It says Marcus Aurelius and the doctor repeats it Hannibal Lecter: “We begin to covet what we see every day.” In the case of screenwriter Ted Tally, his ambition was to adapt the manuscript that one of his wife’s art gallery clients had left on his table. The writer in question was called Thomas Harris and it had already been taken to the cinema in a film without much success that today is considered cult: Manhunter, of Michael Mann (1981).
The two-time Oscar winner Gene Hackman he also coveted new challenges. He had decided to make the leap to directing and half bought the rights to that manuscript entitled The silence of the lambs. The other 50% belonged to producer Orion. The mythical house of Woody Allen, More than lust, he longed to survive: he was having a hard time. Great ball of fire, Valmont and Burning Lips had been big-nosed failures. Tally offered herself to Orion and her enthusiasm convinced those responsible.
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However, Hackman soon walked out of the project. His daughter read the novel and felt that the story of Buffalo Bill, the Flayer, it was too violent. “God bless Gene Hackman’s daughter,” declared his replacement, Jonathan Demme, recalling the happy circumstance in Deadline in 2016, a year before his death. For him: “Violence was not an essential element of the film. The terror was in the interpretation of the characters ”. Demme wasn’t the obvious choice, and in fact, he frowned at first. But the Orion producers knew he would be interested. After all, although his career had lurched toward outrageous comedy, it was shaped by the terror produced by the Roger Corman (here he makes a cameo as head of the FBI). Also, for someone obsessed with female characters, he had a protagonist with undoubted potential: the FBI cadet. Clarice Starling, a feminist icon. Demme saw it and Jodie Foster saw it, who fought for a role that should be for a Michelle Pfeiffer who, following in the wake of Hackman’s daughter’s luminaries, also rejected it as violent.
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As Foster recognized Empire: “It may be the first time I’ve seen a heroine who is not the swollen, steroid version of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is not a woman running around in her underwear armed with a submachine gun. Fight the villain with emotion with intuition, fragility and vulnerability ”. Not only that. Clarice was also a personal and therapeutic matter, a way of confronting the psychopath John Hinckley, that fan who, obsessed with the role of the actress in Taxi Driver, had tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
With Starling recruited, she was missing Hannibal the Cannibal, that man fond of eating human livers with beans and a good Chianti. Neither Sean Connery ni Robert Duvall They accepted for, ahem, the violence. Demme traveled to London to see Anthony Hopkins, whose promising Hollywood career had been stopped by his alcohol problems. He was used to the truculence of bloody Shakespearean tragedies. Those characters had shown him the way: “Being restrained is much more effective. You don’t need to make weird faces “, he says in the making of In the labyrinth. It was enough for him to disturb the staff, avoiding blinking and basking in a glorious diction (dubbed here by a magnificent Camilo García). At the time of its premiere it revealed Empire how he voiced Lecter: “I thought of him as a combination of Katharine Hepburn, Truman Capote and HAL from 2001.” The psycho triangle was completed with Ted Levine as the murderous Buffalo Bill / James Gumb. He was inspired by the same killers as Harris, like Ed Gein, Ted Bundy or Gary Heidnik … and yes, also a little bit by his holy mother.
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The actors were aware that they had a candy in their hands because Demme told them this when he confessed the aesthetics he was pursuing: “I was madly in love with close-ups because I am madly in love with actors. The silence of the lambs is the story of two people fighting to get inside each other’s heads. Conveying it with close-ups and subjective camera was something that Tak (Fujimoto, director of photography) and I were very excited about ”. It was doing everything that old Corman and his tyrannical assumptions had forbidden them as superfluous. Normal to recreate the filming of the outcome from the point of view of Bill’s night glasses, which took him 22 hours.
It was the only joy he took. The production managed to get the most out of the meager 20 million budget. The FBI, short as it was of female agents, saw in the film a magnificent opportunity to publicize and recruit women. Allowed Jodie Foster Y Scott Glenn (who plays their boss, Jack Crawford) went to class with other cadets and was filmed outside of their Quantico headquarters. The body trail, spanning three states and three climates, was concentrated in Pittsburgh. The big problem was the skull moths raised by Buffalo Bill, the great divas of the film. Originally from Asia, they could not import them because their reproduction did not coincide with the shooting plan. To imitate them, Ray Mendez He customized the American moths: he glued a plastic nail with the skull that gives them their name. He moved them by tying them to a thread attached to a stick. Like good stars, all attention was little: they had an incubator for their dressing room and, when they began to break their chrysalis, they went to a refrigerator until the moment of the action.
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Tally, Harris’s fan, only dared to modify the novel’s outcome because, as he confessed to Rolling Stone: “In the book, Hannibal says goodbye by letter. That is not cinematic ”. The majestic final crane in Haiti was pure cinema. The final touch was put by the teacher William Goldman, author of The Princess Bride: following his advice, the scene in which Crawford and Starling are fired from the FBI for Lecter’s escape was suppressed.
The film was presented at the Berlinale And while Demme won the Best Director award, Orion didn’t have a dollar to promote her for the Oscars that year. So it premiered on the worst possible date, Valentine’s Day 1991, when they had already collected every last piece of confetti from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The $ 20 million it cost turned into $ 272 at the box office and, against all odds, it lasted in the memory of moviegoers until a new edition of the Oscars. Still, Orion didn’t have much hope. Maybe they could scratch script … But not to mention Actress (Foster had recently won for Defendants), or Actor. “You don’t want Hannibal Lecter in your head,” Crawford warns Starling, but no one could shake him off after watching the movie. The problem was that he only appeared on screen during 16 of the 118 minutes of footage, which is why the production company wanted to present him as a candidate for Supporting Actor. But Demme refused, as he acknowledged to Deadline: “He was not a supporting character. It was an exceptional achievement in a male lead role. So you had to bet on him ”.
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The film earned that nomination and six more. Part of the LGTB collective attacked them, accusing them of being homophobic, to the chagrin of a Demme and a Levine who did not tire of denying it. Even so, neither Marco Aurelio, nor the most greedy of its creators imagined what would happen at the gala. Hannibal Lecter he gobbled it all up. After It happened one night Y Some one flies over the cuco’s nidus, It was the third film to win the five great statuettes: Movie, Director, Actress, Actor and of course, Screenplay; the second to win Best film with an R rating (for those over 17), after Midnight Cowboy; and the first horror film (although Demme did not accept this label) to do so. A villain of legend, a heroine of ditto and an immortal classic had been born. The lambs would never stop screaming.
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