The Silence of the Lambs: Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music,
and more. We are your two fava beans of frivolity.

Speaker 3 (00:23):
There it is.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
I couldn't wait right at the gate. I'm Alex Hagel, your.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
Lovers of lotion that would have worked to you, yeah, oh.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Never mind, No, your skin suits of scintillating something.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
And I'm Jordan Runtog and we're here to enthrall you
with our acumen.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
As you may have guessed, today, we were talking about
one of the all time Oscar winningest films, a movie
with one of the most talked about to least actually
on screen performances ever, a little picture that taught us
all to live, laugh, love and leaven the well scrubbed,
hustling little rube deep within. That's right, we're talking about
nineteen ninety one's The Silence of the Lambs of a

(01:09):
perfect Film. First of all, I literally a perfect film.
No notes, Great job everyone. I I was trying to
think of when I picked this up, and I was
remembering that I graduated like right from Goosebumps to like
Airport paperbacks because that was like like James Patterson live Custler.
I didn't do as much Clive Custler. Mine was. I
read Jurassic part because that came out, and then I

(01:31):
just started going through the like the paperback racks and
just doing like I did a lot of James Patterson.
It must be said, rights at a fifth grade level.
So there was like nothing that I that was out
of my depth.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
Clive Cusler had raised the Titanic, so that that was
my interest.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yes, yes, I did read one of his. I also
did Robin Cook. I did all of his, which are
very thuddingly boring. He was like an I think he
was an epidemiologist or a medical doctor. He wrote outbreak.
Oh yeah, you know. James Patterson had the whole Oux
Cross series where every serial killer has like a different
gimmick and a different name, and Robin Cook's one was diseases,

(02:07):
so they had like E. Coli and ebola and all
this stuff. I read a bunch of those, and then
at some point I landed on I found my boy
t Harris, my boy Tom's I think my parents had
him down in the basement and I just read I read.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
Him literally in the basement in a well, lowering down
lows and forum.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah, so I read Silent. I think I read Red
Dragon first. Actually I think I might have read them
in order. Yeah, because then the big event of like
ninety nine was Hannibal coming out. It was like the
biggest most talked about, like paperback sequel of the probably
of the decade in all honesty. And then at some
point I found my dad, as was his wont had

(02:48):
rented this and taped it. So I found like the
handwritten Silence of the Lambs VHS dub in our movie cabinet,
and I watched it one night while my parents weren't
home and it was babysitting. And that was the worst
decision I've ever made in my young life at the time.
I'm now old. But yeah, so it stuck with me,

(03:10):
shall we say, And then I've reread them like five
or six times. I think that's the thing is that
like Tom Harris is a great writer. Those books are
good in a way that he is head and shoulders
above your James Patterson. He is head and shoulders above
Michael Crichton. Like those books are just well written. And then,
of course, you know, then there's every other movie except

(03:32):
for the one we're going to talk about today, which
are not good.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
Yes, his books didn't really lend themselves to that many
great movies. You know. My entry point to Silence of
the Lambs was exactly the same. I was like eleven,
twelve years old, and I think I saw Hannibal at
an airport bookstore and bought the paperback. I don't even
think I made the connection that this was the same
guy in Silence of the Lambs.

Speaker 2 (03:54):
But Hannibal is a slog though. That book is like
twelve hundred pages long, right, But it's.

Speaker 1 (03:59):
Also the one where he feeds like a bad guy
to like pigs.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
Well, the bad guy was trying to feed him to
the pigs.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
Oh right, well, somebody gets seaten in my pigs. That
was my main takeaway from that. Several people, right, right, right? Yeah, Well,
I mean I mentioned this on several occasions on this podcast.
I'm not a big horror guy, yet I love Silence
of the Lambs, probably because it's not really horror at all, right,
I mean, it really kind of follows in the continuum
of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in terms of being more of

(04:26):
a suspense thriller.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
It's a gothic thriller. Gothic thriller, I like that.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
And there's Hitchcock's famous maximum of you know, you show
a bomb under the seats of the main characters, but
you don't ever tell the characters about it. That's how
you build suspense. And you see this in Hitchcock's movies
time and time again, and you see it in Silence
of the Lambs all over the place, especially when Clarice
is facing off with Buffalo Bill at the end of
the movie, when she arrives at Buffalo Bill's house and

(04:51):
she's alone and she doesn't know that there's no backup
outside you the viewer know, and it's terrifying. Or of course,
I mean, the scene that still gives me chills is
the night vision scene when she's in his darkened basement
and you're seeing her through the point of view of
Buffalo Bill's night goggles, and he reaches out and like
swipes her hair, and you know that like he's inches

(05:13):
from her, can reach out and grab her at any time,
but she has no idea. Oh god, it's like it's horrifying.
It's the most perfect execution. See what I did there
of the hitchcock like bomb under the seat technique. It's
so good, it's so perfect. But while Silence of the
Lambs builds on these lessons from the Masters, it also

(05:33):
subverts the old tropes, particularly as far as gender is concerned.
Jodie Foster described the plot of Silence of the Lambs
like a fairy tale, like the hero goes off into
the dark forest of evil and ignorance in order to
rescue the princess and come out the other side with
greater wisdom. That's you know, it's a story that we've
seen for centuries, and yet with Silence of the Lambs,

(05:54):
the plot becomes a feminist metaphor in a lot of ways.
As Jonathan Demi, the director says, it's about one woman
trying to save another woman and having to confront the
dreaded patriarchy and the worst of the male gender is
going to be put in Clarice's way. So so many,
so many facets to this. It's it's such a well
made movie, but it's also so smart too as a text.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yeah, and and just even the I mean the I
we'll talk about this a little bit later, but just
like the way that visually represents all these themes. It
was funny. She majored in English in English Lit at Yale,
Jodie Foster did so she talked in one of these interviews,
she was like, yeah, I was coming at this from
like Greek myths and like thinking of oh so much
of like yeah, yeah, like the woman, like the girl

(06:37):
who leaves the instead of a boy leaving in the
here journey and barking on the hero's journey. It's a girl.
She's great. I mean, yeah, what do you say. I
don't there's like nothing critical. There's no like critical summation
about this movie other than it's amazing, imperfect, and you know,
then we'll get to the we'll get to the flaw
of the big flaw later, from the real life origins

(06:58):
of Hannibal Lecter, Buffalo and Clarice Starling to the magnificent
production details that make the film such a masterpiece, to
the sadly botched rollout of the movie from a dying
studio and its triumphant award season run. Here's everything you
didn't know about Silence of the Lambs.

Speaker 4 (07:16):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (07:20):
I just want to keep saying, oh, I love it
over and over again. I have no nothing else to
add to this. In twenty nineteen, this is a mate.
Thomas Harris first of all, mad props for never giving interviews,
never talking about anything, writing like five books and that's it.
He gave his first major interview in twenty nineteen.

Speaker 1 (07:40):
Ever, like that was his first. No, I think it
was like literally his second, and the other one was
like in the seventies or something.

Speaker 2 (07:47):
Yeah. Yeah, And then he had given one on like
Public Access TV that's on YouTube. It's really funny. He
repeatedly insisted to the New York Times reporter, I've never
made anything up when she would ask him about a
character or a plot, which is somewhat alarming considering that
his biggest contributions to pop culture and literature are the

(08:09):
world's most famous fictional cannibal, an ed Geen analog contributing
to the trans Panic of the nineteen nineties, and the
villain from Red Dragon, who is on that same spectrum
of weird. He hallucinates that a famous William Blank painting
is commanding him to kill people with his grandmother's false teeth.

Speaker 1 (08:27):
And then there's the pig guy too.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
Yeah, you can't forget about Mason Verger, the Pig Guy,
the hog Guy. Red Dragon is actually the introduction to Lecter,
and the entire plot is basically a dry run of Silence,
just with a different FBI agent. It's kind of funny
in retrospect. The FBI agent in Red Dragon is a
guy named Will Graham, and he basically visits Lecter and

(08:51):
tries to get hints about the current guy that they
are trying to capture, the titular Red Dragon, although the
nickname they use for him is the tooth Fairy, which
irritates him to no end anyway. Harris grew up in Mississippi
and he was working as a journalist in the sixties
for a pulp magazine called Argasy, and he was sent
on assignment to Mexico to Monterey to the Nuevo Leon

(09:12):
State Prison. He explained all this in introduction to the
twenty fifth anniversary of Silence of the Lambs. He was
sent there to interview a man named Dike's ASQW. Simmons,
who was there under a death sentence for killing three people.
And this guy Simmons, had attempted to escape the previous year.
He had bribed a guard, but the guard betrayed him
and shot him. Harris then had a disturbing conversation with

(09:35):
the prison surgeon who saved Simmons, who Harris calls doctor Salazar,
in which this guy just has very Hannibal Lecter like
conversations about the nature of suffering and is talking to
Harris about Simmons, was like, do you think he was
bullied as a child because he had a cleft lip?
Which is interesting because that's the character in Red Dragon

(09:57):
the villain and Red Dragon has a high left lip.
And then when Harris went to leave the prison, he suppose,
I guess remarked to the warden, that's a weird prison.
Doctor you got there, And the warden was like, that
man is not he is a patient.

Speaker 1 (10:10):
He is a murderer.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
He is not our doctor, is he said as a surgeon,
he packaged his victim in a surprisingly small box. He
will never leave this place. He is insane. The warden
was half right. Doctor Salivar was really a man named
Alfredo Bali Trevino, and as a medical intern in nineteen
fifty nine, he got into an argument with his lover,
Jezeus Castillo Ranguel slid his throat, chopped him into pieces

(10:35):
and buried him in a parking lot. Trevino was the
last person sentenced to death in Mexico in nineteen sixty one,
and a Mexican reporter named Diego Osorno helped Thomas Harris
look up what happened to this guy. Found out he
got out in twenty years So great crime of passion.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
Yeah, yeah, but then he did.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
He stayed in Monterey and he spent the rest of
his life treating the poor and the elderly in a
like a low cost medical clinic. I refused to discuss
his crimes. He was contacted by a different reporter in
two thousand and eight and he said, I paid what
I had to pay. Now I am just waiting for
divine punishment, which came in two thousand and nine. Yes,
which came the following year he died. So anyway. Nineteen

(11:20):
eighty one, Red Dragon Harris's second novel. His first is
Black Sunday, which is a terrorist pot boiler. I actually
haven't read that one. Writing in The Washington Post, Stephen
King called Red Dragon probably the best popular novel to
be published in America since The Godfather.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (11:37):
High praise the film was adopted into a movie called
Manhunter in nineteen eighty six. Sorrying csis William Peterson, directed
by Michael Mann. It's okay, It's not great. Tom Noonan
stars as as the Tooth Fairy and Brian Cox is
Lecter and no, not many people liked it. It kind
of flopped, but Harris told a friend of his name

(11:59):
Anthony Rant and his only televised interview in twenty twenty one,
he said, after Red Dragon, I wanted to try to
do a woman investigator. During this research trip I made
to Quantico into Washington at the time, there was a
plague of Starling's in Washington. They were all around the
White House. They were soiling everything, and there were just
great flocks of them. They were playing different sounds around
the White House to try and scare them off. The

(12:21):
FBI building, you know, looks like a concrete cage, and
they were in every opening in front of the building.
So I don't know if that's where the name came from,
but they were certainly everywhere.

Speaker 1 (12:30):
What is Quantico? How would you that's a training facility.

Speaker 2 (12:35):
It's like their big compound. It's actually I think it's
actually in Virginia. But where they have like the fake
towns and all the shooting ranges, and like you know,
they build like a fake downtown for vehicular stuff, and
they have all these like training facilities. It's huge, it's
very sprawling. Clarice. Meanwhile, Harris said that came from he

(12:56):
said from a woman in the soaps at the time
who had a sort of Elationian accent. And I googled
this and I went researching this, because of course I did.
And as far as I can tell, he is either
talking about the actress Clarice Blackburn, who is most famous
for dark Shadows, or the character Clarice Hobson from another world.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
Which one of those have an appalation accent.

Speaker 2 (13:19):
One of them is from the South, and the other
one the characters from the South. So I don't know.
Maybe in fifty years, well he'll be dead, but maybe
in ten years we'll find out which one Thomas Harris
was talking about. Published in nineteen eighty eight, Silence of
the Lambs was a huge hit. People who blurbed it
ranged from Roald Dall Charlie the Chocolate Factory. Author Roll

(13:40):
Dahl noted misanthrope Roald Dahl he did hate everyone who
described it as subtle, horrific, and splendid, the best book
I have read in a long time. To friggin' David
Foster Wallace, wow, who used He put this on his
curriculum when he was teaching at Pomona College, and he
put Us of Lambs and Red Dragon on his list

(14:02):
of ten favorite novels. So to Thomas Harris' entries on
the on David Foster Wallas's top ten favorite books of
all time, nothing to sneeze at. So Red Dragon was
bought by Warner Brothers. And then do you know de
Laurentis one of the villains of this story.

Speaker 1 (14:19):
His grandpa, right, possibly? Yeah, I think you had Delarentis' grandpa.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
I believed, well, he made a hot TV chef daughter
and he made Conan, so I can't fully hate him.
But yeah, he really ran really granddaughter. He really ran
poor animal into the ground. Dino DeLaurentis picked that up
and they made Manhunter, and Manhunter was not a financial success,
Hollywood manager and literary agent Bob Bookman told Deadline in

(14:46):
twenty seventeen. When Silence was published, Thomas had the right
to sell a one picture license, but he would have
had to change character names in places. Nobody was interested.
Even it was way up on the best seller list.
It was a combination of the serial killer aspect and
the failure of Manhunter. Then one day my colleague Fred
Spector asks, are those rights still available? Gene Hackman wants

(15:06):
to buy them. Gene called a good friend, Arthur criminal Ryan,
and they bought it together fifty to fifty partners. Gene
wanted to direct and play Hannibal Lecter.

Speaker 1 (15:15):
Screenwriter Ted Tally, as luck would have it, knew Thomas
Harris because he was a client of his wife's art gallery.
That's how you break in the screenwriting my friends. And
he was sent in an advanced copy of Silence of
the Lambs, and he later told the Washington Post, as
soon as I read it, I knew it was a
career maker. And he got his agent on the case

(15:35):
to adapt the book. And one fan of this book
was Gene Hackman. Gene Hackman hates most things, loved Silence
of the Lambs novel, he told Empire Magazine in nineteen
ninety one. It's one of the most cinematic books I've
ever read. As I read it, the movie was clicking
in my mind. But Ted Tally, the guy who ultimately
wrote the screenplay for Signs of the Lambs, told Deadline

(15:57):
that while Gene Hackman was sure he wanted to direct,
he was I still trying to figure out if he
wanted to play Hannibal Lecter himself, which would have been wild.
But he was also saying that maybe he would play
Clarice's FBI superior Jack Crawford and get an unnamed and
unspecified Bobby to play Hannibal Lecter. Ted Talley continued the Deadline,
I didn't have the nerve to ask Bobby who Bobby Duvall,

(16:20):
who was indeed up for the running at one point,
Bobby Redford, Bobby de Niro. He just assumed I would
know who Bobby was. And then when Gene Hackman quit
the project while I was writing my first draft, he
never called me. I just heard one day from my
agent that Gene Hackman dropped out of the project. And
Genackman dropped out for reasons that are kind of vague,
but one theory is that he dropped out days after

(16:42):
losing an Academy Award for Mississippi Burning, and so he
was really unsure about doing another film that so deeply
plumbed the depths of human darkness. But there's another off,
repeated reason that he may have dropped out. Producer Bob
Bookman recalled the deadline. I got a call saying, you're
not gonna believe this. Gene Hackman's daughter read the book
and she called her father and said, Daddy, you're not
making this movie. So ultimately the studio gave Gene back

(17:06):
the money that he put up for it. I think
he put up like two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Speaker 3 (17:10):
M h.

Speaker 2 (17:11):
I recall, Yeah, Gene must be whipped by his daughter.
Imagine being one of the A list stars and your
daughter calls you up and he's like, no, you're not
making this movie.

Speaker 1 (17:21):
I mean, it is a movie where he would have
to eat somebody's face.

Speaker 2 (17:24):
He doesn't eat any faces in the movie. He just
bites that guy and then sprays pepper spray into it.

Speaker 1 (17:29):
I'm sure Hanniballeckter is eating a phase. Maybe not that face, but.

Speaker 2 (17:32):
He probably swallowed a little bit of it.

Speaker 1 (17:34):
But it just gets in there. It's like stuck in
your teeth.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
You know, And you gotta spend the night, the whole night,
like working a piece of loose. Oh what is that
that popcorn? And you're like, oh, is that a security guard?
Is that a Memphis cop? Oh? They could do them
with a dry rub, a nice Memphis dry rube. Here's
a pitch. Here's a pitch.

Speaker 1 (17:58):
We reboot to the Lambs instead of Guy Fieri. So
that's how O Ryan got the rights. They bought out
Gene Hackman, Poor old Gene Hackman. Who made What did
he make instead? Probably something bad?

Speaker 2 (18:12):
Oh, great question, Great question, Jordan. Let's check out his IMDb. Well,
this would have been ninety eighty eighty nine. Let's see
what his.

Speaker 1 (18:20):
What was his run between eighty nine and ninety two.

Speaker 2 (18:22):
Well, the next movie he did was called The Package,
and then something called Loose Cannons, and then Postcards from
the Edge. A string of flops. Okay, answer your questions,
is this? Yeah, a string of flops? And then his
next one was Unforgiven when he was h and then
he did The Firm. But yeah, man, So Gene Hackman's

(18:43):
loss was O'Ryan Pictures gain and Jonathan Demi's gain. Jonathan
Demi later told Deadline God blessed Gene Hackman's daughter if
that's true, and that's what I've always heard about Gene
dropping out, and to Empire Magazine, Jonathan Demi added, I
wouldn't have offered it to me as director, and this
is their Jonathan Demi was working with Orian Pictures after
nineteen eighty six is something Wild, which is a comedy.

(19:04):
In nineteen eighty eight, It's Married to the Mob, another
kind of very broad comedy, if I recall, and then
he pitched them a script that he wanted to make.
I don't actually know what script that was, which Orion
Pictures tentatively agreed to, but only if he agreed to
read Silence of the Lambs first and consider directing that,
which is how he wound up doing it. One hurdle

(19:25):
to get into the film was the villain of this story,
Dino di Laurentis. He had produced Manhunter and he still
owned the rights to lect Her, which will come back
to later. Why I keep calling him a villain. They
toyed with changing the character's name. They didn't find anything
to work, and so Bob Bookman, this literary agent manager,
went to DeLaurentis hat in hand to ask for permission

(19:47):
to use them sons charge. And you know, Dino, he
didn't like that.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
I can't believe he signed off on that.

Speaker 2 (19:54):
I think they did not think it was gonna because
the last thing that they had was Manhunter, and they
were like, well yeah, but still they gave it to
him for free and regretted it ever since and have
embarked on the past thirty years of money grubbing horses
to get revenge for it. Anyway, Jonathan Demi initially wanted
Michelle Pfeiffer, which is hilarious. He'd worked with her un

(20:16):
married to the Mob, but Feiffer for the same reason
Gene Hackman, she turned it down, she told New Yorker
in twenty twenty one. With Silence of the Lambs, and
here she invents a word, I was trepidacious. There was
such evil in that film. The thing I most regret
is missing the opportunity to do another film with Jonathan.
It was that evil one in the end that at
the end of the film, evil ruled out. I was

(20:39):
uncomfortable with that ending. I didn't want to put that
out into the world. Does evil win?

Speaker 1 (20:44):
In Silence of the Lambs?

Speaker 2 (20:46):
I think she meant, like Hannibal was free gets a little,
that's a that's still a bad reading in the movie.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
Though, Yeah, I'm trying to think, like, on the surface,
I think that would have been a terrible choice for
Clarice Starling, which was, yes, it would have been well, no,
she was also in she was in dangerous lines.

Speaker 2 (21:04):
Oh yeah, that movie's not this though, Nor does she
turn into Jodie Foster caliber performance on this.

Speaker 1 (21:11):
Okay, No, all right, that's fine. I saw her. They
were considering Gena Davis, which is kind of weird, and
Meg Ryan, which is extremely weird. This must have been
when she was making her jump to uh, semi serious
roles like this was probably around she probably instead of
making this made When a Man Loves a Woman Once
she played the uh, the recovering alcoholic with Andy Garcia,

(21:33):
the movie's devastating real bummer.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
I would have accepted Geena Davis. She's tall enough. Yeah, anyway,
screenwriter Ted Talley told Deadline, Jodie Foster was always in
my mind. It was no brainer. She had just won
It was a no brainer. She had just won an
Academy Award for The Accused. She was the right age
for the character, She had the right intelligence to play
somebody like that. I thought she was just a fabulous
fabulous actress. And she actually even called me while I

(21:58):
was writing the first draft. We had never met, and
she called me to campaign for the part. That was
before Jonathan was on board. Jonathan initially wanted Michelle Pfeiffer.
I said, she's too beautiful. I think she was also
like ten years too old. Like they were looking for
someone who could convincingly be a trainee, like out of college,
and Michelle Feiffer was in her thirties. But Foster had
been lobbying for the rights for the film even before

(22:19):
Jonathan Demi had gotten involved, she told Variety Fair in
twenty twenty one. Hackman dropped out after I had made
it known I wanted to be involved in this film,
and Oriyan immediately sent it to Jonathan Demi. I was furious.
I was like, oh no, not Jonathan Demi. He won't
want me, He'll want someone else. And so I flew
to New York and said, I'd like to be your

(22:40):
second choice. I'd won the Oscar for the Accused and everything.
It wasn't like I was a nobody, but it was
really something that I ran after. Empire Magazine did a
making of around the time in this movie and That's
where one of the places I'm quoting from they quoted
her as telling Demi at their very first meeting, there
are reasons I want to make this movie. There are

(23:01):
very personal reasons, not just because it's a good part.
So a lot of people have surmised that it is
because it all ties back to what we like to
call the John Hinckley quandary.

Speaker 1 (23:14):
No, the John John Lee experience my favorite cover band.

Speaker 2 (23:18):
Yeah, okay, yes, John Hinckley Junior's pre music career as
a want to be presidential assassin. I didn't know this
until I was researching this. Jodi Foster had another stalker
like a few years later. Okay, so I guess, quick,
quick historical summation, most people know this is this the
thing people remember that has to be it's like a

(23:38):
huge okay, yeah. John Hinckley Junior was a deranged man
who developed a crush on Jodie Foster after seeing her
in Taxi Driver where she was fourteen.

Speaker 1 (23:49):
Yeah, yeah, I feel like that kind of gets I
guess after like trying to kill the whole president thing
that it gets out shown.

Speaker 2 (23:56):
Yeah, it's gross and the way that he got it
in his head to impress her was by killing Ronald
Reagan and he attempted to do so. So and now
he's touring the mid level venues of the music venues
of the country playing Beatles covers. So you know who
says it Beatles covers? Oh yeah, he sinks covers.

Speaker 1 (24:15):
Well, I didn't know it was Beatles covers. Oh, God's
see if he's got a setlist out there. Oh no,
it was Joni Mitchell, that was the one. Both sides.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
Now. He said he was influenced by the Beatles and
of course Bob Dylan, but the cover he posted was
Jonny Mitchell. Yeah. So I'm so happy this guy is
more of a music career than I do. Anyway, So,
Jodie Foster had another stalker when she was a Yale.
A guy named Michael Richardson targeted her while she was
enrolled there taking a break from acting, majoring in English literature,

(24:48):
and so she essentially wanted to do a movie with
that she would have a woman playing the protector role.
And she had. The other thing too, is she had
gotten close to a lot of these FBI agents. She's empire.
The thing that I really love about Clarice Starling is
that this may be the first, one of the first
times I've seen a female hero that is not a
female steroid version of Arnold Schwartzenegger. This is not a

(25:09):
woman running around in her underwear with a machine gun.
Clarice is very competent and she is very human. She
combats the villain with her emotionality, intuition, her frailty, and vulnerability.
I don't think there's ever been a female hero like that.
As I mentioned, she grew close to several FBI agents
who are you know, assigned to her after the Hinckley thing.
Some of them even went to a play that she

(25:30):
did at Yale, which hondadorable. But because of that, she
had one big caveat for Jonathan dem She told him that,
unlike Married to the Mob, you can't portray these FBI
people as goofy Republicans. If you want me to be
your hero, you've got to portray them in the correct way.
And one of the things that Demi did to really
highlight how at odds Starling is in the world of

(25:55):
the FBI and the world at large and law enforcement
is that they deliberately cast people to be in all
the men in scenes with her to be like extra tall.
Worked with the casting agent Howard Fruer to find men
who would just like conspicuously be much taller than her,
which isn't difficult. She's only five to three, but you
know she's whenever she gets into the FBI elevator, everyone

(26:17):
there is like eighteen inches towering over her. Then the
other one that I picked up recently was there's like
that scene where she is literally a punching bag as
part of their training. There's they could have filmed any
number of other like FBI training scenarios, and they put
they do it a quick insert where she's called out
of a class where she is holding a punching bag
and getting kicked and punched by male agents. So very

(26:41):
on the nose but effective.

Speaker 1 (26:45):
Jonathan Demi later said the moment he knew he wanted
Jodie Foster for the part was when she paid him
a visit to lobby for the role of Clarice Starling,
and he said that he knew quite literally when she
walked in the door. He's quoted as saying, I watched
her coming down the hall towards me, the sturdy little
figures striding along with his determined look on her face
and I just thought that's her, that's Clarice. Also, there's

(27:06):
a slightly less charitable version of the story where Ryan Pictures,
the production company making this movie, wasn't sold on Anthony
Hopkins in the role as Lecter, which we'll get to
in a minute, and Jonathan Demi wasn't sold on Jody
Foster for the part of Clarice. So the Orion chief said,
all right, listen, Jonathan, I'm gonna make it real easy
for you. If you take Jody Foster, I'll take Anthony Hopkins.

(27:26):
So it could have just been a political move on
Jonathan Demi's part. I like, yeah, I know, I hope
it's not that. Though, Ironically, for all of her personal
connections to the role Clarice, Jody Foster didn't think that
this part was Oscar bait. Screenwriter Ted Talley recalls for
telling him this isn't the kind of part that people
win Academy Awards for just because it's not very showy. Wrong.

(27:48):
One of the few times Jody Foster was wrong. Funnily enough,
for all of his doubts surrounding Jody Foster in the
lead role, Jody Foster herself was a little wary of
Jonathan Demi's directorial credentials because of his background in comedy,
and this was also compounded by the fact that Jonathan
Demi was not a believer in rehearsals, so they only
had one read through by the time they got in

(28:09):
front of the cameras, which must have been scary. Jodi
Foster later said, at first, the ambiance on the set,
which was very nice and playful, was off putting for
me because Jonathan makes a lot of comedies and likes
Hawaiian shirt Fridays and likes kidding around and practical jokes.
We were making this dark drama and I was worried
that everybody was going to bring this comedic sensibility to it.

(28:31):
I love the idea that, like they're in Buffalo Bill's basement,
everyone's wearing Hawaiian shirts, although I think it was done
in January during like the coldest winter in Pittsburgh on record,
at like fourteen degrees below zero, so maybe not Hawaiian
shirts on that stage.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
Jody Foster's most direct model for Chares was a woman
named Special Agent Mary Ann Krauts, who she met at
Quantico while she was doing her research, and Kraus told
people magazine in nineteen ninety one, we went out to dinner.
In My first and lasting in pressure was that Foster
was very sharp and eager to learn, not just about
the FBI, but about me. She really wanted to get
a picture of a female agent. She asked me about

(29:09):
my family. I'm married to a former agent and have
two step children. She wanted to know how tough the
training was for women and if I felt like one
of the guys. I told her yes, but that it
was important to maintain some form of femininity to keep
your identity. The film secured cooperation from the FBI after
the bureau read the script and Foster practiced on the
actual Quantico training course, which is how she's able to

(29:30):
apparently effortlessly scale that rope wall. I would each on
one of those things. Oh yeah, to tell you that
right now.

Speaker 1 (29:38):
Yeah, this whole thing is so interesting to me. Apparently,
this was one of the first movie productions allowed at
the FBI training facility because the FBI saw this as
a potential recruitment tool, not unlike the Air Force with
Top Gun, and they were really having a hard time
recruiting female members, so they really thought that this was
a great opportunity. The production Steff of Silence of the

(29:59):
Lambs described their relationship with the FBI as quote cooperative
and guarded and yeah. Jodie Foster apparently asked the special
agent she was shadowing, Mary Ann Krause, if there was
ever a moment during the day for any sort of
emotional release when you're in the midst of this really
hardcore training, and Kraus replied, only when you're by yourself,
tears are not really allowed. Hence the scene and Silence

(30:22):
of the Lambs where Clurice breaks down alone in her car,
which I believe is the only time she ever breaks
in the entire movie, aside from when she's with Lecter.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
Yeah, Foster and Anthony Hopkins chemistry was helped by Demi's
claustrophobic way of shooting the actors and their scenes together.
He said, by the time I got to Silence of
the Lambs, I was madly in love with close ups
because I'm madly in love with actors, and a basic
premise of Silence of the Lambs is the story about
two people fighting their way into each other's heads. So
the close ups and the subjective camera stuff that was

(30:54):
something cinematographer tak Fujimoto and I were excited about Jonathan
wanted to use this technique that Hitchcock talked about, where
you have the actors use the camera as the other person.
Jody Foster told Vanity Fair and I think there was
something really interesting about that for the film. But that
also meant that Tony and I couldn't see each other
for a lot of the close ups. We were looking
into a camera lens and the other person was just
a voice in the background. They filmed Lecter and Starling's

(31:17):
first interaction down in the dungeon on Hopkins' first day
of filming because it was plexiglass. Because the way that
this film was constructed, they actually had to lock him
in there, so he was in there for an entire
day of shooting at a clip. It is really interesting
to me about the plexiglass and stuff because when they
move him to Memphis, which is not actually in Memphis

(31:37):
in the movie, you know he's actually in the cage.
To use the make the site lines of the bars
work for them, they zoom even closer in it's a
tighter close up, and it's really interesting the way that
it works in the film because like early on, when
he's still in Baltimore, you know, you see their full bodies,
you see them them standing, and they're kind of in

(31:57):
conversation distance. And then by the time they get to
that point in the film at their most intimate moment
when she's talking about you know what gives the film
its name, when she's talking about her recollections of growing
up on on a ranch, they are so close into
each other's faces as like, and it looks like they
might as well be like face to face. And it's
just such an incredible way of having the look and

(32:18):
shots of the film mirror the story and the thematic progression. Gosh,
it's neat.

Speaker 1 (32:24):
Yeah, the production designer said they were really happy with
the plexiglass because it's just it's even more terrifying than
bars because there's nothing visually between them. And they love
the fact that it made Hannibal look like a specimen,
like he was a shark in a tank or something.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
They were also really annoyed when when the sound guy
I've read was annoyed when she proposed that, because the
guy was like, well, occurd, Now we're gonna have the
whole ruth. And so they did the thing with drilling.
They were like, okay, well drill air holes in it,
and I guess Mike right above that. And then she
was like and then we just and Anthony just immediately
did this like sniffing thing with the with the air holes,

(33:00):
and we were like, that's a pro at work. This
production designer, Christy's a she's really interesting. She told the
Museum of Moving Image in an interview that they did
a lot of scouting out west to try and find
this ranch that Clarice talks about running away from, because
initially they were gonna film scenes there and then insert
them as cutaways, right like, as she's telling the story

(33:23):
of trying to rescue his lamb and getting caught, they
were gonna cut to, you know, a young actress doing
the young like they do in other scenes. But then
after he filmed Foster and Hopkins doing that, he was like, no,
we're not doing that. Scrap it. There's no reason to
cut away from this.

Speaker 1 (33:38):
Yeah, he told the screenwriter if I cut away from
those performances, I'll be drummed out of the director's guild.
I cannot cut away from those faces for a flashback.
He literally said, Jodie Foster could win an Academy Award
for this acting scene. Hilariously, in the middle of that
scene where you know it's the pivotal moment of the movie,
gives the movie its title, where she's just describing this

(34:00):
early trauma. It's just like mind melding of the highest
order with Hannibal Lecter. In the middle of that scene,
a grip in the background dropped a wrench, and every
the whole crew just like flinched. But Jody Foster was
so in it she didn't and didn't lose focus and
kept on going with their speech. And then when Jonathan
Demi said cut, she whirled around. I was like, what

(34:21):
the hell was that. It's amazing, But that's the take
that was used in the movie, and I watched it
a couple times and I can't hear like the clatter
in the background. I don't know if they looped the
audio or what.

Speaker 2 (34:32):
But that's so funny, man. I'm obsessed with seeing if
I can find some imperceptible like twitch of her eye
or something in that scene. I tried, yeah, uh.

Speaker 1 (34:43):
You know, probably could Hannibal elector that's true.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
Oh, don't don't ruin the blink thing yet. We gotta
get to wink thing. You're right sorry. Despite their chemistry,
or more likely because of it. Jody Foster explained on
The Graham Norton Show that Anthony and I got to
the end of the movie and had never really had
a conversation. I avoided him as much as I could.
On the last day of filming, they finally spoke. He

(35:08):
came up to me and I said, I don't know.
I sort of had a tear in my eye. I
was like, I was really scared of you, and he
said I was scared of you.

Speaker 1 (35:16):
Oh yeah, we'll talk more about that. But it's crazy.
This was really Anthony Hopkins' first like a big budget
Hollywood movie.

Speaker 2 (35:24):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. After he cleaned up, wasn't he
like in the running for like number three drunkest Thespian
after Like, uh, I was.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
Like seventy five. I think he got clean.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
Okay, yeah, I remember that from that Hell Razors book
where he was like, right, he talked about like quitting
cocaine after a really bad night.

Speaker 1 (35:45):
Anyway, get on quick cocaine after a really good night.

Speaker 2 (35:52):
I want to see young Anthony Hopkins.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
Was he like, oh yeah, he was in the line
in Winter, which rules and movies incredible with Catherine Hepburn,
which is one of the people that he based the
voice for Hannibal Elector on.

Speaker 2 (36:03):
Yeah, he's kind of always looked like a murderer. I
can't really even imagine him looking like I was like,
is was he cute? It's like, no, he just already
like at twenty five, he looked like a psychopath. Anyway.
Demi told Deadline that there was tremendous interest in the
role of Hannibal Elector, with actors ranging from Dustin Hoffman Nope,

(36:24):
to Morgan Freeman. Sure, but he said Sean Connery, Yes,
was the only actor I thought, the only other person
I thought could be amazing for this. Connery has that
fierce intelligence and also that serious physicality, so to take
the most commercial path because Connory was flying very high
at the time we sent the script. Sean connery first

(36:45):
word came back shortly that he thought it was disgusting
and wouldn't dream of playing that part. Show Chlorice have
the lamb stop screaming terrible. That would have been an
awful smart again, I love he's smart. I don't think so. No,
he just certainly not smart enough to not keep talking

(37:07):
about how okay it is to hit women in the
press repeatedly. Certainly not smart enough to not take league
of extraordinary gentlemen.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
He was smart enough thought to do Uh, Indiana Jones
and the Crystal Skull.

Speaker 2 (37:20):
That's true. I want to find more handial lines I
can do, is Sean Connery? What did megs say to you?
Multiple megs? Just Courtsy's just curtsy is unspeakably ugly to me.
I would never have had that happen to you. What
what's yeah? Yeah? What's his when he's uh, oh, he's

(37:43):
talking to the senator?

Speaker 1 (37:45):
Love you?

Speaker 2 (37:46):
So?

Speaker 1 (37:46):
Yeah? One more thing? Oh, we could do.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
This all day. I'm sorry, I'm sure you have things
to do.

Speaker 1 (37:56):
I've also seen we've we talked earlier about how apparently
Robert Duvall was up for consideration for the part of
Hannibal Lecter. They were apparently worried he would push it
too far, despite the fact that they were also considering
Dustin Hoffmin Morgan Freeman, Sean Connery, and also Jack Nicholson.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
Oh, that would have been terrible who never responded to
the requests. So, but like Bobby Duvall was the one
that they were worried about. I just, yeah, he would
have been too broad.

Speaker 1 (38:20):
How would how would uh Jack as Hannibal elective?

Speaker 2 (38:23):
Sounded uh so, Clorice. I know, I don't think I
can pull it off. I don't think it's not gonna
do it. Give me a second, maybe it'll come to it.
I need a line. I need a line to say,
I'm really hung up on this chunk on everything. We
begin to we.

Speaker 4 (38:40):
Begin to cove it by what we see every day. No,
that is incidental, Clarice, you would have been just he
sounded like a nagging asshole. Yeah, No, Clarice, that is incidental.
Read Marcus, read Marcus Aurelius.

Speaker 1 (38:57):
It's a little bit Napoleon dynamite kind of Do you
just feel like a god in there?

Speaker 2 (39:03):
God, I gonna find more to do with Connery. It's
gonna be my new parlor game. You know who would
have been great? Who threw in here was Jeremy Irons.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
Oh yeah, he turned it down because he just played
Klaus falm Bulow and he didn't want to get type
cast as a as a battie. But then he went
and made Lolita, and.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
He had been in Dead Ringers, so I think he
probably didn't want to hit another gory horror thing on
the on the you know.

Speaker 1 (39:28):
You know what, you're good enough. You kind of had
it like, you know what you look like with your
good bag and your cheap shoes. You look like a rube.

Speaker 2 (39:37):
You gotta do it as him as Whitey Bulger though
from Yeah, that's hard. A Shenshish taker tried to pech,
can you.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
Morgan Freeman, is that that's a.

Speaker 2 (39:54):
Sorry? Am I read? Am I supposed to be read?

Speaker 1 (39:56):
I'm still trying to all right, Yeah, we're here, by
the way, but I'm still trying to.

Speaker 2 (40:02):
Demi had had Jonathan Demi had had Hopkins in mind
as well, motivated by his role as the doctor in
The Elephant Man. Uh sure, he said. I was in
the theater in London. My agent, Anthony Hopkins told Vanity Fair.
I was in the theater in London. My agent phoned
me and he said, I'm sending a script over to
the theater called The Silence of the Lambs. I said,
is it a children's story? I didn't know. No, he said,

(40:26):
it's with Jodie Foster. I said, oh so. I came
into the dressing room and I started reading it. And
I got through about ten pages when Crawford said the
FBI agent, you don't want Hannibal Lecter inside your head.
I thought, ooh, that's it. I phoned my agent and
I said, is this an offer? He said, well, it's
not a big part. I said, I don't care.

Speaker 1 (40:43):
Apparently he wasn't sure if it was an offer or
just like something that considers, so he stopped reading after.

Speaker 2 (40:48):
About ten pages because he didn't want to.

Speaker 1 (40:51):
He just was trying to spare himself with disappointment if
he didn't get the role, which makes me sad.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
Yeah, I wonder if you read the did you ever
talk about reading the book?

Speaker 1 (41:00):
Think so?

Speaker 2 (41:00):
Anyway, Jonathan Demi told Deadline Anthony was doing M Butterfly
in London. I flew over and we agreed to do
the work together. And Hopkins and Foster didn't even meet
each other until the first table read. She told Vanity Fair,
I didn't really get a proper meet with Tony. So
we're sitting across from each other and he launches in
and we start the reading and I was just petrified.
I was kind of too scared to talk to him

(41:22):
after that.

Speaker 1 (41:23):
But we touched on this earlier Anthony Hopkins was a
little nervous himself, because it's really difficult to remember. When
he was cast in Silence of the Lambs. He was
ready to give up on Hollywood for good. Late eighties
movies like The Bounty and The Good Father and a
Chorus of Disapproval were all bombs, and he'd gone back
to theater work in London just assuming that his film
career was over. So now here I was working on

(41:44):
his first big budget Hollywood movie with a newly minted
Oscar winner, and so he later admitted that he had
a pretty big case of the nerves this whole time.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
We had to read through in the boardroom at Oriyan
a week before we started shooting, Jonathan Demie told Deadline
all the executives were there electricity in that room coming
off of what Hopkins was doing. He had found lecter
and I remember when he delivered the last line, the
room was just silent.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
Well, can you do the last line as Sean Connery.

Speaker 2 (42:11):
I'm having an old friend over for shabah. That's good.

Speaker 1 (42:14):
Wow, lovely changing dinner to supper so you can get
the in there. Yeah, that's a pro wow. Good, nice time.
There's a great story from this early read through where
Jodie Foster starts to cry as she tells the story
of the slaughtering of the Spring Lambs. Again, it's the
scene that we spoke about earlier, and Eddie Hopkins in
character took out a handkerchief from his pocket and slid

(42:36):
it across the table just as the scene continued, And
those presents said it was just such a powerful moment
between the two because it really offered a taste of
the they're funny chemistry that borders on it's like paternal
but also kind of romantic, but also kind of and
it's weird. So their relationship is fascinating.

Speaker 2 (42:55):
Someone said she has three fathers in this movie. She
has her actual dad who like haunts the entire story
and drives her to be a law man and save
old girl. Uh is her name?

Speaker 1 (43:09):
I don't know. I never can remember her name. Caroline.

Speaker 2 (43:12):
Maybe No, I don't Debbie, just keep going. I'll tell
you when you're closes. Is it Catherine? I thought the
senator's name. The senator's name is Catherine, though, no, it
is Catherine. It is Katherine. We're talking about Oh yeah, yeah,
so I was reading. I forget if this was someone.

(43:33):
I forget if it was Demi or someone, but they said,
you know, Clarice has three fathers in this film. She
has her her dad, who she talks about being inspired
to go into law enforcement because of and his death
obviously haunts her still haunts the so he Lingers over
the entire movie. She has Jack Crawford, who's her career dad,
and they also have kind of a weird thing because

(43:53):
Scott Glenn is such a haughty uh. And then she
has lect who is sort of pushing her to be
come the best version of herself that she can and
giving her kind of the reinforcement that she lacked growing up,
saying like, I mean, yeah, what is a dad if
not someone to say things like the world is more
interesting with you in it. You know, wait, I wanted

(44:15):
to do. You know what you look like to me
with your good bag and your cheap shoes. You look
like a rube, A well scrubbed, hustling rube with a
little taste. Good nutrition has given you some length of bone.
But you're not more than one generation from poor white trash,
are you, Agent Starling.

Speaker 1 (44:32):
It's somehow more sinister as Sean Connery.

Speaker 2 (44:36):
I'm leaning into it all the way to the end.
All those tedious, sticky fumblings, that set of cows, God,
all those.

Speaker 1 (44:48):
I can'tchnic is too grossy for me.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
Yeah, Hopkins told Empire there were two, maybe three voices
that I heard for Lecter. I thought of him as
a combination of ca Atherne, Hepburn, Truman Capoti and how
from two thousand and one. That's so perfect that it
is it really is? Yeah, yeah, because I didn't realize.
You know, this is maybe a geographical distinction that gets lost.

(45:11):
But Hannibal Electors from Baltimore or lived in Baltimore. I
think he's originally from Lithuania, if I'm remembering his fictional
character biography. But he does a little bit of a
Southern accent at different points, like the Loveest Suit, like
some of the different things, like he's almost mocking them. Though,
well that's exactly it. You're like, can't tell if he's

(45:32):
doing it, doesn't as an insult.

Speaker 3 (45:34):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
Well, there was a moment when he when he does
the bit about like just one generation away from poor
white trash and he.

Speaker 2 (45:41):
Was a daddy of minor did a stink of the lamb.

Speaker 1 (45:45):
Apparently Tony Fonster got like genuinely annoyed because she was like,
this guy's mocking me.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
Yeah, and he was on the set and he was. Yes.
He said, in terms of his physical elector's physical apperiod,
it was Jonathan's idea that he'd be pale, and he
convinced me to stay out of the sun. It was
my idea to give him dark, slicked back hair. I
also wanted him to wear a very tight prison uniform
that would suggest total control. A costume designer, Colleen Atwood

(46:13):
told The Hollywood Reporter with Anthony Hopkins, the fit of
the costumes was very precise. We had a lot of fittings,
even though it was a prison uniform. We felt that
Hannibal would somehow make it look like his clothes were
made to order for him, even though he was in prison.

Speaker 1 (46:27):
Anthony Hopkins said he was very big on brightly colored
white outfits like the one that he wears in the
man cage when he eats the CoP's face, because he
said it reminded him of the doctor who took out
his tonsils as a boy, which was an experience the
left of traumatized. It's a funny hearing Annibal lecter talk
about the things that scare.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
Him, concluding one of his drama teachers. Oh yeah, when
I was in the Royal Academy, there was a teacher.
We had a Stanislavsky method teacher, and he was lethal.
Hopkins told Vanity Fair. He was very charismatic and he
was deadly. He would rip you apart. He would just
take you apart intellectually. He'd just smirk and he'd say, no,

(47:05):
do it again. His name is Christopher Fettis. He's retired.
Now you do a piece, and he'd say do it again. No,
I based it on him. No clarice, This teacher had
stayed in my conscience all my life. I got a
phone call afterwards, Tony, it's a wonderful performance. Did you
base that on me? By any chance?

Speaker 1 (47:24):
He's still alive? Apparently?

Speaker 2 (47:26):
No, that is incidental. No, that is incidental. Do you
think Jack Crawford wants you actually too much fun? You
should have left that detail out at the expense of
total accuracy, so that I would be derailing this for
the next three hours. I'm going to run out of

(47:49):
line readings before we run out of time.

Speaker 1 (47:50):
Table like sixteen twenty four minutes of Annibal let you're
in here. Hey everyone, this is Jordan. A few days
after we tape this out episode. Now, I couldn't stop
thinking about what it would sound like if Jack Nicholson
have been cast as Hannibal Lecter. It was one of
the few impressions that Heigel couldn't conjure up. So I
started fool around with some voice cloning software and I

(48:11):
came up with but I think it's a pretty decent
fact simile. Now, I didn't tell Haigel anything about this,
so I'm just sneaking it in right here as a
little surprise for him. Hope you enjoy.

Speaker 3 (48:20):
You know what you look like to me? With your
good bag and your cheap shoes. You look like a rube,
a well scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Good
nutrition has given you some length of bone. But you're
not more than one generation from poor white trash? Are you?
Agent Starling? And that accent you've tried so desperately to
shed pure West Virginia? What's your father, dear? Is he

(48:43):
a coal miner? Does he stink of the lamp? You
know how quickly the boys found you, all those tedious,
sticky fumblings in the back seats of cars while you
could only dream of getting out, getting anywhere, getting all
the way to the FB.

Speaker 1 (48:58):
I thank you very much, and that back to a
regularly scheduled.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
Program as you meditate on that, We'll be right back
with more too much information.

Speaker 5 (49:08):
After these messages, Anthony Hopkins would recall that Jonathan Demi
told him that Hannibal Lecter was quote a good man

(49:28):
locked inside an insane mind, which is who among us really,
and the fact that he played the good doctor and
the elephant.

Speaker 1 (49:39):
Man went a long way and getting him the role
in Silence of the Lambs, because this role led Jonathan
Demi to wonder what if the good doctor went terribly
wrong somehow, which is Hannibal Lecter. And screenwriter Ted Talley
described Lecter as quote the Sherlock Holmes of evil, which
I love.

Speaker 2 (49:55):
Yeah, they really pushed that a little too much in
my mind in Annibal. When he's like basic doing like
secret agent, he's like taken out a whole gang of
cops and whatever. My decision was to play the non
psychopathic side of him, to play him very quiet, very charming,
not dripping blood. Hopkins told the Hollywood Foreign Press Association,

(50:16):
I played King Lear once and the trick of the
mad scenes is not to play them, not to play
him mad. The lines that Shakespeare wrote for him are
mad enough that you don't have to act madness, just
play it normally. But the audience is listening to this
madness coming out of the lines. What Hannibal does, what
he says speaks of madness, speaks of cruelty. What he
does to those two guards is cruel and violent, terrifying

(50:36):
and insane. But you don't have to act that out.
That makes him more frightening. It's the old maximum. Less
is more of that iconic introductory scene when they go
down they do the long, slow walk down the cell block.
Hopkins were called to Vanity Fair. I remember the day
when Jonathan asked me how I wanted to be revealed
for the first time. It was Monday, January the ninth,

(50:57):
nineteen ninety. I think he kept a diary because because
he's very precise with these dates in this it's very creepy.
He said, the camera's going to be Jodie coming down
the corridor. How do you want to be seen? Do
you want to be standing or reading or asleep or something?
I said, no, I'd like to be standing where I said,
in the center of the cell. Why I said, I
can smell her. Jonathan said, you are crazy. The inhale

(51:23):
sucking thing. The fifth thing is, he says he in
the commentary track for the DVD, he did it as
a joke. He didn't think Demi was going to keep
it in. Demi was like, that was wacky. We're keeping that,
but it's actually really funny. In the DVD commentary, he
says that he was inspired by Bella Legosi as Dracula,

(51:43):
but he freely admits that he doesn't actually know if
that's something that Bella Legosi does as Dracula or if
it's just something that he thought he did. Assume.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
I understand that. Yeah, it's knowing something emotionally and not
in a life.

Speaker 2 (52:00):
Actually I like that, Yes, yes, knows it in here
taps to heart. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:06):
It's truly one of the best character introductions in movie history,
because after all of us build up, the most terrifying
thing that Hannibal Electric could do was just stand there, Amy, please,
and you're like looking for You're waiting for him. It's
the suspense thing. You're waiting for him to snap. You're
waiting for him to become the guy that you've heard
so much about for the first twenty twenty five minutes

(52:27):
of the movie. I love that they had shot for
like a month I think before Anthony Hopkins came to
the set, So this kind of I think added to
this whole sense of oh sure.

Speaker 2 (52:37):
Yeah, yeah. Hannibal's iconic mask took some developing. The production
designer called it an interesting dilemma. She said, for a
while there were thoughts of fencing sort of grid masks.
That was a costume designer, Colleen Attwood, And you can
see the non cool looking one is in the when
Chiltern's in his cell telling him about the new offer

(52:59):
from Senator Martin. When he gets the pen from Chilton,
he's got that sort of half half like fencing mask
thing that really actually very awkwardly like squishes Anthony Hopkins
nose down. So for the hockey inspired mask that they
ultimately used, Atwood said in a twenty fourteen interview, we

(53:19):
sent it to a guy to be made from a drawing.
All I wanted was a hockey style mask. The designer
sent it back to me in raw fiberglass to check
before it was to be painted, and glazed. It looked
like it was made out of this piece of skin
or leather. Straight away, I said, it's so much better
doing it this way than doing anything else to it.
So that's how the mask came to be. And that's
back in the day when multiples were not regularly made

(53:41):
or marketed. So I think only two of those masks
exist in the world. Now we come to one of
our most favorite bits here at TMI, which is ruining things. No,
it's debunking off aggregated pieces of trivia. You know, if
you go to you got a lesser clickbait factories across

(54:02):
the Internet, not the union made made in usmor by
hand clickbait that we do. Here, you find this persistent
thing that he doesn't blink. Anthony Hopkins does not blink
while playing Hannibal Lecter, which even a cursory rewatch of
the movie would disprove. But ground zero for this appears

(54:22):
to be our girl, Barbara Walters, friend of the Pod,
Barbara Walters. She volunteers unprompted in this interview. He's I
think he's talking about like being still or something, and
she just goes you never blink.

Speaker 1 (54:37):
I assume she's speaking metaphorically.

Speaker 2 (54:39):
No, she no, because she says, I've seen this clip.
She says, you never blink, and he immediately goes no.
And then she says, as Hannibal, and he says no,
and then ted Tally, the screenwriter is this is as
recently as twenty twenty one. He was talking to Rolling Stone.
He was saying, I don't know if you would notice
this even but he only blinks one time in the
entire movie, and he doesn't very slowly and dramatically. Otherwise

(55:02):
his eyes are completely wide open. He trained himself to
do that.

Speaker 1 (55:06):
Not true.

Speaker 2 (55:07):
Neither of those things are true. Sorry, he doesn't blink
a lot, but he certainly does not blink never, nor
does he blink only once. So myth busted. Where's my
uh yeah, where's my soundboard? Give me a second? What
do you got?

Speaker 3 (55:24):
All right?

Speaker 2 (55:25):
Myth busted?

Speaker 1 (55:28):
We're living moss once again.

Speaker 2 (55:31):
Can you imagine Hannibal if he had if he had
been worse or must dignified dire straits like finances after
this movie came out. Can you imagine him as handle
Elector doing doing Taco bell commercials? Can you imagine Sean
Connery as hand of Elector doing Taco Bell commercials. We
begin to covet by what we see every day, and
that includes the new Kaishia Dia Supreme available for a

(55:54):
limited time at Taco Bell, pajh Well with a Knife, Kiante.

Speaker 1 (56:03):
All that said, one of the upsides of having no
sponsors on the show.

Speaker 2 (56:10):
All that said, Anthony Hopkins was super creepy on the set.
Demi recalled in the making of an on set interview.
Every morning when we do a lector scene, Tony would
come in and say, good morning, Jonathan. You know you're
really the one that's mad. He don't empire. He just
showed up with doctor Lecter. As a matter of fact,

(56:32):
I've spoken to him a few times recently and he's
still doctor Lekker. I'm a little distressed about that, but
that's Tony. I like to think that Tony just got
the joke about doctor Lecter in a way that nobody
save perhaps Thomas Harris, may have gotten. And the film's
editor Craig Mackie recalled a very wonderful image of Hopkins
sitting in the all white outfit covered in fake blood

(56:55):
on set reading Eudora Welty. Not a shooting day went
by without Tony gliding up behind Jody or myself baring
his fangs and going good morning, Demi told people in
nineteen ninety one. Or he'd look round with these gigantic
eyes at the whole crew and go, you know, Jonathan's
the mad one. He never blinks. He's quite insane.

Speaker 1 (57:18):
The obsession with blinking on this set is great.

Speaker 2 (57:21):
It weakens him anyway. It worked. Aside from the Oscar
and untold millions in box office grows and the thousands
of impressions, parodies and Halloween costumes dedicated to Hannibal, the
character was named the Greatest Villain in American Cinema by
the AFI American Film Institute in two thousand and three. Ah,
he holds the record for winner. I'm trying to think

(57:44):
of how to phrase this. That character in Hopkins hold
the record for the shortest amount of screen time that
went into a Best Actor win. And I have been
I didn't time this out. I'm not that much of
a nerd. I'm not gonna watch this movie with a stopwatch.
But I have seen estimates of as low as sixteen
and as high as nearly twenty five minutes of screen time.
Seems like a big variance. I don't know why we

(58:06):
can't nail that down, but if you were a loved one,
want to, uh you know, send us your stop Watch
readouts will many five bucks.

Speaker 1 (58:16):
Let's see who are the best supporting actors up for
that year? So this is nineteen one eighty two Best
Supporting Actor. The winner was Jack Palance for City Slickers,
Tommy Lee Jones and JFK. Harvey Kai Tell and Bugsy,
Ben Kingsley for Bugsy, and Michael Lerner and Barton Fink.
If Anny Hopkins could have taken on them, yeah, you
sure could have. Because he was going up against Warren Beatty,

(58:36):
Robert Danira, Nick Nulty, and Robin Williams in Best Actors.
That actually seems like less competition in the Supporting Actor
Jack Palance. Come on, well, of course, the film wouldn't
be complete without its big bad Ted Levine's horrifying killer
jam Gumm aka Buffalo.

Speaker 2 (58:57):
Bill not pronounced Jamie. I. I want to be a
pedantic about it because it says it in the text.
We'll only know this because I've read this book with
like a half dozen times. It's like it was an
error on his the character's birth certificate and he insisted
on it, pronouncing it James like James without the s.
It's just a very funny note that they made it
into the movie. But some people say Jamie in the movie.

Speaker 1 (59:19):
But he's more of commonly known as Buffalo Bill because
as the Kansas City homicide apparently joked this one likes
to skin his humps.

Speaker 2 (59:27):
Oh awful.

Speaker 1 (59:30):
Johnny Douglas the now retired FBI special agent who's probably
the most famous profiler in history. He's written the book
mind Hunter, inside the FBI's elite serial crime unit that's
the inspiration for the famous Netflix series. He's personally interviewed
some of history's most notorious serial killers, and he was
also a consultant on Thomas Harris's books and the film

(59:50):
Silence of the Lambs, And with John Douglas's help, Thomas
Harris modeled Gum as an amalgam of real life killers
like Ted Bundy, who used cast on his hand to
lure women into his car to help him, like Gum did.
Gary Heidnick, who I wasn't familiar with him, imprisoned, tortured,
and killed women in his Philadelphia basement. I said that

(01:00:11):
way to chipperly Go Eagles, you say go Eagles.

Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
Yeah, dude, Philly, Philly represent Philly. Doesn't care how it's
in the news, just that it is.

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
Gary Heidnick a bad John if you will. And then
of course ed gean from Wisconsin who killed at least
two women, probably more, but also dug up graves and
made trophies out of bones and skins from corpses.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
Is he the one who made lampshades out of okay?

Speaker 1 (01:00:40):
Jim Johnny Douglas, the FBI profiler, is also the inspiration
for the Jack Crawford character in the electro verse. He's
been played by Dennis Farina, Harvey Kaitel, Scott Glenn, and
Lawrence Fishburn in various Hannibal Ee properties. But he's not
a fan of these movies, though He's told The New
York Posts in twenty seventeen, don't put across accurate portrayals

(01:01:02):
these movies, and that aggravates me. I can't look at
those movies.

Speaker 2 (01:01:06):
That's a bummer. Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
I feel like when FBI profilers get aggravated, people die.
I feel like he's high on the list of people
you want to keep happy. Ted Levine, the actor played
Buffalo Bill. I'm just gonna keep calling on Buffalo Bill
because that's who he is.

Speaker 5 (01:01:22):
To me.

Speaker 1 (01:01:22):
Phil rolling Stone in twenty twenty one why he wanted
the role, He said, I read the script and the
script was great. I read the book and the book
was better. I reread the script and realized it was
also pretty damn good. I met Jonathan Demi and everything
fell into place. Ted le Avin auditioned for the role
of Jamie Gone Buffalo Bill after John Malkovich, who was
his peer in Chicago's fame Steppenwolf Theater Company.

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
Passed on the role. Wow, John Malkovich, he would be good. Yea, Yeah,
that was really good. It puts the lotion in the basket.
He would have been so precise.

Speaker 1 (01:01:53):
And annoying the nunciation the diction had been off the charts.
Ted Levine said, I scared them to death in the audition.
This is him talking to the Chicago Reader in nineteen
ninety one. I had no idea what I was going
to do. Actually, I think my audition was better than
my performance by far. And after he got the role,
he went in depth into research. He said, I read

(01:02:14):
a lot of shits. He's stucking. To Hunter Adams, his
director in twenty fourteen's Dig two Graves for an interview.
I went to Quantico. I met the guys there in
the behavioral science unit and talked to them. They showed
me some shit and I heard some shit. Actually they
got cut off because they were showing me that they
shouldn't show me. I saw some shit there and it
wasn't good. Heard some tapes of people that did horrible, horrible.

Speaker 2 (01:02:35):
Things for real.

Speaker 1 (01:02:37):
And aside from the killers that Thomas Harris based Buffalo,
bill On Lavigne added Jerry Brutos, who's a foot fetishist
serial killer from Oregon, into his performance, and he said
that the basis of his character was based on the
assumption that these serial killers were quote self indulgent, addicted
to the idea of sex and death being close together,
and they really got off on that. Just an interesting insight.

Speaker 2 (01:02:59):
I have a theory that John Douglas had one tape
that he showed all of these guys, because Scott Glenn
talks about going to visit him as well and being
like traumatized by the tape that that John Douglas played him.
So I have to wonder if if John Douglas just
like pulls it out of his desk and like blows
the dust off it, and it's like, here's the tape
I used to traumatize people who want to come here

(01:03:19):
and research behavioral profiling and serial killers. Do you want
to know what tape it was? I actually know that
it was a tape of these these these uh. I
think he talks about this in the Inside the Labyrinthine documentary.
There were a pair of serial killers of killers who

(01:03:40):
were kidnapping teen girls in chronological order, so they like
started I forget if they started with like eleven year
old or something, but they went out and specifically found
one at every age and they were keeping them chained
up and there and and torturing them. And that was
the tapes they made tapes of them like torturing them
and screaming and the that was the ones that he

(01:04:01):
showed us or played for Scott Glenn and made him
reconsider his position on the death penalty. That's how bad
it was, which, yeah, that'd do it, yeah, yeah. And
then I think it was John Douglas, the actress who
plays Katherine Martin brook Smith was I think in her

(01:04:22):
Vulture interview she talks about like during one of her
like breakdown scenes. She like came up for air, so
to speak, and on the set, and John Douglas was
there and he was like, Yep, that's what it's like,
which is either great to hear as an actress or
just bone chilling. Ted Levine also visited a drag club

(01:04:44):
where he found some insight into the character. He told
Rolling Stone, I talked to a lovely, probably five foot
one Hispanic boy girl and bought him a drink. Obviously
this phrasing is outmoded. I asked, why do you do this?
He said. When I'm a dude on the street, I'm
just little Porto Rican mother. When I'm here, I'm a
hot Latina mama. It struck me that it was about power.

(01:05:06):
By trying to become a woman, he gains power. Hence
the moth, the lava turning into the butterfly, the whole
thing blossoming. It was the same impetus as a female impersonator,
but it became psychotic. It was donning the cloak of
feminine power, and perhaps most horrifyingly, he added that for
Bill's voice, I kind of did my mom a little
bit phrasing.

Speaker 1 (01:05:28):
Uh, just as creepy are the bodies that he used
to make his skin suit. No, all the word for it.
For the skin suit, they used the life model and
then disassembled it and then sewed it back together to
make it more segmented. And for the body fat of
these bodies, they used pastina pasta and ky jelly, which

(01:05:50):
as an Italian upsets me deeply.

Speaker 2 (01:05:53):
Yeah, they didn't use any fake corpses for this because
one of the special effects guys. I was like, oh man,
all those models you made sounded great, and all the
crime scene photos, even the woman in the autopsy, those
are real women. Those were just made up and had
to stay still.

Speaker 1 (01:06:09):
Do you talk about what the larva thing was made
out of in here?

Speaker 2 (01:06:13):
You must, I'm sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, h yeah yeah, sorry,
I'll TWITSI rolls and gummy bears, right, yeah yeah. Brooke Smith,
who plays the kidnap senator's daughter, told Vulture, I already
had the part and it was like, hey, Brook, can
you come in and read for the three people for
callbacks for the people we're bringing in for the role.
I guess they wanted to see what we looked like together,
and oh my god, Ted was just it. He walked
in the door, and he wasn't an actor trying to

(01:06:34):
get a job. The guy who had gone before him
and had props, had everything figured out what he wanted
to do, and they were like, thanks for coming in.
I can't really say what Ted did in that room,
except I thought, oh my god, I'll never be able
to audition again, because if people are this good in
the room, I'll never be able to get any work.
I remember asking him later on set, what did you do?
You were unbelievable. He was like, it's so funny you

(01:06:54):
say that, because I didn't know what I was going
to do, so I just drank a lot of coffee.
Brook Smith gained twenty five pounds for the role. She
told Rolling Stone. I was in an acting class with
Vincent Andofrio when I got the role, and he had
just done Full Metal Jacket. So he said, you got
to ask the producers to give you a credit card.
They gotta pay for your food. So I did, and
we always joke that's why they went over budget because

(01:07:16):
of my food. That's the film When Stanley Kuber kept
calling Vincentofrio to his house and Vincent was like not enough. Yeah,
he was like, oh, I'm gonna get I'm gonna get
acting advice about the character, and like, I think for
the character, and Scubrick would just be like, no, still
not fat enough, just slammed the door in his face.

Speaker 1 (01:07:38):
Yeah, just just on the stoop. He don't even let
him in and.

Speaker 2 (01:07:41):
Just opens the door. No, thanks for coming.

Speaker 1 (01:07:49):
Brooks Smith, who played the senator's kidnapped daughter, she's pretty
hilarious in real life and in these interviews, she's got
a million of these similar lines. In a twentieth aniversary
feature for the History Chain, and recounts a moment when
Jonathan Demi asks her if she's ever been in jail,
presumably together in the mood for being locked in the pit,
and she replies, Jonathan, I've never been in jail. Jonathan

(01:08:12):
Demi was like really, she got all offended, and then
she makes a point of turning to the documentary camera
and going and I still haven't been in jail, Jonathan.

Speaker 2 (01:08:24):
Yeah, she's really funny. I like it so funny.

Speaker 1 (01:08:26):
Yeah, And she also talks about Buffalo Bill's famous the dance,
Yes that he does. Apparently they made that up on
the set, and she said that in the same documentary,
people come up to me all the time and say
my boyfriend always tucks his penis in and does that dance,
which is a really weird thing to say to me.
It's like, oh, okay, great, he sounds like a great guy.

Speaker 2 (01:08:51):
Ted Levine and brook Smith actually grew quite close on
the set, to the point where Jodie Foster started calling
brook Smith Patty Hurst in reference to the heirest earned
bank robber Ya Stockholm syndrome. We had to take care
of each other to shoot those scenes, Smith told Vulture,
we had to trust each other.

Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
Anthony Hopkins thought it was really funny to see the
pair having lunch together after spending the whole day being
tortured by it.

Speaker 2 (01:09:15):
I think she gave She gave him one of the
necklaces that he wears in the penis tuck dance scene,
which is so cute and horrifying. Smith talked about despite
the fact that Tom Petty's American Girl has been indelibly
linked with her character in the film, another track being
floated with Shaka cohns I'm every Woman, and that as
a veteran of New York City's eighties punk scene herself,

(01:09:37):
she wanted bad Brains to go in the movie, which
is hilarious. Can you imagine? Smith told Vulture that she
locked herself in her parents' basement closet as research, which
got her in the right headspace. I had a lot
of bad dreams before we shot, but by the time
we got there, I was pretty relaxed. I think all
that screaming is kind of a primal therapy, so I'd
be really relaxed at lunchtime, and all the teamsters everyone

(01:10:00):
be not relaxed after having lived through the past few
hours of me screaming. Ted Levin and Jodi Foster meanwhile,
deliberately avoided each other. He told Rolling Stone. We stayed
away from each other, and I think that was a
good choice when you're the antagonist and you're dealing with
a protagonist. That night vision scene, though, took twenty two
hours to film.

Speaker 1 (01:10:19):
Oh that's nuts, and that was on her last day, right, yeah,
last day of filming.

Speaker 2 (01:10:26):
Wow, God Foster's anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:10:28):
Yeah, but at least there wasn't actually in complete darkness
for twenty two hours.

Speaker 2 (01:10:32):
Which I am shamed to admit that. For the longest time,
I was like, Wow, they actually shot that because her
performance is so convincing.

Speaker 1 (01:10:41):
And then an interview she like laughs about she like
can't figure out why everyone thinks that it's real, and
it's like, well, because you're really good at it.

Speaker 2 (01:10:48):
You're an amazing actress.

Speaker 1 (01:10:50):
But she points out that if this were actually really
done in the dark, it would be completely shadowless with
this night vision thing, but there's a telltale shadow. When
Buffalo Bill lifts his hands with the gun, you see
shadow on her shoulders.

Speaker 2 (01:11:01):
So yeah, in the book, I remember, there is like
a thing about he's immediately struck by her hair, and
so he has this whole thing about, you know, wanting
to use her hair as part of his his suit.
They filmed those basement scenes in what was once a
giant airplane turbine factory in Pittsburgh, and it was on

(01:11:23):
a multi level set so Smith could either enter it
through a trapdoor at the bottom which they covered with dirt,
or through the sides. And then it was actually like
the filmmakers and everyone shooting it were actually like twenty
feet up, and it was I forget who talks about
having to look down into that thing and giving them vertigo.

Speaker 1 (01:11:41):
Yeah, she said it was a real bummer when she
was in the pit and had to go pee like
that was.

Speaker 2 (01:11:46):
Yeah, she had a bucket.

Speaker 3 (01:11:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:11:52):
All all being on the sound stage that they built
in an abandoned ge turbine factory seems like hell. They
were filming during the coldest Pittsburgh winner in recent memory,
in what was described as quote a giant cement block
with no heat in it, fourteen degrees below zero, so
cold that the elevators regularly froze, and the crew had
the wear chemical hand heaters. So Brooke Smith was a

(01:12:13):
real true for being down on that pit. The real
friends were the penises. We tucked a lot in blaugh Ah.

Speaker 2 (01:12:24):
She of course also spent a lot of time with Darla,
the dog that plays precious. She said, I felt bad
for that dog. Told Rolling Stone, I just thought, well,
how does this dog know that this isn't real? The
trainer was always there. If I was looking up at ted,
the trainer will be right next to them. And the
trainer was almost scarier because I was like, I better
not hurt this dog. Oh and the lotion placed in
the basket under thread of getting the hose again, brook

(01:12:48):
Smith says it was just crappy lotion, nothing fancy, and
the prompt Mistress Anne Miller delivered the bottle to her
apartment in New York a few years after shooting, which
is really creepy. She said. My doorman was like, someone
left you this package, and it was the lotion, just
this little white plastic bottle. She taped a piece of
paper to it that said, it puts the lotion on

(01:13:09):
the skin. It does this whenever it's told Jay Gumm,
I don't think I've seen her since then. That's horrifying.
That is a strange thing to do.

Speaker 3 (01:13:20):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (01:13:20):
I mean, as somebody who collects random memorabilia like I
do and is really sentimental, I almost I appreciate that.

Speaker 2 (01:13:28):
But just to anonymously drop it off and then you
never see that person again. That's what's creepy. Fact that
I know where you live is a little Yeah. That's
kind of another iconic aspect of the performance. The dance
to Q Lazarus is Goodbye Horses. That is a prosthetic nipple,
which Ted Levine and Jonathan Demibo said freaks people out,
but it is not a real nipple, guys. The crotch

(01:13:52):
tuck dance is in Harris's book, and Levine said it's
something any boy can do at home. I thought it
was essential, he told the Chicago Reader. To prepare for
the filming that scene, he took a couple of shots
of tequila.

Speaker 1 (01:14:07):
Yeah, he's kind of echoed that quote in a lot
of interviews I've read with him. That's a simple thing
that anybody can do in the privacy of their own home.
It made it immediately accessible to people.

Speaker 2 (01:14:19):
Sure, I'm not gonna disagree with that, dude. I was
as shocked as everybody else when I saw him tucking
his genitals between his legs and posing. Screenwriter Ted Tally
told the mag I thought, oh my god. When Jody
first saw it, she said, this is really disturbing, which
is the idea?

Speaker 1 (01:14:37):
So was it in the book but not the screenplay,
but then they made it up on the set.

Speaker 2 (01:14:41):
Is that I feel like it might have just been
like Jame does a creepy dance in the mirror. Like
I don't think they Uh. I think he looks great
by the way. He looks great with that long hair
and make up. The scalp.

Speaker 1 (01:14:52):
I mean, oh, was that? I think I missed that.

Speaker 2 (01:14:57):
Oh yeah, it's kind of a blinking you miss it moment.
It's when he's like adjusting it. You can see it
as like a bloody piece of like scalp on it. Still, Yeah,
but that scene almost had a very different flavor pun
intended when Levine started working on it. When Levine started
working on it with Jonathan Demi, it was soundtrack to
Bob Seeger's Her Strut. He explained, I actually had a

(01:15:20):
very a different, very sort of raunchy stripper dance for hearst.
When Goodbye Horses came up, it served my purposes better.
It made it a little gentler and stranger. It wasn't
just so crass and sexual. It was a little bit
more feminine, and I liked that. Do you know about
Q Lazarus? Do you know her life story? I don't know.
She was born Diane Lucky in New Jersey and she
had a band called Q Lazarus and the Resurrection. She

(01:15:42):
was working as a cab driver in New York in
the eighties and when she picked up Jonathan Demi as
a fair she played him her demo and they remained unsigned,
but he put Candle Goes Away, one of their songs
in Something Wild and Hit nineteen eighty six, and then
Goodbye Horse, which is the only single she ever released commercially.

(01:16:02):
He put that in both married to the Mob and
so into the Lambs, and then he cast her in
Philadelphia singing a talking head song which is one of
the songs that they actually do, and stop making Sense,
which is a really nice full circle moment. But she
never really managed to make anything out of a music
career because she basically fell off the map until like
twenty eighteen or twenty seventeen, where she was tracked down

(01:16:24):
by some freelance journalists. They found her in Staten Island,
where she'd been driving a bus for years, So goodbye horses. Indeed,
Levine sadly wound up type cast after the performance. People
recognize my voice a lot. Yeah, it's a horrifying voice.
But I'm grateful I could get equal attention for his
other biggest role, Stottlemeyer on Monk That's a show a

(01:16:47):
kid could watch with her grandma. He was locked into
these creep roles for a while until Jennifer Jason Lee
actually pitched that he play her husband. He plays a
stay at home dad in the nineteen ninety five movie Georgia,
for which he said I will be for ever grateful
to her because it helped break out of his type casting.
And he doesn't do a lot of interviews about this.
He really doesn't talk about it. He's never he said,
he's never watched the movie.

Speaker 1 (01:17:09):
So it's so sick of it. I mean, do we
think it ruined his life? If he was like poised
to be like a John Knakovich.

Speaker 2 (01:17:18):
Yeah, like step Chicago Steppenwolf character actor. And then the
people were just like, it's the do the do the
do the do the tuck thing, like it's a buffalow bill. Hey,
hey hey, it puts the load ship. Hey hey, Ted, Hey,
it puts the lotion in the basket. Remember when you

(01:17:39):
remember it was awesome? It was I was the thing
when you did your penis, that was awesome. Man. Can
I get your autography? Yeah? I would, I would go no,
I would go insane. Yeah. Uh. Scott Scott Glenn hot
ye with a body. He's so handsome. I love him

(01:18:01):
so much.

Speaker 1 (01:18:02):
Isn't he like a Chuck Norris level? Like martial artist?
And then he's like eighty something. Yeah, he's done a
lot of martial arts. He was photographed like doing like
knife routines and men's health. At one point, he was
just coming off of Hunt for Red October nineteen ninety,
but Jonathan Demi had actually known him from years prior.

(01:18:23):
They both worked on a Roger Corman biker picture called
Angel As Hard as They Come phrasing Nope, I'm not
even gonna say it.

Speaker 2 (01:18:34):
Demi co wrote and produced that film, and he gave
Scott Glenn one of his first big on screen parts.
Roger Corman has a cameo in Silence of the Lambs
as the head of the FBI, and so does George
Romero Zombie auteur Pride of Pittsburgh. George Romero pops up
as one of the prison guards escorting Clarice out of
the cell in Memphis.

Speaker 1 (01:18:52):
And another beloved Pittsburgh performer, Don Brockett, famous for playing
Chef Brockett from Mister Rogers Neighborhood, plays one of Hannibal
Lecter's cellmates, though sadly not Miggs, because that would have
been That would have been amazing. You also missed my
favorite cameo I think of this entire movie, Chris friggint Isaac, Yeah,
of that song I don't like.

Speaker 2 (01:19:15):
Wicked Game. Yeah, he plays.

Speaker 1 (01:19:18):
One of the cops. I think it's one of the
cops in the scene where uh he's face, Yeah, he's away.

Speaker 2 (01:19:23):
He's a swat guy.

Speaker 1 (01:19:25):
Yeah, no, No, he's not a squat guy. I think
he's a cop.

Speaker 2 (01:19:27):
Oh is he Chris Isaac? I think he is because
they do like a conspicuous They do like a conspicuous
like like he gets out of the truck and it
like zooms in on his big Chris Isaac jaw and
he says like let's go or something. I was like, okay,
Jonathan would they try to.

Speaker 1 (01:19:44):
Position him as like a Harry Connick junior style, like no,
he can like crossover artist or I.

Speaker 2 (01:19:50):
Don't know, I don't care. I don't think anything's interesting
about Chris Isaac.

Speaker 1 (01:19:54):
Well here's something it's interesting about Chris Isaac. He'd worked
with Jonathan Demi. He's had a couple run with Jonathan Debbie.
He worked with him and Married to the Mob. And
Chris Isaac also worked with Jonathan Debbi in My Beloved
That Thing You Do, where Demi had a cameo as
the director of the Beach Party movie that the Wonders
are appearing in Weekend at Party Peer with Captain Geech
and the shrimp Shacked Shooters. And this is perfect because

(01:20:17):
Jonathan Demi had just directed Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, and
Tom Hanks did a little role reversal. He's directing his
old director now because Tom Hanks wrote and directed That
Thing You Do. Plus, Jonathan Demi had got to start
working with Roger Corman, as you mentioned, who's the king
of the sixties teen movies. So it's kind of cute
he's putting him in those role as a director of
a teen movie. And that Thing You Do. I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:20:39):
Scott Glenn and Jody Foster's dynamic in the film is
one of its strongest parts, and it was something that
Demi was shepherding along from day one. Scott Glenn told
Rolling Stone after I read Ted Telly's script, I remember thinking,
this is the strangest relationship of the movie, even stranger
than her and Lecter. I don't know about that, buddy.
I remember Jody and I were doing a table reading

(01:20:59):
early on, trying it one way or another, and Jonathan
Demi said, don't play the relationship. That's just a writer
being a writer.

Speaker 1 (01:21:06):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (01:21:07):
Later on, there's a scene where she's leaving Washington and
I'm helping walk her out to the car. She had
a hard time getting in. So I just took her
arm to sort of help her getting into the car,
and Jonathan yelled no. Cut. He comes running, like really
running up to us and goes, Scott, I do not
want you to touch her. Jody said, well, he's just
helping me in, and then he says, remember back when
we did that reading, and I told you too that

(01:21:27):
you couldn't play that relationship. Well, it exists on the screen.
I see it in every frame of the footage. I
watched the two of you, and I just know that
instinctively that if you touch in this scene it's going
to blow it all. You should only touch her once
at the end when you shake her hand. That handshake
will be so loaded and it only works if you
don't do that. It's a good point. Frankie Faisan plays

(01:21:47):
the orderly. Barney had just starred as the Landlord in
nineteen eighty eight's Coming to America when he was up
for Silence, and he had actually appeared as a detective
in Manhunter, the original Red Dragon adaptation. Jonathan Demi had
a thing about not wanting to hire any of the
crew who did Manhunter, but like a few people, somehow
sneaked in so frankiefies On got himself cast in Silence,

(01:22:09):
and then he reprised that same role of Barney the
orderly in Hannibal and in the Red Dragon remake, which
makes him the actor with the most appearances in the
lector verse. Nice, he said to the AV Club, I
think it was a crossword puzzle answer in the New
York Times. What more can you ask for? Anthony Held
plays the oily doctor Chilton, the head of the psychiatric hospital,

(01:22:32):
who grossly overplays his hand against Lecter and winds up
paying the price. Demi had seen quite a lot of
Heald's drama work on stage in New York and contacted him.
Heald wanted to play Chilt from the outset, but Demi
didn't think he was old enough. A couple weeks after
his audition and this talk, Hal told the AV Club,
I get news we're going to do a reading. Jodie
Foster has been hired as Clarice and Gene Hackman has

(01:22:52):
been hired as Hannibal. The day before the reading, I
get a call from Jonathan Gene Hackman has dropped out.
His daughter doesn't think it's the right role for him,
so we don't have a Hannibal, but we still want
to do the reading. Jody is flying in. This is
not an audition. I would not cast you in this role,
but it would help us out if you would, tomorrow,
at the reading read the part of Hannibal Lecter. I
said sure. So for the first time we read the script,

(01:23:13):
I was sitting across the table from Jody, and I
was playing Hannibal. I had a great time. After the reading,
Jonathan took me aside and said, you can play chiltin.
You convinced me when I told Jonathan in that first
meeting that I wanted to be Chilt and he said why,
I said, well, I always played lovable nerds. Chilton is
much more complicated, less sympathetic, and I think it would
be exciting for me to explore that. I think that

(01:23:34):
my sort of boyish, pleasant demeanor would set up a
nice contrast with what's coming out of that character's insides.
But much like Ted Levine, he wound up tight cast
as a weasly dickhead for the next chunk of his career.

Speaker 1 (01:23:45):
And you can't self identify as a boyish.

Speaker 2 (01:23:48):
Yeah, that dude's boyish in like nineteen fifties years when
people aged it seven times the right they do now.
Though the film takes place in the DC, Virginia area,
the film was shot in and around Pittsburgh after extensive
canvassing by Demi and producer Kenneth Utt, who has a
cameo as the funeral Mertu. The city's Natural History Museum

(01:24:12):
is where Starling gets the bug found in the autopsy,
and that model is constructed of a mixture of Tutsi
rolls and gummy bears because it was actually in that
woman's throat, which is horrifying. I don't know how you
how you?

Speaker 3 (01:24:24):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:24:24):
No? The Soldiers and Sailors Museum in Pittsburgh is where
Elector makes his terrifying escape from. And that hit a
little too close to home for good old ted Levine,
he told the Chicago Reader. Once I got the part,
I was looking at location scouting photographs. They said, this
may be Gum's house. I'm thinking this house looks really familiar.
They told me we found this really awful, god forsaken

(01:24:46):
coal mining town on the Ohio River. And I said
bel Air, Ohio, And they said, yes, I grew up
in Belair, and the house they were thinking to be
Gum's house was next door to the house of my
girlfriend when I was in the third grade. The hospital, though,
this is really interesting. Every shot you see of the
hospital that she goes to visit Elector in is a
different location. So like the Anthony Heil talked about, they

(01:25:09):
would go and just do like a pickup of them,
like walking through the offices, and that was like a jail, uh,
And then they would go somewhere else and that like
that cool staircase shot that they're going at, the concentric
staircase thing, that's like a third location. And then the dungeon.
The cell block where Lector is is obviously a set
and production designer Christy z said that she took influence

(01:25:30):
from where the Nazis were on trial at Nuremberg, not
the Memphis one. I forget what I don't I didn't
read actually what she said about the cell block in
the freestanding cell in the one in the Memphis one.

Speaker 1 (01:25:43):
I'm just stuck on the escape though, I mean that
is just the whole I mean, visually, it's so stunning.
I mean, just this giant cage in the middle of
the room. It just seems like that that's in the book. Yeah,
the least efficient way to keep a prisoner.

Speaker 2 (01:26:00):
I think it might have been another I think it
might have been another visual callback to I mean, I
didn't read anybody about this. I'm just spitballing. But when
the when they put Andre Chikatillo on trial, who was
the like the most famous Russian serial killer that they
they put him in just later though, right, no, because
he was dead by ninety four. Oh no, you're right
he was. He wasn't on trial until ninety two. Yeah,

(01:26:22):
you're right, I stay corrected. I should know better. I
was gonna stayal I was gonna say I should know
better than the not come correct.

Speaker 1 (01:26:30):
So I love this escape so much. But apparently one
person who does not is Hannibal Lecter himself. Anthony Hopkins.
He said that was particularly unpleasant. I guess he's referring
to eating the guy's face. I did not enjoy that.
That was shot around three am. It is an all
time quote. Eating someone's face off is kind of ridiculous.

Speaker 2 (01:26:51):
It is, Yeah, it is.

Speaker 1 (01:26:53):
It's true that they did that whole face biting thing
by having I think rubber like teeth guards in Anthony Hopkins'
mouth and then like a rubber mouthguard in the other
guy's mouth with like a little bit that's stuck out.
So Anthony Hopkins is like biting with like rubber mouthguard,
like a piece of rubber in this other guy's mouth.
So that's how that effect was true year to guess.

(01:27:16):
And then the all the elegant night stick beating where
it looks like he's almost conducting. Yeah, that was done
by hitting a rolled up sound blanket wrapped up with
gaffer tape, and there was a grip down below throwing
up fake blood onto Anthony hopkins face every time he would.

Speaker 2 (01:27:32):
Strike a blow or land a blow.

Speaker 1 (01:27:35):
And then that grotesque tableau that lect their stages with
the cops body and the christ pose on the cage
that was inspired by Francis Bacon painting.

Speaker 2 (01:27:44):
Yeah, I did read that they're in the Museum of
Moving Image. I saw a couple of them. How did
he get that guy up there?

Speaker 1 (01:27:51):
Handcuffs?

Speaker 2 (01:27:52):
I lift him up there, you carry him up a ladder.
I don't know how much time do we think that
took start to fit? That's a great question, because you
think he has to he has to take the other guy.
He has to take the other guy, change clothes, take
that guy and throw him on top of an elevator.

Speaker 1 (01:28:08):
Oh if I could take his face, take his face, Yeah,
take his face, throw him on the at the top
of the bracket. I don't really, I don't have access
to the face taking. Take taking some other take face.

Speaker 2 (01:28:20):
Oh I do. It's about ten minutes. Yea, yeah, facial
come down to McDonald's for the new facial FILET Well,
I'll be having you for dinner.

Speaker 1 (01:28:37):
But up, up, up. We're gonna take a quick break,
but we'll be right back with more too much information
in just a Moment.

Speaker 2 (01:28:57):
Ray Mendez, whose credits include bug centric films like Creep
Show and Later Joe's Apartment, served as the moth wrangler
and stylist for Silence of the Lambs Every Guy. Everything
he says regarding the moths was accurate in the movie.
They even borrowed some of his cases to use in
Gum's Layer. The only thing that he had trouble was

(01:29:18):
finding the Death's Head Hawk moths, since there was only
one colony at the time, it was in England and
they were recovering from a virus. So he got the
idea to use another species of moth and dress it
in a little costume. Which is so adorable. He painted
the little death's head the little skull onto a fake
press on fingernail, and then used a dissolvable glue to

(01:29:41):
affix it to the moth in a way that wouldn't
harm it. He told Rolling Stone. When Clarice's going down
the corridor and there's moths flying, I've got all these
moths that are ready to go in the box. I'm
running in front of the camera out of view, throwing
moths like the Romans used to do with rose petals.
Incredible movie magic. Because they were shooting in the cold

(01:30:02):
part of the States during a record cold winter, the
moths had to be kept in a separate heated environment,
and I heard that the cast members were joking to
this guy, hey, can you represent me next time because
the moths had to be kept they had their own
heated compartment, and he would have to say, Okay, moth's
got to take a break, and Jonathan Demi would be like,
all right, break for moths. Meanwhile, Jodie Foster's shooting in

(01:30:25):
twenty two straight hours in that horrific basement.

Speaker 1 (01:30:27):
Yeah, this moth wrangler slash stylist is wildly entertaining. He
said that he would keep the larva in an heated
incubator when he noticed that they were starting to I
guess they were hatching. I don't know what the correct
term is. And then he would put them in a refrigerator,
which emphasized didn't hurt the moths. He was very, very
concerned about the moths well being, but slow their activity
down because they're cold blooded. So then it was time

(01:30:49):
for Buffalo Bill to shoot the scene with them. He'd
take them out of the fridge and in the room,
and the room temperature would lead them to like heap
back up again, and they start to wiggles as soon
as Ted Levine started handling them, which I think is
pretty cool and gross and gross, Yeah, very gross. And
there's this one documentary where you have got the guy
playing Buffalo Bill. He says in his Buffalo Bill voice,

(01:31:13):
there were no moths harmed in the making of Silence
of the Lamps, which is hilarious.

Speaker 2 (01:31:19):
Yeah, man really doesn't have a creepy voice for the ages.

Speaker 1 (01:31:22):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:31:23):
Well.

Speaker 1 (01:31:23):
Much of Buffalo Bill's lair was built on a sound
stage the house in Perreopolis, Pennsylvania, in which the upstairs
and exteriors were filmed was on the market for many,
many years because no one wanted to live in Bill's
house until twenty twenty, when an entrepreneur named Chris Rowan
bought the decidedly dilapidated for bedroom Victorian for just two

(01:31:44):
hundred and ninety thousand dollars, and he since turned it
into an airbnb and attraction. And he even enlisted the
help of the Pittsburgh special effects legend Tom Savini and
the nearby Special Effects Academy to help recreate the well
the pit in the basement where Catherine was kept, which
in reality was done on a separate sound stage. So yeah,

(01:32:04):
you can stay in Buffalo Bill's House and sleep in
the pit if you want, if that's your thing. But
Buffalo Bill's House is not the only silence of the
Lamb's location you can visit in the Pittsburgh area either.
Every Halloween season, the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, where
Hannibal Elector's bloody escape occurs, holds the silence of the

(01:32:25):
Lambs themed event, presumably in that very room, and a
local horror attraction company, a hundred acres Manor built a
replica of the freestanding cage the Hannibal Elector escapes from
and they erect it in the cavernous Hall for photos
and such rotesque costplaying. I suppose.

Speaker 2 (01:32:47):
No segue here. Howard Shore composed the score for Silence
of the Lambs was recorded with the Munich Symphony Orchestra.
I think it's a great score. I'm baffled by when
I was researching it, I just did not find anything
for interesting about it. They said it was kind of
like they wanted something that wasn't going to be like
the score for Psycho or like Jaws, Like they didn't

(01:33:08):
want everyone to have like an instantly identifiable theme that
was going to jump out of the way. I think
they wanted it to be kind of unobtrusive and you
know more. I guess wallpapery, so good job. Aside from
Goodbye Horses an American Girl, Probably the most famous Q
in the film is Glenn Gould playing Box Goldberg variations,

(01:33:31):
which Lecter conducts later following that escape. I found a
long scholarly paper called doctor Lecter's Taste for Goldberg or
the Horror of Bach in the Hannibal Franchise from a
twenty twelve issue of the Journal of the Royal musical association,
but I won't bore you with that. Just funny. I
think it's out.

Speaker 1 (01:33:51):
There, doctor Lector's taste for Goldberg. I see what you
did there. Nice.

Speaker 2 (01:33:55):
The puns write themselves with this stuff. Really, I mean,
it's kind of the you don't really have to do
too much.

Speaker 1 (01:34:00):
Well, kind of touching on what you said earlier, Howard
Shore made a really interesting observation about his score. He
said that it was more operatic than most movies scores,
certainly most horror scores, because it was designed to underpin
the emotion of the scenes, which I know, I guess
you could argue that all scores do that, but this
one on a more subtle level. Jonathan Demi said that
the music was something that was felt rather than heard,

(01:34:22):
and I would agree with that. Yeah, I mean I
watched whole scenes from this, you know, a couple hours
before we taped, and I can't remember a single one,
but I remember they were very affecting.

Speaker 2 (01:34:33):
Yeah. So much more interesting to me than any of
that is the actual sound design of the film. They
actually had two separate teams. They had not just the
kind of the foldy guys whose job it is to
be like Okay, you know, here's the sound of these
guys walking across a room, or here's the sound of
the cell door clanking. They had another team whose job
is to just find weird stuff and bury it in

(01:34:56):
the mix to create kind of the ambiance. And those
guys are Skip Leave saying Ron Bushar, and there's anti Chin, Yes,
there's room tones. In nineteen ninety five issue of Ciniste,
Bushar explained that for Clarice's first visit to Lector in
the hospital, there were animal screams and noises built into
the ambiance itself down there from a movie I had

(01:35:17):
made years ago called Little Monsters. I took this lunatic
kind of screaming that I had recorded. I took the track,
processed it, slowed it down, and played it in reverse.
That became one of the ambiences in the room too.
It's the room tone, but the room tone has been
made from some guy screaming in pain. Fitting Skip Leaves
told The New York Times nine tenety one that for

(01:35:38):
Bill's Lair, he used the sound of rain falling in
an Amazonian forest, and then he slowed it down to
the point where just the occasional drop or plink would
sound like like a and then he further distorted that
electronically and also in the mix buried deep within there
in Bill's basement scene is like a sound of an

(01:35:58):
oil rig, the barking of seals, the howling of wolves.
I haven't listened to this movie on like, I haven't
watched it on headphones yet, but I actually want to
go back because, you know, another thing that they talk
about is supposedly when they do the whole you know,
his heartbeat never got above eighty five, even when he

(01:36:19):
was eating her tongue. They said they buried they make
the sound mix sound like heart beats, which is really
interesting and wow, horrifying.

Speaker 1 (01:36:29):
For a movie that didn't have a huge budget. Yeah,
I really admire the extra mile they went with.

Speaker 2 (01:36:34):
Those, Yeah, Leevesay said in an interview with designingsound dot Org.
Jonathan would have to, you know, battle with the rest
of the crew to put our stuff in. But he
really liked it, and he convinced them all to be
quiet and let him experiment with this stuff. And oftentimes
that meant taking out Howard Shore's score and listening to
these sounds, and he had to endure this crush of
negative vibe like you're ruining the film? Are you putting

(01:36:55):
all that noise in there? The music is so great
and Jonathan bless his heart, endured all that. Demi told
the Director's Guild and interview with Silence of the Lambs,
we wanted to create this mood of extraordinary dread and suspense.
Even before we started shooting for the scene where Clarice
first meets doctor Lecter, I talked to production mixer Chris
Newman about what would lead us to a sense of dread?

(01:37:18):
Are there ways you can mike this? Is there b
roll you can get? How can we make it feel
like Clarice is literally going to hell in this meeting?
And you wind up with things like let's make it
sound like she's in a submarine, and then let's get
humpback whale sounds and mix them in. Writing on Silence
of Lambs in nineteen ninety two, Roger Ebert pointed out
the film's sound design is also focused on breath in

(01:37:40):
a way that you wouldn't ordinate like the even the
foley stuff, like people's breaths are highlighted in the way
that you because if you think about your normal film,
even something that's very dialogue heavy. You don't hear people
breathe because it's just considered distracting, right unless it's designed
to be part of the mix, and it was very
much so in this film. And the movie is actually
book ended with Clarice's breath because if you remember, it

(01:38:00):
opens up with her jogging the training course and so
you know, get the sound of her exhalations she's winded.
And then again in the night vision scene that the
whole thing closes with you just hear her after she
shoots him, just like breathing heavily, and he is exhaling
his last breaths. And of course I would be remiss
if I didn't mention one of my favorite creepiest, weirdest

(01:38:22):
Easter eggs. When that moth chrysaliss is pulled out of
the corpse's throat at the autopsy, the corpse exhales, this.

Speaker 1 (01:38:30):
Dying breath has been plugged.

Speaker 2 (01:38:32):
Oh so upsetting and so perfect. And then there's a
point at which Clarice like exhales, right, she just like
blows out her breath and you and Lecter immediately inhales
like he's trying to breathe her breath. In just the
little touches in this and that, and it all blays
into what I said earlier about how it's gothic. Like
every single location in this movie is like a haunted house.

(01:38:57):
Even like even the sterility of like the f the
I headquarters all have this kind of claustrophobic, dense ambiance
to them. It's so great. But despite all the fraught
filming scenarios, locations and dynamics, the atmosphere on the set
was pretty lighthearted. As you mentioned earlier, they had Hawaiian
shirt Fridays and on they celebrated Valentine's Day while shooting.

(01:39:22):
Brooke Smith said the crew ate lamb and made the
blueprint of the set into a board game called the
Gum Game. It had stuff like liposection, go back two spaces.
The object was to save Catherine.

Speaker 1 (01:39:37):
There's this grape behind the scenes picture of one of
Lecter's cellmates gleefully holding a sheet cake for his birthday
in his cell. Yeah, it's great. One person of the
cast is quoted as saying, you don't always get to
have so much fun on something so awful.

Speaker 2 (01:39:51):
Yeah, but there was one key change from the book
that made it to the film. In the novel, lect
bids Clarisse farewell with a it. Actually, in the book,
if I remember correctly, she is shown to be I
think she's like pictured in bed with the guy she
meets at the museum who's like flirting with her, the

(01:40:12):
one bug guy, and he comes to her graduation, so
you do see him again in the film. But I
think in the they like Thomas Harris makes it explicit
that they were like dating by the end of it,
but Ted Tally decided that wasn't cinematic enough, so he
wrote an ending in which Lecter has the same phone
call with Clarice, but then he hangs up and approaches
a bound doctor Chilton. He's holding a knife and he

(01:40:33):
says something like, well, doctor Chilton, shall we begin? Well,
Doctor Chilton, shall we begin? Jonathan, who hadn't asked for
a lot of changes, said, well, you know that's kind
of icky. Ted Tally told Deadline Children is despicable and
we don't like him, and he's a crumbbum. I love that,
but he's still a human being and to have him

(01:40:55):
trust up for slaughter is just too squirmy. Ted should
we give him some kind of a fighting chain's Tally continued,
I was a little miffed. I thought I'd been so
clever to work out that ending. But I thought about it,
and I said, well, what if Chiltren fled the country
instead of hiding out in his house, only Lector has
figured out where he went and got there first. Never
mind how Lector would figure that out. I have no idea.

(01:41:16):
Jonathan said, so, you're proposing that the last thing we
shoot in this movie will make us all have to
go to a tropical island at the studio's expense. Ted
Talley said, yes, that is exactly what I am suggesting.
But DEMI told Deadline I needed to clear this with
Thomas Thomas Harris, who I had a minimal relationship with,
So before we started filming, I called Tom and he

(01:41:37):
said he wished us luck, but he was not going
to see the movie. But we had stayed scrupulously faithful
to his great book, and now we wanted to do
this radical departure at the end. We were in Miami anyway,
and so I went to Tom's house. There we sit down,
have a nice tea, and I tell him that I
want to change his ending. I want to see Lecter
out in the world. And how would he feel about that.
He gave us his blessing, but he said a couple

(01:41:58):
things I thought were great. If you take Lecter to
the tropics, there's one thing I'm sure of, he would
never sweat so armed with that. When you see that scene,
everybody's sweating like crazy, except for doctor Lecter. The ending
was shot in Bemini, off the coast of Florida, and unfortunately,
the weather didn't cooperate for the entire week the production
was shooting down there. It just rained and with whites
like all overcast and gray there. Demi initially balked at

(01:42:21):
using a crane shot for that now iconic credit scene.
He said it was going to be difficult to get
the necessary equipment on location, which sure, but Tally ted
Tally persisted and he was correct. It's funny for the
audio to do the overdubs for this. Anthony Hopkins had
already started filming something in Utah. He was already out
off that side of the country, and so they patched

(01:42:44):
him through to Foster to record this line. But they
didn't tell her that it was actually going to be
him on the phone. I think they just said, Okay,
you know, Jody, we're just going to record your lines
and then we'll mix it up. And so they were like,
all right, pretend I goes to hold the phone and
Anthony Hopkins is actually on the other end doing It's horrifying.

Speaker 1 (01:43:05):
Yeah, Hopkins said of that shot where he's walking off
into the crowd, just sort of vanishing, which is kind
of the most terrifying thing. He suddenly suddenly not seeing
Hannibal Lecter is even scarier than seeing him.

Speaker 2 (01:43:18):
Because you now don't know where he is. It's the best,
is such a great, unding, great and you know everyone
always plays the part of like you try and follow
him as long as you can through the crowd. It's
just a perfect, perfect ending.

Speaker 1 (01:43:32):
Yeah. Anthony Hopkins said that he was trying to move
like a cat chasing its kill as he was moving scans.

Speaker 2 (01:43:38):
After editing, a cut was shown to a small crowd
of about seventy five people. Manager and literary agent Bob Bookman,
who you possibly remember from the beginning of this episode
three days ago when we started taping it. He invited
William Goldman, which feels like a threat. If Willie Goldman
is coming to the rough cut of your movie, you're

(01:43:58):
sweating bullets. Obviously, one of the greatest screenwriters of all time,
literally wrote several books about it that are still used today.
Demi told Deadline, I got a phone call at my
house the next day. Hi, this is William Goldman calling.
I was like, oh, hi, God, one of my favorite
writers of all time. He said he thought the picture
was terrific, but he thought there was one section that

(01:44:19):
was holding it back from its full potential. This came
after Doctor Elector escapes and there was the scene that
took place somewhere between eight and twelve minutes. Crawford's kicked
off the case, Clarice's kicked out of the academy. They
go downstairs and there's this blistering, really terrific scene on
the steps. So Goldman said, take all that out. I'm like, what,
that's one of the biggest scenes in the movie. Really what?

(01:44:40):
And he says, that's what's my gut's telling me. You
guys should really take a look at it. So I
was like, well, thank you for this, goodbye. Demi told
editor Craig Mackey about the call, and mackay was not happy,
Demi said, but they went back to the editing room
and rewatched the movie on the machine without that scene,
and per Demi, it was just an extraordinary difference, an
immeasure improvement. That is William Goldman. Another thing about the

(01:45:04):
film and another reason I call it gothic again because
like true in the sense of like gothic, whore is
not like it is grotesque, but it's not like splattery.
It's not gory. And that's a lot with this movie.
There's really not that much gore that happens on screen.
I like it, yeah, and it remains largely implied, which
is something that Demi was keen on from the start.

(01:45:24):
You know, he told Empire violence was not that necessary
as an element within the film. The terror is represented
through characterization. Jody Foster told Vanity Fair that after rewatching
the film a couple of years back, she was struck
by the fact there's really no blood and gore. There's
only really one scene at all that is gory. The
movie is so scary because it seeps into people's consciousness
through fears. It works on fear more than anything else.

(01:45:48):
So with the finished film. In the Can, they were
headed towards the finish line, hampered by the fact that
Oriyan we had no money. They were skating on Thin Nights.
They were on a tray runaway trail train with noe
what am I saying here? Johns and cut all this.
They had a terrible nineteen eighty nine. They came in
last among the larger studios. Wow. They produced a biopic

(01:46:12):
of Jerry Lee Lewis called Great Balls of Fires, starring
Dennis Quaid.

Speaker 1 (01:46:17):
It's bad, I.

Speaker 2 (01:46:19):
Assumed, a movie called She Devil that teamed Meryl Streep
with Roseanne bar Speed Zone, an action comedy starring SCTV
alumni like John Candy, Joe Flaherty and Eugene Levy. Oh,
that seems like a good and Milo's Foreman's adaptation of
Les Lion Dogs Valmont, which was released against another dangerous

(01:46:45):
at Liaison's adaptation the one You've Heard of? Yeah, and
also weird Al's uhf oh Yeah. So Oriyan made a
lot of bad decisions. They had a couple more flops
in nineteen ninety with the hot spot State of Grace Movies.
I've never heard. They had a huge win with Dances

(01:47:06):
with Wolves, But that was it, and that was basically
what was keeping them afloat, and their founder just kept
socking more money into the company and everyone knew Silence
was going to be a hit. They were like, we
have a you know, we have a masterpiece on our hands.
But Orian literally could not. They didn't have the money
to release it during the traditional awards show season. Like
you know, February is considered a dumping ground. January and

(01:47:28):
early February big dumping ground for movies. You want something
to be considered for the Oscars, you put it out
in fall, approaching winter, and Orian literally couldn't. They're like,
we need the cash that this movie will, you know, generate.
So they released it on Valentine's Day nineteen ninety one,
which ordinarily would have doomed it, but they did have

(01:47:50):
the advantage of And the other thing too is Ryan
had no money to campaign for it in the trades
or anywhere, but it did have the advantage of opening
over a long weekend Sinceday weekend and raked in nearly
fourteen million, and then it stayed at number one for
five weeks.

Speaker 1 (01:48:07):
Yeah, you know, I mean, these days it's all about
what you make the opening weekend. But back in the
early nineties, you could afford to have a slow burn basically,
and so that was really what this movie was. It
was more of a word of mouth movie than anything else.
I love that it was released on Valentine's Day. Sounds
of the Lamps pleased on Valentine's Day for Jonathan Demi
that was semi intentional because he thought it was quote

(01:48:29):
a good date movie, something about Clarice and doctor Electra
said Valentine's Day to me, which brings me to a
deeper point. I kind of touched on this earlier. The
sexual chemistry between Lecter and Clarice maybe the weirdest in
cinema history, but it is. It is off the charts
in this movie, right am. I am I alone at
thinking that you won't give me the satisfaction.

Speaker 2 (01:48:50):
Okay, I know it is. It's a different I mean,
I just rewatched this. It's it's they have chemistry. I
don't think it's romantic though, yes, love there, Okay, it's
definitely Well, it's funny that Hannibal ends up the book.
In Hannibal, Thomas Harris writes them as together, like by
the end of it, they end up his lovers, which
is maybe my head.

Speaker 1 (01:49:11):
Yeah, I guess they're only in four scenes together in
the movie, which is wild to think about, considering that's
all the stuff that anyone remembers. Yeah, exactly. Anthony Hopkins
has said, I think Hannibal loves her in a way.
He admires her courage. There's this young woman who doesn't
have the physical strength of a man, and she comes
and visits a monster, and I think he's amused by it.

(01:49:32):
She's got courage, She's come to visit me.

Speaker 2 (01:49:35):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:49:35):
I think he responds to it. Jodie Foster said something similar.
She said, there's a love between us, there's a human connection.
There's something like seductive about Hannibal. Letg he's very arm
like rooting for him even when he's like beating up
the cops.

Speaker 2 (01:49:49):
Hell yeah, bad example.

Speaker 1 (01:49:52):
But it's like Dexter. It's like the show Dexter.

Speaker 2 (01:49:54):
Sure, yeah, yeah yeah. A strong critical consensus, except from
Gene Siskell, who pays that and word of mouth helped
the film become a sleeper hip, grossing a total of
two hundred and seventy five dollars, crossing its total two
hundred and seventy five million dollars worldwide. Though the films
swept the Guild and Critics Awards, the consensus was that
opening nearly a year before the next Oscars was going

(01:50:17):
to scotch its chances. And interestingly, the Golden Globes, which
are usually considered the predictor, the sort of smart betting
predictor of the Oscars, did not have silence in them
very much at all. Jodi Foster won Best Actress in
a Drama, but then the other top line awards were
split between this this movie Bugsy that you mentioned earlier.

(01:50:37):
I don't know what this movie is at all. It's
been memory Hold for me. JFK, the Prince of Tides
and Felm and Luis, which are all very predictable. But
one thing that Orion did have in its pocket was
Ted Tally told Deadline our film had a videotape, and
Orion had just enough money scratched together to send them
out to voters, the Academy voters. That was still a
new idea, and no movie had opened far enough in

(01:50:58):
advance of the Auscar to be on videotape. And he
says he talked about like this thing where it created
this effect where people were like, oh, silence slams. I
remember seeing that movie last year, but then they got
this videotape of and they were like, oh, I'll watch
this again and be reminded that it was genius. He said,
it saved our lives. Oriyan had just enough money left
to do this. That was the extent of it. They

(01:51:19):
didn't reopen the film in New York or LA. They
didn't run extensive ads in the trades. That was it.
They sent out a tape. Demi told Deadline the nominations
took everybody by great surprise. We thought these bigger pictures
would win the prizes. And the only thing I can
remember us ever really talking about was the impulse to
put Anthony Hopkins in the Best Supporting category because a
screen time was so relatively short. Then in the night

(01:51:40):
of the Oscars, he said, we started winning. I was
just completely freaked out. Ultimately, Silence became the third and
currently most recent film to win the top five major
categories Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and
Best Adapted Screenplay, and it's still the only horror film
to win Best Picture Van bar Trivia. The other two

(01:52:02):
films to have swept the top five are nineteen thirty
four's It Happened One Night in nineteen seventy five's One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's.

Speaker 1 (01:52:09):
Nest a reporter on the end of the Oscars asked
that Anthony Hopkins what he thought Hannibal Elector would have
done had he not won the Oscar, and without a beat,
Anthony Hopkins breaks into the Hannibal Electric Boys without missing
a beat. It's incredible. Well, if I hadn't received it,
you would all be in trouble.

Speaker 2 (01:52:27):
You just sort of you're just sort of elfin, like
a little guy a little too high, like the Great Kazoo.
There is all right, we've had enough laughs. There is
one asterisk on Silence's legacy, and that is its handling of,
let's just say, the portrayal of what is perceived as

(01:52:49):
transgenderism in the movie. The most common defense of the
book and the film is that Harris and Demian, all
of them went out of their way to highlight the
fact that the character of Buffalo Bill is not a transperson.
They say it in the book, he's not transgender, he
just thinks he is. And that's a verbatim line in

(01:53:10):
the movie, and Demi wanted to keep that in there.

Speaker 1 (01:53:12):
Yeah, Jonathan Demi says, basically, paraphrase is something that Hannibal
Lecter says in the movie. Somebody that hates themselves so
much that they will do anything to turn themselves into
someone who has no resemblance to themselves. So that is
a psychological assessment of Buffalo Bill.

Speaker 2 (01:53:29):
And Ted Levine, for his part, said he never played
the characters gay. He said that he and Demi had
these conversations about the character during which Demi basically said,
I don't want to I'm worried about this character coming
off this way, and Levine said the stance I took
was one of a more acutely homophobic heterosexual man doing
that mocking thing.

Speaker 1 (01:53:47):
And Ted Levine also added that he believed the character
quote one of the power that he imagined the woman
would possess.

Speaker 2 (01:53:53):
But coming on the heels of the AIDS epidemic, the
trans community was understandably not thrilled to have one of
the biggest movies of the year star a killer playing
up on public misconceptions of drag and transgenderism. And it
was building on a pretty bad climate of LGBTQ portrayal
in Hollywood. You had the gay criminal conspirators in JFK.

(01:54:17):
Sharon Stone's murderer and basic instinct is bisexual, and then
there's dressed to Kill, which is a DePalma film in
which I think It's Michael Caine plays a quote unquote
transgender murderer, and Silence was protested by activist groups across
the country at theaters. Act Up and Queer Nation showed
up at the nineteen ninety two Oscars for a protest

(01:54:39):
which resulted in ten arrests. Mark Dice has a book
called Hollywood Propaganda, How TV's movie and music shape our cultures,
and he quotes a GLAD leader who criticized Silence of
the Lamb, saying the killer in this movie is a walking,
talking gay stereotype. He has a poodle name Precious, he sows,
he wears a nipple ring, he has an affected feminine voice,

(01:55:00):
and he cross dresses. He completely promotes homophobia. Orion Pictures,
who produced and distributed the film, tried their best to
calm things down by loaning out prints of the film
for AIDS fundraisers, which feels like a miss guys and
most troublingly, Silence was released into a period of a
nationwide spike in anti gay violence. There was a study

(01:55:23):
issued by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy
Institute released in March nineteen ninety one reported that incidents
of violence against gay men and lesbians in nineteen ninety
had risen by an average of forty two percent in
New York, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, San Francisco, and
Los Angeles. New York's crimes jumped sixty five percent. Wow,

(01:55:44):
and Demi was initially a little more combative towards the criticism.
He told The New York Times in nineteen ninety three,
I got all this unfounded abuse on silence of the lambs.
Bill wasn't a gay character. He was a tormented man
who hated himself and wished he was a woman, because
that have made him as far away from himself as
he possibly could be. But he did seem to evolve

(01:56:04):
his views on this. He told The Daily Beast in
twenty fourteen, a few years before he died, Jame Gum
isn't gay. And this is my directorial failing and making
solemn to the lambs that I didn't find ways to
emphasize the fact Gum wasn't gay. Jan Botos, who is
one of the inspirations for Philadelphia, said to me, you
can't imagine what it's like to be a twelve year
old gay kid, and you go to the movies all

(01:56:25):
the time, and whenever you see a gay character, they're
either a ridiculous comic relief caricature or a demented killer.
It's very hard growing up gay and being exposed to
all these stereotypes. That registered with me in a big way.

Speaker 1 (01:56:36):
And there was also an incident where representatives of an
LGBTQ organization passed out leaflet set of screening where silence
was taking place, and Jonathan Deby was actually there and
instead of ignore it, he got up to the podium
and urged the crowd to read these leaflets. So he
was very open to obviously hearing what these people had
to say and really regretted, like you said, his directorial

(01:56:56):
failing for not being more clear about this.

Speaker 2 (01:56:59):
Yeah, one thing that I thought of when I was
kind of thinking about how to fill this section was,
you know, art can't answer for itself, but artists can,
and I think that that's the responsibility that people have.
So I'm happy that Demi was still talking about this
and apologizing for it as recently as a couple of
years before he died. Jodie Foster is also gay. She

(01:57:21):
was closeted for a very long time, but eventually came out.
She told Vanity Fair that in addition to the line
about build up being trans they actually shot a scene
with a psychiatrist that would have reinforced these themes, but
it ended up being cut, and she said in this interview,
I think I can say this now because Jonathan's gone.
I feel like he was really heartbroken that he didn't
make that clear in the film. If there's ever a

(01:57:42):
gnawing part of him, I think he really did understand
where the controversy came from, and he felt like he
didn't do as good a job at making his intentions clear.
If there was something to revise, I think he would
have gone back and revised that, just to make it
very clear. Demi's next film was, in fact, The Aid's
Parable Philadelphia, just one of the first Hollywood productions to
even mention aids, and while it's been claimed that he

(01:58:04):
was inspired to make that film by the backlash to Silence,
that isn't strictly true. His then producer, Edward Saxon, who
funnily enough provided the mold for the head that they
find in the car, that is another Jonathan Demi cameo
from that film. Is his producer cameos as a severed head. Anyway,
that guy said at the time, we had wanted to

(01:58:25):
make a movie in which AIDS was a major character
before we ever filmed Silence of the Lambs. With Philadelphia,
Demi was more prepared for the backlash this time around,
he said, I expected it. I actually hoped for it.
It's the job of militants to demand more of anything.
If these people were satisfied, change would be hard to
get through. Every one of them is right. There could
have been more of this or more of that. But

(01:58:46):
now maybe another film will take it further. That statement
did not mollify the firebrand playwright and Act Up founder
Larry Kramer, who wrote in it LA Times op ed
on Philadelphia, I bring up the painful reminder that Demi
also directed The Silence of the Lambs, which many gays
consider one of the most virulently and insidiously homophobic films
ever made. Is Philadelphia some sort of attempt on his

(01:59:09):
part offer an apology after these two films. I wish
he'd just go away and leave us alone. Plenty of
scholars and activists have written about this side of Silence's legacy,
but one of my favorites is the transcritic Emily Saint James.
She tweeted in twenty twenty one, knowing the intent of
a work doesn't mean because the intent is less important
than the impact. And when people saw Silence of the Lambs,

(01:59:30):
they didn't hear Buffalo Bill isn't trans. They saw a
weirdo serial killer dancing around women's clothes. It is one
of the most influential movies ever made. Its influence includes transphobia. Yeah,
so I think about that, and like I said, art
can't answer for itself, but artists can, and you know,
looking at things within the lens of their time, or

(01:59:51):
you know, saying it was just a product of its
time or whatever. I've never really enjoyed that. I think
criticism of art strengthens it. And that's just something to
consider for this film is, as we have said many
times before, in all other ways perfect no segue. Silence
actually came out at the tail end of the peak
of what is recognized as peak serial killer in America,

(02:00:15):
which they have actually identified, which is horrifying. That is
roughly nineteen seventy to nineteen ninety. Ted Bundy had been
executed in nineteen eighty nine, and Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested
in July nineteen eighty one. I don't think they found
BTK until the mid nineties, but I think he'd stopped

(02:00:35):
killing before then. Anyway. Lecter, of course, cast the film's
longest shadow. Hopkins' portrayal ushered in a new era of
cinematic stereotypes, where killers were erudite and sophisticated instead of
frothing lunatics or neurotic lone wolf weirdos. Criminologist and author
Scott Bond told Vanity Fair in twenty twenty one that
for ten years while he was teaching criminology and criminal

(02:00:58):
justice classes, about half his students told him they wanted
to be Clarice Starling. So now we have to get
into Dino de Laurentis being a money grubbing cartoon Italian.
This guy's so ridiculous. He owned the rights to Harris's characters,
but you know he, as we mentioned earlier, he let
Orion make Silence for free. So even before Silence had

(02:01:19):
come out, Tom Pollack, who's a chairman at Universal who
had worked with Dino DeLaurentis, was lobbying him to if
you make any sequel to this movie, because he knew
he in the rights, you have to make it at Universal,
and Delarentis felt that Tom Pollack was using other films
that they were working on as leverage for this, and
this whole thing went to court. There was a twenty
five million dollar lawsuit that ended up happening, But that

(02:01:39):
was all extremely premature because Thomas Harris takes forever to write.
Each year, Delarentis would fly down to Miami with his
personal chef and have dinner with Harris and ask him,
how's the follow up coming? Where's my new Hannibal book?

Speaker 1 (02:01:58):
He's not still alive, is he know?

Speaker 2 (02:02:01):
Hannibal picks up the book. Hannibal picks up ten years
after Silence left off, with Lecter on the loose in
Italy and Starling disgraced after raid gone bad. One of
Lecter's earliest victims, a disfigured cattle magnate named Mason Verger,
plans to use her to bring Lecter out of hiding,
at which point he will kidnap him and feed him

(02:02:21):
alive to specially bred pigs. The novels end in which
he drugged up Clarice. Do you remember how this book ends.
It is truly insane. Hannibal has bars. Well, yeah, but
it's weirder than that. Hannibal dug up Clarice's dad's bones
and put her on like a crazy psychotropic cocktail, and

(02:02:43):
that has this whole elaborate, grand genial dinner scene where
he cooks and eats. He lobottomizes a guy while he's
still alive her FBI rival or Justice Department, I forget,
And it's in the Israelioda in the movie. He takes
off the top half of this dude's head, takes out
a portion of his brain, cooks it at dinner and
Clarice eats it, and then he shows her the bones

(02:03:05):
her dad, and then they are in love and they
travel the world together. And literally how that book ends,
it's very bizarre.

Speaker 1 (02:03:13):
It's like that South Park episode with Radiohead, Yes, Sama
would die where he feeds him his parents. Yes, Cartman
feeds him his parents.

Speaker 2 (02:03:20):
Yeah, your tears are just so sweet. Anyway, that was
enough for Demi to pass. In the twenty ten biography
Channel History Inside story The Silence of the Lambs, Demi
said Tom Harris as unpredictable as ever, took Clarice and
Doctor Lector's relationship in a direction that just didn't compute

(02:03:40):
for me. I thought, I can't do this.

Speaker 1 (02:03:43):
And then he was trying to sabotage these people because
he's already talking about like, yeah, I don't really I mean,
I guess financially that would only be hurting himself. But
it seems like Thomas Harris isn't really thrilled about his
movie adaptations, so he's like, all right, I'm gonna make
this thing that they can't make it into a movie.

Speaker 2 (02:03:59):
My sense is that he wanted to do Hannibal. I don't.
He didn't. We'll get to the one that he didn't
want to do. De Larentis told Premier magazine of Demi's decision.
When the pope dies, we create a new pope. Good
luck to Jonathan Demi. Goodbye. What a bastard. They also
don't create a new pope. You find a new pope.

(02:04:20):
What do you think popes are grown in labs? Italian weirdo. Ultimately,
I am Italian, by the way, so I can sail this. Ultimately,
they went with Ridley Scott, who initially thought that they
were pitching him a biopic of the sacking of Carthage.
He said, I don't want to do a film about
bloody elephants, and they said, no, it's about Hannibal Lecter,

(02:04:42):
not Hannibal, the elephant guy from Antiquity. Ted Tally also declined.
David Mammittt supposedly did a draft of this, which is wild.
Julianne Moore replaced Jody Foster. Foster had told Larry King
in nineteen ninety seven that she would definitely be a
part of a sequ adding the same year to Entertainment
Weekly that Anthony Hopkins also talks about it. Everyone wants

(02:05:05):
to do it. Every time I see Anthony, it's like,
when is it going to happen? But years later, Foster
told Total Film, the official reason I didn't do Hannibal
is that I was doing another movie, Flora Plum, so
I could say in a nice, dignified way that I
wasn't available when that movie Hannibal was being shot. But
Clarice meant so much to Jonathan and I. She really did,
And I know it sounds kind of strange to say,
but there was no way that either of us could

(02:05:26):
really trample on her as if she saw Hannibal, she said,
I did. I won't comment. Deela Renis's version of this,
he told Premiere, was that Foster asked for twenty million
up front and fifteen percent of the gross, and he
which is kind of. Fifteen percent might be a lot,
but twenty million up front is pretty standard. You know,
freaking Julie Roberts was getting twenty mil a pick, and.

Speaker 1 (02:05:47):
Maybe she was high ball on him just so that
he would have to be the one to say no.

Speaker 2 (02:05:51):
Yeah, but no, he hung up on her. I believe
Hopkins made eleven millions for coming back for Hannibal. He
told prom I never thought a sequel would come up,
and then it did, and I thought, okay, fine, let's
see what it's like. I tend to be low key
about things like that. I liked the script. I didn't
know what the problem was. I said, yes, it was

(02:06:11):
as simple and as a matter of fact as that,
it's a living. It's just work. Then he would later
tell Vanity Fair, I saw the poster for Hannibal somewhere
and I thought, why did I do that? And then
I remembered it paid my mother's hospital bills. Oh yeah.
Thomas Harris once again gave the director permission to change
the ending, which instead saw Hannibal chop off his own
hand to escape Starling. Hannibal was fine. Reviews are mixed,

(02:06:35):
but it made enough money to get Universal and gear
to remake Red Dragon, starring Edward Norton alongside Hopkins returning
for a third time and Ray Fines and directed by
now disgraced garbage Shuman and Enemy of the Pod Brett Ratner.
That movie is not good. In twenty sixteen, Hopkins said
of the sequels, I made the mistake of doing two
more Hannibal Electra movies, and I should have only done one.

(02:06:58):
But Dino Dey Laura Dentis wasn't done squeezing every last
bit of cash out of lecture with his all of
oil stained hands. No, he essentially strong armed Thomas Harris
into writing, at a greatly accelerated pace, a prequel book,
Hannibal Rising, that would then be adapted into a movie.
Harris is not commented on this, but a February two
thousand and seven issue of Entertainment Weekly features a pretty

(02:07:19):
damning quote from DeLaurentis. I say to Thomas, and this
is his actual quote, I'm not doing an offensive accent.
I say to Thomas, if you don't do the prequel,
I will do it with someone else. I don't want
to lose this franchise and the audience wants it. He
said no, I'm sorry, and I said I will do
it with someone else, and then he said, let me
think about it. I will come up with an idea.

(02:07:39):
So that, dude, I hate that. I hate that man.
That's what like what they did to Lanawachowski for Matrix Reloaded,
where Warner Brothers was like, we're gonna do this with
or without you. You can either come on board or
we're gonna just do someone else. Hollywood Magical Industry. Hannibal
Rising was savaged critically and made a respectwol on a

(02:08:01):
reported fifty mil budget, but it basically killed the franchise
into twenty twelve, when Brian Fuller's NBC series Hannibal, starring
Mad's Mickelson in the titular role, picked up. I actually
like Hannibal quite a lot. It's very visually beautiful and
very twisted, but very well acted. And the three season
arc of that show combines the plots of Red Dragon

(02:08:21):
and Hannibal, but it fudges the timeline so that the
whole thing builds up to him meeting Clarice. And then
in twenty twenty one, CBS made a series called Clarice
because Yeah, you didn't hear about this, No, No ip
remains unturned in the current Hollywood climate, that focused on

(02:08:41):
the events between Silent Lambs and Hannibal. Most recent news
reports I read about it suggests that it is unlikely
for it to get a second season, but ultimately, despite
all of those misbegotten sequels, Silence remains relatively untarnished. In
twenty eighteen, Empire raked it forty eighth on their list
of the five hundred Greatest movies of all time time.
The American Film Institute ranked it their fifth greatest and

(02:09:03):
most influential thriller, Starling and Lecter, ranked among the greatest
film heroines and villains, and always my personal favorite. The
Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the
National Filmmark Registry in two thousand and one, deeming it culturally, historically,
or esthetically significant. And then, finally, two years after the
film swept the Oscars, Thomas Harris turned on the TV

(02:09:25):
to check the weather and land it on a cable channel,
and he said the dialogue was very familiar. So I
sat down and watched it. It was a wonderful movie. Wow,
coming from him, So there's your happy ending.

Speaker 1 (02:09:39):
That's the opposite of Ken Kesey flicked through the channels
and seeing one flew of the Cucko's Lest the Nilis
forman version on TV and absolutely hating it and changing
the channel right away.

Speaker 2 (02:09:51):
Oh, I didn't know that.

Speaker 1 (02:09:53):
Yeah, there's a great line from Anthony Hopkins about why
this movie and so many psychological thrillers, but especially this
movie continue to resonate with so many people. You've just
given yourself a little rehearsal for what terror is really like,
but you know that you're really safe. I just thought
that was a really elegant, articulate way to sum up
a very complex psychological concept.

Speaker 2 (02:10:15):
Yeah, you talked about going into the theater, and he's like,
and you're in the dark, you know, and then you
come out when you're in all the people in the daylight,
and it's this wonderful contrast. Talking to Vanity Fair, Foster
and Hopkins bantered a little bit about the lines that
they get badgered with the most. Hopkins said, I never
get tired of it. I mean it's worn a bit
thin now. When people say, do the slurping sound, I say, okay,

(02:10:36):
you know, fava beans and all that. But I'm amused
by it. And Jodi Foster added, I do love it.
When people say, can I get you a nice kiante?
I still love it, and there's no part of me
that'll ever be tired of it, mostly because it's such
a damn good movie. Almost three hours later, here we
are twenty five pages, twenty five pages on signs and lamps. Folks,

(02:10:58):
Thank you for so much for listen. And in case
it was not evident, this is one of my favorite
movies of all time. Real passion project for me, So
thank you for going on this journey with us.

Speaker 1 (02:11:06):
It's time to have an old friend for dinner. Don't
follow the trace in the call.

Speaker 2 (02:11:11):
I won't be on don't bollow the trace in the call.
I won't be on wrong trees. Oh that jokes weren't thin, folks.
Thank you for listening. This has been too much information.
I'm Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (02:11:22):
And I'm Jordan Runtagg. We'll catch you next time. Too
Much Information was a production of iHeart Radio.

Speaker 2 (02:11:33):
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk.

Speaker 1 (02:11:36):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder. June.

Speaker 2 (02:11:39):
The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runtalg
and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (02:11:43):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.

Speaker 5 (02:12:00):
At la

Speaker 1 (02:12:02):
Adclat Basin and tur

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Silence of the Lambs: Everything You Didn't Know