The following piece has been compiled from two interviews which David Thompson had with Jonathan Demme. The first was done for BBC television in November 1989. The second was done in London at the National Film Theatre in 1989. The section on The Silence of the Lambs has been taken from an interview conducted by Saskia Baron for the BBC's "Late Show" in May 1991

DAVID THOMPSON: You were born in Long Island, but at the age of fifteen you moved to Miami. What was the contrast between those two places?
JONATHAN DEMME: The biggest contrast was moving from an area where kids couldn't drive to an area where kids could, and your life explodes in a certain way under those circumstances. But in New York living on Long Island was very lonely, and moving to Florida was kind of getting out of the suburbs, getting out of a metropolitan situation into big, big spaces and kids that drank beer and drove cars and talked with funny accents - it was a very exciting kind of thing to have happen to you at that age.

And originally you were set on a veterinary course?
Yes. I very much wanted to be a veterinarian and had worked in animal hospitals from the age of ten or eleven. I would go and wipe down tables between doggies and kitties for the vets. I was obsessed with being a vet, everything was geared towards that, and by the time I was in high school I had become a really excellent kennel man and veterinary assistant and could do amazing things.
     What happened is - it's a simple, sad story - after high school, I saved up enough money to go to college for a year. So I went, and then encountered college chemistry and I had a complete inability to master the most fundamental kind of chemistry, and within two days I was miles behind everybody else. I was sitting there listening to them talk this foreign language and realized that medicine wasn't for me. But I wanted to stick out the term because I had put so much money into it, and also I was a movie junkie at that stage of the game - I had been for quite some time.

What sort of movies were you seeing then?
Actually, that was a cusp in my life. Up to then I was seeing popular American movies of all kinds, and at college it was my first chance to see things like Bergman movies, Truffaut movies. That was eye-opening for me. I remember the excitement I experienced the first time I saw Shoot the Piano Player. It was probably the first movie of my life I had seen with subtitles, and I realized there was a whole other kind of excitement and fun you could have watching movies. There's this moment in Shoot the Piano Player where Charles Aznavour tells the hoods, 'If I'm lying to you, may my mother drop dead,' and the film cuts to his mother dropping dead! I'd never seen this sort of thing in American movies, and it was really great.
     I had noticed that our college newspaper didn't have a film critic, and I felt that perhaps if I could be the film critic I could see the movies for free, because I certainly couldn't afford to go and see them on my budget at that stage of the game. They didn't have one, so they said, 'Well, give us a sample of your views.' I was so excited about getting this job, but I couldn't even afford to go to a movie, so I said, 'OK, I'll go and see Wrong Arm of the Law, which is playing at the State Theatre now.' Then I went racing to the library, pulled out all the magazines, saw what the critics had had to say about Wrong Arm of the Law, formed an impression of the film, wrote a review, took it back, they accepted it, and I became a film critic at college.

And it was being a film critic that got you your introduction into the movie business.
Yes, it's true. Once you start going to movies for free, it's hard to start paying for them. After I left college, I came across a little newspaper back home in Miami called the Coral Gables Times. It was a shopping bi-weekly, but they didn't have a film critic and were willing to let me write reviews for them, so I started doing that. At that time my dad was working for the Fountainbleau Hotel, and he met the amazing movie mogul Joseph E. Levine, who had done Hercules, A Bridge Too Far, any number of films. He was very, very active - especially in the 1960s and early 1970s. My father mentioned to Mr. Levine, the great mogul, that his son was a film critic, so Levine said, 'Well, I must meet him. Bring him to my houseboat,' which was down in the canal across from the hotel. I came along - my dad had told me to bring some of my reviews - so I did, and there was Levine, and - yes - it was a pink houseboat, and - yes - he had a cigar a foot long. There was another producer there with a gigantic cigar, and they got out the scrapbook and started flipping through these reviews. They got to one I'd written of the movie Zulu, which I'd had very strong feelings about and written an especially positive review. 'Zulu, ah!' He started reading it and: 'My God...brilliant...marvellous.' He looked up at me and took the cigar and, jabbing me in the chest, said, 'You've got great taste, kid. Do you want to come and work for me?' He actually offered me a job as a publicity writer and I said, 'Yes, I do,' and he said, 'Where do you want to work? New York, London, or Rome?' So I said - and this was pretty hot for a Miami kid, you know - I said, 'I'll start off in New York.' Modestly. So I went and did my military service - quick - and I called up afterwards and there was, indeed, a job available, and I went up and took it.

And this also brought you to London, eventually, in the late 1960s.
Yes. I came to London in 1968, having had a variety of publicity jobs. There was a production company that was making television commercials, but wanted to get into film production, and because I was a publicist with United Artists they thought that I might somehow be able to help them get movies financed in England. They weren't experienced at that sort of thing, but I took the job and came over to London. I was not very good at selling commercial directors; I couldn't do a thing. I had a lot of great lunches, but it didn't work out. So I started writing some movie reviews for a couple of periodicals - I was pretty much of a drop-out at the time. It was the heavy days of the Vietnam war. I was really happy not to be living in America, a country I had grown to hate at that time, in many ways. While I was in London Roger Corman came over to Ireland to make a film called Von Richtofen and Brown, and I got a call from my old friends at United Artists to see if I'd be the unit publicist on the film. So I come over to Ireland from London to be interviewed for the job, and, as fate would have it, he was just forming New World Pictures, his big production distribution company. He interviewed me for the publicity job and said, 'OK, you can have the job and, by the way, do you like motorcycle movies?' I said, 'Yes, especially your Wild Angels,' and he said, 'Well, good, because I'm desperate for screenplay writers. I'm over here in Ireland for the next several months, and would you write a motorcycle movie for me?' So I said, 'Sure.'
     I then went to a gifted friend of mine, a guy named Joe Viola, who was directing commercials here in London and who's a great storyteller, and said, 'Joe, we have the chance to write a script. What do you think?' and he said, 'Absolutely.'
     We had heard that some of the better motorcycle movies had been based on some of the Japanese samurai films - for example, Seven Samurai, which had become The Magnificent Seven, became The Savage Seven directed by Richard Rush; and, of course, Yojimbo had become For a Few Dollars More, which in turn became some other terrific motorcycle movies. So we went to Rashomon - because there's a murder and a lot of sword-fighting and abuse to women, which was very popular in movies in those days, and unfortunately remains that way. We did a motorcycle movie version of Rashomon and Roger read the script, and said, 'OK, the knifing is great, the rape is great, but lose this varying points-of-view thing, fill in the gaps.' He was off to the Middle East to try to put some production deals together. 'I'll be back in four weeks. Have a script ready for me and maybe, you know, it'll be made.'
     We met him at the London Hilton a month later, having written our sleazified motorcycle Rashomon and we handed it to him in the lobby of the hotel. He said, 'Wait a minute, guys. I'll read it right now, come into the bar and have a drink.' That was strange, sitting at a table with a guy who's reading your script while you make small talk with your partner. He read it and looked at us and said, 'OK, this isn't bad. It needs a lot of rewriting, but it's not bad. Joe, you direct commercials, so why don't you direct this film? Jonathan, you've been trying to produce commercials, why don't you produce this film? Be in Los Angeles in six weeks.' So that was it. Suddenly we were filmmakers and we went over and did some rewriting and made the film - which we made for $120,000 - and we kept working for him.

The second film you did, The Hot Box - you got to do some directing on that, didn't you?
We were over in the Philippines - on one of the more remote islands, Negros - and we had all the problems that the bigger movie, Apocalypse Now, later had: we had monsoons, endless disasters; we got very behind schedule and it became necessary to catch up, to have some second-unit work, which is when a smaller team goes out and gets shots that don't involve dialogue.
     I went racing off to the local cinema because I suddenly realized, 'Well, I've always loved movies, but how exactly do you make them?' There was an Italian movie playing at the tiny little cinema on the island, the Doomegeti Theatre - a remake of a Brazilian classic Conga Shiero, directed by a guy named Giovanni Fado. It was exceptionally well done. I scribbled shots down and went out with the second unit the next day and stole some of Giovanni Fado's shots, set them up in the same way, and just fell in love with the process.
     I had really discovered something. I thought, 'There's a way of actually earning a living doing this. I want to go for it.' So when we got back to Los Angeles I asked Roger if he'd give me a shot at directing and he said, 'Sure, write up a women's prison movie and we'll take a look at it,' and that, for my sins, became Caged Heat.