Dr. Hannibal Lecter: “We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don’t you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice? And don’t your eyes seek out the things you want?”
It’s ideas about the acts of looking and participating that linger long after the end credits of “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991). Director Jonathan Demme – in one of the greatest introduction scenes in movie history – makes us lock eyes directly with Lecter (Anthony Hopkins). He’s shot in a tight close up – establishing a proximity to us that’s intimate. He’s looking directly at us – with his deep blue eyes. It’s rare to see the face of a character on screen in this position. It provides a higher degree of familiarity. “Closer,” he beckons. And then in the next shot we see his point of view, and we’re exposed at a similar distance to Clarice. We dive into her eyes. “I’m here to learn from you,” she says. “Maybe you can decide for yourself if I’m qualified enough to do that.” It is an electrifying encounter. “Mmm…that is rather slippery of you Agent Starling,” he states. The contiguity establishes the ambiguity and complexity of the relationship (and it pulls us in, as well, making us complicit in the ever-changing dance) – a mentor, a lover, a captor, an object of desire, an object of fascination – a study. What’s so rich about this scene is the palpable understanding that these two characters want something from one another. “I will give you a chance to have what you love most,” he tells her. “And what is that, doc,” she asks. “Advancement, of course. But listen carefully, look deep within yourself.”
The opening scene of the movie has Clarice Starling training through a trail in Quantico – working hard to physically overcome the obstacles. In a tree, there’s a sign that she passes that says “Hurt, agony, pain: love it.” Immediately after this she will find herself inside an elevator filled with male FBI agents in red polo shirts – physically dwarfing her. It sets up the main character’s journey – she will be thrown unto overwhelming circumstances but she will prove self-possessed.
It’s been almost 30 years since the release of this work which swept the top awards at the 1992 Oscars (only the third time in history, joning 1975’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and 1934’s “It Happened One Night”) – this psychological thriller has gotten better with time. An adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novel of the same name, it tells the story of young FBI trainee Clarice who is used by a superior – Agent Crawford – as bait and sent on “an interesting errand” – to lure imprisoned Dr. Hannibal Lecter – a brilliant psychiatrist and cold-booded serial killer – into helping in the apprehension of another active serial killer – “Buffalo Bill.” The latter kidnaps female victims for three days and eventually skins them. As you Hitchcock fans should know by now, apprehending “Buffalo Bill” is a MacGuffin and what interests us is the pas-de-deux between Clarice and Hannibal – in particular the admiration that he develops for her intellectual acumen and the confidence that she gains from him. It’s a psychological journey – in which we travel into the landscape of the minds of both.
On a recent viewing I was more entranced with the fleeting flashbacks of Clarice when she was a young girl with her father who was a policeman. He was murdered when she was ten years old. When she accompanies Agent Crawford to one of the victim’s funeral – while walking towards a coffin – she’s framed by a sliding door in a similar way as when she first sees Hannibal. She has a memory of kissing her father goodbye. It is those moments combined with her climactic recounting to Hannibal of witnessing lambs being slaughtered as we hear a wind howling in the soundtrack that provides the film with a deep subjective feeling.
Director Jonathan Demme – who started his career making B-movies like “Caged Heat” under the tutelage of the great Roger Corman – impressively mixes pulp and an elevated sense of composition. Besides the staging of the incomporable matching bouts between the two leading characters, there are other set pieces that are unforgettable – in particular the autopsy scene with its whizzing flashes and the cross-cutting sequence in which FBI agents are surrounding the suspect’s home.
Anthony Hopkins creates the greatest most appealing villain in history – and Jodie Foster is the perfect – most complex foil.
Clarice Starling: “You see a lot, Doctor. But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself? What about it? Why don’t you – why don’t you look at yourself and write down what you see? Or maybe you’re afraid to.”
Love,
Roger
Available to stream on Netflix, Showtime, Hulu (via Showtime), Amazon Prime, Sling TV, DIRECTV, FuboTV and Pluto TV. Available to rent on iTunes, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, FandangoNOW, Amazon, Microsoft, YouTube, Redbox and AMC Theatres on Demand.
Screenplay by Ted Tally
Based on the Novel by Thomas Harris
Directed by Jonathan Demme
Starring Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine and Kasi Lemmons,
118 minutes
Bringing “The Silence of the Lambs” from Page to Screen
In 1985, the couple [Martha and Dino De Laurentiis] bought the rights to Thomas Harris’s bestselling thriller “Red Dragon,” from which they produced the 1986 movie “Manhunter,” directed by Michael Mann. The film, which features the first, brief screen appearance of the serial killer Hannibal Lecter (then spelled Lektor and played by Brian Cox), was inventive, frightening and well-received, but it grossed $8.6m, 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 characterises this lack of interest. Harris and director Jonathan Demme came to him, wanting to set the project up elsewhere; Dino agreed and lent the now-defunct Orion Pictures the character of Hannibal Lecter – for free. “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 $131m and received five Oscars, including best actor for Anthony Hopkins, best actress for Jodie Foster, and best picture. (theguardian.com)
Director Jonathan Demme on the Making of “The Silence of the Lambs”
Jodie taught me that this is a story of a young woman trying to save the life of another young woman. Maybe it’s a thriller. Maybe it’s a horror movie, but you have to honor that core story. [production designer] Kristi Zea and [cinematographer] Tak Fujimoto and I worked so intensely together, planning what that picture was going to look like. I think we wanted to take as high a road as possible. We wanted to welcome as many moviegoers as we could, and we just didn’t see it as a splatter movie, or a gory movie, or a crazy killer movie. It was a story of this young woman. I was very concerned about turning people off, and of the idea that people would hear, ‘Oh, no, there’s a scene that’s so gross, you shouldn’t go…’ I really wanted to make sure this great story reached as many people as it was capable of. So we were trusting the imagination of viewers to set the path as much as possible. (deadline.com)
Jodie Foster on “The Silence of the Lambs”
Foster said that she had originally wanted the role because she had been playing characters that were victims. “For me, it was so important to make sure there was a healing process, to finally playing a woman who saves the women. “The film is still relevant today. We are moving forward and we’re at a very painful and interesting place in our conscious whether it’s about violence or race,” she added. “If you think of the mythology the film comes from: the prince whose country is suffering from an illness. He goes into the forest and battles monsters and trolls to bring back a panacea and realises once he’s cured his people, he can never be one of his people again. That story has never been reserved for women. “I had just won an Oscar so I thought I’ve got a shot. It was going to be directed by Gene Hackman, who was going to play Crawford and he read the first draft [but] said that it was too violent and he dropped out. I thought I’d be considered to direct but the studio said that the next director was going to be Jonathan Demme and he’s not interested in you. I was devastated. So, I got on a plane and I said to him I want to be your second choice and eventually got the role,” she added.
She revealed that a number of U.S actors, including Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, had been considered for the role of Hannibal Lecter, but that Demme wanted a Brit. “Lecter is a manipulator and has a way of using language to keep people at bay… you wanted to see that Shakespearean monster. That’s why we jumped the pond.” However, Foster admitted that she and Hopkins didn’t film together much during the shoot. Foster had originally approached producer Orion Pictures after discovering it had optioned Thomas Harris’ book. “I did the whole first part of the movie without him; he went off [after rehearsal] to go and shoot another movie. He only shot for 7 or 10 days or maybe even less. I never saw him until halfway through the movie. “Much of the dialogue is straight to camera, a Hitchcock technique so some days I never even saw him. It was the last day of shooting and I was eating a tuna fish sandwich and I said ‘I was a little scared of you’ and he said ‘I was scared of you’ and then we had a big hug.” (deadline.com)
Demme on Casting Anthony Hopkins
“It was so easy for me to see that Anthony would be a superb Dr. Lecter because he had been such an amazing good doctor in ‘The Elephant Man.’ He had been as believable a doctor as you can imagine, and he was good. What if you cast Anthony Hopkins in the part of Dr. Lecter, who is not the worst doctor, but he’s a…good doctor turned bad? That was my engine for Anthony Hopkins. Everybody at Orion had tremendous respect for him as an actor. But everybody wanted to play that part, gosh, from Dustin Hoffman to Morgan Freeman. There was tremendous interest. Sean Connery was the only other person I thought could be amazing for this. Connery has that fierce intelligence and also that serious physicality. I love Tony Hopkins, but Sean Connery could be amazing. So to take the most commercial path, because Connery was flying very high at the time, we sent the script to Sean Connery first. Word came back shortly that he thought it was disgusting and wouldn’t dream of playing that part. So, great, now we can go to Tony Hopkins. Anthony was doing ‘M. Butterfly’ in London. I flew over and we agreed to do the work together. Having Anthony and Jodie at the center of this, two such intelligent actors? We had a read-through in the boardroom at Orion, a week before we started shooting. All the executives were there. There was 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. And my producer, Kenny Utt, just goes, real quiet, “Oh…yeah!” I realized the actual bottom line truth of doing ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ something I felt when I read that book. I thought this could be the scariest movie ever, and I wanted to make that movie. I wanted to make a ‘Psycho’ caliber fu*king terrifying movie.” (deadline.com)
About Director Jonathan Demme
Jonathan Demme was born in Baldwin, Long Island. Demme was educated at the University of Florida, where he became a film critic on the college newspaper. Demme met Roger Corman while working in London on publicity for the war film “Von Richthofen” and “Brown” (1971), and was soon recruited into the stable of writer-directors that had already spawned Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich. He shot one scene of the sex film “Secrets of a Door-to-Door Salesman” (1973) and wrote assorted scripts for Corman. Demme made his major studio debut with “Handle With Care” (1977). His film, “The Silence of the Lambs” was only the third in history to win all five major Oscars; it made more than $240m worldwide and its influence was strongly felt on the thriller genre, Aside from his fiction work, Demme was an accomplished documentary maker whose subjects ranged from family (his cousin, an Episcopalian minister, in the 1992 Cousin Bobby) to musicians (Robyn Hitchcock, Neil Young, Justin Timberlake) and politicians (Jimmy Carter in the 2007 ‘Man From Plains’).” (theguardian.com) A few of his other works include “Something Wild” (1986), “Married to the Mob” (1988), “Philadelphia” (1993), “Beloved” (1998), “The Manchurian Candidate” (2004), “Rachel Getting Married” (2008), and “Ricki and the Flash” (2015).