TORONTO—The buzz at this year’s edition of the Toronto International Film Festival is focused on just a handful of movies. One of them is Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, which stars Anne Hathaway as an alcoholic and drug addict who returns to her hometown from a stay in rehab in order to attend her sister’s wedding. Kym started her downward slide while still in her teens and was doing enough drugs that she ran her car off the road, killing a family member.

In a Toronto hotel room, Demme says that when he was reading the Jenny Lumet script, Kym’s story reminded him of something he was told by Oscar-winning actor William Holden when Demme was a young New York journalist and publicist. The memory of Holden’s story affected the way he envisioned the film.

“Holden told me that when he was living in Africa, he got drunk one night and ran over a 12-year-old boy, who was killed. He said that every day of his life the memory came back to him again, and he felt the anguish. So while I was reading the script, I kept thinking that although Kym is a big pain, I am able to cut her more slack because I have come to understand what she has been responsible for and her huge effort to come to terms with it. At some point, I started really loving her.”

The other thing that Demme had strong feelings about when he read the script was that the audience should spend time at the wedding. He gave the father of the bride a job in the music industry and assumed that he would invite a lot of musicians. Then he phoned up some of his own favourite musicians and gave them jobs playing music during the wedding scenes. To make the movie look like a documentary about a wedding, he shot it on digital video. He says that even though he had Hathaway involved, he was aware that the theme of the film wouldn’t bring him studio money and that he might as well work with an independent distributor and have fun.

“A studio would have never approved a script like this with all of these maddening characters, so their involvement would never have happened. But I have to make movies. I love making all kinds of movies, and it is wonderful in a million ways to make big-budget movies and work with stars and all the technology and be so well paid. If you are excited about doing something different, then the lower the budget the more wiggle room there is to try stuff out. So you go to Sony Classics, where you have these penny-pinching, tight-fisted guys who milk everything they can from every movie. They are good guys and they love movies. You are never going to get that in the office suites in L.A. God bless them and may they continue to make fabulously entertaining blockbusters.”