that's when I got the call to meet Roger Corman, who was making Von Richtofen and Brown in Ireland and needed a unit publicist. I had it in the back of my mind that Corman would be a good man to know if I had an idea for a movie, but he was the one who asked me if I had any ideas.
     After I did the publicity, Corman said, "Why don't you write a biker movie for my new company?" (He was just starting up New World Pictures.). Joe Viola and I worked on it and arranged to drop off the script at the London Hilton. As we were walking away, Roger called us back; he said, "Joe, you've directed commercials; why don't you direct the movie for me? And Jonathan, you've produced commercials; why don't you produce the movie?" That became Angels Hard As They Come.
     We knew that you had to use elements from "classier" movies to make successful exploitation movies. I'd just seen The Savage Seven, the biker movie that Richard Rush based on The Seven Samurai, so Joe and I decided we'd make a biker movie based on Rashomon.

So Angels Hard As They Come really was about "the nature of guilt?"
Oh, yeah. You needed reasons like that to justify making the movie.

Were you influenced by other directors during those days?
I love a lot of directors, but the only role model I had in the Corman days -- sort of a group hero for me and George Armitage and Joe Viola -- was Raoul Walsh. We'd growl at each other and say, "Just give us an assignment and we'll make something of it. We're professionals!"
     I've always loved cheapo movies. And Corman uses one of my favorite formulas -- action, nudity, and a little social comment. What more can you ask for in a film?

Is it an inside joke that Corman plays the head of the MacBride Aircraft Company in Swing Shift?
I wanted Roger to play MacBride because I knew that Roger took parts in movies and I thought he would be great for the part. But I also love that guy, and it was a chance to hang out with him. Of course, it became an inside joke that he was playing a stern slave driver running an airplane factory. That's often how he is when he's making movies!

Did you ever chafe under Corman the producer?
Paul Bartel is the only guy I can think of who chafed, because Paul probably had much more of a fully realized vision of what he wanted to see on film than the rest of us. We knew what the hell Corman wanted and that we'd better deliver it. Roger does kick you out of the nest at a certain point anyway. There are always other new guys coming up.
     The most important thing Roger did for me was sit down with me right before I directed Caged Heat and run down just how to do a job of moviemaking. He hit everything: Have something interesting in the foreground of the shot; have something interesting happening in the background of the shot; try to find good motivation to move the camera, because it's more stimulating to the eyes; if you're shooting the scene in a small room where you can't move the camera, try to get different angles, because cuts equal movement; respect the characters and try to like them, and translate that into the audience liking and respecting the characters. To me, those are the fundamentals. I don't know if Roger had a similar lunch with Coppola, but look at The Godfather. It's a classical Roger Corman movie. All the Corman moves are there -- a little sex, a little violence, a little social comment. Also, "make the audience like the characters even if they're mafiosi."
     Roger beat me over the head about not getting enough warmth into the characters. He hated my second movie, Crazy Mama, hated it to the degree that he almost didn't let me direct Fighting Mad. Before Crazy Mama, I'd worked for four months on the screenplay for Fighting Mad, which was supposed to be my second film. Roger wanted a movie in the Walking Tall vein and suggested strip mining as a background. The whole subject was galvanizing -- I wrote a righteous, kick-ass movie, and we were going to do it for something like $600,000. But Shirley Clark, who was going to direct Crazy Mama, fell out with Roger ten days before shooting, and Roger said to me, "The bad news is Fighting Mad gets postponed; the good news is you've got Crazy Mama to direct." I had to cast four or five parts, rewrite the script (the actors hated it), and start shooting in ten days. You haven’t written anything since Fighting Mad. Do you still see yourself as a writer-director?
Writing was a way of getting to direct, and I soon realized I was a much better director than I was a writer. I worked very hard at both things and was, at best, an average writer.

Did you exert a strong influence on Paul Brickman’s screenplay for Citizens Band?
The producer, Freddie Fields, asked me to direct the screenplay; I supervised the rewrite and Paramount agreed to make it. Paul Brickman had an etched-in-concrete idea about what the movie should be like. Apparently, that was very different from how the movie turned out. He disliked it very much; even when the picture won a certain amount of notoriety, he never went, "Oh, great." He’s a very good writer; we just had a lousy relationship.
     On our second day of shooting, on location, one of the actors told me that Paul came up to him after a scene and said, "Did you read those lines the way you did because that’s the way you wanted to do it or because that’s the way Jonathan told you to do it – because that’s not at all the way I saw it." The moment I heard that I walked over to the production manager and said, "If you want me working tomorrow, that dude’s got to be out of town." And he was on the six o’clock flight that night. The hilarious thing is, the theme of the movie was communication.

When you are presented with a script like Citizens Band, which has a strong original conception, how does it become your movie?
I consider myself an interpretative director. If I get turned on by a script, it's my job to make the viewers of the movie feel the way I felt as a reader of the script. If there is a scene in the screenplay that I don't feel I can make work, I'll tell the writer. He'll either say, "OK, we can loose it," or he will explain why the scene is important, so that I'll understand the value of it and be able to direct it well. It's always a dialogue.

When did you realize Citizens Band was in trouble at the box office?
The day it opened, in a seven-hundred-theater regional break. Nobody went. It hadn't been tested at all. The studio, the producers, everybody was so convinced that it was going to ba an unqualified success because of the CB mania of the day that their attitude was: "Get it together and get it out there and get ready to count the receipts." And nobody went.

Was it hard to find work after Citizens Band?
I couldn't get arrested. I did do an episode of "Columbo," because Peter Falk liked Citizens Band, but that was it. Finally, two producers who'd seen Citizens Band, Mike Taylor and Dan Wigutow, sent me the screenplay to The Last Embrace, which they were then developing at UA. I thought the story had the potential to be a contemporary film noir, and I thought that Roy Scheider could be the Humpherey Bogart of the seventies. The screenwriter, David Shaber, and I had a terrific time working together, and if we'd been able to do one more draft, I think we would have had something hot. But it got the green light too soon.

Did you see The Last Embrace as your chance to pay homage to Hitchcock?
Every movie I make is a chance to show what I have learned from Hitchcock. In terms of style, I'll admit it -- I can't match the master. But I employ his techniques constantly. Take the subjective camera -- Hitchcock perfected that and I use it a lot. I love putting the audience in my chartacters' shoes; if you choose your moments well, it's powerful.

You once said, "Melvin and Howard dropped into my hands out of heaven."
One of my favorite little ironies is that before Thom Mount at Universal put me on the movie, I was already meeting with him about some other project, and when I asked him how he was, he said, "I am great! I read perhaps the finest screenplay I've ever read in my life this morning. It's called Melvin and Howard." Mike Nichols had prepared the script with Bo Goldman; I signed on to the movie only after Nichols left. I give the Goldman-Nichols collaboration a lot of credit.

Bo Goldman told me that at your first meeting he said he wanted his affection for the people to come through, and you said, "Not affection -- but respect."
That may be more of my Corman influence; Roger always wanted both. I thought it would be easy for audiences to like the characters in Bo's script, but the tricky part would be to make an audience identify with them and not look down on them. We had to understand the characters' motivations. I told Bo that Melvin's first wife had to come right out and say, "We're poor, Melvin." We had to get across what an influence that can have on a person's life.

Goldman also said that he was much more nervous than you were about the lack of any obvious story.
Whether he intended it or not, when Bo wrote Melvin and Howard he went on an amazingly poetic flight of imagination. To open a movie with an eighteen-page dialogue scene, two people riding along in a truck at night? Outrageous idea! It breaks every rule known to man, and yet the emotion he poured into that scene makes it wonderful. What's incredible is that Mary Steenburgen got it right away and that Jason Robards got it, too. Paul Le Mat got it, but he had reservations. It turned out that Paul thought Melvin was a terrific character, but a bit of an asshole. And Bo had some stuff in the script that Paul felt he couldn't do, because he thought it was too foolish, such as sniffing his wife's panties when she was gone or carrying his clothes bag on his back when he entered the strip joint she was working. It was an effort to get him to do any of that kind of stuff, but I thought it was funny and touching.

As a director who considers himself extremely dependent on the script, how did it feel, on Swing Shift, to work with a succession of screenwriters for the first time?
I never really worked with the original writer, Nancy Dowd. I met with her, but then she and the producer, Jerry Bick, had a falling out. When Bo Goldman came on, the deal the studio and the producers were trying to work out with me didn't work out, so I wasn't directly involved in the writing of Bo's script. When I came on, Bo was no longer available. Then I got Ron Nyswaner involved, and, together with Goldie Hawn, we unified.
     Working with Ron on Swing Shift was a very pragmatic process of finding scenes from Bo's and Nancy Dowd's drafts that worked and then fitting them into an organic whole. Nancy's drafts were highly political, and the movie isn't. Who knows what her vision fulfilled would have been? From what I saw on paper, she wrote an expose of what was done to women working in the defense industries during World War II. This movie is a salute to the women, and I think that's a crucial distinction.
     The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter was a big source of thematic inspiration for us. It documented that the U.S. war machine tried to manipulate women into work at the beginning, despite all the real dangers, and then, at the end, coerced them into returning to the kitchen; that there was still sexisim on the job; and so on. But the biggest thing I got from Rosie the Riveter was a sense of triumph.
     Every movie has a key line for me. In Melvin and Howard it is when Melvin tells his lawyer, "I'm never gonna receive the money; I know that. But Howard Hughes sang Melvin Dummar's song." In Swing Shift there's a moment when the women are partying, after they've all been fired, and one of them says, "Boy, they laughed at us the first day we came to work." And another woman says, "Yeah, but we showed them." To me, that is what the whole thing is about.

What will people get from Swing Shift that they couldn't get from Rosie the Riveter?
It is more of an entertainment. We tried to treat our characters as real, complicated people, not as forties movie characters. We had no "conventions" to go by except the conventions of the historical time. There is no genre of stateside wartime movies. There just is none. I started looking at Since You Went Away, and the social strata were so elevated and sanitized that it was a waste of time. We did a tremendous amount of research and just went for the reality.

Isn't there a possible problem posed by merely glancing at some of the social issues? Isn't there a danger that they'll simply seem tacked-on?
Well, a good example is a scene of the swing shifters watching a convoy passing by filled with Japanese-Americans being transported to the nisei camps. For the moment, that scene is being taken out, as we're trying to find the strongest possible through line and approach a reasonable running time. But that scene serves two functions: It observes the dreadful thing that was done to Japanese-Americans, but there's also an emotional value in seeing Goldie and Christine share the upset and disturbance caused by this event -- and you get to share that. I think that scene will wind up back in the movie.

In a sense, the wartime period provides some very positive experiences for the women. How are we supposed to feel when the men come back?
There's no easy sociological resolution; it's all worked out in terms of the characters. It's easy for us to sympathize in a big way with the women who were yanked out of one life-style, into a deep involvement with the fate of the world, and then summarily pulled out of what the world considered "meaningfulness" and sent back to the home. But we complicate that by asking, "What about the guys coming back? Did they not deserve to get their jobs and families back?" It's an unanswerable dilemma.

Now that you've put in a few years as a director, is your hero still Raoul Walsh?
I still like all the usual hardworking guys, like Budd Boetticher. You can tell the directors who are working hard to do their very best. Sydney Pollack is a great example of a guy who's achieved terrific commercial success and is also, right down the line, a terrific filmmaker, Martin Ritt is another one. I'm interested in the guys who try to take chances and shoot their wad every time out.