Director Jonathan Demme was recently interviewed at BFI Southbank about his Jimmy Carter documentary Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains. The film follows Carter on his recent controversial book tour for Palestine ­Peace Not Apartheid in an effort to explore the public and private sides of a man who has devoted his life to peace . During the interview Demme talks about the film and his influences:

DT: And how much did you really know about his personality before you got involved? What were the things that you discovered?

JD: There’s a profile of Carter in the New Yorker by Hendrick Hertzberg, who writes wonderful political stuff, especially for the New Yorker. He had been a Carter speechwriter and sometime in the early 90s he wrote this incredibly loving profile of Carter. And I was excited because there is this combination of this presidential-sized ego, convinced you’re right, macho, in the sense of striding the world, contrasted with this weepy, big-hearted guy who will burst into tears at the drop of a hat. So that sounded like a nice, complicated character and certainly a more complicated character than we knew of on the basis of what we saw from the media during his presidency and since. [Guardian Unlimited]

Demme, who has directed The Agronomist, Philadelphia and The Silence of the Lambs, also gave a great Participant Productions shout out in the interview:

DT: You’ve already expressed your admiration for Jimmy Carter before making the film. How did this come about?

JD: There’s a company in America called Participant Productions which wants to make films that will be entertaining and commercially viable but that address something important in the world today and that offer an agenda for positive change. They famously did the Al Gore film An Inconvenient Truth. Anyway, the guy that heads up Participant, who’s yet another eBay billionaire, a terrific guy called Jeff Skoll, became quite enamoured of Carter and asked him if he would be willing to have a film made. He called me up because I’d done some quite good films before, and I said: “Yes, I’d love to.”

So I went down and [Carter] squeezed me into his schedule four months later, for an hour. And in searching for a story he mentioned he had this book coming out, which would be called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, so, to me it was obvious: it was a road movie, which would be supercharged with a certain amount of controversy, and would be a great way to check the legendary stamina of this 83-year-old who supposedly sleeps for three hours a night and is doing good the rest of the time. So that’s what happened and he bought the idea. But the folks at Participant weren’t very happy that the focus was going to be on the Middle East. They said, what would the message be? And I said, well he does have this message that people should talk to each other and that, through that, peace can be achieved. [Guardian Unlimited]

to read the entire interview and again to learn more about the issues in the film and how you can TakePart!

Also here’s a trailer for the film - it’s out on DVD now!