My Dinner With Hannibal

By Julianne Moore

February 2001

The lambs are no longer screaming, and Clarice Starling is back in business. In this exclusive diary from the set of 'Hannibal', Julianne Moore writes about stepping into the long-awaited sequel, becoming a sharpshooter, meeting President Clinton, and explaining fake blood to her three-year old son.

FEBRUARY 2000
Great Scott!
It’s inevitable—you’re on some arduous press trip, and you get a call saying you have to fly somewhere else. While I was in London, doing interviews for The End of the Affair, I heard that [director] Ridley Scott wanted to see me in L.A. about Hannibal. They suggested I fly from London, but I had been away from Cal [Moore’s three-year-old son, with director Bart Freund lich] for four days and didn’t want to be separated any longer. So I flew home to New York first, then to L.A. There I went straight to a hotel room, changed my shirt, and put on some makeup. Ridley came over half an hour later; we met for about an hour; I flew back to New York. The following day I got the offer—it was that fast.

I thought it was a great script. And Ridley really surprised me. I had expected someone much gruffer. But he was so relaxed and personable, I knew I’d enjoy working with him. And it’s very exciting to be doing another film with Tony [Hopkins]; we were in Surviving Picasso together.

MARCH 28
Got up for Cal in the middle of the night and broke my toe on a chair. Have to sit down for two solid weeks and then walk around with a special shoe; no exercising. Puts a bit of a crimp in the workouts I’m supposed to be doing to turn myself into an FBI agent.

APRIL 26-MAY 4
Honeymoon in Florence
MGM and Universal brought us all over to Florence for rehearsal, costume fittings, and a press conference. None of my scenes were being shot in Italy, so I had nothing to do for a week but get fat. Which I did. Cal went to every restaurant in town and ate everything that was put in front of him, and I was right there with him. I knew I’d have to spend the next month, after my toe healed, losing five pounds.

There wasn’t much I could say at the press conference. Tony could talk about the character, and Ridley could talk about his plans for the movie, but I had nothing to contribute except that I was happy to be in Italy, which is a very beautiful country. There were the inevitable Jodie Foster questions, to which I said—as I always do—she’s great, she’s brilliant, and I hope I can act the role half as well as she did.

Came home feeling enormous, with only one month to get in shape. Ridley never said, “I need you to lose weight.” That’s just me being a girl. He did tell me I needed to put on five pounds of muscle. I started working out furiously.

MAY 10
Special Agents
My stunt double, Cinda-Lin James, and I went to Washington, D.C., to FBI headquarters, and we met a woman named Melissa Thomas, who has worked on a violent-crime squad. Ridley picked her because she matches the perfect profile he wanted for a female FBI agent: young, attractive, very bright and fun to be with, articulate, in teresting. Melissa, who stayed with us through much of the shoot, took us around the FBI offices, and then we went down to Quantico in Virginia and did some shooting and training exercises. Years ago, I shot a submachine gun in one movie, but that was my only previous experience.

The people I met at the FBI had a great sense of humor and were incredible risk takers. There were two women agents, Monique and Lou, who were planning a drug raid that night. They saw me edging toward them and said, “Come on over. What do you want to know?” They emptied their purses and showed me where they keep their guns and handcuffs, which for a woman is not so easy. They have these things called paddle holsters that stick into your pants. Many agents keep their handcuffs in their pants, but some women keep them in their purses. You think there’s a regulation way to do things, but then you speak to people and find out that, obviously, it’s a personal choice. Those women were great. And it was fun for me to see that they all had long hair. Lou told me, “Don’t cut your hair!” because they were tired of seeing FBI women portrayed as just someone in a suit with a bob

EARLY JUNE
Drivers Ed
Toned, trained, and no longer limping, I drive down to Washington, D.C., from New York with Cal, our nanny Michelene, and every piece of baby paraphernalia in existence. We are joined by everyone who’s been filming for the past month in Florence—they’re already exhausted.

June 9 was my first day on the set. I’m always very nervous on my first day and prefer to sit, so it was lucky that I had a driving sequence to shoot. The minute I arrive, the prop guy starts showing me the cell phone that I’ll be working with. “This is the phone,” he says. “This is how it attaches to your belt. . . .” And Ridley was great; he said, “Don’t bother her with the phone—it’s her first day.” We shot my half of a dialogue sequence with Tony, and then I had to drive by myself for a little bit, which is always challenging because you’re in the middle of regular traffic, and you have to change lanes while staying the perfect distance behind the camera truck. I didn’t want to look like a sissy in front of all the guys. But I did fine. I didn’t run into the camera once.

JUNE 16
From the Fun House to the White House
Spent a week in Washington’s Union Station, shooting a complicated sequence in which I’m tracking Hannibal through what I hear over my cell phone. All around us people were rushing for trains, going to the stores in the station’s mall, checking out a dinosaur skeleton on display. It was very busy and noisy, with sound bouncing off the walls. And your legs begin to ache because you’re standing on a marble floor. I had earwig things in both ears—one was connected to the phone as a prop and the other was an actual sound device so I could hear the other actors. You feel like your ears are stuffed up all the time—I couldn’t wait to take them out.

Cal has been on the set every day. We have a routine where he comes before lunch, and we eat together. We get a makeup touch-up—they put sunscreen on Cal and blow-dry his hair. Then he stays around for the afternoon. John Mathieson, our director of photography, has a young daughter, Isla, who hangs out with Cal a lot. [Producers] Dino and Martha De Laurentiis’s two girls, Dina and Carolyna, are also frequent playmates. They’re lovely and polite, both blonds. Cal loves blonds.

One night, Tony and I were invited to have dinner at the White House with President Clinton. A mutual friend of Tony’s and the Clintons’ arranged an invitation. I was so tired, the first thing I said was no. Tony looked at me and said, “Come on.” It was a small dinner, very casual, and we ate on the balcony. Bart had asked me beforehand, “What’s it going to be, a buffet?” I called him back later and told him that yes, it was! We didn’t talk about Hannibal; mostly the president talked about politics and former presidents, and he told stories about the Lincoln Bedroom. We got to tour the private quarters. Hillary was campaigning in New York City, so she showed up after I had gone. I was so tired, almost falling asleep. I’m glad I was invited to the White House during a Democratic administration. Who knows what’s going to happen this fall.

LATE JUNE-EARLY JULY
Just Shoot Me
We’ve moved on to Richmond, Virginia, and an action sequence early in the movie, in which Clarice and other agents are involved in a shoot-out with drug dealers at an outdoor market. It’s a huge scene with a lot of coverage [shooting from multiple angles with many cameras], and it’s very physical. There have been constant interruptions because of rain, which is driving Ridley crazy. He can’t believe it. The dusty, dirty lot in which we’re working has turned to mud, and the longer we’re out here in the heat and rain, the harder it is on the produce in the market stalls. A pile of rotting watermelons sits near where we eat lunch every day—very appetizing.

What was exciting about this week was working with three cameras at a time, which I’d never done before. When you’re a film actor, the camera is your proscenium; if you have three cameras operating at three different angles, you have three prosceniums—you’re actually working much more dimensionally than many of us are used to. There was a sequence in which I had to run in carrying a gun, shoot the gun, kneel down, unload, reload while the squibs go off in front of and behind me, get up, shoot again, run, stop, and walk into a close-up and a dialogue scene on the third camera. “Whatever happened to breaking up the scene?” I asked. “I thought we were supposed to do this a little bit at a time.” Terry Needham, our first assistant director, said, “That’s not the way Ridley does it.” Ridley gets a huge amount of work done at once. It’s extremely efficient but incredibly demanding, because it means that you can’t mess up.

Every time I reloaded the gun, it wouldn’t shoot. We rehearsed the sequence nine times, and every time we got to this one spot, the gun would fail. Terry kept saying to me, “Let’s just film one.” I said, “No, no, no. I don’t want to film one because I want to make sure that I can get it.” I felt so defeated by this gun, and I really thought it was me. Thankfully, the gun guy came over and said, “It isn’t you, it’s the gun.” It had to do with the temperature or the humidity or something; guns are not always predictable. I was all ready to get yelled at, but Ridley finally came out from behind the village and said, “Are you like me? Every time I walk into a room, the television set breaks.” I was like, “Yeah,” so relieved that he didn’t think I was screwing up.

At another point in the scene, I had to take this baby that was caught in the shoot-out—we used an animatronic infant, not a real one—over to a stall where they were cleaning fish, sweep the fish aside, and hose her off. Instead of some innocuous bluefish, there was an enormous, bloody sand shark, and I was like, “Ridley, you couldn’t give me a break? You couldn’t make it a couple of trout?” He always ups the ante.

JULY
Headed for a Breakdown I hadn’t read Thomas Harris’s novel before starting the movie, but during the shoot I did. It was an interesting reference because there were things in the script that aren’t in the book and vice versa. Ridley and I would occasionally refer to the novel when we were working on something, and I ended up taking a couple of character points from it.

We were trying to decide where, if anywhere, Clarice would get emotional. There’s a scene after one of her friends is killed at the raid on the fish market, and Ridley said, “Do you think she would be crying here?” And I said, “Actually, I don’t.” It just didn’t seem right to me. On the other hand, I felt like what happens at the fish market is so dramatic and unsettling—the death of her colleague, the baby, and everything—that she needed to have a reaction to it somewhere. I rarely suggest additions to a film, but I saw in the book that Clarice’s reaction to the fish-market events occurs at home. She’s all by herself, and she sits down and starts crying. So I said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to do it that way.” Ridley was like, “Yeah, I think you’re right.” He found a place for it.

Then, of course, once the scene was decided upon, I was worried that I couldn’t deliver. I was sitting in my trailer, waiting to be called to the set, and Cal was there, too, having a play date with a little girl from the neighborhood and John Mathieson’s daughter, Isla. Literally, it was like a preschool in my trailer. I was covered in fake blood, and the kids wanted to know what it was. I told them it was paint. It’s funny—we worry about this stuff, and kids are always just like, “Okay, whatever.”

We did the scene in one take; no problem. Hopefully, it will be in the movie. Then I went on to an early dinner at Friendly’s with Cal. That’s where we ate in Richmond—Friendly’s during the week and Chuck E. Cheese on Sundays, for variety. I’m sure there are some fine restaurants in that town, but I never saw the inside of them. JULY 25
A Man of Wealth and Taste
The dinner scene, which we shot at a house in Richmond, is the most important event in the movie, a horrifying mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. Clarice and Paul Krendler, her Justice Department rival (played by the wonderfully nuanced Ray Liotta) are being treated, under duress, to one of Hannibal’s personally prepared gourmet meals. Ray’s and my character are heavily medicated—I’m supposed to be on morphine, and God knows what Ray is supposed to be on.

People got really kooky during the filming of this scene, which I guess made perfect sense. Tony likes to tell stories and do imitations, and he was telling us about John Gielgud, who was known for saying awful things by mistake. Apparently Gielgud went to see Richard Burton’s Hamlet and came into Burton’s crowded dressing room afterward and said, “Oh, Richard, I’ll come back when you’re better—I mean later.” So Tony was regaling us with these tales, and in between he and Ray were doing this staggeringly wonderful work, which was exciting and terrifying to watch. In a way, I was grateful that my coverage was last. Clarice is the audience for this scene—she’s the one it’s all intended for. I needed to see their part of the action before I could do my reactions. You can become incredibly intimidated when you watch amazing work for three days in a row, but in this case I couldn’t have come up with what I did if I hadn’t. They were so good and so brave.

Hannibal is an interesting character because he’s the bad guy you root for; he has his own personal morality. Ray is playing a really unlikable guy, but he managed to bring tremendous sympathy to him. I did make fun of Ray, though. A lot. For some CGI [computer-generated imagery] effects that were done with him, he had to come in wearing a green cap—it looked like a beanie with pearls stuck on it. I said, “Ray, that’s the wonderful thing about being an actor—it’s so dignified.” He looked so ridiculous, it was hard to resist. There was also a mechanical double of him that was used at one point. It looked like a dead body—very scary.

By July 31, we had moved into one of the final confrontations between Clarice and Hannibal, which got quite physical. Now, Tony is a very, very strong guy. When he hugs you, he kind of crunches you a bit. It’s great to work with somebody who has that kind of vitality, but he can also really throw you across the room. We were rehearsing, and Tony let go of me at one point; I went flying into the stunt coordinator, who caught me and said reassuringly, “You’re okay.” I was like, wooo—Tony just doesn’t know his own strength. We had a great time together on this movie. Every once in a while, he would look at me and say, “Isn’t this fun?” And it truly was.

WEEK OF AUGUST 3RD
The Boar War
The dreaded pig scenes were shot, incongruously, on a beautifully preserved estate in Montpelier, Virginia, that was once the home of James Madison. Mason Verger, played by Gary Oldman, is one of Hannibal’s old victims, and he’s plotting a gory revenge involving a voracious pack of boars, really enormous beasts. They were being carefully handled for the movie, of course, but they’re big and smelly and trained to go after food. Tony and I were in a big ring with them, along with the trainers, and usually we weren’t right on top of them. But a couple of times when we were on camera, they were very close—you could feel them knock into you. At one point, when my head was down, I could feel a pig run through my hair—yeech! It was so smelly and nasty. Cal loved the animals, however. He’d say, “Mommy, we go to work and see the pigs?” One of them was affectionately called Prosciutto because he didn’t behave. The trainers would say to him, “You know what you’re going to be?”

Things have relaxed considerably for me—I’ve finished a lot of the major stuff. But there’s always, it seems, one more shoot-out to be done. Every time I fire a gun, I think—I hope—it will be the last time. I do pretty well with guns, but I hate them. Everybody keeps saying to me, “I bet you love them now that you know how to use them, huh?” I’m like, “Nope. I really hate the guns.” They’re violent and frightening and unnecessary, and I don’t care if they are just blanks, someone could get hurt. People have. So I’m supercautious.

AUGUST 10
Last stop, Asheville, North Carolina—a beautiful resort town, the kind of place where people went at the turn of the century to cure their tuberculosis. We are shooting the scenes at Mason Verger’s house on the Biltmore Estate, which was once a residence of the Vanderbilt family.

Gary has been a great sport about the three and a half hours of makeup he needs in order to play Mason Verger. It was interesting because the first time we rehearsed our scenes, it was just Gary—no makeup. And then he was quite transformed by it. It’s so disfiguring—he can’t see out of one eye, and the other . . . I couldn’t figure out where to look. I said, “Listen, where can you see?” because I was trying to focus on the eye that he could see out of. He said, “Darling, I can’t see you anyway. Don’t worry about it.” So I had to kind of holler in his direction. He was really, really great for such a creepy role, and so patient. Whenever you’re wearing 50 pounds of rubber, it gets really hot.

Very near the end, the last couple of days of shooting, we did these driving sequences. I was supposed to drive across a beautiful, pastoral piece of land, open a gate, and drive through with the cows. It was the first take, and there I was in my big redneck Mustang, and the cows didn’t move. People were screaming, “Just honk your horn!” I was trapped, with the cows all pressed up against the car. When you’re very, very close to a great big mother cow who won’t move, it’s really terrifying. The crew was in stitches; Ridley was beside himself with laughter. They couldn’t believe, after all the things I had done—the guns, the boars, the running, the falling—that what scared me most were these big, stupid cows. I sat there for a long time and eventually drove around them, parked, and ran. I left the car in the middle of the field.

AUGUST 24
I wrapped a day early. One of the last things I did was a pickup shot for the fish-market scene—once again, involving a gun. But thankfully the gun guy had gone and we didn’t have enough left, so I only had to use a rubber one. Saved from having to shoot again!

And then it was over—filming ended at six o’clock, and I was on a plane to New York by eight. This was one of the few movies I’ve been on where I hated to see it end. It was a tough shoot, really busy, but I enjoyed everybody so much. Ridley truly loves filming and surrounds himself with the best. It was exciting, too, because it was like doing several different kinds of movies at once. The FBI scenes were heavy-duty, dialogue-driven stuff. The fish market was completely action-oriented. The climax of the movie was dark, almost like a gothic thriller.

Cal, of course, was very happy to be home. He didn’t want to leave the house for a few days because he had missed all his toys. And now, thanks to Tony, he can do a Hannibal Lecter imitation. Tony would go, “Watch this,” and growl and bare his teeth, doing that sort of slurpy thing he did in The Silence of the Lambs, when Hannibal was talking about the liver and fava beans. And Cal would growl and slurp back at him. Now you can say, “Cal, do Tony,” and he goes sip-sip-sip. And when he sees Tony’s picture somewhere, it’s, “Look, Mommy—Tony! That Tony.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Julianne Moore, the Oscar-nominated star of Boogie Nights and The End of the Affair, is just starting to get her appetite back.

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