SASKIA BARON: You said you liked films with themes and psychological complexities. Is this what attracted you to The Silence of the Lambs?
JONATHAN DEMME: I saw the story of a woman in it. That was what appealed to me more than anything else. The idea of doing a violent picture, per se, didn't hold any particular appeal to me - especially violence with women as the subjects. Certainly, that is the background of the film, but the film itself is very much the heroic struggle on the part of Clarice Starling to try to save a life, and that gripped me right away.
     We tried hard to swing the story very much from Clarice's point of view in order to force the audience into an even stronger identification with her than might ordinarily be the case. My cameraman, Tak Fujimoto, and I recognized that point-of-view shots are used in films often, but usually either for a particular point of emphasis, or an extraordinary visual gag. What we decided to do here was to capitalize on the ability of subjective camera to, once again, force identification with the character. We decided to use it, not just for a particular emphasis, but to bring that kind of emphasis to everything Clarice saw: operating on the premise that every scene she's in is a scene of great importance, let's show exactly what she sees in every single scene. Aside from the 1940s film The Lady in the Lake, we probably made the most use of point-of-view, in recent years anyway. We wondered if audiences might find it distracting, but we decided to commit to it anyway, because the potential was there to up the emotional ante quite a bit.
     The funny thing is, it's an easy shot to set up because all you have to do is watch what Jodie Foster does in the rehearsal and what she looks at; the cameraman watches that, and then it's his turn to duplicate what she saw. It's the easiest shot to dream up because you don't actually dream it up. You just copy what the actress is doing. When you get to the editing stage, theoretically certain kinds of shots need to precede a point-of-view shot for it to flow seamlessly into the montage - usually a shot of whoever's point-of-view it is, looking very, very close to the camera so it's not at all jarring when we turn around and see what they're seeing. It's quite easy to edit in as long as you have good close-ups of whoever it is whose point-of-view you're seeing.

Why Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter?
Anthony Hopkins appears to be exceptionally intelligent; there's something about his face, something about his eyes, something about the way he expresses himself. He also appears to be deeply humanistic. He seems to be a very good person. There seems to be a tremendous depth of human feeling behind those eyes. I thought that intelligence is obviously an important ingredient for Lecter, because there's someone who's smarter than almost anybody he will ever encounter. And I felt that it was important to find someone with implications of great humanity, like Tony Hopkins has, in order to colour the character, or else he would have the potential of being an icicle, a brilliant icicle. Therefore, there wasn't much thought involved in arriving at Tony Hopkins. I've admired him tremendously over the years, and I think his characterization in The Elephant Man was a wonderful reference point for Dr. Lecter: as good and as decent as that doctor is, Dr. Lecter will prove to be the antithesis, but will also have a complexity because of all these other things which Tony possesses. Incidentally, as it turns out, Tony, as a person, is indeed as wonderful a guy as his appearance suggests.

The cell in which Dr. Lecter is confined is very different from the way it is described in the book. How did that come about?
The story about the cell in The Silence of the Lambs is fun because in trying to solve a problem we stumbled into something that, for me, is very effective in its own right: the idea of a glass-walled cell for Dr. Lecter, instead of the traditional bars.
     We assumed we'd have bars for his cell and we were upset about the fact that, having extended dialogue scenes, we would be stuck with the presence of bars. We were concerned about seeing both eyes of both characters at all times, and about how far apart we had to make the bars so that we could see the eyes very well, and what colour they had to be to be as unobtrusive as possible.
     We started filming a number of tests: different thicknesses of bars, spaced at different intervals, painted different colours; vertical bars, horizontal bars. With horizontal bars we could see both eyes, but now we couldn't see the mouth or the nose. We were constantly frustrated; plus, on top of the technical problem of the eye/bar relationship, I started to realize that bars pulled us into a different kind of sense memory - of other movies containing other cell scenes - so it would now look like a prison movie; Lecter would be some inmate in a prison movie. It would evoke all these other scenes which we've seen throughout our movie-going lives, and it would deprive these encounters of the unique, special nature that they were entitled by virtue of how intense the characters in the scenes were.
     At one meeting after viewing yet another bunch of bars - diagnol bars, probably, that were painted pink, or something like that - somebody suddenly said, 'My God, we should just put him behind thick glass like they do rats in a laboratory, then we could see everything.' And the light bulb went on for us, and we thought, 'Yeah, why don't we do that?'
     Tony worked with the glass in a wonderful way, for example, when he smells her perfume and, in fact, smells whatever scents are associated with her. It would be one thing to smell her through the bars, but Tony, at that moment, goes up on his tiptoes and sniffs through these holes way up, which turned that into a far more special moment than it would otherwise have been.

What about the problem of how much of the horror you could show without losing the audience?
We - when I say 'we' I mean the designer Kristi Zea, Tak Fujimoto, the screenwriter Ted Tally and I - we knew that we were walking a very dangerous tightrope that we chose to visualize from the story and how, specifically, we went about visualizing it. On the one hand, we knew it was imperative that we honour the horrific nature of the book, because if you didn't, it would be a watered-down version. Also, you have to accept the fact that one reason why people find the book so powerful is that it is so horrific. On the other hand, movies don't give the viewer the same luxury that books give the reader, when you can, with your own mind's eye, picture as much as you wish of what's being described to you. And when it came to the more horrifying things that happen in the story, we didn't want to make people physically ill; we didn't want to upset them in a way that transcends the degree of 'upsettedness' we bargain for when we go to a frightening movie. We felt that this definitely had the potential for being revolting, and we didn't want to go that far.
     There were endless discussions among all of us: how can we show it, yet spare the viewers having to cross a line that they would be compromised by? We worked very, very hard on it. When Dr. Lecter has his encounter with the police officers, we looked at endless possibilities of how to visualize that, and, finally, aided very much by Ted Tally's original take on it at script level - which was: to show a lot, but only for a second - we plotted our way through it.
     I did make sure to shoot a little more horrifying material than probably we would be able to use, so that we could make the final decisions in the cutting room. We previewed the movie a few times and I discovered after a few previews that I was being too sensitive on behalf of the audience; in fact, the scenes that were supposed to have tremendous impact were falling short. So we started putting a bit more in, until finally we felt we'd achieved that delicate balance.

As you said about Married to the Mob, you have definite ideas about violence.
I think that filmmakers definitely have responsibility to portray violence, first and foremost, in a way that is not thrilling and glamorizing, as many movies do - movies which I as a kid enjoyed seeing. I think it's important that when you have a scene containing violence you let people know just how awful it is, how painful and difficult it is, how unappealing it is. I try to do that as much as I can whenever there is a scene containing violence, because I think that the usual targets for people like me who complain about this are Rambo movies that show, in almost sexual terms, how thrilling and exciting it is to spew bullets out of your gun and see many, many people of another race writhing in exquisite agony in front of your spew. I just think that's disgusting.
     As I said before, as a little boy, and even as a young man, I was very ready to be thrilled by that kind of thing in the movies. I think that the easy, cheap thrill that young men, and even older men, are able to enjoy at the sight of violence is part of the complex web of sickness that makes the male human capable of going out and performing real violence against other people including, but not limited to, women and children, and vast numbers of other people.
     I think there's a good case to be made for pushing, whenever possible, for an honest portrayal of how ugly violence is. I'm still struggling with my adolescent self, who is subject to excitement at gunplay. In a lot of the movies I've done, for instance Married to the Mob, there's sort of exploitative, fun use of firepower that I find so offensive - and there it is! I directed it, and I had fun directing it, and I blame the twelve-year-old that still lurks inside of me.

So how do you deal with the violence in a situation like the final confrontation between Clarice and the serial killer, Buffalo Bill?
At the final confrontation, where guns are involved, I've never heard an audience cheer for what happens at that moment in the film. I tried very hard to film it in such a way that it wouldn't provide the kind of relief that you'd get from someone biting the dust. Once again, even the idea of an essentially good person murdering an essentially bad person is not that palatable: you wish that there could be another solution to a confrontation like that.
     I don't think it's something to cheer about. Although I acknowledge that audiences love to cheer at a moment such as that, I didn't think it was appropriate for the film. Also, I didn't want to relieve whatever tension the film had going at that point. I was hoping to keep the audience still bottled up a little bit, and then when they'd see the next scene where Clarice is back at the academy, maybe the feelings which might have been released by a cheer would be channelled into a more emotional place.

Up till now you've had a big critical following, but not really a large popular one. How do you feel now that The Silence of the Lambs seems to have changed that?
Honestly, I love directing movies. I think it's exciting work; I enjoy it enormously when I do it; it's good paying work. In every way, it's something I'm just so happy I've come to as a profession. And that's 90 percent of how I feel about me as a filmmaker. If anything that I've done has had a nice review or it's been shown at a film festival, or anything like that, it's just gravy on the whole experience of being able to make movies. It's delightful, but it's a transitory pleasure. It's not something you go around thinking about. Now, with The Silence of the Lambs, here's a movie which will be seen by many, many people. That's great because I know that at a certain point I started wondering, 'What is my problem? I can do films that are appreciated in some quarters, and so on, but either there's something that I find interesting which is getting in the way of my sharing my work with a lot of people, or there's some ingredient that I'm simply missing.' So it's great to know that, finally, you've made a movie that's seen by a lot of people.
     I don't care what I get remembered for - or don't get remembered for. That's of no interest to me whatsoever. I just love making movies.