Sometime before, during or after 2004’s “Manchurian Candidate” remake, Academy Award-winning director Jonathan Demme swore off making fiction. He’d always had a passion for documentaries and was damn good at them, too. His Talking Heads doc, “Stop Making Sense," is arguably the best concert film ever made. Demme had no plans to return to making stuff up.
Things changed after he read Jenny Lumet’s script about a recovering drug addict named Kym, who returns to her dysfunctional family during the weekend of her sister’s wedding. The resulting film was the withering, emotional tour de force, “Rachel Getting Married.” Fans of both that Anne Hathaway-starring film and earlier Demme movies like “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Philadelphia” could only hope that the director might once again invest himself in the world of fiction. Now, while promoting the DVD release of “Rachel," Demme revealed to MTV News that he has in fact optioned a work of fiction he plans to write and direct.
“I took an option on a wonderful novella by Michel Faber recently and I’m going to do a screenplay of that,” Demme told us. “It’s called ‘The Courage Consort.’”
Faber’s novella tells the story of Catherine Courage, who travels with her avant-garde vocal ensemble to a chateau in rural Belgium, where they plan on rehearsing a difficult new composition—only to be interrupted by a tragedy that shocks them all out of complacency.
“This guy is such a great writer,” Demme said of Faber, who’s also written the acclaimed novels “Under the Skin” and “The Crimson Petal and the White.” “I read it for pleasure and I found myself kind of haunted by it. It’s something which is extremely truthful and intimate and character-driven and fresh and original.”
Demme conceptualizes the “Consort” adaptation as being more similar to his recent work than to the big-budget flicks of his earlier career. “It’s the kind of piece—as with ‘Rachel’—where you can make it inexpensively enough and you’ve got a very good chance at returning the investment and having a movie that doesn’t have to open up in a thousand theaters,” he said.
Before Demme jumps fully into adapting the novella, he’s concentrating on a few of his beloved documentary projects. Next week he’s bringing his Neil Young concert film to the South by Southwest festival in Austin. He’s also been filming in New Orleans for several years as part of an investigation into families struggling in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And then there’s the authorized exploration of the life and music of Bob Marley, a job Demme took after Martin Scorsese dropped out because of scheduling conflicts.
“I feel like everywhere I look there’s a great subject for a documentary,” said Demme. “And nothing—no fiction could ever compete with that. It’s very heady stuff.”
Which Demme project are you most looking forward to? Would you like to see him return to big studio films like “The Silence of the Lambs” or is he best suited to indie projects?
Comments