Eat Drink Man Woman
By Jill Bernstein
February 2001
Capturing Hannibal the Cannibal onscreen again took ten years, two studios, a new leading lady, a director with a vision, and a star with an appetite.
The only person watching Clarice Starling more closely than Hannibal Lecter is director Ridley Scott. In a Los Angeles sound studio, Scott, his weathered face somewhat at odds with his baby-fine, strawberry-blond hair, sits behind a console as the opening scene from his new movie, Hannibal, plays on both a large screen across the room and on a nearby monitor. “Pretty busy today,” Starling mouths, via hidden mike, to a fellow FBI agent at a fish market, where a sting operation is about to go tragically wrong. “Pretty busy today,” comes the simultaneous voice of Julianne Moore, who is in New York on this November day, taking part in a bicoastal looping session to ensure that the scene’s background noises do not drown out her dialogue. Scott presses a lighted square atop a little black box. “That was good,” he tells her in his quietly authoritative British accent. “It’s going to be quite loud. Project as much as you dare, considering what your face is doing.” He takes his hand off the button and whispers, “Can I get some coffee?” as the footage is cued for replay. Three beeps indicate when to begin speaking. “Pretty busy today,” Moore says again.
Sound technicians scrutinize the playback, making sure the words match the lip movements, and give Scott a nod. The director sits back in his chair. For the next few hours, he will remain supremely attuned to the nuances of Starling’s voice, the logic of her actions, the nature of her character. Everyone connected with Hannibal knows there is much at stake. Three months from now, Moore will appear before millions of fans who have waited ten years to see Lecter and Starling play cat-and-mouse again.
Italian is the first language spoken at Martha and Dino De Laurentiis’s production office on the Universal lot in the Hollywood Hills. Dino, the 81-year-old veteran of such films as La Strada, Ulysses, and War and Peace, is a short man sporting large, dark-rimmed glasses and a coral shirt, with the first few buttons opened, under a tweed jacket. His wife and partner, 46-year-old Martha—a slim woman in a cornflower-blue suit, with long blond hair and dainty, sandaled feet—sits beside him. Nearby, a dark wooden desk, big enough to roller-skate upon, is covered with awards. But today they are talking about the one that got away.
Back in 1985, the couple bought the rights to Thomas Harris’s best-selling thriller Red Dragon, from which they produced the 1986 movie Manhunter, directed by Michael Mann and starring William L. Petersen and Joan Allen. The film, which features the first, brief screen appearance of the serial killer Hannibal Lecter (played by Brian Cox), was inventive, frightening, and well-reviewed, but it grossed a paltry $8.6 million, less than the cost of its print ads. The De Laurentiises were disappointed. “Manhunter was not Red Dragon,” Dino says. “Manhunter was no good.”
And so when Harris completed The Silence of the Lambs, neither Dino nor Martha bothered to read it, even though they owned the screen rights to the Lecter character (who figured much more prominently in this new novel). “Big mistake” is how Dino now characterizes this lack of interest. Harris and director Jonathan Demme came to him, wanting to set the project up elsewhere; Dino said yes and lent the now-defunct Orion Pictures the character of Hannibal Lecter—for free. “Well, we were afraid to make the movie,” Martha explains. “You could be terrible and say no, or you could demand money, which was kind of, ‘Why be greedy?’ Or you let them use it, and if it’s successful, your asset has value.” The Silence of the Lambs was released on February 14, 1991. It grossed $131 million and received five Oscars, including Best Actor for Anthony Hopkins, Best Actress for Jodie Foster, and Best Picture.
The De Laurentiises suddenly found themselves sitting on quite a valuable asset. Even before the movie came out, there was maneuvering for a stake in a potential Silence sequel. Tom Pollock, then-chairman of Universal Pictures (and a former attorney who represented De Laurentiis while he was making Manhunter), asked Dino, who still controlled the Lecter character, to make the sequel at Universal, if one should develop. The De Laurentiises felt that Pollock was using other films they were partnering on as leverage for this request; Pollock felt they had reached an oral agreement to do the sequel. A conflict ensued, and the producers filed a $25 million lawsuit against Universal. The parties ultimately settled; the studio got the participation it had wanted.
All of this planning was still hypothetical, of course—the notoriously unprolific Harris was years away from finishing the next installment. Every year, the eager De Laurentiises would fly down to Miami, with their personal chef in tow, and have dinner with Harris. (“Tom is a great gourmand,” Martha says.) “Finally, I receive a call from Thomas,” Dino recalls in his gravelly voice. “ ‘Dino, I did it.’ He finish.” Hannibal picks up ten years after Silence left off, with Lecter on the loose (he spends a chunk of time, to the De Laurentiises’ delight, in Italy) and keeping a watchful eye on Clarice Starling—who will be used to smoke the serial killer out. The novel received mixed reviews but pushed Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets out of the number-one spot on the best-seller list. Dino purchased the rights for a record $10 million.
Before publication, the manuscript went out to Hopkins, Foster, and Demme, who had expressed interest in directing the sequel. Dino and Martha flew from Malta, where they were filming Universal’s U-571, to New York to meet with Demme and begin structuring a deal. Later, however, Dino received a call from Demme’s agent, CAA’s Rick Nicita. “He say to me, ‘Dino, I have-a no good news for you. Jonathan Demme pass.’ I say, ‘Rick, when the Pope-a die, we create a new Pope-a. Good luck to Jonathan Demme. Good-bye.’ ”
It wasn’t long before a puff of white smoke appeared in the air, signalling that a new leader had been chosen. Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Alien, Thelma & Louise), who had worked with Dino briefly on 1984’s Dune before pulling out for personal reasons, was in Malta filming Gladiator next door to U-571. He invited Dino in for a cup of espresso. Five days later, Scott recalls, Dino brought him “a giant manuscript that said Hannibal,” which prompted this classic response: “I said, ‘Dino, I don’t want to do elephants coming over the Alps. I’m doing a Roman movie now.’ ”
But after reading the book (which features vicious boars rather than elephants), Scott accepted the job—although not without some hesitation. “My first question was, ‘What about Demme?’ ” he says. “I couldn’t understand. After I did Alien, I would have definitely done a sequel. But in those days, I was never asked, right?” And he had qualms about the ending of the book, in which Clarice and Hannibal ride off amorously (and, to many readers, inconceivably) into the sunset. “I couldn’t take that quantum leap emotionally on behalf of Starling. Certainly, on behalf of Hannibal—I’m sure that’s been in the back of his mind for a number of years. But for Starling, no. I think one of the attractions about Starling to Hannibal is what a straight arrow she is.” (Universal, too, was wary of the ending.) “I said to Dino, ‘I’d really like to talk to Tom [Harris] to see how much license we’ve got.’ Tom said, ‘Well, what would the interpretation be?’ I said, ‘I really don’t know.’ ”
Figuring that out meant hiring a screenwriter. Ted Tally, who’d won an Oscar for his Silence adaptation, passed on the sequel. An offer went out to Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List), who also turned it down. “I was busy,” Zaillian says. “And I wasn’t sure I was interested, basically. You can almost never win when you do a sequel, particularly a sequel to a successful movie.” David Mamet then whipped up a version, but according to Scott and the De Laurentiises, it needed major revisions, and he was about to begin directing State and Main. Dino and Scott went back to Zaillian, who at that point was willing to reconsider. “I had found out that David Mamet was working on it,” Zaillian says, “and I started to feel like, What sort of a jerk am I? You know? Who am I?” Besides, he says, “it’s hard to say no to Dino once, and it’s almost impossible to say no to him twice.”
Still, Zaillian would not commit to the proj ect until the ending was sufficiently resolved. Somehow, Dino convinced the reclusive Harris to fly to Los Angeles, where the author spent four days brainstorming with Scott and Zaillian in his Beverly Hills Hotel suite. “Tom had said, ‘I don’t really do this, you know?’ ” Scott recalls. “But after four days of sitting around the table, his comment was, ‘This has been really fun. I’ll do this again.’ ” (Harris would remain closely involved with the project, even sending handwritten notes to Universal Pictures chairman Stacey Snider on issues such as casting.) Zaillian then went off to write; both he and Mamet are credited with the final screenplay. “I think the ending is more tonal as to what could possibly be in her mind at that moment,” Scott says, shrugging and lighting a small cigar. “He’s quite specific. She is more enigmatic.” The film, he adds, contains “an interesting postscript, which, if nothing else, I think is fun. Some people think it’s sick.”
The character of Clarice became an obsession for the entire production, for two reasons: First, when the De Laurentiises passed on making The Silence of the Lambs, they also passed on the rights to Clarice. To get her, they would have to go through MGM, which acquired Orion’s properties after the latter company folded. Inevitably, a coproduction deal, including equal shares of the profits, was struck between Universal and MGM. (MGM is releasing the film domestically, and Universal is handling foreign rights.) The second problem? What Snider calls “a hiccup with the casting.”
As far as Lecter was concerned, “everybody felt like there was nobody [but Anthony Hopkins] who could play him,” says Kevin Misher, Universal’s president of production. The actor came aboard happily. “I never thought a sequel would come up,” Hopkins says. “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.” Hopkins had recently returned from a brief, self-imposed exile from Hollywood, following a trying experience making Titus. He read Harris’s manuscript but formed no opinion of it. (“I go into neutral. I don’t make very much of things,” he says.) Then he read the screenplay. “I liked the script. I didn’t know what the problem was. I said yes. It was as simple and matter-of-fact as that. It’s a living. It’s just work.” The kind of work that would net him $11 million in salary alone.
Foster reacted differently, for reasons that are widely speculated upon by those close to the situation. (She declined to be interviewed for this story.) Some say she had sequel-itis. Others say she either disliked the book, didn’t want to do it without Demme, and/or was slated to direct the circus-world love story Flora Plum (a project that, ironically, was later sidelined when star Russell Crowe injured his shoulder). A final possibility is that when she saw the film’s back-end points (percentages of the gross profits) already being divvied up between Harris, Dino, Hopkins, and Scott, she got her back up. “I call the agent of Judy Foster,” recalls Dino, who chronically mispronounces the actress’s name. “He say to me, ‘I have instruction. She no want to read the script if you no give her an offer of $20 million and 15 percent of the gross.’ And I say, ‘Give my love to Judy Foster, good-bye.’ That’s a crazy demand.” Besides, he says, “I don’t believe Judy Foster from day one was right when I read the book.” (Foster’s agent did not return calls.)
Universal took Foster’s decision much harder. “We went back to her, like you go back to any actor who has passed, and said, ‘Come on, this is Clarice Starling. This is the character that really was yours. Can’t you do it?’ ” Misher says. Scott, who worked with the actress in the early ’90s on the never-produced adaptation of Richard Pres ton’s New Yorker story “Hot Zone,” spoke with her, too, but to no avail.
Hopkins stayed out of it. “I think that actors who get involved in that stuff must need a good psychoanalysis,” he says. “Just give me my plane ticket, and I’ll show up. I keep my life much simpler that way.”
“It was one of those moments when you sit down and think, ‘Can Clarice be looked upon as James Bond, for instance? A character who is replaceable? Or was Jodie Foster Clarice Starling, and the audience will not accept [anyone else]?’ ” Misher says. To find out, Universal quietly floated the possibility around town, and soon several A-list actresses (Cate Blanchett, Angelina Jolie, Hilary Swank, Ashley Judd, and Julianne Moore) had shown interest. “I think it emboldened us,” Misher says, although they knew that they “had this enormous bar to live up to. We really had to pick well.”
Moore quickly rose to the top of the list. She was someone with “impeccable credentials who was also a star,” Misher says. “She was kind of it,” adds Scott. Before offering her the role, however, Scott consulted with Hopkins, figuring that the franchise “was more his than mine. He said, ‘Oh, yes. Jolly good.’ ” Moore was hired for a reported $3 million, and she opted out of Unbreakable as a result. Even the Internet rabble-rousers seemed pleased. Scott considers her a fitting successor to Foster, seeing in her “a certain kind of gravitas, an intelligence, which is very similar. But you know, honestly, most good actors are really smart. Some producers will say that’s nonsense,” he adds with a chuckle. “No. I’ve got to work with them.”
Lecter’s mind may be a creepy place, but Hopkins had no trouble moving back into it. “I just learned the lines and showed up and walked around as Hannibal Lecter,” he says. The actor did, however, pop in a tape of Silence before shooting began. “I thought, ‘Do I repeat that performance, or do I vary it?’ Ten years had passed, so I changed it a bit. Because I’ve changed.” Today’s Hannibal is “a bit mellower,” Hopkins says. “He’s probably a much richer character.”
Rivaling Lecter in the villainy department is Mason Verger, a pedophile and the only victim of Hannibal the Cannibal who remains alive (but, unfortunately, not quite intact). Verger uses his enormous wealth to search for Lecter and plot a gory revenge. The role required hours of prosthetic makeup, and Scott found his man in the chameleonlike Gary Oldman, who goes uncredited in the movie. “We had a funny situation with Gary,” Martha De Laurentiis says. “He wanted a prominent credit. Now, how can you do a prominent credit with Hannibal? The characters are Hannibal and Clarice Starling. So we really couldn’t work something out [at first].” For a while Oldman was out, then he came back, asking to go unbilled. His casting was announced by Dino at a press conference in Florence just prior to the start of shooting, “so we couldn’t deny that he was in the movie,” Martha says. “They [Oldman and his camp] got really pissed off. And to have a pissed-off actor . . .” She changes tone abruptly. “You’ll have to see the film to see if it’s Gary Oldman or not.” (Oldman’s manager declined to comment.)
Even then, audiences might not recognize the actor. Oldman (who zooms around in a wheelchair, unlike his bedridden character in the book), has been completely transformed, thanks to a translucent type of silicone that makeup artist Greg Cannom says he and his associate, Wesley Wofford, invented for Bicentennial Man. “I knew we could get away with more with him than some other actor,” says Cannom, who was part of the Oscar-winning team that did Oldman’s makeup for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. “The first thing he said [regarding Hannibal] was, ‘Can we stretch my eye open?’ ” No lips, no cheeks, no eyelids. “It’s really disgusting,” Cannom says. “I’ve been showing people pictures [of Oldman as Verger], and they all just say, ‘Oh my God,’ and walk away, which makes me very happy.”
Verger wants Lecter dead. Most of all, he wants to watch him suffer. To this purpose, he has been breeding an especially vicious pack of wild pigs, “hip-high to a man,” Thomas Harris writes, “intelligent little eyes in their hellish faces . . . capable of lifting a man on their great ripping tusks.” Animal coordinator Sled Reynolds (who worked with Scott on Gladiator) looked at more than 6,000 pigs across North America before finding what he calls “the biggest ones I could,” fifteen 350- to 600-pound breeding boars from a Canadian dealer, who ships about 200 a week to Japan. After some blood work and a quarantine, the tusked, long-haired beasts, with teeth four or five inches long, arrived to train with Reynolds on his California ranch. “They’re supposed to look very violent and mean, but they’re also supposed to stand around in a crew of 150 people and have Gary Oldman lying among them and not eat him,” Reynolds says. “So, ob viously, their aggression has to be trained, not spontaneous.” He quickly discovered the animals to be very intelligent. “I really grew fond of the little buggers.”
Cinematographer John Mathieson, another Gladiator vet, says the “rather charming” creatures would “come up and wipe their noses on the cameras and get pig shnoz all over the front.” One “particularly nasty” task, Mathieson recalls, was left to an animatronic boar, which “grabbed [a dummy’s] face and ripped it right off,” Cannom says. “The other one grabbed his entrails. People were getting sick. I don’t think they will be able to show much of that.”
Another of the movie’s stomach-turning set pieces involves a cozy little dinner that Hannibal arranges for himself, Clarice, and Clarice’s Justice Department nemesis, Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta). “He has the opportunity and the know-how to make [Starling’s] life miserable,” Liotta (Good Fellas) says of Krendler, “so that’s what he does.” Liotta used a little know-how of his own to nab the role: He caught Scott off-guard, at a Gold’s Gym in L.A., before production began. “He was walking out,” Liotta recalls, “and, like two or three movies that I’ve gotten, I just went up to him and said, ‘I’d love to work with you.’ ”
“That worked,” Scott says, still amused by Liotta’s tactic. “I was struggling at the gym and he was sitting on a bicycle, reading a newspaper. I had never met him, but I knew he knew who I was. I was walking out in the car park, and he said, ‘I know what you’re doing. Is there anything in there for me?’ I thought about it and said, ‘Well, why not?’ ”
A $70,000 animatronic dummy of Liotta was created for the climactic dinner scene, which gave the actor an unusual opportunity to stand off-camera and “watch myself acting with [Hopkins]. They had all kinds of wires and things, levers they’re pushing, opening the mouth. It was the oddest thing.” Liotta, who endured a full head and body cast, and shaved his head for the role, says he had a ball playing someone who’s “filled with drugs yet is still awake while all this is happening. I think people will definitely remember this scene.” Those who’ve read the book certainly do. But even they may be in for a surprise. “If anything, it’s more explicit than in the book,” Liotta says.
It’s the morning after Halloween. Taped to the door of an editing room is a reduced copy of the Hannibal poster, which has been doctored with a strip of paper near Hopkins’s mouth that reads: TRICK OR TREAT. DO YOU HAVE SOMETHING I CAN EAT? Ridley Scott emerges from a chat with editor Pietro Scalia and Dino De Laurentiis and goes right into a meeting with members of a Manhattan design studio, who’ve come to pitch ideas for the film’s opening title sequence. They present Scott with storyboards offering a tour through the chambers of Lecter’s mind and discuss using the aptly named type font Chianti. Scott seems pleased but warns against making the sequence “whimsically gothic.” He suggests that instead of music—or in addition to it—the journey could be accompanied by “the sound you get from blood when it moves through the vein,” or “old secrets whispered over books.”
With Hannibal nearing completion, Scott’s got a few things on his own multifaceted mind. Back in his office, he has an easel full of panoramic snapshots showing possible locations in Rabat, Mor roco, for his next film, Black Hawk Down, based on the true story of American soldiers who got caught in a ground battle in Somalia in 1993. “I’m already drawing some helicopter sequences,” he says. As he drives from one postproduction facility to another in his black 1987 Bentley, a call is patched through from Bonnie Timmerman, the casting director on Black Hawk Down, who is calling to express her delight at Scott’s having offered a role to Tom Sizemore (Saving Private Ryan). “I don’t know what he wants,” Scott says, referring to Sizemore’s salary request. “I don’t really even want to know.” In a few weeks, he will sign on to direct Disney’s upcoming pirate movie Captain Kidd, and DreamWorks’ big Oscar push for Gladiator will commence.
And he may not be through with Hannibal Lecter quite yet. The De Laurentiises have announced plans to capitalize once more on their investment and remake Red Dragon at Universal; the studio’s Stacey Snider says it will include new, Lecter-related plot lines. It is unusual, to say the least, for a story not written by the likes of Shakespeare or Austen to be made into a movie twice within some 15 years. One can only guess how Manhunter director Michael Mann (who declined to be interviewed) feels about it. “Mann was informed that we were doing this,” Snider says. “We didn’t want to be disrespectful of his earlier work.” Many directors, she adds, have raised their hands for the job, and “I’m sure Dino spoke to Ridley. They’re very close.”
Hopkins, who has verbally agreed to play a cameo, now waits to see the script, which Lambs scribe Ted Tally is writing (it’s due to be delivered to Universal this month). He is delighted and surprised by Lecter’s continuing appeal. “He seems to be a popular cult figure,” says Hopkins of the character he enjoys playing with tongue firmly in cheek. “I don’t know if that makes the whole of the world crazy, but . . . there are dark sides to all human nature.”
