This morning it was reported that filmmaker Jonathan Demme has died at the age of 73. The influential director, who succumbed to complications from cancer and heart disease, made his directorial debut in the mid-1970s with Caged Heat, and followed up with a number of well-received comedies. In 1991, he earned an Academy Award for best director with the universally acclaimed The Silence of the Lambs. Several darker dramas followed: Philadelphia (1993), Beloved (1998), and The Manchurian Candidate (2004).
In November 1986, Demme called in to WQXR for a brief chat with Steve Sullivan. They talked about his latest project, Something Wild, starring “a new guy” named Ray Liotta, whom Demme calls “a big excitement about the movie.” The director also told Sullivan about the role music played in his life, reflecting on his steady diet of rock and roll.
Demme had a deep relationship with pop and rock — musicians that shaped the emotional color of his films include Q Lazzarus, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie and so many others — his musical knowledge was not limited to one particular aesthetic. Just rewatch the opera scene from Philadelphia, in which the gay, HIV-positive Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) sits with his lawyer, Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), the night before Beckett’s testimony during his wrongful discrimination trial. Beckett plays a Callas recording of one of his favorite arias, “La Mamma Morta” (from Giordano’s Andrea Chénier), walking Miller through the music. The emotional parallelism isn’t hard to grasp, but it is still a moving example of how stirring music can intensify on-screen drama.
That day he called in for Steve Sullivan, Demme cheerfully parted with a musical request — the lamentation of Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio. A fitting listen for a heartfelt goodbye.