Jonathan Demme has managed to successfully divide his career between Hollywood blockbusters, low-budget independent movies and documentaries. On the release of his latest film, Beloved, the Oscar-winning director of The Silence of the Lambs talked to Adrian Wooton.

THE GUARDIAN: In a few minutes I'll ask you about Beloved, and about Storefront Hitchcock, but before I do I'd just like to do a little canter over some other parts of your career. I know you've talked a lot about your time in the Corman stable in the 1970s and your development through the work you did there and the movies you made with Roger Corman. I wanted to ask you about what the single most important thing was that you learnt from Roger Corman in terms of that background that really gave you the opportunity to become a director?
JONATHAN DEMME: I think it was probably that it was completely understood that if you didn't complete the day's work on any given day that you would be replaced. That instilled in me a very strong discipline and a sense that first and foremost your priority was to keep the movie on schedule and on budget, and that's one way you get to stay on the job. That was very valuable. Roger also said something I'll never forget. He said that as far as he was concerned the formula for a director was 40 percent artist, 60 percent businessman. He also had a little pat speech that he'd give you before you did your first directing job, a lot of really good rules - stuff that most movie goers know anyway - just ways to keep the eye entertained, the value of well-motivated camera movement... that kind of thing. He was great. We called it the Roger Corman school of film technique. You really did learn on the job.

That was really quite an interesting period for US independent cinema in the 1970s, were you aware at the time that it was an exciting period, with all these directors coming out of that Corman stable, the people who went on to become really major film-makers?
I was really excited during that period of time making my Hell's Angel movies and my women in prison movies...

You cashed in...
Of course now there's the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls that documents that period. I think sometimes in a very unflattering way. I don't know if many people have read the book, but it seems sometimes like the writer is trying to see the downside of the film-makers he was covering. I think that a lot of the people, like Hal Ashby, were a lot more complicated and there was a lot more magic going on in their lives and their work than the book indicated.
     But yeah, it's funny, now that you mention it I can remember going to a theatre out there and seeing an almost finished version of Apocalypse Now and being overwhelmed with excitement. But that's just what was going on because I was a young guy in town on a fluke making a movie for Roger Corman and then a couple more, and this was all going on. It was very heady.

And then in the '70s you left the Corman stable, and made a series of critically acclaimed - though not necessarily massive box office - movies, things like Melvin and Howard. They established you as a renowned filmmaker - I know Melvin won a lot of awards at that time. But then you went on from there and had your first big studio experience with Swing Shift, which didn't work out terribly well I think. Is that right?
It turned out very poorly, yeah. We did a film and I hope that very few people here have seen it!

It's played a lot on British television I think.
Oh great! Well, an extraordinary thing happened. We made this film and it told the story a certain kind of way and it was a very different kind of movie for Goldie Hawn to make. When the picture was finished and the studio looked at it, they perceived this great chemistry that existed between Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell - who had fallen in love while making the movie. So a very high profile Hollywood writer was brought in to rewrite the movie as more of a kind of Tracy and Hepburn film, a light romance. We had this hard-nosed feminist, all women together thing, and Kurt Russell was supposed to be a bastard, and suddenly all these scenes were being rewritten, and I found myself in a very awkward position because I had to co-operate with these new scenes. I actually had to shoot them, otherwise I would have been in violation of my contract, and so in order to protect the movie that I thought we were making I had to shoot these very bad scenes.
     Finally we shot the scenes and had a screening for the Warner Brothers executives. Everybody trooped in, really proud of themselves because they had sort of made me do this, and we screened the movie for them. They saw the new scenes and they came out slightly pleased but also, probably, scratching their heads because it didn't quite work.
     There was a preview that night and the editors and I had gone back to the cutting room and restored our version, so they all sat down in the theatre again and saw what they hated. I lost my control after that. I was called into the office the next day for a list of changes, and I told them then that I was finished with my work.

After Swing Shift you, well I won't say retreated, but you diversified in terms of not jumping into doing another feature film. Particularly in the 1980s, but I know you've continued to do this, you started making documentaries. What led you to start making documentaries? Because I think I'm right in saying that you hadn't done that many in the 1970s.
I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films. I went to see a Talking Heads concert with Gary Getsman, who was the producer of Stop Making Sense and the executive producer of Storefront Hitchcock. What went through my head was that there was a movie waiting to be made here, which is also what I thought when I saw Robin perform for the first time a couple of years ago. I'm a real music enthusiast and I think it's exciting beyond description to work with a musical artist that you admire, and be filming and trying to capture his magic.

When you started making performance films did you develop any general principles for how to deal with them? It's very easy to make clichéd rock movies and clichéd concert documentaries that are incredibly flat and non-atmospheric. It happens a lot on TV and video, but you manage to avoid those dangers. When you started making things like Stop Making Sense, how did you approach it?
One of the things that was great for David Byrne when we did Stop Making Sense was that David really got to design the lighting for the show - and by extension for the movie. He hadn't got to do everything he wanted to do lighting wise with the stage show because of the limitations of technology at that point. But David got a chance to work with Jordan Cronenweth who shot Blade Runner and was a great master of American cinematography, and he could do all the little tweakings and brushstrokes that he had dreamed of doing with the stage show. Nobody goes to concerts or performances and spends the time looking at members of the audience or going backstage, so the trick is to try as you can on film to create as close a thing to a live experience as possible.

That has been a theme throughout your movies. What seems to be the aesthetic principle is that you're always looking for a straightforward shooting style, but actually in quite an original setting. Obviously in Stop Making Sense you had that, but it's the same with the Neil Young thing, The Complex Sessions, in terms of setting it in a studio and now you've got a storefront with Robyn Hitchcock. Is that what you're looking for? Instead of actually doing tricks with different shooting angles, to try and find an interesting setting? It seems to be very common in your work. It's also true of New Order, the wonderful "Perfect Kiss" video...
One of my favourite things in watching any performance on film is when there isn't a lot of cutting going on and when you get a chance to become really absorbed in the artist in hand. The same way we do, hopefully, at a concert, when we get a chance to really trip in to something that's happening on stage. Whether the singer's singing, or one of the other musicians is playing, we sort of stay there instead of cutting round with our eyes a lot.
     Making a film with Robyn I went back to the Roger Corman idea of trying to keep the camera moving and the interest sustained. If you're in a cramped space and you can't move the camera around a lot to keep the eyeball interested, then you should be able to cut and you should try to get a lot of angles to cut. With David Byrne and Talking Heads you had a whole stage full of musicians to cut to, so you were obliged to cut to a certain extent. With Robyn it was basically 'there he is' - except for when Tim and Denny joined him - and it's just one guy and one guitar. That was challenging. We didn't want to do it just in one room, in an enclosed space, because the eye might get too familiar with the surroundings.
     I recalled this wonderful Dutch theatre group, called The Squat Theatre, that had been in New York in the '70s and '80s, and they did their performances in a storefront space. Often you came in and just like in our film there would be a drape, and then they would find some excuse to open this drape and reveal the street. On one amazing night they did this piece called Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free. In New York City traffic they had this military jeep, with four soldiers in it, do a screaming U-turn in the middle of Twenty Third Street. The jeep goes up on the sidewalk while people are walking by, the soldiers jump out of the jeep, run into the theatre, grab one of the characters in the play, put them in the jeep and then they're gone. You never see them again, and that was the most amazing moment in live theatre I've ever seen!
     So when we were trying to think of how we'd make the Robin show have more going for it visually, we thought "Ah! Homage to The Squat Theatre."

How did you come to work with Robyn? Had you known him for a long time?
I knew his work on disc for a long time, and I had been quite an admirer but I'd never seen him live. Then my wife noticed that he was playing at a club near where we live in upstate New York one night a couple of years ago, and we went to see him. I was completely blown away by every aspect of his show and I approached him afterwards to see if he ever needed a director for a video or something like that, and told him that I would love to do it. We started talking and both agreed that it was absurd to do videos lip-synch, and that if we were going to do a video together then it should be a live performance video. Then we realised that if we were going to have all the equipment there we might as well go to the trouble of doing the whole set, since it was such a terrific piece and Robyn changes his character so many times. So we were up and running.
     The people at Orion pictures - who are dearly missed - were very happy because there were a lot of Robyn Hitchcock fans up there and they leapt on the idea.
     Can I go back to one thing and really reveal my inner guts for one second? I'm sitting here very calmly and telling you the Swing Shift story, and about how they took it away from me. For a film-maker, in your professional life, it's hard to imagine anything more devastating, because you haven't just had your work taken away from you. You've worked on it for more than two years, first with writers, then through pre-production, then with the editors and the composers, etc. etc., so everybody else's work is being taken away. And the director is the kind of custodian of all the collaborative artists' good work and it is his job to maximise everybody's work and present it in the best way possible. So when they took this movie away and started chopping it up I knew that this would happen, so it wasn't the usual ego thing - like my God, they're going to take my movie away - it was also this investment of everybody else's hard work.
     This high priced Hollywood writer - who I've never mentioned - came in and saw this as an opportunity to really endear himself to Warner Brothers, who were mad at him for a movie he did where he went grossly over budget. So this guy came in and started writing scenes but had some difficulty writing them and was taking time, and meanwhile this one thing that we had been planning to do Stop Making Sense. It was scheduled for three nights in the beginning of December and September rolls by and October was rolling by, and Bob (oops, sorry!) isn't providing the scenes...
     He was the second person they went to actually. Originally they went to Elaine May. This is on the up side actually. This was a great moment. Elaine May came to see the movie in its original form and then came to lunch with Goldie and Goldie's partner and I to - as far as Goldie and Warner Brothers were concerned - launch into things. Elaine May who I'd never met before, God bless her, came walking into the room and said, "Are you Jonathan? What a wonderful movie, it's fabulous! Are you guys out of your mind?" And they explained to her the vision of what the film could be, you know more of this Tracy and Hepburn kind of thing. And she said, "Well all these ideas sound great for some movie, but they go completely against the ecology of this movie as it now exists, and you'll never pull it off." (I love that, the ecology of a movie!) But anyway, we did it and then this extraordinary thing happened. Finally these pages come in and they weren't very good, and the Warner Brothers executives, God bless 'em, are going "ah, um, well jeez." We knew there was going to be a scene in the living room and a scene in the kitchen and a scene in the backyard, and they all involve Goldie and Ed Harris (who played her husband) and Kurt, for some other scenes, but there are no details.
     The scenes come in and we're two days away from when we're meant to be shooting and now the Warner Brothers guys say, "Jonathan, what are we going to do?" And I'm like, "Are you kidding? We'll throw them out, we'll forget the re-shoot, we've got a nice movie, let's get it out there." And they say, "Oh, God, that's just typical of you." So they push it back another week, right into the three nights when we're shooting, and it stops making sense. So now suddenly - as if it wasn't hideous enough before - I'm not going to be able to be there during the daytime preparing the night's shoots. There was this one day where we got the days work done. But on the second day - there's this practice when if you're a director and you object to how things are going, you put your name upside down on the slate - I put my name upside down on the slate. Directors always hear about this upside down on the slate thing and you never know if it actually happens, and then one day your name is upside down on the slate! So we did that and we finished the shooting at six o'clock and then I jumped in the car. Ed Harris came with me, and we raced to the theatre and shot it. And the next morning I got up and started getting ready to do these re-shoots, and, all I can tell you, I don't know how I got there, but I just remember finding myself sitting in the bathtub at six thirty in the morning, just crying. I was just so low. But we continue shooting that day.
     By this stage, all the Warner Brothers guys hate me so much now, and they come in and they're like, "Hum, it's going rather slow today, and you're meant to shoot about six pages of work. You may have to miss your shooting tonight if things don't speed up a little round here." I'm doing a take and the whole directing thing was horrible. I'd turn to the actors and say, "Okay, actors, what are you going to do?" And then I'd turn to the cameraman. They'd fired my cameraman, Tak Fujimoto because he didn't make the actors look young enough or something and the whole point of the re-shoot was to make everyone look younger. So I turn to Bill Fraker, another wonderful cameraman, and say, ' "Well Bill, any ideas on how to shoot this?" And he'd say, "Well we could..." And I'd say, "Actors how does that sound to you? Good, okay, great, let's set it up..." And that's my job.
     So finally, it's about six o'clock. We're not finished and there's a certain amount of relishing going on on the sidelines because now I'm really going to pay, I'm not going to show up on my shooting on the other thing. Ed Harris, God bless him, sees what's going on and he says, "Oh Jesus, I've got a terrible headache, I've got to rap. I've got to get out of here." So Ed walks out the door and I'm like, "It's a rap!" And I go running out and go rushing to my car, and there's Ed Harris in the car seat and says, "Let's go!" So the movie gets made and they took Swing Shift away. They trashed the score, put the new scenes in, etc, and I was really depressed about all that. As joyful as I was about how Stop Making Sense had turned out, I remember more the horror of what can happen to you in this line of work. Not so much that stuff I was talking about but just seeing how tough people can be and how mean they can be to you. I didn't want to see that again. I went on a really lonely trip to the Caribbean and walked around on my own for a couple of weeks and decided that I would hope to continue making movies, but only with people I really liked. So that's my new rule, since 1984.

And has it worked out?
It's worked pretty good so far. I moved back to New York and made Stop Making Sense and so on. Anyway, that was a very long story and I apologize for going on. I had to get it off my chest.

I apologize for bringing back such painful memories! Just going back to documentaries for a second, you did start making documentaries around that time and you've made a lot of them, and executive produced a lot. You've talked about the aesthetics of making performance movies. How different for you are the aesthetics of making documentaries compared to fiction films? Do you use a completely different mind set? Is it freer? What rationale do you employ?
Well, you're out there with the crew, and you're all out there for a particular reason which is hopefully to capture something really fascinating about the subject that you're pursuing. But what's interesting is that when you're doing a fictional film the whole aspiration most of the time is to try and make it as real as possible, but when you're making a documentary - I've discovered - you try and make reality as entertaining as possible. I like the difference.
     I also love the absence of pressure, any kind of pressure, with documentaries. I know what Roger Corman's talking about when he says that a director has to be part businessman. Obviously if your film is overtimed then you're not going to get the investment back, and you'll probably stop getting opportunities to do that business. With documentaries it's usually very minimal pressure. Everybody knows it's a documentary. It will probably be on television. Nobody expects it to set the box office on fire. Although we made a documentary a couple of years ago, an amazing documentary directed by Joe Menell, Mandela, that we were convinced we had made a documentary that would finally blow the roof off theatres. It wound up not making any money in the theatres, even though we thought it was such a great story and Joe, and Angus Gibson who collaborated on it, had done such a magnificent job. Anyway, at least it made it into some theatres.

You say you changed where you lived, you adopted a new principle of working, and it obviously did pay off, because apart from making some of the best concert documentaries and other kinds of documentaries, your fictional film career appears to have gone from strength to strength. You have had massive blockbuster success with The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. Has that success changed your approach to movie- making in the way you select your projects or the kinds of pressures that are now upon you? Has the box office success and critical acclaim for those movies changed things for you? How come there was such a big gap between Philadelphia coming out and your next big movie?
I think the biggest change in my film-making life was when I got married and started raising a family, probably quite late in my life as a guy in my forties. I suddenly didn't want to make a movie every year. I wanted to enjoy my life more. Movies were essentially my life, in a way, the great source of joy, but now I had another thing that was making me a little lazier. When The Silence of the Lambs did well commercially it was more than anything. My partner Ed Saxon and I were just so relieved that finally we had made a movie that had made some money! At a certain point you've just made a lot of movies that have come in on budget and are pretty good or whatever, so you're given another shot, but they aren't making money. You get nervous. And certainly as a filmmaker I started thinking, "What is it I'm not understanding here? Why can't any of these things achieve?" Cos I love them and believe in them etc. So it was just a relief when The Silence of the Lambs did well, and when Philadelphia did well also it was an even greater relief.
     In a funny way, instead of increasing any pressure I think that it kind of alleviated it. I think that the conventional wisdom is that if you make a movie that does quite well from time to time then you're allowed some bombs. So it sort of helped. I've come to a point, or a realization - what with the family etc. - that it's such hard work for such a long time when you make a picture. It's about two years from when you get involved in it at a script level to when you say goodbye to it in the theatres, and I've realized that you've got to be very enthusiastic about it. As a director, you have to be really, really glad that you're there. It's just finding something that gives me the confidence just to satisfy myself and amuse myself is the trickiest thing. I don't think it's possible for me to pick a movie just because it's going to do well at the box office. I just don't have that knack.

Were you, along with your producer and your agent, deluged with scripts after the success of Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia? Was everybody trying to get you to make the next $60 or $70 million motion picture?
I wasn't deluged necessarily, but there were certainly a lot of opportunities, especially to do movies about serial killers!

You have now made, aside from Storefront Hitchcock, a big movie which has come out in the States but which we're going to see a little later on, perhaps at the beginning of next year, and that's Beloved. Could you tell us a little bit about that? What attracted you to Toni Morrison's novel and how you got involved in it. It's an incredibly famous novel, and I know that it's been very much a personal project of Oprah Winfrey's.
Oprah bought the book shortly after it came out, which was about 10 or 11 years ago. I got involved two years ago. I know that she had talked to other directors and that there had been other drafts of the script. When it came to me, two years ago at Christmas, I find it hard to believe that such an aggressively different kind of movie was actually going to be financed. That was one reaction I had. The movie deals with a very difficult subject, and it's not a subject that America is dying for opportunities to confront and that is the unresolved, tragic subject of slavery in our country. It's arguably a subject that the entire world has to come to terms with appropriately. It's not just that we were a colonial territory where slavery, this horrendous thing between the races, was acted out. It started in other hemispheres. It's a deep, challenging piece that just, to me, had incredibly emotional rewards. And also it's a ghost story and it has a deeply suspenseful, deeply disturbing, supernatural dimension to it.
     The American history books - taught in our public school system - and most of the popular literature and movies rarely look at this amazing part of American history. An entire people were set free, in the sense that slavery was abolished, and then turned out in an extraordinarily hostile environment to create lives for themselves and future generations. So this great heroic initiative began on the part of the black race in America and there's just so little about that in this period that we call Reconstruction. I just think that the light Toni Morrison shed on it, and the way she dived into this fresh terrain with such imagination was just an amazing opportunity for me as a film-maker.

What was it like working with Oprah Winfrey when it was her project and she was going to be one of the main characters in it? She was effectively going to be the producer on the project. Did that lead to tensions or was it always a plain sailing relationship?
There were never creative tensions. Oprah is certainly one of the credited producers, and later, especially in the editing phase, her opinions and points of view came positively into play - along with her partner Kate Fortay, Ed Saxon, Gary Getson and the rest. We had a five person producing team working on the movie. Maybe that's why it's so long. It's two hours, forty minutes long and there's a lot to produce there for us! Oprah felt and rightly so, that with such an able team working on the producing that she could concentrate on the extraordinarily difficult task of bringing her character, Sethe, to life. As Beloved is unique to cinema there's never been a character like Sethe. Oprah doesn't act that much but she's incredibly gifted and as exciting an actor as anyone I've ever worked with, both with the ideas she brings to the table and her ability to change focus, she was a joy to work with. She was just so pleased to act her part that there was never a moment's aggravation whatsoever.

Well I think that's whetted everybody's appetites to see the film, but you're going to have to wait a little bit longer. I think at this moment, as time's running out, I think that it's time to throw the floor open to the audience.