DEMME: ‘ORDINARY GUY,’ NO ORDINARY DIRECTOR

NEW YORK —  Director Jonathan Demme calls himself “an ordinary American guy.” But he expresses himself, both on and off the screen, in ways that are original, unconventional and, lately, even controversial.

Long known as an idiosyncratic director, Demme has become more audacious in his work and has begun to speak out on public issues of importance to him, such as racism, which he has called “the greatest problem facing mankind.”

He and fellow New York-based director Martin Scorsese recently called on other film directors to join them in forming Filmmakers United Against Apartheid in an effort to petition the major Hollywood studios to join the United Nations cultural boycott of South Africa. “We don’t intend to carry on a crusade,” Demme said of the effort, “we are just trying to add a little voice.”

Demme firmly established his reputation for the offbeat with the 1977 film “Handle With Care,” then built on it in 1980 with “Melvin and Howard.” But with the recent release of “Swimming to Cambodia,” a film version of a pacifistic, dramatic monologue by Spalding Gray, with music by Laurie Anderson, Demme capped a three-year period in which he made three distinctly different films that also make strong statements.

The preceding pair were “Stop Making Sense,” a concert film featuring David Byrne and his Talking Heads, and “Something Wild,” a perverse comedy/drama about middle-class violence, starring Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith.

“It keeps you on your toes, and from getting bored with the medium,” said the 43-year-old director, a man of few but precise words who brushed aside the suggestion that he consciously sought to stretch himself or his audience. “I want to make films that excite me a lot, and hopefully others also will be excited.”

Demme was in his downtown Manhattan editing room the other day, taking a break from work on his latest project, a one-hour television documentary about the coming of democracy in Haiti. Co-directed by Jo Mennell, a South African-born, California-based film maker, the documentary is, for Demme, “another attempt to do something” about racism.

Earnest, yet unpretentious, he expressed the view that, because of racial bias and “because there’s no perception of a communist threat (in the region),” Americans are paying too little attention to the attempts of Haitians to move from a right-wing dictatorship to a democracy.

“Working on the ‘Sun City’ video sucked me back into the awareness that you can use your work to do something,” said Demme, who co-directed the music video recorded last year by Artists United Against Apartheid. He said the recent focus on South Africa, together with a longtime interest in African art, music and culture, has rekindled passions that stirred in him, as in others, during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

His political sentiments might seem surprising to fans of his earliest offbeat films of the horror genre, such as “Caged Heat” and “Crazy Mama,” produced in the mid-1970s by his mentor, Roger Corman. And Demme’s later films, including his film noir thriller, “Last Embrace,” and “Swing Shift,” which he has called his “salute to American women who worked on the home front during World War II,” delved more into character than politics. But an interest in the character of America has lurked beneath the surface of most of his work.

Demme said the other day that he initially was attracted to “Something Wild” by the “crazy path” of criminality the film’s middle-class characters set out on, and not by “the dark side of (suburban) America” that is revealed as the story unfolds. But he called the film a moral tale that cautions “those who would indulge in violence that they will come to suffer from it.”

Demme literally picked up “Swimming to Cambodia” from Gray’s Off-Off-Broadway stage performance of the monologue (also presented earlier this season in Los Angeles), which chronicles the performance artist’s hitch as an actor in “The Killing Fields” and the revulsion toward violence that rises in him on location in Southeast Asia for the 1983 film.

“There is a pacifistic consciousness behind both films,” Demme said the other day.

His own consciousness, like his directing career, has taken a circuitous route.

“I was a typical kid living in Florida, and as much as I loved the movies, it never occurred to me that ordinary people could work on them, let alone make them,” recalled Demme, whose family had moved from Long Island to Miami, where his father worked as a hotel publicist. He said he himself was working as a kennel man at a local animal hospital and was “not at all career-oriented” after failing chemistry at the University of Florida had dashed his hopes of becoming a veterinarian.

“I started writing movie reviews for the Coral Gables (Fla.) Times Guide, because I found out I could get into movies for free. My father introduced me to (producer) Joseph E. Levine, and when I showed him a rave review I wrote of his film ‘Zulu,’ he offered me a position as a publicist at (Levine’s) Embassy Pictures,” recalled Demme, who was 20 at the time. He said this job led to working as a writer, producer and finally a director for Corman.

“Some people are lucky, and some people are really lucky,” he said.

Demme said he is now developing two feature films: his own adaptation of Herman Melville’s classic South Seas adventure, “Typee,” and a screen version of Russell Banks’ recent novel, “Continental Drift,” about the conflict between a working-class American family “in search of the American dream in Florida” and Haitian boat people in the region.

However, the next project he plans to shoot is another concert film featuring the Senegalese group, Yousso.

“I’m not career-oriented,” repeated Demme, resisting talk of career plans or ambitions. “It is important for me to keep making films, and I do think about making a big-audience film.

“But in this success-oriented country, the quality of one’s experience can be far and away more important than the money or possessions that can be accumulated. I get much more out of life’s experiences,” he said.