Demme-Young film aims for an extra dimension

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Jonathan Demme, 62, is the positive Pied Piper of American cinema. It’s no accident that the directors of the best independent movies of 2005, Phil Morrison (“Junebug”) and Bennett Miller (“Capote”), started out as interns for Demme. Over the course of 35 years, with movies as different as “Melvin and Howard” and “Stop Making Sense,” Demme has taught them and others that a film’s scope depends on its vision, not its budget.

With his new performance film, “Neil Young: Heart of Gold,” Demme transforms the singer-songwriter’s odyssey of an album, “Prairie Wind” – written and recorded when Young was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm and successfully treated for it – into a concentrated, engulfing vision of a hardy individualist confronting his own mortality and the confusions of life post-Sept. 11.

Stirring plain statements about friendship and marital and paternal love, as well as windblown evocations of Young’s family roots in rural Canada, collide with quietly blistering contemporary material, such as when he quotes “somethin’ Chris Rock said – Don’t send no more candles/Whatever you do.” The no-bull embrace of experience has become so rare that its heightened expression in this movie stiffens your backbone even as it heals your soul.

From his home base in Nyack, N.Y., Demme calls this movie “the closest I’ve ever come to making a western.”

Demme decided to film Young at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium on Aug. 18 and 19, 2005, only after “unhinged” brainstorming with wild notions such as “doing a performance against a blue screen and using a combination of home movies and archival footage to see what was going on in Neil’s head.” The concert format “evolved the more Neil talked about Nashville and I saw all the photographs of the Ryman with its great old backdrops.”

Demme practices 100 percent organic moviemaking, sans sprouts. But he keeps three rules in mind when he makes a full-length music movie. “No. 1, it’s got to have great music. No. 2, it’s got to be presented in a really excellent way to justify people going to a movie theater. But No. 3, it’s got to have one other dimension – something that turns it into a proper movie rather than just the record of a terrific musical event. For me, it was trying to capture Neil’s dream state of mind when he wrote these songs.”

He knew about that mind-set because he was in on “Prairie Wind” from the beginning. A collaborator with Young ever since he wrote a song for Demme’s “Philadelphia” (1993), and a fan of his long before that, Demme, after the rigors of his 2004 remake of “The Manchurian Candidate,” called the singer-songwriter to see if he could catalyze a new music project.

“He started sending me lyrics,” Demme said. “And he started describing things behind them.” The key line for Demme was, “Trying to remember what my Daddy said.”

“Neil told me that when he was a little boy his dad told him about a lot of childhood places. But as so often happens with parents and children, he hadn’t gotten around to taking Neil to all those places. Then his father came down with dementia. … What Neil had in mind when he wrote these songs were images of places based on his memory of his father’s memories – places Neil understood now he’d never get to see. This is so abstract but also so touching that it excited me more than anything else. It sewed the seed for a movie that presents itself as a dream.”

When Demme realized that doing “Prairie Wind” alone would result in a 55-minute movie, he called Young and asked, “Would you be open to an encore dimension?” Young was, but only if he could draw additional numbers from his Nashville songbook. As he put it all together in the cutting room, Demme was astounded at the double-edged effect Young classics had in their new context.

Young’s hymn “When God Made Me” poses a series of questions including, “Was he planning for all Believers/ Or those who just have faith?/Did he envision all the wars/ that were fought in his name?” It made Demme think, “This movie is so patriotic, and so unlike a certain kind of patriotism stuck in our faces for so many years now. I feel as if we’re saying, ‘Now it’s Neil Young’s turn; this is what it means to be an American.’ I just love it.”