Jonathan Demme names his most overlooked movie: “It’s actually a good film”
In addition to his narrative exploits, Jonathan Demme was also a prolific documentarian, with his career defined by regular alternations between the two mediums.
Between his 1974 debut on prison thriller White Heat and his swansong on 2015’s musical dramedy Ricki and the Flash, the filmmaker helmed 18 features, but he also found time to direct 14 full-length documentaries and one short film on biologist Tyrone Hayes.
Much like his big screen efforts, Demme’s slice-of-life stories were suitably eclectic, covering everything from his two Neil Young concert films and the Academy Award-nominated Mandela to the exploration of Haiti’s first independent radio station in The Agronomist and former United States president Jimmy Carter embarking on a politically charged book tour in Man from Plains.
Diversity was always the name of the game for Demme, who cut his teeth as one of the many future greats to serve as a Roger Corman protege to reaching the summit of the industry with an Oscar for ‘Best Director’ thanks to The Silence of the Lambs, which remains the last movie to ever complete the ‘Big Five’ sweep at the most prestigious event on the Hollywood calendar.
Like many long-lasting careers, there were ups, downs, triumphs, disasters, flops, busts, bombs, underrated gems and unheralded minor works, with Demme pointing to one of them as the most overlooked film he’d ever made. It was one he had a personal connection to, with the subject a family member and well-known Episcopalian minister who used it as the springboard to an unlikely acting career.
“Especially at this moment, I’ve got a soft spot for this documentary I made, Cousin Bobby, about a cousin of mine,” he told Filmmaker Magazine. “We made that in the early ’90s, it had a little bit of a theatrical life, and it was on POV over the years. Cousin Bobby died recently, and it makes me realise that the film, which was financed by a Spanish television company, is not around anymore.”
Cousin Bobby screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1992, and Robert W Castle would go on to appear in not only several of Demme’s films, including Philadelphia, Rachel Getting Married, and The Manchurian Candidate, but also Sylvester Stallone’s Cop Land and Barry Levinson’s Sleepers.
“I would really love to get Cousin Bobby back onscreen,” Demme reflected on his documentary slipping out of the public consciousness. “It’s actually a good film because he was an amazing guy.” While he’s obliged to say that, seeing as Castle was his cousin and he made a movie about him, it was that personal connection failing to be reciprocated by a mass audience that made the director view it as his most unheralded film in the first place.
