It is entirely possible that Jonathan Demme is the planet's least cynical human being. In person, the 54-year-old moviemaker radiates a clear-eyed, can-do optimism that's rare in any individual, let alone in one who has toiled in the motion-picture business for the better part of three decades. In that time, he's created one of the most diverse, enjoyable, and respected bodies of work of any American director today, from the exploitation-with-a-difference women's-prison drama Caged Heat (1974); to such gentle, character-driven, born-in-the-U.S.A. comedies as Citizens Band (1977), Melvin and Howard (1980), and Married to the Mob (1988); to the screwball-turns-brutal Something Wild (1986). Along the way he also managed to direct Stop Making Sense (1984), a mesmerizing concert film of the Talking Heads; some equally splendid rock videos (Such as New Order's "The Perfect Kiss"); a couple of affecting documentaries (Cousin Bobby and Haiti Dreams of Democracy); and the lovely PBS film Who Am I This Time? Demme's permanent ticket out of Cultville came in 1991, with The Silence of the Lambs, a smash hit that swept the Oscars, an unprecedented feat for a horror movie. His next picture, Philadelphia, also a big hit, broke the AIDS taboo in Hollywood and earned Tom Hanks his first Oscar.

This fall sees the release of two new Demme pictures: Storefront Hitchcock, another concert film, this one showcasing English singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock; and Beloved, a remarkable, 170-minute adaptation of the Toni Morrisson novel, starring and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey and backed by Disney. Beloved tells the saga of a former slave, Sethe (Winfrey), living in post-Civil War Ohio with her daughter, Denver (Kimberly Elise); her lover, Paul D (Danny Glover); and Beloved (Thandie Newton), a strange being from out of the past who transforms all of their lives. By turns harrowing, meditative, humorous, and phantasmagorical, the movie is a tour de force for both the director and Winfrey - not once does anyone resembling the host of a television talk show appear onscreen.

PREMIERE: It would be difficult to conceive of a filmmaker who would - or could - make both Storefront Hitchcock and Beloved. Does it strike you as odd that you did?
JONATHAN DEMME: I just know that both movies felt so right. Hitchcock because it's just consistent with my lifelong passion for rock 'n' roll in particular and music in general. I've done a lot of really exciting stuff that wasn't feature-length - a short film with Neil Young a few years ago, videos with Bruce Springsteen, and UB40 and Chrissie Hynde - and it's a real busman's holiday, when the music fan in me gets a chance to make a movie on an artist I admire. And with Beloved, well, both as a consumer of movies and as a filmmaker, I love a great story movie. And they don't come along all that often.
     I'm interested in many, many things in life, and the one thing that I know is true for all of us who make movies is that you've got to do the best work you're capable of in order to stay at work. And in order to do your best possible work, you've got to have immeasurable enthusiasm for the task at hand. And that's the only common denominator in the things I do.

Beloved is more than a story movie - it's practically an epic, mixing social and historical concerns with the paranormal phenomenon of folklore. There must have been enormous challenges in adapting Morrison's vision to the screen.
The greatest challenge was to somehow honor the book on film while letting the movie have a life all its own. Every step of the process, those of us who made this picture always had the book handy, even in the cutting room. But at a certain point as the weeks went by, when we started seeing the dailies and discovering what this movie was going to be like onscreen, the emerging movie became our greatest reference. But we never threw the book away.

What was the evolution of the project?
Harpo, Oprah Winfrey's production company, sent Richard LaGravenese's script to Clinica Estetico, my production company. My partner, Ed Saxon, told me, "You're not even going to believe what's in here." It's a script that actually moved me to tears while I was reading it. For about seven or eight years, I had very much wanted to make a movie that addressed some meaningful aspect of the African-American experience, and we hadn't succeeded in fulfilling that goal. Ed and I went to Chicago immediately and met with Oprah, and agreed on the spot that we were going to try to make the movie together. We went to work right away; the movie happened fast. This was in January of '97. Oprah had the summer off, so we had to decide whether to dive right in and somehow get this huge ocean of a movie ready to film by June or wait till next summer. If we went for it, the script would have to be done - and as wonderful as Richard's script was, it was still an early draft. And the locations would have to be found; there was casting, creating the music, all that. Of course, we dove right in. Oprah's vision and belief in this picture was extremely contagious. It was contagious to me, it had already been contagious to Disney, and it has continued that way to this day.

Beloved is not the first collaboration you've had with a powerful star-coproducer. [Demme's film Swing Shift (1984), with Goldie Hawn, was taken over by Hawn in postproduction] Did you enter into this project with any kind of trepidation?
I had worked with Oprah before, on a PSA [public-service ad] for more sane control of guns in this country. And I had already held her in high esteem for the way she functions in our culture; I had every confidence she was as great a human being as she appeared to be. My one concern until I met with her was that she is, you know, Oprah Winfrey - would we be able to suspend our knowledge of who she is and accept her as this nineteenth-century character? That's a big, big leap. And I mentioned that to her, and she explained to me her whole trajectory: how she had read the book ten years earlier and gotten in touch with Toni Morrisson directly, and didn't just want an option on the book [in which a deal must be reached within a certain ammount of time] - she wanted to buy the film rights, period. When I heard her speak of her passion for the piece, what she'd been through already with it, and how she intended to portray Sethe, I thought, You know what? Even if she's too Oprah Winfrey for us to successfully overcome that, I still want to be there. And I signed on immediately.
     As for the collaborative process, in the deal I made, I got final cut, though I think it was clear that Oprah has the best kind of respect for directors' having the last word on certain decisions on a movie. But I also saw her as the mother of this project. She's the one who had the courage and the vision to buy it and get ot to this place. She's so smart, she's so deep that I trusted her completely, and I felt that if we got to situations where I felt very strongly A and she felt very strongly B, then I didn't think it was going to be hard for me to buy B. So I embraced the possibility of some kind of disagreement; I believed that the movie would only benefit from my respecting her side of things.

Why did she come to you?
She said that she loved the movies I had made. That was more than enough for me.

When a story like this is adapted by a white director, inevitably the question of why a black director didn't get the project arises. Has that happened?
Not that I'm aware of. I want to see the opposite: more pictures made by African-American directors that address white society. One of the ones I'm most excited about is Carl Franklin, making One True Thing. I think that's fabulous. If in your life you have tried to combat various kinds of apartheid, both institutionalized and the more subtle kind, are you suddenly going to respect creative apartheid? I don't think so.

You are known for having a loose shooting style, which allows your actors to fully inhabit their roles. But given the logistical demands of a period piece - Beloved offers a remarkably palpable view of what it must have been like in post-Civil War Cincinnati - were you able to work in your usual expansive way?
The environment that out production designer, Kristi Zea, created, working from the book and other sources, was so truthful that it gave the actors a fantastic opportunity to work with that truth in a very spontaneous way. It was amazing; it took us all back. The story spans one whole year, and I thought it was tremendously important to turn the sound down and show how an area of land changes over the course of a year. From the book, I got a very strong sense of characters' being part of an ecology of living things, including birds and animals and insects - pre-automobiles and pre-electricity. We started thinking about how exciting it would be to take advantage of the sounds that nature makes. We have a tremendously complex bird population working in this movie, at certain carefully chosen times, for certain carefully chosen reasons. The same thing with insect noises - and images. We were scouting locations one day, and I noticed a little butterfly colony. Some of us were taking snapshots, and the assistant director said, "Hmmm, would you like to have some butterflies there when Beloved appears?" And it was, like, What a great idea! And that thing took off. That led to, How about let's cover her with ladybugs, and what have you. I didn't realize how creepy the ladybugs would look at night.

Thandie Newton is extraordinary as Beloved. It's a part that must have been both physically and emotionally difficult.
Of all the actors who I've worked with, I got to know Thandie much, much less, until very late in the shoot, when I found out that she and my kids had become very good friends during her off-hours, and they were telling me how great Thandie was. We didn't schmooze and get to know each other; I sense that she wanted to keep it that way in general. Because, while not being standoffish, she was trying to keep a lid on lots of stuff.

There certainly is some brutal, demanding material in this picture.
There is. I thought that long ago I had really gotten over the wasted energy of the director's getting upset about what is being portrayed. In the toughest scenes, I felt that the director should be the most cool and relaxed and upbeat person, as a reminder that, yes, when the camera rolls we're going to portray something, but we're doing it for a reason, and it's not real, and we're all going to be okay. But shooting the scene in the woodshed [a climactic, bloody flashback] got to me. And when I looked at the dailies, I saw that the director had all the characters come running into the frame, saying their lines and getting out, and the camera didn't go nearly close enough to where it needed to go. I was mortified to see how cowardly I'd been. We went back with an understanding that if we fudged on that scene, then we had no right to be making this picture.
     I feel haunted - in the best sense of the word - by the experience of making this film. It wasn't a difficult shoot; it was a joyful shoot. I still miss the shooting so much. And the dailies every night - it was a celebration. There'd be a certain point where you'd hear Oprah go, "I ain't never seen no movie like this before."

There have been recent rumblings in the press about a Silence of the Lambs sequel.
I think there have been rumblings every couple of years since it came out. And I'm as excited as ever about the possibility. But I hope to film anything that [Silence author] Tom Harris writes. Anything, whether [Silence characters] Clarice or Dr. Lecter or Crawford are in it or not, because Tom is one of the great American storytellers, and what he writes is so dynamic and gripping, and so deeply moral, as well. But you know, we're not allowed to talk to Tom about when the new book is going to be ready. We're not even allowed to ask what it's about. And we're all very, very good friends. That's just the deal with Tom. You let him do his thing, and eventually there will be a book. And if you're lucky, you'll get to read it, and if you're extremely lucky, you'll get to participate in making the movie of it.

Hannibal Lecter has become a part of contemporary American folklore. What makes a character that's so aberrant so fascinating?
I think it has a lot to do with the way Anthony Hopkins brought him to life. The reason I immediately went to Tony to play the part was because I felt that one of the most richly human characters I had ever seen in a movie was Dr. Treves in The Elephant Man; there's something in his essence that bespeaks goodness and depth and reliability, and I felt that if you coupled that with the complex soul of Dr. Lecter, you'd really have an awesome character. As appalling as Lecter's behavior is, as unredeemable as many of his actions are, there's something about the humanity that Tony radiates that makes him utterly unique in fiction and in movies.

You keep in touch with the people who were part of your low-budget moviemaking roots. B-movie stalwart Charles Napier appears in almost every movie you've made, and your old mentor Roger Corman makes frequent cameos. Looking back, do you ever reflect on what a strange journey it's been?
I feel that it's all still moving so fast, there's hardly time to get that perspective. Reading Peter Biskind's book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls made me realize that when the giant thing that the book describes [young, creative filmmakers overturning a dying studio system in the '70s] was unfolding, my friends and I were all there, doing stuff off to the side. I read the book as compulsively as anything I've ever read, and I found it incredibly fascinating, but I feel that the movie industry has a lot more generosity and friendship to offer those who go through it than the book indicates. And you know, some of those lives that I was on the periphery of, like Hal Ashby's - it was strange to read this depressing vision of Hal Ashby [director of Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Coming Home, and Being There], which bore no resemblance to the one I was exposed to. He was just this extraordinarily generous, enthusiastic, revolutionary, brilliant filmmaker, with an amazing open door to anyone who wanted some advice or some input about something they were trying to achieve, or if they were having a problem. Hal was always there with an ear, ready to pick up a telephone and call anybody. There were always young filmmakers, myself included, whom he invited to come watch and hang out at the mix. Someone with no credentials, like myself, would be sitting a row away from Warren Beatty. Hal understood how much you could learn under those circumstances. He was just a very, very generous guy - an inspiration and an example.

Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson, when asked a year ago which directors have influenced him, responded "Jonathan Demme, Jonathan Demme, and Jonathan Demme." Do you enjoy having a connection with young talent?
Listen, I was so knocked out by Boogie Nights - I'm influenced by Anderson. I love hearing that, and we're working with Paul now. He's going to be writing a script set in the world of magic, against a carnival backdrop, and [magician-actor] Ricky Jay is working on it as well. There are a couple of things that Clinica's doing that I'm really excited about, and that I hope come to fruition: Neil LaBute [writer-director of In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors] is now doing a rewrite on a script that I worked on with [novelist-screenwriter] Richard Price about three years ago. It's called Bleeder, and we're hoping it'll be Neil's next movie. Extraordinary director.

Are you bothered by the amount of time it takes to make a movie in today's system?
It seems as if for the past ten years or so, there are at least two or three years between the movies I've made. It's not my approach, but it's just the way it's been, and it suits me fine now because I get so thoroughly exhausted by the time a picture comes out. Also, it gives me more time to spend with my family. But there are frustrations. Before doing Beloved, I spent a year and a half working on a script with [Crimes of the Heart playwright] Beth Henley, and then, when we got a magnificent script and started scouting locations in Canada, Florida, Arizona, and San Diego, we couldn't get together a cast that justified the budget in the computer. It was a heartbreaking discovery, but you know, you can't always get what you want. And I think the script's too good for it not to be made eventually. But having had to accept not making it after getting so close - I don't know if I can get there again. The irony is that when something falls through, it creates an opening for some other wonderful thing. In this instance, if we had made that movie, then I wouldn't have made Beloved. And confronted with that reality, it would be ludicrous for me to complain.