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

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: 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.

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Speaker 3: There it is.

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

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

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Speaker 2: Never mind, No, your skin suits of scintillating something.

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

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

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

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Speaker 2: 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, 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.

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

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Speaker 2: 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 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, 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 for the one we're going to talk about today, which are not good.

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Speaker 1: 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.

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

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

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Speaker 2: Well, the bad guy was trying to feed him to the pigs.

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Speaker 1: 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 a suspense thriller.

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Speaker 2: It's a gothic thriller. Gothic thriller, I like that.

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Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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, 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.

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

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Speaker 4: Wow.

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Speaker 2: 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.

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Speaker 1: 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.

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Speaker 2: 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 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.

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Speaker 1: And then there's the pig guy too.

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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.

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Speaker 1: He is a murderer.

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Speaker 2: 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 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.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, but then he did.

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Speaker 2: 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 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.

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Speaker 1: Wow.

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

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

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Speaker 2: 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 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.

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Speaker 1: Which one of those have an appalation accent.

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

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

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

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Speaker 1: 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 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 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, 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 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 the money that he put up for it. I think he put up like two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

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Speaker 3: M h.

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Speaker 2: 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.

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

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

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

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Speaker 2: He probably swallowed a little bit of it.

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

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Speaker 2: 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.

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Speaker 1: 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?

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Speaker 2: 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.

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Speaker 1: What was his run between eighty nine and ninety two.

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Speaker 2: 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 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. 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 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 to use them sons charge. And you know, Dino, he didn't like that.

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Speaker 1: I can't believe he signed off on that.

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Speaker 2: 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 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 uncomfortable with that ending. I didn't want to put that out into the world. Does evil win?

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Speaker 1: In Silence of the Lambs?

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

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Speaker 1: 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.

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

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Speaker 1: 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, the movie's devastating real bummer.

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Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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.

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Speaker 1: No, the John John Lee experience my favorite cover band.

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Speaker 2: 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 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.

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Speaker 1: 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.

00:23:56
Speaker 2: 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.

00:24:15
Speaker 1: 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.

00:24:23
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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 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 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 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 on the nose but effective.

00:26:45
Speaker 1: 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 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. 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. 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 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. 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.

00:28:47
Speaker 2: 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 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 apparently effortlessly scale that rope wall. I would each on one of those things. Oh yeah, to tell you that right now.

00:29:38
Speaker 1: 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 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 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.

00:30:31
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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 shots of the film mirror the story and the thematic progression. Gosh, it's neat.

00:32:24
Speaker 1: 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.

00:32:39
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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.

00:33:38
Speaker 1: 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 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 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.

00:34:32
Speaker 2: 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.

00:34:43
Speaker 1: You know, probably could Hannibal elector that's true.

00:34:47
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:35:16
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, we'll talk more about that. But it's crazy. This was really Anthony Hopkins' first like a big budget Hollywood movie.

00:35:24
Speaker 2: 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.

00:35:34
Speaker 1: Like seventy five. I think he got clean.

00:35:36
Speaker 2: 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.

00:35:45
Speaker 1: Anyway, get on quick cocaine after a really good night.

00:35:52
Speaker 2: I want to see young Anthony Hopkins.

00:35:53
Speaker 1: 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.

00:36:03
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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 about how okay it is to hit women in the press repeatedly. Certainly not smart enough to not take league of extraordinary gentlemen.

00:37:16
Speaker 1: He was smart enough thought to do Uh, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.

00:37:20
Speaker 2: 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 talking to the senator?

00:37:45
Speaker 1: Love you?

00:37:46
Speaker 2: So?

00:37:46
Speaker 1: Yeah? One more thing? Oh, we could do.

00:37:51
Speaker 2: This all day. I'm sorry, I'm sure you have things to do.

00:37:56
Speaker 1: 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.

00:38:11
Speaker 2: 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.

00:38:20
Speaker 1: How would how would uh Jack as Hannibal elective?

00:38:23
Speaker 2: 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.

00:38:40
Speaker 4: 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.

00:38:57
Speaker 1: It's a little bit Napoleon dynamite kind of Do you just feel like a god in there?

00:39:03
Speaker 2: 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.

00:39:14
Speaker 1: 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.

00:39:22
Speaker 2: 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.

00:39:28
Speaker 1: 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.

00:39:37
Speaker 2: You gotta do it as him as Whitey Bulger though from Yeah, that's hard. A Shenshish taker tried to pech, can you.

00:39:51
Speaker 1: Morgan Freeman, is that that's a.

00:39:54
Speaker 2: Sorry? Am I read? Am I supposed to be read?

00:39:56
Speaker 1: I'm still trying to all right, Yeah, we're here, by the way, but I'm still trying to.

00:40:02
Speaker 2: 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, 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.

00:40:43
Speaker 1: Apparently he wasn't sure if it was an offer or just like something that considers, so he stopped reading after.

00:40:48
Speaker 2: About ten pages because he didn't want to.

00:40:51
Speaker 1: He just was trying to spare himself with disappointment if he didn't get the role, which makes me sad.

00:40:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wonder if you read the did you ever talk about reading the book?

00:41:00
Speaker 1: Think so?

00:41:00
Speaker 2: 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 after that.

00:41:23
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:41:52
Speaker 2: 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.

00:42:08
Speaker 1: Well, can you do the last line as Sean Connery.

00:42:11
Speaker 2: I'm having an old friend over for shabah. That's good.

00:42:14
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:42:55
Speaker 2: 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?

00:43:09
Speaker 1: I don't know. I never can remember her name. Caroline.

00:43:12
Speaker 2: 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. 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 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 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.

00:44:32
Speaker 1: It's somehow more sinister as Sean Connery.

00:44:36
Speaker 2: I'm leaning into it all the way to the end. All those tedious, sticky fumblings, that set of cows, God, all those.

00:44:48
Speaker 1: I can'tchnic is too grossy for me.

00:44:51
Speaker 2: 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. 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 doing it, doesn't as an insult.

00:45:34
Speaker 3: Uh.

00:45:35
Speaker 1: Well, there was a moment when he when he does the bit about like just one generation away from poor white trash and he.

00:45:41
Speaker 2: Was a daddy of minor did a stink of the lamb.

00:45:45
Speaker 1: Apparently Tony Fonster got like genuinely annoyed because she was like, this guy's mocking me.

00:45:51
Speaker 2: 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 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.

00:46:27
Speaker 1: 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.

00:46:44
Speaker 2: 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, 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?

00:47:24
Speaker 1: He's still alive? Apparently?

00:47:26
Speaker 2: 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 line readings before we run out of time.

00:47:50
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:48:20
Speaker 3: 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 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.

00:48:58
Speaker 1: I thank you very much, and that back to a regularly scheduled.

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

00:49:08
Speaker 5: After these messages, Anthony Hopkins would recall that Jonathan Demi told him that Hannibal Lecter was quote a good man locked inside an insane mind, which is who among us really, and the fact that he played the good doctor and the elephant.

00:49:39
Speaker 1: 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.

00:49:55
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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.

00:51:56
Speaker 1: I understand that. Yeah, it's knowing something emotionally and not in a life.

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

00:52:06
Speaker 1: 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 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.

00:52:37
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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 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.

00:54:37
Speaker 1: I assume she's speaking metaphorically.

00:54:39
Speaker 2: 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 his eyes are completely wide open. He trained himself to do that.

00:55:06
Speaker 1: Not true.

00:55:07
Speaker 2: 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?

00:55:24
Speaker 3: All right?

00:55:25
Speaker 2: Myth busted?

00:55:28
Speaker 1: We're living moss once again.

00:55:31
Speaker 2: 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 limited time at Taco Bell, pajh Well with a Knife, Kiante.

00:56:03
Speaker 1: All that said, one of the upsides of having no sponsors on the show.

00:56:10
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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.

00:57:18
Speaker 1: The obsession with blinking on this set is great.

00:57:21
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

00:58:16
Speaker 1: 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, 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.

00:58:57
Speaker 2: 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.

00:59:19
Speaker 1: 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.

00:59:27
Speaker 2: Oh awful.

00:59:30
Speaker 1: 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 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 way to chipperly Go Eagles, you say go Eagles.

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

01:00:23
Speaker 1: 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.

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

01:00:40
Speaker 1: 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 these movies, and that aggravates me. I can't look at those movies.

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

01:01:07
Speaker 1: 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.

01:01:22
Speaker 5: To me.

01:01:22
Speaker 1: 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.

01:01:43
Speaker 2: 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.

01:01:53
Speaker 1: 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 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.

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

01:02:37
Speaker 1: 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.

01:02:59
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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.

01:05:28
Speaker 1: 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 as an Italian upsets me deeply.

01:05:53
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:06:13
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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.

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

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

01:07:49
Speaker 1: 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 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.

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

01:08:26
Speaker 1: 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.

01:08:51
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:09:15
Speaker 2: 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, 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 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.

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

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

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

01:10:32
Speaker 2: 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.

01:10:41
Speaker 1: 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.

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

01:10:50
Speaker 1: 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.

01:11:01
Speaker 2: 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 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.

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

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

01:11:52
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:11:52
Speaker 1: 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 real true for being down on that pit. The real friends were the penises. We tucked a lot in blaugh Ah.

01:12:24
Speaker 2: 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 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 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.

01:13:20
Speaker 3: Oh.

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

01:13:28
Speaker 2: 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 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.

01:14:07
Speaker 1: 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.

01:14:19
Speaker 2: 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?

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

01:14:41
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:14:57
Speaker 2: 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 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 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. 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 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 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.

01:17:09
Speaker 1: 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.

01:17:18
Speaker 2: 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 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 so much.

01:18:02
Speaker 1: 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. 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.

01:18:34
Speaker 2: 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.

01:18:52
Speaker 1: 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.

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

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

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

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

01:19:27
Speaker 2: 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.

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

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

01:19:54
Speaker 1: 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 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.

01:20:39
Speaker 2: 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 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.

01:21:06
Speaker 1: Ah.

01:21:07
Speaker 2: 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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.

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

01:23:48
Speaker 2: 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 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?

01:24:24
Speaker 3: Oh?

01:24:24
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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.

01:25:43
Speaker 1: 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.

01:26:00
Speaker 2: 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, 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.

01:26:30
Speaker 1: 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.

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

01:26:53
Speaker 1: 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. 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.

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

01:27:35
Speaker 1: 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.

01:27:44
Speaker 2: 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?

01:27:51
Speaker 1: Handcuffs?

01:27:52
Speaker 2: 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.

01:28:08
Speaker 1: 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.

01:28:20
Speaker 2: 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.

01:28:37
Speaker 1: 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.

01:28:57
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 twenty two straight hours in that horrific basement.

01:30:27
Speaker 1: 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 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, there were no moths harmed in the making of Silence of the Lamps, which is hilarious.

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

01:31:22
Speaker 1: Yes.

01:31:23
Speaker 2: Well.

01:31:23
Speaker 1: 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 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, 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 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.

01:32:47
Speaker 2: 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 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, 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.

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

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

01:34:00
Speaker 1: 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, 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.

01:34:33
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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 was eating her tongue. They said they buried they make the sound mix sound like heart beats, which is really interesting and wow, horrifying.

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

01:36:34
Speaker 2: 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 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? 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 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 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 Easter eggs. When that moth chrysaliss is pulled out of the corpse's throat at the autopsy, the corpse exhales, this.

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

01:38:32
Speaker 2: 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. 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. 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.

01:39:37
Speaker 1: 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.

01:39:51
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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.

01:43:05
Speaker 1: 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.

01:43:18
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:43:38
Speaker 2: 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 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 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? 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 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. 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. 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 of Jerry Lee Lewis called Great Balls of Fires, starring Dennis Quaid.

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

01:46:19
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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.

01:48:07
Speaker 1: 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 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.

01:48:50
Speaker 2: 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.

01:49:11
Speaker 1: 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. She's got courage, She's come to visit me.

01:49:35
Speaker 2: Wow.

01:49:35
Speaker 1: 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.

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

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

01:49:54
Speaker 2: 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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.

01:52:09
Speaker 1: 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.

01:52:27
Speaker 2: 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 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 the movie, and Demi wanted to keep that in there.

01:53:12
Speaker 1: 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.

01:53:29
Speaker 2: 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.

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

01:53:53
Speaker 2: 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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.

01:56:36
Speaker 1: 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 failing for not being more clear about this.

01:56:59
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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?

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

02:02:01
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 her dad, and then they are in love and they travel the world together. And literally how that book ends, it's very bizarre.

02:03:13
Speaker 1: 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.

02:03:20
Speaker 2: 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 for me. I thought, I can't do this.

02:03:43
Speaker 1: 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.

02:03:59
Speaker 2: 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. 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, 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 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 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.

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

02:05:51
Speaker 2: 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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.

02:09:39
Speaker 1: 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.

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

02:09:53
Speaker 1: 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.

02:10:15
Speaker 2: 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, 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, 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.

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

02:11:11
Speaker 2: 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.

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

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

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

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

02:11:43
Speaker 1: 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.

02:12:00
Speaker 5: At la

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