Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme has never shied away from exploring the often shadowy and troubled contours of the American story landscape. He’s been equally successful at revealing a rich universe of uniquely American eccentrics who engender both laughter and compassion, covering the nation’s story in sunshine and in rain as well as anyone. His latest picture, The Truth About Charlie—a loose reshaping of Stanley Donen’s 1963 film, Charade—reveals Demme’s playful side.

Demme’s own story of how he “fell backwards into this business” is a gem not to be skipped over. After a stint in London as a rock journalist in the late ‘60s, Demme launched his career with Roger Corman, where he learned the basics of moviemaking from the godfather of B movies himself: always get your day’s coverage and keep the audience entertained.

“I’d been a publicist in New York before moving to London,” recalls Demme. “Roger Corman made Von Richthofen and Brown for UA in Ireland, and they called me up to see if I would go over to be the unit publicist. As fate would have it, that was just at the moment that Roger was starting up New World Pictures, and he was in desperate need of screenplays. He was stuck over there in Ireland and suddenly here was this avid film buff, who could write press releases, in his office. And he asks, ‘Wait a minute, you want to write a script? I’m starting up this company…’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ (laughing). He said, ‘Do you like motorcycle movies?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, especially your The Wild Angels’. So he said, ‘Okay, why don’t you take a crack at it?’

“There was a particular moment when I fell madly in love with movies… it just turned me on my head… I thought—oh, my god, look at what movies can do!”

Collaborating with friend Joe Viola, who had a career directing commercials in London, Demme cranked out a motorcycle flick based on Kurosawa’s Rashomon. After a cursive read through their first draft, Corman immediately proposed that the two come to California and make the picture, with Joe directing and Jonathan producing. A couple of years later, Demme was tackling directing duties himself, steering several Corman releases through the pipeline: Caged Heat, Crazy Mama and Fighting Mad.

Not surprisingly, Jonathan Demme has encountered his share of setbacks over the years, including the 1984 release Swing Shift, a film which was disastrously retooled by the studio. Still, the general arc of his career—which includes celebrated performance films like Stop Making Sense and Storefront Hitchcock—has been marked by an enviable marriage of commercial successes and personal milestones.

In part framed as an homage to the films of the French New Wave, The Truth About Charlie saw the director take on a less formal style of directing—an approach very much in tune with the guerilla aesthetic in vogue during the Paris of the early 1960s. “Stanley Donen shot Charade in Paris in 1963,” notes Demme. “Three blocks away, Claude Chabrol was shooting something. François Truffaut was a couple of blocks in the other direction. They were all out there with their handheld cameras grabbing it, cinema verite style. We wanted to do that. So we thought: let’s pretend that we are doing the New Wave version of Charade.”

The Truth About Charlie stars Mark Wahlberg—a likeable, streetwise counterpoint to Cary Grant’s urbane, silver-haired fox—and the gifted Thandie Newton, taking a much deserved break from tight corsets and long gowns to play, as Demme puts it, “a fully-rounded, modern person.” With Tim Robbins and a devilish Stephen Dillane rounding out the cast, the picture also contains delightful cameos by such New Wave alum as Charles Aznavour (Shoot The Piano Player) and Ana Karina, Godard’s frequent muse.

Though cut from new cloth, Demme’s film embraces Charade’s penchant for blending and bending genres. At its core, however, it is a romance which depends heavily on the audience’s investment in the relationship between Wahlberg and Newton. In his first interview with MM, Demme gives us the lowdown on Charlie, Roger Corman’s golden rules and what made Beloved the medicine audiences didn’t want to take.

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Phillip Williams (MM): What attracted you to The Truth About Charlie? Why do a remake of Charade?

Jonathan Demme (JD): I had finished Beloved and was working on a couple of scripts, and we screened Charade at the office one night for fun. As the picture unfolded, I thought what a splendid opportunity
[it would be] to go to Paris and make a fresh, entertaining piece based on this movie. I knew that Universal held the rights to Charade and my working relationship has been with them for the last couple of years. The more I pictured Thandie Newton in situations like [the ones in the picture], the more excited I became.

I wanted to work with Thandie very badly after having such an exciting experience with her on Beloved. I think she is a brilliant, brilliant actress, and also a very extraordinary person. Those were the triggers: Thandie, Paris, and also the mixing of genres. I love mixing moods in movies. It’s one of the things that made Something Wild so enjoyable to me.

Stars Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton with director Jonathan Demme on the set of The Truth About Charlie.

MM: There are a few playful links between Something Wild and Charlie. In both cases, of course, the lead character is named Charlie, and in both cases you actually brought your soundtrack playfully into the film by having the performer on-screen for the end credits. Were you thinking about Something Wild while making The Truth About Charlie?

JD: I wasn’t thinking about Something Wild much, but I was thinking about Shoot The Piano Player, which is a film I am madly in love with. It’s a film that I saw for the first time in 1965, when I was madly in love with movies already. It just turned me on my head. There was a particular moment where that happened, even: the two bad guys that are following Charlie, they get pulled over and one of them is put on the spot—the question is put to him, ‘Are you telling the truth?’ And he says, ‘I’m telling the truth, so help me God. And if I’m lying, may my mother fall dead.’ And the movie cuts to an old woman, clutching her chest and collapsing to the floor. I just thought, oh my God, look at what movies can do! In this kind of serious, tough, gripping, romantic melodrama, suddenly there’s a moment such as this!

I guess, by extension, that’s one of the things that made the New Wave movies so exciting to young cineastes like myself back in the ’60s when I was seeing them. [They had] this outrageous mixture of moods and genres. Charade is like that—I’m talking about the Stanley Donen one, which really did manage to be a terrific mystery, a terrific romance and a terrific black comedy… One of the things that I did want to emulate in The Truth About Charlie is that way that Charade, early on in the movie, signals that this is going to be a movie that will be one thing one minute and something else the next. In Charade a dead body comes rolling down the hill in the opening sequence and it cuts to a gun being aimed at Audrey Hepburn—with heavy, melodramatic music—and then a stream of water comes out…

MM: …from a toy gun!

JD: We borrowed heavily from the original there. We have Charlie with the look of growing fear on his face backing away from the camera, and we cut to Thandie, apparently in a situation of jeopardy. She falls out of frame and is underwater, [when in fact] a little kid was backing her up to the swimming pool; she was playing with him.

MM: Were you concerned about being criticized for remaking a classic film?

JD: I’m not too concerned about that. Charade is Charade. We can see it at retrospectives for all times.
We haven’t done anything to Charade; it’s just as fabulous as
[it was] the year that Stanley Donen made it. Now there’s this other picture that would not have existed were it not for Charade—hopefully [one which] has a life all its own and is a pleasurable experience, too.

MM: Was there anything about the film you knew you wanted to change?

JD: The funny thing is that, as I watched the movie that night and we were all sitting around, I thought: what a cakewalk. You could just take this script and run out and shoot it. But you don’t want it to be a cakewalk by trying to duplicate everything the original did. I wanted to capture the spirit of Charade and have that same kind of playfulness, but I wanted to see if we could come up with our own fun way of treating certain aspects of Charade.

More than anything, I didn’t want to duplicate the relationship between Reggie (Audrey Hepburn) and Joshua (Cary Grant) at all. I thought, first of all, there’s no such thing as another Cary Grant, so I wanted to try and turn that totally upside down. [I wanted] to make the guy not elegant—make him a rough-edged, street smart, maybe boy-next-door type.
Or maybe bad boy next door. And I wanted to have him be the one who quickly falls for her.

Wahlberg and Newton in The Truth About Charlie.

MM: As you went into the shoot, did you have a sense of the sort of visual take you wanted to employ? Or did you choose your camera angles and so forth as you went along?

JD: It depends. I work a lot—and have for the past several pictures—with storyboard artists as much as possible up-front for any scenes with action or any kind of visual complexity to them. I love to have a plan going in. We may stick to the plan or we may [stray] from it, but at least we have a plan. If it’s other kinds of scenes—stuff not involving complicated visuals—then I love to go out and watch rehearsals and come up with the angles on the spot.

We went back and looked at tones of the Truffaut movies, especially
A Woman Is A Woman, and there we saw something that we really loved: exterior scenes that look like news reels, like documentaries. There’s the real Paris, real Parisians on the street—no extras; a fantastic sense of the city. Also, we looked at the Wong Kar-Wai movies which are films that have obviously been inspired, in their way, by the New Wave, especially Godard. And we looked at Run Lola Run a lot; we were really excited by the use of subliminal flashes in that movie. So our picture has its own motif of impressions of what people are thinking.

MM: As part of a long list of directors who got their start with Roger Corman, do you still put the principles you learned from him to use?

JD: Roger’s golden rules, once they’re in your head (for me anyway) become just the way you think when you get out on the floor. So on the visual side of things, yes. All of Corman’s golden rules are exploited to a maximum in the New Wave films.

MM: What are his golden rules?

JD: Always be seeking ways to move the camera, because that keeps the viewer’s eye stimulated. He stresses that you make sure that the movement is well motivated… and if you’re in a situation where you can’t move the camera, get a variety of angles so that you can cut and keep the eye engaged through editing.

MM: You got to direct by producing films for Corman first?

JD: I produced two movies that Joe Viola directed: Angels: Hard As They Come, which was the motorcycle movie. Then we went to the Philippines and made The Hot Box. That was a deeply committed film about American nurses being kidnapped by a revolutionary movement and coming back radicalized and joining the revolution—and having lots of shower scenes along the way!

Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey star in Jonathan Demme’s Beloved (1998).

MM: Naturally.

JD: When we were shooting The Hot Box we had really bad weather and fell very far behind schedule. It became necessary to have a second unit and I became the de facto second unit director. I went out with this wonderful young Filipino cameraman and a bunch of soldiers to do some battle shots and instantly fell in love with this process of making my own shots up.

When we returned to California, I asked Roger if I could have an opportunity to direct one myself and he said, ‘Okay, write a prison movie and we’ll see how that works out.’ And I wrote one, and that became Caged Heat. I did two other pictures for Roger: Crazy Mama and Fighting Mad, starring Peter Fonda.

It was a fantastic experience, working with Roger. Obviously he’s presenting you with these opportunities that would not have presented themselves under any other circumstances. I think he was a brilliant teacher and a great encourager. And also an honorable guy. I love Roger, for a myriad of reasons.

MM: Melvin and Howard came soon after that, did it not?

JD: Yes. I got a chance to do a non-exploitation movie with Citizens Band, which was a movie they were doing at Paramount. One day
I saw the list of the 23 directors that had turned the script down. Paramount really wanted to make the movie because they thought that, with the CB craze at full steam, a CB movie could do very well.

Paul Brickman had written a really charming script, the conceit of which was that there were no car chases—none of the things you would expect from a CB movie. Instead it was very character-driven, with people talking to each other on their citizens band radios.

Smokey and The Bandit made a billion dollars and we made nothing. [laughs] But it was a great chance to get into non-action material. I had fallen in love with the idea of directing actors and hungered to work much more with actors instead of action. It was a great cast. We had a great time doing it and we were invited to the New York Film Festival, despite the fact that the film tanked horrendously—and famously—at the box office.

MM: Then was Melvin and Howard your way to show that you could make a hit?

JD: In those days—and I don’t know if I’m talking about myself or the business—it seemed like if you had a chance to direct a good script and you did your best and it turned out well that, regardless of the outcome, you’d be okay. I still believe that the only way to advance your work is to seek out ways of doing good work. So with a screenplay like Melvin and Howard, I just wouldn’t have been concerned about ‘then one day it will be in movie theaters and people will have to go out and see it.’ [laughs] For me, it was just a great opportunity to go out and film a great script.

Melvin and Howard did better than Citizens Band did, but then again all movies have done better than Citizens Band! [laughs] But Melvin and Howard got a lot of notoriety: it won a lot of awards and was in different film festivals; it was good for everybody concerned.

MM: To me, Melvin and Howard is one of the classic films of the ’70s: it has the kind of pacing and very natural performances we saw much of then. The 1970s seemed to be a period when a certain type of film was being made, where a lot more of America’s story was being told.

JD: I know what you mean. That was when Five Easy Pieces was made. It was a time when there was a belief within the industry that any good picture—any really good picture—had the possibility of doing well at the box office. That’s why it was an exciting time.

I feel that there were two occasions where I had uniquely good luck in being able to make movies that, certainly on paper, were hard sells in terms of [generating] high end results: Melvin and Howard was one of them—the story of this very poor family in pursuit of the American Dream. The other one was Beloved, which is this harrowing look at our country’s legacy of slavery.

In both situations, I just thought I was so lucky to make them. With either of those pictures, it was never being made because it clearly has the makings of a blockbuster. They were both made because the material was unusually rich and there were important relationships involved in both situations.

MM: Were you surprised by the reception that Beloved received? It didn’t do as well as hoped for at the box office.

JD: It had a complicated reception. It’s funny, because I feel that what we’ve read about Beloved in magazines and the newspapers may present one perspective on how the movie fared and what the movie’s story was. But, the thing is, I love the movie and I’m so proud of it and I thank God and Walt Disney—and Oprah—that I was able to make that picture. I love that it’s part of our American movie literature, but
I think that we ended up selling that picture with an evident degree of ‘it’s take your medicine time, America.’ I think the intentions behind that attitude were pure, but it probably just wasn’t a smart approach.

Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar for his portrayal of Dr. Hannibal Lecter in Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991).

Also, the picture probably opened much too wide. If we had the opportunity to market it again, we would have been much more low-key about it: open it up smaller and give it a chance to find its audience.

MM: You moved back to New York after making Swing Shift in 1984. Was the move a result of your studio experience with that film, or something more complicated?

JD: Yes, I was laid very low by the turmoil of Swing Shift and I wanted to go home. [laughs] I guess I needed to get out of town and freshen up a bit.

MM: Does living in New York provide anything to you as a moviemaker that is unique? How might you describe what’s going on with production in the city at the moment?

JD: The New York filmmaking community is small, but it is a community. Most everybody knows each other. It’s so great. When we were mixing The Truth About Charlie, I’d go into the building and in that same building are Sidney Lumet’s offices. Sidney Lumet is working there! So I feel like there will always be a film community in New York. And from what I understand, it’s tough all over. People who work on movies—whatever the department—we get to do something special when we gather together to make pictures. We all feel that way. Everybody works their asses off. It’s a real drag that it’s so hard to find the gigs and that you don’t get to stay home enough.

MM: What’s up next for you?

JD: I’m involved with three movies at the moment: one is The Truth About Charlie, which comes out in October. On the home front, I’ve been working on a documentary for a couple of years about a friend of mine named Jean Dominique who was a Haitian radio journalist. He was assassinated outside his radio station two years ago in Haiti. He was a great man, who always wanted to be an agronomist, but wound up being a brilliant journalist. We showed it at the Maine International Film Festival as a work in progress and it was very well received. And I’m one of the producers of the new Spike Jonze picture, Adaptation, which is a script that we developed at [my company] Clinica Estetico. It’s based on Susan Orlean’s book, The Orchid Thief.

MM: And Charlie Kaufman wrote the script?

JD: Oh, yeah. The hero, by the way, is Charlie Kaufman, a screenwriter who is trying to write a screenplay based on The Orchid Thief. [laughing] It’s amazing—a great film. I have learned so much about filmmaking watching the dailies and watching Spike put this movie together. It’s been such a blast for me.

And Richard Price (The Color of Money; Sea of Love) has a fantastic idea for a movie, which is an opportunity to team up with Jodie [Foster] again. It’s an urban thriller with supernatural overtones. He’s great; he’s also a very prolific novelist. Another reason that living in New York is great! MM