Jonathan Demme's Musical Moments Made Sense
The director's gleeful fusion of song and subject matter provided a guide to how personal playlists could serve broader narratives.
One afternoon in 2009, I ran into Jonathan Demme on the sidewalk in Woodstock, N.Y. We'd known each other glancingly since the 1980s, thanks to a shared life in downtown NYC, seeing bands in clubs and going to screenings. As it happened, I was on my way to a film festival showing of a movie I'd made. And there was Demme, in town with his Neil Young Trunk Show, a follow-up to the seminal doc Heart of Gold (2006), ambling down the street by himself, looking around quizzically in the bright autumn sunlight, because that was one of his main modes: quizzical.
We said hi, chatted a bit, and the twinkle in his eye told me he appreciated the fact in particular.
