Jonathan Demme has been making intelligent films for three decades. The Oscar-winning director talks to Michael Dwyer about his latest, a drenched-in- paranoia remake of The Manchurian Candidate

JONATHAN Demme has been directing movies for 30 years, among them Melvin and Howard, Something Wild, Stop Making Sense and The Silence of the Lambs, which earned him the 1991 Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. However, when we met in London recently, Demme said that he never harboured any ambitions to make movies, that it never even occurred to him until 1970, when he was 26 and started working for legendary producer and director Roger Corman.

Demme's first job in film was in Ireland, when Corman hired him as unit publicist on The Red Baron.

"It was shot in Co Leixlip," Demme says. "Oh, Leixlip's not a county, but anyhow, that was the name of where we were shooting. I was in Ireland for a month, based in Dublin. There was an amazing restaurant called The Guinea Pig, which seemed to be in the middle of a family house, and they produced the most extraordinary food. I had such a good time, and it wasn't hard work."

It was Demme's only job as a publicist. Corman had just set up his own distribution company, New World Pictures, and was seeking screenwriters to turn out scripts for him.

"It was a great, great moment in time for me," says Demme. "He asked me how I felt about writing a motorcycle movie script. I told him I'd never written a script before, but he asked me to write a treatment and if he liked it, I could write the screenplay. He liked what I wrote and he said I might as well produce the film, too. So there I was at the age of 26, making a movie in Los Angeles."

The film was Angels Hard As They Come, starring Scott Glenn, co-written by Demme and Joe Viola, who also directed it. Demme and Viola had the same arrangement on their next, The Hot Box, a "nurses-in-bondage movie", which was "shot in the Philippines because Corman had some deal over there," says Demme.

Demme caught the bug for film-making when he did some second unit directing on The Hot Box. "After we got back, Roger let me direct a prison movie, Caged Heat. It was an exploitation movie with a very sincere feminist subtext, so it got some good reviews." It was also Demme's first film with lighting cameraman Tak Fujimoto; they have worked together ever since.

Demme recalls the 1970s as a particularly exciting era for American film-making. "There was Roger Corman providing all these entry-level opportunities for film-makers starting out, and then the generation just in front of us was making films such as Five Easy Pieces and Apocalypse Now. It was a very heady period, when anything seemed possible."

Demme's latest movie is an updated remake of John Frankenheimer's 1962 Cold War classic, The Manchurian Candidate, now starring Denzel Washington as a traumatised veteran of the first Gulf War and Meryl Streep as an amoral New York senator ruthlessly determined that her son (Liev Schrieber) be selected as the vice-presidential candidate at her party's national convention.

While remaining true to the essence of the original, Demme infuses his Candidate with urgent topicality and the edgy, paranoia-steeped atmosphere of the great post-Watergate thrillers of the early and mid 1970s, notably The Parallax View and All the President's Men.

"It's interesting that you make that observation," he says, "because Tak Fujimoto and Kristi Zea, the costume designer, watched both of those films again and again before we made The Manchurian Candidate. Those films had a palpable reality to them. Our aspiration was to ground our film in that kind of verisimilitude while superimposing on it a more impressionistic look as seen through Denzel's eyes, as a deeply paranoid, tragically damaged soldier who is haunted by his nightmares. I wanted the audience to see and hear things through his senses."

Demme draws parallels between the periods in which the two versions of The Manchurian Candidate were made, in their depiction of "how leaders aspire to control and manipulate populations through fear in order to pursue agendas that may go against the grain of the basic values of the society. That was what was happening then with communism and that's what's happening in America today with the current administration using every method they possibly can to keep the American people terrified.

"Part of what I hope people will take away from the film is to realise that the money being spent on research projects is funded by the government through subsidiaries of multinational corporations that profit from war and the aftermath of war. In our movie, the company is called Manchurian Global, but we know the names of the actual ones.

"A lot of this research always has its cosmetic upside, which we show in the film, but there's always that darker scientist who will go around the corner and sell the latest discoveries to the highest bidder. In the pursuit of power, the people with the most money will buy those things."

Demme had no trepidation about remaking such a respected classic.

"I admit I read the script sceptically because I wasn't sure how they could have successfully updated a film that was so inexorably wed to its moment in time over 40 years ago. One of the brilliant things that Dan Pyne did in his screenplay was to replace the idea of communism as the great global threat to mankind with the notion that arguably the great global threat to mankind today is the proliferation of multinational corporations that profit from war and intersect with government leadership.

"These corporations are so huge, their proliferation is so extensive and they're so protected by the governments that we haven't got a clue how to address this issue. Here, in this film, the screenwriter tackles that in an interesting way within the context of a thriller, and I really sparked to that."

I mention that when I first heard of the remake, it sounded like an act of sacrilege. "I did, too," Demme laughs, "before I read the script." He'd just taken much critical flak for his previous film, The Truth About Charlie, a remake of the sophisticated 1963 comedy-thriller, Charade, with Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton in the roles originally played by Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.

"I did take some flak for that," Demme says, "but I felt the aggression towards it was somewhat unfair. If it's a bad film, then say so and attack it for what's wrong with it. But don't attack it because it doesn't star Cary Grant."

Yet it has to be said that Wahlberg was particularly miscast in the Grant role. "In that regard, I have to say that my original desire for that film was to team Thandie Newton with Will Smith. She's wonderful. I think Mark's a good actor in the right part, but this was bad casting. The part wasn't right for him. But I read too many reviews that talked too much about the first film and didn't complain enough about what was wrong with my film.

"I choose to do movies on the basis of ideas and scripts that really excite me, and once the enthusiasm gene has kicked in for something, there's no time to be worried about the possible fall-out for the remake of a classic. The energy went into trying to make an original take on a really rich piece of material."

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Demme's Stop Making Sense, featuring Talking Heads in concert, and it feels as fresh as ever today. He prefers to describe it as a performance film rather than a documentary.

"We captured a great band at their peak. In the weeks leading up to the film, David Byrne kept asking me how this was going to be different from all other concert films. "I told him we wouldn't interrupt the performance with interviews and that I didn't think we needed to show the audience. Those were the two defining differences. I trusted the audience of being capable of getting swept up in the show and appreciating the absence of those intrusions.

"For example, I think The Last Waltz is a brilliant music film, but I can't standthose interviews. They put me off watching it over and over. Just as an exercise, I've always wanted to see that film with all the interviews cut out. Can you imagine what that would be like?"

In parallel to his work on feature films, Demme has directed many documentaries, and he is heartened by that genre's recent upsurge of cinema success. "As a moviegoer, I'm thrilled because I've always loved documentaries. It's funny for me as an American, but it was only when I moved to London in the 1960s and got plugged into the BBC that I discovered documentaries for myself.

"I think what Michael Moore almost single-handedly has done is just the most commendable act of film-making in recent decades. Bowling for Columbine started bringing people into the multiplexes for a documentary, and parents started bringing their kids with them, and I think people felt that they were really getting their ticket money's worth. Then to follow it up with Fahrenheit 9/11, he really broke down that wall. Now there are so many documentaries playing in cinemas all around the world."

However, when I cite Morgan Spurlock's hit Super Size Me, Demme asks, "But didn't you feel that the real agenda there was that it was the most elaborate screen test and calling card ever conceived? That guy is very charming, he's very photogenic, and it seemed like he came up with the idea of a documentary so he could put it out there and then pursue his acting career."

Demme's most recent documentary, The Agronomist, recently released here on DVD, tells the story of Jean Dominique, a Haitian radio journalist and human rights activist who was murdered in 2000. It had a gestation period of 10 years, Demme says, and he is "really looking forward" to making a new documentary.

"The great thing now is that I can make a documentary with the same little digital hand-held camera that I shoot my home movies with. The technology now makes us all film-makers. We can all make documentaries if we want."

The Manchurian Candidate opens next Friday