A closer look
The golden rule of producing a live concert film is to crank up the ambient microphone feeds to make the crowd sound massive and ecstatic. Director Jonathan Demme looked at that rule and set it on fire for the 1984 Talking Heads masterpiece, Stop Making Sense. He deliberately mixed the roaring audience almost entirely out of the soundtrack until the very final song. By isolating the crystal-clear audio of the band, he aggressively manipulated the viewer into focusing on the raw theatricality of David Byrne instead of a screaming mob.
