Jonathan Demme: an American abroad

The Hollywood director tells Andrew Gumbel why he has made a film about a murdered Haitian broadcaster

Jonathan Demme first visited Haiti in December 1986, right on the heels of the overthrow of the Duvalier dictatorship, and it was love at first sight. He had gone to cultivate his long-standing interest in Haitian art, but soon he became intoxicated with something else entirely. After 30 years of repression and violence, the country was in the grip of an infectious excitement about the promise of democracy at last. There was, in Demme's words, "an eruption of free speech, of talk of politics and social change and a better future" - all in one of the most benighted, but also most strangely vibrant corners of the planet.

"As a jaundiced American," he recalls, "I found all this enthusiasm for the underpinnings and ideals of democracy moving. It made me almost jealous." And so the long love affair started. Within months, he was back in the Caribbean to make a documentary called Haiti: Dreams of Democracy, which tried to capture the thrill he had sensed almost as soon as he stepped off the plane.

This was one of the most fertile periods in Demme's career - he had directed, in quick succession, the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense, the film of Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia, and the gleefully off-the-wall Melanie Griffiths-Jeff Daniels sex comedy Something Wild - but he found it surprisingly easy to look beyond the bright lights of Hollywood. He became, in his words, "a total Haiti fanatic", inspired and intoxicated by the art, the music, the colour of the streets, and by the spirit of a people who refuse to give up even in the face of appalling poverty and cycles of political despair.

As Haiti plunged back into chaos and CIA-sponsored military violence in the early 1990s, he made time - in between such hits as Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia - to return for a follow-up documentary called Haiti: Killing of the Dream. And he did not stop there. He kept coming back, year after year, film after film, following Haitian affairs in obsessive detail. He has, by now, made no fewer than five Haiti documentaries, the latest of which is being released at a time of yet more political upheaval in the western hemisphere's poorest country. It is also, perhaps, the most deeply felt of all.

The Agronomist, which opens next week, is a portrait of a quintessential hero of the Haitian pro-democracy movement, an extraordinary polymath and populist icon called Jean Dominique, who fashioned radio broadcasting into the supreme instrument of social and political change in Haiti over more than three decades.

Dominique started out his career not as a journalist but as the agronomist of the title, an experience that gave him a unique understanding and a direct line of communication to Haiti's largely rural population. His station, Radio Haïti-Inter, was the first to broadcast news and current events programmes in Creole, the "fabulously emphatic" spoken language of the people, as Demme puts it, rather than French, the preserve of the country's élite. Through his broadcasts he not only educated his listeners and brought the world to them; he also politicised them and made them aware of the shortcomings of Haiti's pampered, self-absorbed political class.

This was, as Dominique acknowledges in the film, a "risky business" that twice forced him into exile - first in 1980, when the passing of the White House from Carter to Reagan emboldened "Baby Doc" Duvalier to crack down on the media; and again in 1991, when a military coup overthrew the eight-month-old presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the radical priest who, at that stage, carried the hopes of the democracy movement on his shoulders.

Dominique's story in many ways mirrors that of his country, which is one reason why he is an ideal subject for a documentary. Another reason is his outsize personality, which all but leaps off the screen. He is expressive, witty, profound, theatrical, sincere - often all at the same time. He proves to have had an unwavering instinct for the way political winds are blowing; he is shown on camera literally sniffing the air in a grandiose flared-nostril gesture whenever he talks about the bad guys getting ready to return.

Much of the interview footage was shot in the early 1990s, when Dominique and his wife Michèle Montas were living in New York. Demme initially hoped to bring the film to a close when Aristide was restored to power by the US Marines in 1994 and Dominique returned from exile to resume broadcasting from his beloved radio station. A happy ending, in other words - the journalist switching his microphone back on and picking up where he'd left off three years earlier.

But it wasn't to be. The paramilitaries who terrorised Haiti during Dominique's absence had smashed the radio studios to pieces, and it became clear that the restoration process was going to be painfully long. Dominique decided that he had enough to do without tending to the needs of the documentary crew, and the film fell into limbo for another six years.

It was the ever-recurring horrors of Haitian history that provided the grim denouement. Dominique fell out with Aristide because he felt that the President had betrayed many of the democratic ideals that had propelled him to power in the first place. Having been regarded as a friend of Aristide's ruling order, he became an enemy; instead of an asset, he was perceived as a threat, not least because he spoke his mind in his broadcasts, and had a palpable effect on public opinion. In April 2000, just three weeks before Haiti voted in parliamentary elections, Dominique and his station manager were shot dead on their way into work.

Haiti was shattered by the news, and so was Demme. This, though, was not a moment to wallow in grief; indeed, Demme suddenly found himself with a burning reason to finish his film. The portrait now became a tribute, and also an elegy to the dashed hopes of a generation. Dominique's widow Michèle agreed to let Demme's cameras back, and through her he eventually found the ending he needed. She is now the one who, at the film's conclusion, resumes broadcasting from Radio Haïti, barely a month after Dominique's death. It is no longer a statement of triumph over oppression, but rather an act of defiance towards her husband's killers. Not a happy ending, but something much more poignant. And, perhaps, necessary.

Demme is very eloquent, and in our interview, he happily recalled the first time he met Jean Dominique in 1987, on the first anniversary of Baby Doc's fall. He had brought his camera crew to the radio station, an obligatory stop for anyone tracing the broad lines of Haiti's democracy movement in those days, and he was given just the briefest of introductions to a man he found to be "amazing, dashing, mercurial". Four years later, Demme approached Dominique in New York and pitched the idea of doing a portrait of the journalist in exile. Actually, Demme thought that there were no limits to what Dominique could do, and even flirted with casting him as the lead actor in a feature film - an idea that makes a lot more sense once you have seen him on camera.

However, even the documentary was almost more than Dominique was prepared to take on. He seemed nervous about being the one answering questions rather than posing them, and expressed misgivings. ("What makes an outsider like you so in love with Haiti?" he shot back at Demme. "Why would some American want to make a documentary about a Haitian radio journalist?") In the end, though, he realised he had nothing much else to do, and agreed. "We became very good friends, and my enthusiasm for him was contagious," Demme says. "He realised he could dominate the film and say whatever he wanted."

Dominique, it turned out, was not only interested in cinema but had been a film pioneer in his own right in the 1960s, bringing foreign films into Haiti for exhibition, and encouraging the first stirrings of an indigenous film industry. Together, he and Demme discussed doing a series of lectures on the history of Haitian cinema. But the relationship changed somewhat after Dominique returned home in 1994. They were to remain good friends, but not collaborators. "The guys with the camera are giving me a big pain in the ass," Demme remembers him saying. "I don't want to do this any more."

Dominique suggested that the crew go instead to the main agricultural region of Haiti, the Artibonite, "to see who I really am". Demme remembers thinking, "Yeah, right. This is a guy who curls up reading Faust to the sound of Gregorian chants on the stereo. Yeah, he's a real shit-kicker." But the Dominique of the years in exile was not the same as Dominique in his element. In the Artibonite, Demme discovered an extraordinary depth of affection for Dominique. His claims to being a man of the people were genuine.

It is tempting to conclude - both from watching The Agronomist and from seeing Haiti once again in the thrall of paramilitary gunmen with links to the CIA and the international drugs trade - that the good guys are all gone, that the figureheads of the post-Duvalier period have either been corrupted or have proved ineffectual, and that nobody is left to defend the interests of ordinary Haitians. Demme, though, does not share that pessimism, or not entirely. "There's a whole new generation of courageous people ready to push the country in the right direction," he says. At the same time, he is filled with rage at the dishonest, anti-democratic role played by the United States in Haiti down the years.

He argues passionately that the instinctive antipathy of the US government towards Aristide was the result of nervousness at the thought of an impoverished Caribbean nation daring to talk about empowering its working class. "What the US wants is a docile, cheap labour pool," Demme says. "Well, suddenly you have the poorest country in the western world raising the minimum wage from $1.50 a day to $3 a day. So this guy is setting a horrendous example to the rest of the Caribbean. We can't let him do this or everyone will want to do the same..."

Demme catches himself for a moment in mid-flow and says: "I feel like I'm echoing Dominique." He seems perturbed by the insight, then rather pleased. "In fact," he adds, "I am echoing Dominique." Certain passions, clearly, are contagious.

'The Agronomist' opens on 16 April