Director · 1944–2017

Jonathan Demme

4: briefs
13:00: average
52 min: in total

On film.briefs4

A Master Builder

Jonathan Demme · 2013

Jonathan Demme’s 2013 film A Master Builder adapts Ibsen’s play into a tightly contained, single-set drama starring Wallace Shawn as the ageing architect Halvard Solness. With Declan Quinn’s restrained cinematography and Tim Squyres’ unhurried editing, it foregrounds language, pause and presence over action or spectacle. Julie Hagerty and Lisa Joyce deliver precise, understated performances that deepen the film’s study of memory, guilt and the slow collapse of authority. Though its formal austerity divides opinion, it remains a rare and committed act of textual fidelity — demanding, quiet, and morally unblinking.

13:00

Something Wild

Jonathan Demme · 1986

Jonathan Demme’s 1986 film follows an uptight investment banker drawn into the chaotic orbit of a woman who shifts identities as easily as she shifts lanes. What begins as flirtation becomes a road trip, then a reckoning — with class, masculinity, and the quiet violence built into everyday American life. Anchored by Melanie Griffith’s layered performance and Jeff Daniels’ tightly wound transformation, it balances quirky charm with genuine unease, using genre not as container but as provocation.

13:00

Swimming to Cambodia

Jonathan Demme · 1987

Spalding Gray sits alone at a table and speaks for eighty-five minutes about filming The Killing Fields, the Khmer Rouge’s rise, and his own search for meaning amid atrocity. Directed by Jonathan Demme and scored by Laurie Anderson, it is a formally austere essay-film built on voice, silence, and the moral weight of first-person recollection—neither documentary nor drama, but something stricter and stranger.

13:00

The Silence of the Lambs

Jonathan Demme · 1991

Jonathan Demme's 1991 thriller sends FBI trainee Clarice Starling to interview imprisoned psychiatrist and cannibal Hannibal Lecter for insight into a serial killer skinning his victims. Adapted by Ted Tally from Thomas Harris's novel and shot by Tak Fujimoto, it swept the Academy Awards' top five categories, a feat achieved by only three films, and remains the only horror film to win Best Picture.