Jonathan DemmeFilmography

Neil Young Trunk Show

Crew: Director, Musical Direction/Supervision, Producer

Rachel Getting Married

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Tunde Adebimpe, Debra Winger

Synopsis: Lingering tensions clash with new hopes in director Jonathan Demme's ensemble drama set during an idyllic wedding that threatens to descend into chaos with the appearance of the bride's estranged sister -- a volatile and unpredictable girl whose turbulent history of personal crisis and family Read More

Jimmy Carter Man From Plains

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Jimmy Carter

Synopsis: Participant Productions, the same studio that heralded An Inconvenient Truth into theaters returns with an insider's look into former president Jimmy Carter's book tour as seen through the eyes of director Jonathan Demme. Using an experimental approach, the camera follows the promotional tour and Read More

New Home Movies From the Lower 9th Ward

Crew: Director

Synopsis: The destruction of most of the city of New Orleans, Louisiana by Hurricane Katrina in the late summer of 2005 was one of the biggest and most startling news stories of the new millennium, but while people around the world were made well aware of the impact of the hurricane and dangerously botched Read More

Neil Young: Heart of Gold

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Neil Young, Emmylou Harris, Ben Keith, Spooner Oldham, Rick Rosas

Synopsis: In the fall of 2005, Neil Young returned to the sound and style of his iconic 1972 album {^Harvest} with {^Prairie Wind}, a set of ten songs which look to America's past and future accompanied by sweet but rough-hewn country-rock. The album was written and recorded after Young was diagnosed with a Read More

The Manchurian Candidate

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, Liev Schreiber, Jon Voight

Synopsis: Jonathan Demme directed this updated remake of John Frankenheimer's 1962 cult favorite The Manchurian Candidate, a pioneering examination of political conspiracy and psychological reconditioning. Major Bennett Marco (Denzel Washington) and Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) are two soldiers Read More

The Agronomist

Crew: Cinematographer, Director, Producer

Actors: Jean Dominique, Michele Montas, Raoul Labuchin, J. J. Dominique, Aboudja

Synopsis: The fifth in a series of documentaries revolving around Haiti's struggle for democracy, this piece from director Jonathan Demme revolves around the life of Jean Dominique, a Haitian radio personality who spent his life campaigning for reform within the notoriously oppressed nation. The Agronomist Read More

Beah: A Black Woman Speaks

Crew: Producer

Actors: Beah Richards, Marylouise Patterson, Gerard Horne, Bill Cobbs, Ruby Dee

Synopsis: Actress Lisa Gay Hamilton makes her directorial debut with the documentary Beah: A Black Woman Speaks, a biography of actress and writer Beah Richards, whom Hamilton had worked with on The Practice and Beloved. The production of this project spanned many years; Hamilton realized, early on, that Richards Read More

The Truth About Charlie

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Mark Wahlberg, Thandie Newton, Tim Robbins, Park Joong-Hoon

Synopsis: Director Jonathan Demme filters the classic Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant vehicle Charade through the influence of the French New Wave in this stylish romantic thriller. Regina Lambert (Thandie Newton) has been having second thoughts about her marriage to the often enigmatic art dealer Charlie (Stephen Dillane Read More

Adaptation

Crew: Producer

Actors: Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Brian Cox, Tilda Swinton, Cara Seymour

Synopsis: The creative team behind Being John Malkovich -- director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman -- return with this equally offbeat comedy, in which Kaufman himself becomes the leading character. Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) is a gifted but profoundly neurotic screenwriter who, after the Read More

The Opportunists

Crew: Executive Producer

Actors: Vera Farmiga, Cyndi Lauper, Donal Logue, Peter McDonald, Anne Pitoniak

Synopsis: In this downbeat drama, a reformed criminal finds himself led back to a life of crime. Fresh out of prison, former safecracker Victor Kelly (Christopher Walken) wants to support his daughter Miriam (Vera Farmiga) and Aunt Dierdre (Anne Pitoniak) with his new career in auto repair. But Victor's Read More

Dial H For Hitchcock

Actors: Kevin Spacey, Jonathan Demme, Joseph Stefano, John Michael Hayes, Janet Leigh

Synopsis: This documentary is a loving look at the cinematic genius of Alfred Hitchcock. Speeding through much of his early British works, the film focuses on his American classics, such as Marnie, Vertigo, and particularly Psycho. The movie also neatly examines Hitchcock's signature touches, from his Read More

Storefront Hitchcock

Crew: Director

Actors: Robyn Hitchcock, Deni Bonet, Tim Keegan

Synopsis: Rock-music lover and feature-film director Jonathan Demme takes on eccentric British singer-songwriter, Robyn Hitchcock, in an ambitious concert film, though tinier in scope than his previous rock-film effort, Stop Making Sense(1984), featuring Talking Heads. Setting up a stage in a New York Read More

Beloved

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, Kimberly Elise, Beah Richards

Synopsis: Jonathan Demme directed this adaptation of Toni Morrison's fact-based fifth novel (winner of a 1988 Pulitzer Prize), written in an experimental stream-of-consciousness flow and capturing the impact and aftermath of slavery on the human soul. In 1873, middle-aged Sethe (Oprah Winfrey) lives near Read More

Shadrach

Crew: Executive Producer

Actors: Martin Sheen, Harvey Keitel, Andie MacDowell, John Franklin Sawyer, Scott Terra, Daniel Treat, Monica Bugajski

Synopsis: Susanna Styron made her feature directorial debut with this family drama, an adaptation of a 1978 short story by her father, novelist William Styron (Sophie's Choice). Paul Whitehurst (voice of Martin Sheen) recalls Depression-era events in Tidewater, Virginia, when he was ten years old. In the Read More

Subway Stories

Crew: Director, Executive Producer

Actors: Rosie Perez, Mercedes Ruehl, Lili Taylor

Synopsis: Subways provide the common setting for this modern anthology comprised of distinct vignettes made by ten of Hollywood's top directors and featuring some of Tinseltown's most popular actors. The episodes are based on real stories submitted by scores of subway regulars. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Read More

That Thing You Do!

Crew: Producer

Actors: Tom Everett Scott, Liv Tyler, Charlize Theron, Johnathon Schaech, Steve Zahn, Ethan Embry

Synopsis: Tom Hanks made his directorial debut in this bright comedy set in the mid-1960's about a rock group and their brief fling with fame. Guy Patterson (Tom Everett Scott) works as a salesman at his father's appliance store and plays the drums in his spare time, fancying himself a jazz musician. One Read More

Mandela

Crew: Producer

Synopsis: Nelson Mandela was born in the remote South African village of Qunu; an excellent student, Mandela went on to become a lawyer and then a political activist with the African National Congress, a political party who sought to bring down South Africa's Apartheid regime, in which the minority white Read More

Devil in a Blue Dress

Crew: Executive Producer

Actors: Lisa Nicole Carson, Denzel Washington, Tom Sizemore, Jennifer Beals, Don Cheadle, Maury Chaykin

Synopsis: Denzel Washington stars in this adaptation of the novel by African-American crime author Walter Mosley, the first of his stories to reach the screen. Ezekiel Rawlins (Washington), known to his friends as "Easy," has just lost his job at an aircraft plant in post-WW II Los Angeles, a time when Read More

Neil Young & Crazy Horse: The Complex Sessions

Crew: Director

Synopsis: Acclaimed filmmaker Jonathan Demme (whose credits include The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia) spent two days at Complex Recording Studios in Los Angeles, as Neil Young and Crazy Horse worked on songs for their album {^Sleeps With Angels}. Neil Young & Crazy Horse: The Complex Sessions was Read More

One Foot on a Banana Peel, the Other Foot in the Grave

Crew: Producer

Synopsis: Secrets from the Dolly Madison Room
This thoughts and feelings of gays with AIDS are revealed in this documentary set in a New York West Village clinic. One of the patients dies during the course of the film. The patients speak with candor and humor about their grave condition, about the Read More

Roy Cohn/Jack Smith

Crew: Executive Producer

Actors: Ron Vawter

Synopsis: Based on a popular one-man play and filmed in a single day at the theatrical space the Kitchen in 1993, this avant-garde drama contrasts the lives of two famous homosexuals, both of whom died of AIDS in the 1980s. Both men are played by original castmember Ron Vawter. Roy Cohn was a gay-bashing Read More

Philadelphia

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Jason Robards, Jr., Mary Steenburgen, Antonio Banderas, Ron Vawter, Joanne Woodward

Synopsis: At the time of its release, Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia was the first big-budget Hollywood film to tackle the medical, political, and social issues of AIDS. Tom Hanks, in his first Academy Award-winning performance, plays Andrew Beckett, a talented lawyer at a stodgy Philadelphia law firm. The Read More

Household Saints

Crew: Executive Producer

Actors: Tracey Ullman, Vincent D'Onofrio, Lili Taylor, Judith Malina, Michael Rispoli

Synopsis: Household Saints is a leisurely-paced portrait of three different generations of working-class, New York-based, Italian women. Carmela Santangelo (Judith Malina) is an elderly immigrant whose son (Vincent D'Onofrio) wins a wife, Catherine Falconetti (Tracey Ullman), during a pinochle game. The Read More

Cousin Bobby

Crew: Director

Synopsis: Episcopal priest Robert Castle is the subject of this documentary, whose title refers to his relation to the film's director, Jonathan Demme. Best-known for his Oscar-winning work on Silence of the Lambs (released the same year as this film), Demme is no stranger to nonfiction filmmaking, with one Read More

The Silence of the Lambs

Crew: Director

Actors: Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Anthony Heald, Brooke Smith

Synopsis: In this multiple Oscar-winning thriller, Jodie Foster stars as Clarice Starling, a top student at the FBI's training academy whose shrewd analyses of serial killers lands her a special assignment: the FBI is investigating a vicious murderer nicknamed Buffalo Bill, who kills young women and then Read More

Miami Blues

Crew: Co-producer

Actors: Alec Baldwin, Fred Ward, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nora Dunn, Charles Napier

Synopsis: Based on the late Charles Willeford's series of hard-boiled crime novels featuring Miami cop Hoke Moseley, the Jonathan Demme-produced Miami Blues opens with the prison release of Frederick Frenger Jr. (Alec Baldwin), a deranged killer who has barely de-boarded his plane before he's killed a Hare Read More

Married to the Mob

Crew: Director

Actors: Michelle Pfeiffer, Matthew Modine, Dean Stockwell, Mercedes Ruehl, Alec Baldwin

Synopsis: Michelle Pfeiffer is Married to the Mob in this comedy. The wife of Mafia hitman Alec Baldwin, Pfeiffer regularly chastizes her husband for his underhanded line of work. Baldwin refuses to entertain any thoughts of quitting the mob-and besides, he's got a good thing going with Nancy Travis, the Read More

Haiti, Dreams of Democracy

Crew: Director

Swimming to Cambodia

Crew: Director

Actors: Spalding Gray, Sam Waterston, Ira Wheeler

Synopsis: By rights, an 87-minute filmed monologue should be as stimulating as watching paint dry. Ah, but when the monologist is the brilliant Spalding Gray, then the audience is in for a cerebral feast. Based on his one-man Broadway presentation, Swimming to Cambodia is a mesmerizing account of Gray's Read More

Something Wild

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Jeff Daniels, Melanie Griffith, Ray Liotta, Margaret Colin

Synopsis: A wildly inventive and entertaining comic nightmare from former Roger Corman prodigy Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs), this screwball odyssey is a ride to remember. Jeff Daniels plays clean-cut New York bond trader Charlie Driggs, who accepts a ride home from a strange but attractive Read More

Into the Night

Actors: Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Pfeiffer, Richard Farnsworth, Irene Papas, Kathryn Harrold

Synopsis: Filled with enough cameos to keep film buffs entertained, this otherwise routine action-comedy by John Landis boasts Michelle Pfeiffer as one of its major attractions. She plays Diana, a woman prone to having affairs with some very dangerous men, and Jeff Goldblum is Ed Okin, an aerospace engineer Read More

Stop Making Sense

Crew: Director

Actors: Bernie Worrell, Alex Weir, Steve Scales

Synopsis: Stop Making Sense was the first feature-length documentary effort of filmmaker Jonathan Demme. The director's subject is The Talking Heads, a new-wave/pop-rock group comprised of David Byrne, Chris Franz, Tina Weymouth and Jerry Harrison. The film was made during a three-day concert gig at the Read More

Swing Shift

Crew: Director

Actors: Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Christine Lahti, Fred Ward, Ed Harris

Synopsis: Director Jonathan Demme made one of his more conventional movies with Swing Shift, an examination of life on the American home front during WWII. Goldie Hawn, who also served as the film's producer, stars as Kay, a woman who takes a job on the line at a plant producing war planes after her husband Read More

Who Am I This Time?

Crew: Director

Actors: Susan Sarandon, Christopher Walken

Synopsis: To overcome his shyness, hardware store clerk Christopher Walken gets involved with his local community theatre group. Proving himself a powerful stage presence, Walken is cast as Stanley Kowalski in the group's upcoming production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Still, he remains as bashful as ever Read More

Melvin and Howard

Crew: Director

Actors: Paul Le Mat, Jason Robards, Jr., Mary Steenburgen, Jack Kehoe, Michael J. Pollard, Dabney Coleman, Pamela Reed

Synopsis: Jonathan Demme's breakthrough movie featured the shaggy energy and affection for marginal American eccentrics that marked his earlier Citizens Band (1977) and such later films as Something Wild (1986) and Married to the Mob (1988). Melvin Dummar (Paul LeMat) is a barely-getting-by Nevada milkman. Read More

The Last Embrace

Crew: Director

Actors: Roy Scheider, Janet Margolin, Christopher Walken, Sam Levene, John Glover

Synopsis: In 1979, Jonathan Demme was still a cutting-edge director and The Last Embrace was his first effort at a completely commercial assignment. Very much in the Hitchcock vein, The Last Embrace is an intense suspense film concerning Harry Hannan (Roy Scheider), a government agent recovering from a Read More

Roger Corman: Hollywood's Wild Angel

Synopsis: Documentary filmmaker Christian Blackwood, whose previous subjects have included John Huston and Thelonious Monk, aims his sights at low-budget movie maven Roger Corman. Hollywood's Wild Angel traces Corman from his screenwriting days to his earliest directorial efforts at the newly-formed Read More

Citizens Band

Crew: Director

Actors: Paul Le Mat, Candy Clark, Ann Wedgeworth, Bruce McGill, Marcia Rodd

Synopsis: CB radios provide a human connection between the lives of a collection of varied characters in Jonathan Demme's energizing film that exploits the CB radio craze of the mid-'70s. Chrome Angel (Charles Napier) is a truck driver who has an accident and is laid up recuperating at the home of Hot Read More

The Incredible Melting Man

Actors: Alex Rebar, Burr de Benning, Myron Healey, Michael Alldredge, Ann Sweeney

Synopsis: Essentially a seedy '70s version of The Quatermass Experiment, this painfully cheap production from writer/director William Sachs involves the horrific plight of returning astronaut Steve West (Alex Rebar), the sole survivor of a disastrous expedition to the rings of Saturn. The fatal outcome of Read More

Fighting Mad

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Peter Fonda, Lynn Lowry, John Doucette, Philip Carey, Scott Glenn

Synopsis: Peter Fonda here gives a studied performance of a man alone against the odds. When he discovers that members of his family are going to be killed because they are standing in the way of a corporate master plan which involves their land, and the local sheriff seems unconcerned about the threat, he Read More

Crazy Mama

Crew: Director

Actors: Cloris Leachman, Stuart Whitman, Ann Sothern, Tisha Sterling, Jim Backus

Synopsis: Cloris Leachman stars as Melba, a woman with whom violence is a way of life, in Jonathan Demme's high-pitched "B"-movie Crazy Mama. The film spans three decades in the violent life of Melba, beginning in Jerusalem, Arkansas in 1932, when law enforcers kill her father (Clint Kimbrough), turning her Read More

Caged Heat

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Juanita Brown, Erica Gavin, Barbara Steele

Synopsis: Considered the quintessential "girls in prison" flick of the 1970s, novice director Jonathan Demme's Caged Heat is set in a hellish American woman's penitentiary run by vicious, wheelchair-bound Barbara Steele. Statuesque convict Erica Gavin is forced to undergo horrible (but legal) tortures when Read More

Black Mama, White Mama

Crew: Screenwriter

Actors: Jess Ramos

Synopsis: Two female prisoners, one black and one white attempt to escape a women's reformatory in this violent exploitation film that is a cheap knock- off of The Defiant Ones. The black woman is in for prostitution while her blonde counterpart was involved with a radical group. They escape after lesbian Read More

The Hot Box

Crew: Producer, Screenwriter

Synopsis: Co-written and produced by Jonathan Demme, this women-in-prison outing focuses on a group of escapees who ignite a revolution. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide Read More

Angels Hard As They Come

Crew: Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Dennis Art

Synopsis: Angels Hard as They Come is a melange of sex, violence, leather, and souped-up Harleys with a note of topicality added in by having some of the bikers dress and behave like hippies. One of the things distinguishing Angels Hard as They Come other pictures of its ilk is the fact that it was produced Read More