‘Refrigerator Questions’
After studying theatre as an undergraduate at Yale, Ted Tally wrote plays in New York for ten years. He transitioned into writing for TV and film, his first feature credit was the Susan Sarandon drama White Palace (1991). Shortly thereafter he won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Silence of the Lambs (1992). Tally has a reputation in Hollywood for making beautiful screenplays out of difficult adaptations, as witnessed in his work on Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses (2000).
Synopsis
The United States, the present. Young FBI agent Clarice Starling is assigned to help find a missing woman and save her from a serial killer named ‘Buffalo Bill’, who skins his victims. Clarice attempts to gain a better insight into the twisted mind of the killer by talking to an incarcerated psychopath, Dr Hannibal ‘The Cannibal’ Lecter, who prior to his capture was a respected psychiatrist. Starling’s mentor, FBI agent Jack Crawford, believes that Lecter might have the answers to questions that will help them locate the killer. Starling’s twisted relationship with Lecter not only forces her to confront her psychological demons, but also leads her to face-to-face with Buffalo Bill himself.
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KEVIN CONROY SCOTT: Ted, who were your artistic heroes growing up? I’m thinking mainly in terms of playwrights, novelists and film-makers.
TED TALLY: Well, I didn’t read or see much theatre growing up, not until I was about eighteen. There weren’t that many opportunities to see live theatre around where I grew up. But I did read voraciously, I loved adventure books and science fiction – anything that was a thumping good read; and that could be Charles Dickens, too. Movies were just another world to me, though: I liked to go see them, but I didn’t figure these things were actually made by people – certainly not people like me.
You didn’t think of filmmaking as a tangible ambition?
Not at all. But theatre, as I began to act in plays and stuff, I thought was a viable kind of thing to pursue, because you could get a bunch of people together and put on a play. I didn’t know how to get a bunch of people together to make a movie …
So what was your first acting role on stage?
God, it was probably in the ninth grade, in a play called I Remember Mama. It’s sentimental, based on a book of memoirs about a Norwegian family in New York, it had been on Broadway. I just remember a bunch of North Carolina kids with terrible accents, trying to be Norwegian and play roles much older than themselves. But I was very bitten by theatre. I just loved the whole camaraderie of it. And I started doing tons of plays – summer theatre and community theatre, and every so often some pretty good university theatre, where occasionally they would let local kids be spear carriers. I was always in a couple of things at a time.
Can you pin-point a certain time where you thought you could create plays yourself?
Well, I was in a summer programme in North Carolina, it still exists, called the Governor School. It’s a six-to-eight-week summer programme for high school students, with teachers from all over the state. You have to apply and audition. So I went into the theatre programme and it was mostly acting and acting exercises, and we put on two productions during the course of that summer. And after the first production they said, ‘OK, for the last one we’re going to give you a chance to write your own play. And if you ever wanted to write a play, now’s your chance, because if they’re any good we’re going to put them on.’ It had never occurred to me to write a play before, but I couldn’t pass up that opportunity, so I wrote a strange kind of pantomime play with music and dance, and no dialogue. It was very arty – kind of like performance art. But it was very well-performed and some local person got wind of this and decided to tape it as a local television special. So I thought, ‘That was easy enough. Maybe next time I’ll try dialogue …’ Then I wrote a more conventional one-act play, a historical drama, and sent it off to a play competition, which it got picked for. And so that play was also staged.
Were you solely interested in writing at that time?
No, I was directing, I was designing sets, you had to do what you had to do, and in college I still mostly acted – I didn’t write a full-length play until I was a senior at Yale. I majored in drama, and I went to Yale because they had such a strong tradition of undergraduate productions with virtually no limitation on them; they had sixty or seventy a year. Each individual college there would put on a play, then there was the Yale Rep which was a professional theatre, and the Yale Drama School which had its own theatre activities. That was the attraction for me.
Was there anyone working in theatre at that time whom you especially admired?
This was the late sixties, so it was a time of great turbulence and a lot of very strange things were going on in the theatre, which I didn’t care very much for, because I’m innately conservative. But there were playwrights who I admired very much; Pinter, Arthur Kopit who I met and had a seminar with at Yale, Jack Gelber. There were a series of youngish off-Broadway playwrights of that generation that we all admired. We got such heavy doses of the classics academically that it was a turn-off – Ibsen, Strindberg, they just weren’t very 1969 for us … But we were constantly being told we should concentrate on Chekhov, that he was more modern than we realized, so we did read a lot of Chekhov.
Really, I was like a sponge at that point. I was also seeing lots of movies, because the college had cheap film societies. Every night they would show real prints on projectors in a huge law school auditorium, and for twenty-five cents you could go in and see great films that I’d never seen on television. I saw movies there that made up ninety per cent of my film education. I can remember seeing Truffaut films, which were an eye-opener to me. I’d even never seen a foreign film before. But they would also show Citizen Kane and Casablanca, and they would have ‘Hitchcock Week’.
Was there a particular Hitchcock film that stuck with you?
My favourite is Rear Window. I love a lot of them, he’s extraordinary, but I think Rear Window is the most wonderful combination of romance and claustrophobia. He would set himself such challenges, like ‘Can I do an entire film in a rowboat? Can I do a whole film in a courtyard …?’
Are you still involved in the theatre at all?
No, my theatre career, if you can call it a career, lasted for about ten years. I reached a point in my early thirties where I just thought I wasn’t really pushing to the next level in the theatre because it wasn’t going to happen. And I was also getting more interested in the movies.
It took you eight years to get your first film made. Living in New York City, what did you do to make ends meet financially?
Well, my plays were all getting staged, they just didn’t play for very long. But then they were getting subsequent production in regional theatres, and occasionally abroad. So I had a fairly good income from theatre royalties and publications. I kept getting writing grants too, so that helped. I graduated in drama in 1977 and right away had a professional production, and an agent, and a teaching grant, so I never had to work at any other job. And then pretty quickly I started getting asked if I would do TV scripts, within two or three years I think. Then I rewrote a TV movie called The Father Clements Story with Louis Gossett, Malcolm-Jamal Warner, and Carroll O’Connor, directed by Edwin Sherin, a good director. I had nothing to do with the actual making of it but they did a very good job of it and finally after all those years it gave me a little bit more credibility. I had a credit, and that helped me to get the job writing White Palace, which was the first feature film that I had made. I’d been like somebody hanging by his fingertips from a wall for years, and now finally I felt like I’d got my foot up on it.
Funnily enough, it seems like you had a very easy entry into professional writing, but then getting through the glass ceiling was another story.
I have a strange career in that way, it took me forever to get going and then I had a lot of early success, and then I went into a trough and nothing got made. It always seems like feast or famine. I don’t have any kind of game plan. I can go for three or four years without any movie being made, and then two or three will be made at once. I don’t think there’s a lot of rhyme or reason in this business.
You’ve said that one of the big breaks in your career came at the hands of Lindsay Anderson?
Yes, this must have been about 1979, 1980. He sort of took me under his wing and he was a tough guy, very fierce and very proud, a very angry man. I think he had a real chip on his shoulder about a lot of things. But he really loved movies, and not just as a filmmaker but as a cinephile. He even wrote a book on John Ford.
When he first called me up, I was so green I’d never even seen a screenplay, didn’t even know what they looked like, but he said he’d show me one. I didn’t understand all the camera angles and those kinds of things, and he said, ‘Just leave them out; nobody reads them or takes any notice of them anyway.’ He told me to just write it like a play, where you have a lot more freedom to change the scene, and that was good advice. It was based on the Indian Mutiny and specifically the siege of Delhi in 1857. Lindsay grew up in India, it was very much in his blood, and he always wanted to make a movie set there: a Ford-style Western epic set in India. That was his obsession. And he would say things like, ‘This must be an epic. What do you think is an epic?’ And I would say, ‘Lawrence of Arabia is an epic’, and he’d say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Then all I could think of was Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai and he’d say, ‘That’s not an epic, that’s a war adventure.’ I kept trying to get him to define what an epic was, and I could never really get a clear answer, except that he would snort at anything I suggested. But I think he thought that an epic was something that really expressed a great national movement of people. It couldn’t just be a love story set against an epic background – it had to be War and Peace. It had to really suggest a change in ethics.
But Lindsay was his own worst enemy when it came to Hollywood and the making of films, because not only would he not suffer fools gladly, he wouldn’t suffer them at all. And you would cringe when you went to a studio meeting with him because you knew he just wasn’t going to censor himself if he thought he was speaking to an idiot. So, not surprisingly, most of his Hollywood movies never got made, including mine … But he was a patient and sometimes sarcastic teacher. I went back and forth from New York, where I was living then, to London or LA, working over a screenplay with him and he would say, ‘Yes, OK, well, that’s nice enough, and let’s have a scene where so-and-so happens.’ And I would go off and come back with reams of more pages. He never had any interest in editing this stuff, the final script was about 150 pages long and completely unfilmable in its length. But it had great scenes, great passion, great characters. He was a great teacher; it was like getting paid to learn how to write a screenplay. Anyway, we worked for a year, and then we just sort of abandoned it, he just never called again.
You’ve said elsewhere that when you’re adapting a book into a screenplay, you turn the book into a treatment before you do the first draft. Can you describe what this treatment consists of?
It’s about twenty-five or thirty single-spaced pages normally, in paragraph outline, and it has a very conventional three-act structure and it’s my attempt to describe the movie scene-by-scene. If it’s an important movie, I’ll go into some detail about what happens and why. There’s virtually no dialogue in it unless it’s really important to the scene – it’s suggested but I don’t want anybody to pin me down on that. And if it’s a small scene or a sequence of them I might just say ‘And now there’s a montage’ without going into too much detail. But it’s pretty specific; act one, scene one, two, three …
You actually number the scenes?
Oh yeah, there tend to be eight-to-ten scenes per act, and I reference the book. If I give this kind of thing to a producer or a director, I don’t know if they’ll sit there with the treatment in one hand and the book in the other, but if they care to look, I cross-reference, say, ‘Scene four of the movie uses pages thirty-five to forty-seven of the book, but with the following changes’, and I will suggest how it will change. It’s already beginning to change from the book by the time it’s a treatment. And then, usually by the time I’ve finished the treatment and maybe done some revision, I’ve absorbed almost everything from the book I’m ever going to. Very often the book is hardly referred to from that point, and the treatment becomes the blueprint for the screenplay. Only if I’m confused about some point or if I really want some bolstering of specific details am I going to go back to the book – or if I want to crib some dialogue. But basically I work off the treatment as I work. The treatment is really intended as a tool for myself, it’s to reduce the book to a manageable level and to give me the illusion that I have a road map for the screenplay. It never quite works out that way: when you’re writing you’re continually finding out what you thought you needed and didn’t need after all, so you tear out three pages of the treatment, throw them away and do something else, wing it. I wish there was a way of knowing those things in advance; you’d save a lot of time and a lot of heartache. But I can’t, I just have to write my way into it – which you wouldn’t think would be true with an adaptation but it happens anyway. I said to Jonathan Demme one time, we were talking about cutting a scene and I said, ‘I worked for weeks on this, we got it polished and you were happy with it, Kristi made the set, we got the costumes, the actors there, we shot it. Wouldn’t it be better if we had known in advance that we didn’t need it?’ And he said, ‘If we’d known, it would have been boring …’
You’ve said that the first act is always a struggle for you. Is this because you’re trying to get the audience involved as well as getting exposition out of the way?
Partly. It’s also just that you’re coming to grips with a story and characters that are not your own and that you’ve got to try to make your own, and that’s just an almost physical struggle until you feel some mastery over it. It may be a world you’ve never lived in or imagined before, it may be science fiction or a western, or something that you don’t really have the dramatic vocabulary for – you’ve faked your way into getting the job and now you’ve got to actually sit down and do it. So that first half of the first act is a tremendous struggle, and those pages get constantly rewritten. But by the time you get to the last part of the act, it goes by in a blur and you hand it in.
Other writers have said the same thing, about how hard it is to get momentum.
Well, you put a lot of pressure on yourself because you’re so conscious of the importance of those first ten or twelve pages. Somebody said, and it’s not much of an exaggeration, ‘The only thing that matters in a screenplay is the first ten pages, and the only thing that matters in a movie is the last ten minutes.’ From a Hollywood point of view there’s some truth in that. If the first ten pages don’t grab the agent then they’re not going to tell the client to read it, or the studio person, or whatever. If the audience doesn’t walk out happy after the last ten minutes then they’re not going to recommend the movie to their friends. I don’t agonize so much over the last ten pages of the script, because by then I’ve got the rhythm going and I feel like I know what I’m doing. The first draft in particular, I feel like it’s mine – it’s the one time during the process of making the movie where I have total control over what I’m doing, I don’t really have to answer to anybody.
Do you then feel a lot of pressure when you turn in the first draft to the producer?
I didn’t use to. And in truth, now, from the point of view of worrying if they are going to like it, or hate me, or am I going to get fired or whatever, I don’t feel that way. After I stick that first draft into a FedEx envelope and send it off, I sleep like a baby! Because I feel like I’ve done the best I could and if they don’t like it there’s not much else I could have done. But I’m very conscious that there’s pressure on a first draft now that didn’t used to be – that they’re hiring me to do it and paying me a lot of money, and the first draft has got to be as polished as I can possibly make it.
I’ve had movies where I’ve still never written anything but the first draft, I have movies where the first draft hung around for eight years and then got green-lit. I’ve had movies where the first draft was on the internet within a week of me posting it into the studio. It’s a first draft, but there’s no privacy any more, it gets leaked somewhere, and suddenly people are reviewing my first draft. That happened with Red Dragon. And it’s a weird feeling. ‘Guys, it’s not done yet! Can I get the director’s notes before I get yours?’ So there is that feeling that once a script leaves your hands, you don’t know where it’s going or who’s going to see it, and it’s very important to make it good. From the moment you turn in a first draft, it’s either on its way to being a movie or it’s on its way to development hell – one or the other is going to happen. It’s not like anybody’s going to say, ‘This is an interesting idea, let’s gently nurture and develop this and maybe in a year after a lot of work we’ll have something …’
How did you come across Thomas Harris’s novel, The Silence of the Lambs?
It was actually sent to me by Tom Harris, who was a client at an art gallery where my wife worked and was great friends with the gallery owner, and still is. I met Tom a couple of times, once at an art exhibit in New Haven, and I had dinner with him a couple of times. So I knew him socially and I admired his books and he knew I was a playwright, but I don’t think he’d seen anything that I’d written. So I said, ‘What are you working on?’ And he just mailed a soft-cover press copy, and I read it, and because I knew the Lecter character from Red Dragon, I was just beside myself, I couldn’t believe how powerful this story was. But I assumed that someone was already doing the screenplay since the publication date was only three or four weeks away. Throughout my career I’d never been able to catch up to a good book before it’s too late: by the time I would see it in a bookstore, the screenplay was already written. That’s one of the main reasons I switched agencies and went to ICM because they have a literary department in New York and they have people who hunt down books, and I thought I needed to get in that pipeline before it’s too late.
So I was weeping and wailing and saying, ‘This is too good to be available still’, and my wife said, ‘Call your agent and find out.’ She’s never let me forget that she was the one who nagged me into getting that job … So I called my then-agent and she called Orion Pictures. And they said they didn’t have a screenwriter yet, and they remembered me because I wrote that Lindsay Anderson script for them and they liked it. They thought I was an interesting idea for this, but they were buying the book for Gene Hackman to direct and act in, and he wanted to write the screenplay too. But basically Orion said, ‘Hang in there, because we don’t think he can do this.’ Sure enough, three or four weeks later they called up again and said, ‘He was up to page thirty of the screenplay and only on page thirty of the book, so that’s not going to work out.’ I had to have a writing sample to show to him, and I had White Palace, which had just been green-lit. So again, after a year of bad timing it was suddenly good timing, because I could say there was this movie with Susan Sarandon that Universal were going to make, so now I have some credibility. Hackman read it and said, ‘OK, let’s talk.’ And I had to convince him to give me the job.
Did you find that daunting?
Yeah, a little scary. He’s a giant figure, and I had to go to his home in Santa Fe to meet him. I guess he still had some questions after our first meeting, because he then made me fly to Chicago and talk to him for four hours. His back was bothering him too, so he lay on the floor with a pillow under his head while I was talking and talking and talking. Every once in a while he would toss out some little bomb, he had some weird ideas for things he wanted to try visually, to which I just had to say, ‘Yes, that’s a good idea.’
Which role was he considering playing?
He couldn’t decide whether he was going to play Lecter or Crawford; he thought he might be taking on too much to play Lecter. And then when I was halfway through the first draft he got cold feet about the whole thing and dropped out. He didn’t call, which really offended me, since I’d done the whole song and dance for him and was beavering away on this job. For him to quit and not even call, I think, is appalling manners.
Going back, can you describe the excitement that you felt when reading the story?
First of all, I just thought it was so smart, so literary and knowing, and not just in a technological, police-procedural, serial-killer way – which Tom is extremely knowledgeable about. It’s so knowing about people and human nature and character, and the dialogue is so good. It was ‘the thriller’ raised to literature. And the story is just so unpredictable; to have the twinned killers, two bad guys instead of one, and the whole intricacy of the criminal plot. But, above all, it was the relationship between this young woman and this mad psychiatrist which was not like anything I’d ever seen. Jonathan and I were talking about it and he said, ‘This is new, dramatically; there has never been a relationship of two main characters like this.’
And then, for reasons I’m not even sure of, I felt very moved, and still do, by Clarice Starling. By her courage and vulnerability – and I probably respond more to courage in a main character than any other quality. She’s in a male world, and she’s a student, and she’s orphaned … I was just deeply moved by her. And Thomas Harris had so artfully worked in mythic underpinnings – it just had this feeling that there’s the orphaned young woman making her way in the world, and there’s the good stepfather in Crawford and the evil stepfather who’s Lecter who are taking on her education. That’s a huge part of the story, in fact it’s the emotional heart of the whole story; her search for a missing father and her attempt to replace that void which is never going to go away. The whole thing of saving the lamb and being able to save Catherine Martin is all tied up with her inability to save her own father when she was a child.
And this is what you saw clearly in your first read?
Oh yeah. And I also thought these are just incredible parts to attract actors. I guess from my theatre background I always think of that. I don’t see a specific actor when I’m writing a part but I always think of trying to give actors great stuff to do, because that’s what gets movies made and that’s what makes them memorable for audiences.
You said that when you’re adapting a novel you try to write the scenes that stick out in your mind. In the case of The Silence of the Lambs, I assume that the meeting of Clarice and Lecter was the first one.
Right. You’ve got to start with her tutorial from Crawford where he, as it turns out, is being quite manipulative and not entirely nice in sending her into this rat’s nest. Then you’ve got to have a journey into the labyrinth of Dr Chiltern … most of those building blocks as you adapt a book are pretty evident. But there are nine or ten key scenes that will tell the story. Then the question is what do you do with the really interesting ones that don’t fit into that scenario? And what do you do when you’ve got these grisly gaps between them: what is the new connective material and what is the new rhythm? Because you’re not going to have the rhythm of the book.
Jodie Foster commented that if we’d had a less sympathetic studio they would have made us cut down those long scenes between Clarice and Lecter, eight-page scenes where they’re just static, two people talking to each other. They wouldn’t have accepted it or understood that it’s the heart of the movie, it’s not just filler waiting for the next action sequence.
Each one of those scenes really crackles.
Well, it’s just great dialogue, and a lot of it is just verbatim from Thomas Harris. It’s like a fencing match, but with sexual overtures. Those things play like they’re theatre. I was a little worried that I was giving a director a very difficult job to keep that visually interesting. I was aware that I was dumping a very big slab on him and normally I try to be more sensitive towards a director. But there was no other way to do this. I kept them as short as I could but there was a limit to how much they could be cut.
There are numerous points of view in the novel. When did you figure out that you had to tell the screenplay from Clarice’s?
Well, that was part of the interest of the book. Then I was confronting this mountain of pages knowing I’d probably be ending up with only one-fifth or one-sixth of the text. So the first thing you’d better do in a case like that is to find an organizing principle, or an editing principle; and in that one it seemed pretty clear to me that Clarice is the character that we care most about, our surrogate going into this world. So it would also be more moving for the audience if we were made to see the story through her eyes.
At times I thought Clarice was in danger of being a do-gooder, a go-getter, or an annoyingly keen character. How did you overcome that?
Well, she’s smart and she is ambitious but not in a way that I think the audience would be offended by. But the biggest help there, is to have Jodie Foster play the part, because she’s such a great actress and so smart that it’s impossible for the audience not to respond to her and like her. As a screenwriter you always assume that an audience is much like yourself and so I assumed that if I cared this much about this character then so would the audience. As it went on and we had more perspective on it making the movie, we gradually began to realize that we were breaking all kinds of thriller rules, not only did we have a woman in the central role but we also had no action until the last half of the third act, we had no car chases. Not only that, but we didn’t even have our heroine in physical jeopardy until almost the very end of the movie. She’s in emotional jeopardy but she’s not in physical danger. It just broke rule after rule after rule in that way.
I didn’t know until later that a bunch of people in Hollywood had turned down the book and some very famous screenwriters had said it was un-filmable. Apparently some thought it was either too dark, or too complicated, or too ugly. I’m glad I was naïve enough not to think of it that way, because to me I felt like it was a home run; it was easy, except that it’s an embarrassment of riches. You’ve got a great hero, you’ve got a great villain, you’ve got great dialogue, great twists and turns, a fabulous finale.
What did you think of Jonathan Demme as the director? He was known for quirky character driven films like Something Wild and Melvin and Howard.
Well, I wasn’t suspicious of him. I liked him personally, his sense of humour and his talent. I didn’t quite know what was going to happen when he bashed heads with this material. I know that Jodie was the same, she told me she was terrified that he was going to bring some kind of irony to it. Jonathan is so liberal and so sweet that she was afraid he was going to do some goof on the FBI and make them look like fools. When she realized that wasn’t going to happen, she felt much better. And the moment I first started seeing the dailies, I knew he was going to nail it.
After which draft did Demme get hired?
He read the book after Gene Hackman dropped out, but before I finished the first draft, probably a month or two before. Initially he’d had no interest in reading the book because he thought it was just some slasher story, but once he read it he began to see possibilities. He read my first draft not long after it was finished, and we met, then I was just startled by the speed of things. We met in May 1989 and we were shooting in November. I don’t remember any big revisions.
And he invited you to be on the set …
Well, he wanted me to be there as much as I could be. It was hard, as I had a new child and I couldn’t spend the whole time in Pittsburgh. He was very nice, he said, ‘I don’t want you to come for two or three weeks at the start, because I need to establish my authority over this set and these actors and I don’t want them looking out of the side of their eye at you if I say something, because the actors will come to the screenwriter looking for emotional shortcuts and they need to have their own process to find a way into it.’ But he then told me that, any time after that, he hoped I’d come as often as I could, and if I couldn’t he’d send me dailies. He kept me very involved.
Considering you’d had some negative experience before that, how did that help you as a writer, being invited on set?
Oh, it was great, it made it real to me in a way that it had never been for my screenplays. Either they weren’t made, or they were made and I wasn’t involved in production. So it was an enormous payoff, both emotionally and artistically, after all the years in the wilderness – to see what was happening with all that time I’d spent alone in that room. It’s satisfying to write a play or a novel, but there ‘coming to life’ means it appears in print. The realization of the life you’ve created as a screenwriter is an astonishing thing to witness, especially for the first time. William Goldman says the most exciting day of a screenwriter’s life is the first day he is on the set of a movie that he wrote, and the most boring day of his life is the second day. Which is kind of true! [laughs] I’d been in theatres and seen sets and performances, but you can’t compare. I remember going into this giant abandoned turbine factory in Pittsburgh where they were building Lecter’s asylum and Gumb’s basement. I walk into an enormous three-storey set, and outside there are these girders and ladders, and it felt like there were hundreds of workers swarming over this thing, painters, people applying dust to the stones, people distressing the bars of the cell, costume people, lighting people, electricians, cables everywhere. I’m standing there staring at this, and Ed Saxon, the producer, says to me, ‘What hath Ted wrought!?’ And that was the feeling, an astonishing feeling, to see your ideas turning into a three-dimensional construction.
Now I’ve written a screenplay for Alexander the Great … well, it’s one thing for me to sit there and write, ‘The trumpet sounds and five thousand horsemen launch themselves across the plain.’ But to make that actually happen is a very difficult thing, and I’m sure I’ll have that same feeling if I’m standing there in Morocco watching that cavalry charge. It begins years before with a screenwriter, then it becomes somebody else’s problem! Thank god I’m not there having to feed those horses and clean up after them. I spent years writing plays hoping that, if I got lucky, one hundred and fifty people a night would come to see them. Then you write a movie and it opens and fifteen million people see it all over the world. That’s an astonishing thing for a writer.
Did you ever get notes from Orion on Silence of the Lambs?
No. At least, I never did. I’ve had two or three experiences where I never saw a single note from a studio. Either the director would absorb them and pick and choose the ones that they had some interest in, or just toss them out the window and say, ‘It’s too late, this ship will sail!’ When a movie is being made, in my experience, the studio tends to be very supportive; they just want to give you the best tools they can to make the best movie you can. Where they torment you, like a cat with a mouse, is when a script is in development hell and probably will never be made but they will never admit that – that’s where it can be agonizing. It’s all about diplomacy and studio politics, in ways that you’ll never be able to understand if you don’t live out here and know what’s going on behind the scenes: who’s in, who’s out, who has power and who doesn’t. It becomes about a lot of things besides about what’s going to make a script better … That part of it is no fun. And I always like the idea that it’s either quickly going to get green-lit or going into development hell. I lose interest quickly if it’s not going to become a movie. I just want to move on to something else. I’ve been in situations where there’s a lot of money still on the table but I’ve just made an amicable parting, if they’re not serious about making the movie, so they can keep the money and let me have my time back. There’s nothing deader than an un-produced screenplay.
Did you find it easier to adapt a thriller than a more literary screenplay?
I guess, in general, thrillers are easier to adapt. They give you a strong motor to drive the narrative, which other movies don’t necessarily do. All the Pretty Horses, from a structural point of view, wasn’t a difficult adaptation because it’s a simple plot – too simple, many critics may say. But it’s very dense so that’s a problem. Sometimes you can read a book and immediately there’s a hundred pages that just go right out, you know you don’t need them. But that book was very beautifully and densely written, with no wasted scenes. So it was kind of like Silence of the Lambs, an embarrassment of riches. And so much so, I would have liked to have done a TV mini-series of it. That’s how I feel when I hit a really good book, I feel it’s sad to reduce it to two hours, but that’s what they want and that’s what I do.
When you wrote the first draft of Silence, who did you think of playing Lecter?
I didn’t visualize an actor. I did think of Jodie Foster as Clarice, and that was hardly a leap of genius. In fact she called me as I was writing it, because she loved the book and was aware that I was doing the script. Tony Hopkins’s name came up when Jonathan and I started talking about casting. He’d played a lot of loonies, he’d done thrillers, and he had been very good on the stage, and we thought that to play that character we needed an actor with that kind of theatrical grounding. His language is so baroque and epigrammatic that it was not going to sound like credible speech unless there was a classically trained actor doing it. Also Tony is a handsome guy, we thought that was important too – that evil of that kind should have an attractiveness, it shouldn’t just be repugnant.
Were you worried about Lecter upstaging Clarice?
A little bit, but I knew that we wouldn’t care about him like we did her. He would impress people and be exciting but he wouldn’t move people as she did. And in the end she’s got a lot more to do, so she will be the star. Jodie said one time that it wasn’t the kind of part that gets awards, you do a lot of quiet listening and he’s got all the flashy stuff. I said I thought she was wrong: I didn’t think there would be a bigger woman’s role that year …
Lecter serves many different purposes in the story. Did you find it difficult making each facet of his character work? Mentor, sexual tormentor, friend, murderer, cannibal …
No, he just leaps right off the page. In Red Dragon I had to invent a lot more stuff that just didn’t exist in the book but with Silence I played very close. He is very much Thomas Harris’s invention and I was just hanging on to his coat-tails. Every once in a while I had to make up some new dialogue for him, or find some movie equivalent – something that could be spoken and acted – for the cryptic games he plays. But when a character is that well-written you just try to mimic what the novel is already doing.
Much of Crawford’s story is cut out. What was the logic behind that?
Well, that was very sad to me. I regretted that we couldn’t keep more of that in the movie because it’s very moving that his wife is dying. While he’s trying to find this killer his own life is a shambles and he’s trying to hold back the pain of that. Also, in some weird way it does inform his sort of muted sexual attraction to Clarice too. I struggled to keep that stuff in the screenplay. I think in the first draft there were a few scenes relating to Crawford’s wife. Bits of it might have stayed into the second draft but finally Jonathan said we had to face it, it wasn’t important enough, and we couldn’t afford it, and he was right.
There was other stuff: we had a whole sequence involving Senator Martin, where Clarice goes to Catherine’s apartment and Senator Martin finds her there finding the nude Polaroids and gets in trouble. That was one of the first things Jonathan shot, in Washington, and they’re not in the movie: scenes where Senator Martin is pissed off and Lecter has escaped and Clarice and Crawford get blamed for that and dismissed from the case. Jonathan always said it was his fault – he’d just started the movie, he didn’t know the actors well enough, and he didn’t direct the scenes very well. But the truth is, they were what he thought was ‘fake suspense’. In every cop film there’s always a point where the cop gets suspended from the case, but we always know that they’re going to come back on the case and solve it. We had truckloads of real suspense in this movie and we had trouble enough fitting all that in – we didn’t have room for fake suspense. But he didn’t know that until he shot it and it went into the edit. And I think they were one of the last things to come out.
Apart from Crawford’s story, what was the biggest change from the book to the film?
Gumb is a much richer character in the book. In the movie he’s really reduced to a cipher, we don’t know what makes him tick, he’s just kind of a bugaboo. And I regretted that, but I couldn’t see any way around it. I was trapped in my own logic; if it was from Clarice’s point of view, she doesn’t know anything about Gumb. I had to go to Catherine Martin for the suspense, for the famous Hollywood ticking-clock, but I really didn’t want to know too much about Gumb if Clarice didn’t know it. I didn’t want to put the audience in a superior position to her as it would have broken the bond with her. I think the strategy worked but it short-changed the Gumb character in a sad way. Jonathan said he made up for that with some extravagant improvisation, they managed to find something for him to do, some kind of weirdness, and it’s very creepy and effective but it short-changes the book a bit.
The music in that scene where he tries on his ‘wig’ was particularly …
That’s them, there’s not much in the script there. That was a desperate actor and director thinking, ‘What the hell do we do now? What is this guy doing?’ When I first saw it I thought, ‘A nipple ring?’ I was horrified, but then I thought, ‘What would I have done in their shoes?’ You can’t have him just sitting there reading a TV Guide.
I just wanted to stay with Clarice at every possible moment and only cut from her in a case of dire necessity. I had to cut away from her for Lecter’s escape, which did affect the rest of the plot, but even that made us nervous. Jonathan said we were breaking another rule; we were cutting away from our main character for twelve minutes in the third act. He said, ‘Does that make you nervous?’ But I said it was just the greatest set piece of action: and if you didn’t have that, why make the movie?
In terms of not empowering the audience, another thing you change from the book is when Clarice comes to Lecter with the offer. In the book the reader knows it’s a bogus offer. In the film, the audience doesn’t know until later that Clarice is trying to dupe him …
It’s definitely a better strategy to try to sell them while you’re selling Lecter. We used the book as our bible, and where we saw an opportunity to take it further, we did. The piece at the end where Clarice thinks she’s missed the real action, just doing grunt work, and she comes to Gumb’s house just to ask a few questions – that slight overlap is suggested in the book, it happens for a beat, and you have to be reading it closely or you’ll miss it. Jonathan thought we could run with it, overlap, slice and dice, and have some fun. So we did.
I’d just like to take you through the film and ask you some questions about some specific scenes. For example, in the opening sequence where Clarice is running through the woods, alone, were the atmospherics and the sense of isolation important?
Well, it’s very much in character to see her alone in the woods in this strange setting. It’s quite a brilliant sequence by Jonathan. Is she chasing someone or is she running from someone? It’s ambiguous and it doesn’t particularly register that she’s in a training regiment. It has a wonderful physical intensity, Jodie had to actually do all of those things, which are not easy; she had to climb over a tall netting wall and flip over to the other side. So spunky little Jodie actually does all of these tasks, which was good for her getting into the part. We had talked about different kinds of credit sequences; at one point it was going to be very arty, close-ups on moths’ wings that were so abstracted that you didn’t know what you were looking at.
Did you write a credit sequence of your own?
In my experience it’s hard to get the director to film what you want the credit sequence to be, it almost never happens. They consider it their own perk to devise that sequence, so I hardly ever even write them in the screenplay. I did for Red Dragon, which actually got made the way I wrote it, but that’s very rare. For Silence I just thought, ‘I’m not even going to bother. I’ll start with her approaching Crawford’s office.’ But Jonathan did something that I love, which is that he carries us into the movie, into this world and into this character, before we’ve had any dialogue. He doesn’t waste the credit sequence.
There are a lot of smooth transitions between scenes in Silence; words echoed, overlapping dialogue. Are they something that you pay close attention to?
I’m a sucker for that kind of transition, I like to do leap-forward transitions and dialogue where the next scene segues with this scene. Transitions are just as important as anything else that happens; they can be very important. And I’m always looking for what makes the strongest transition – it maybe something visual, it may be something in the music, it may be something verbal, I’m just trying to stitch the scenes together tightly.
Can you tell me something about when Clarice first meets Lecter at the hospital/prison. There is something of a build-up to get to his cell.
That kind of sequence, where Dr Chiltern is walking with Clarice and giving her the rules of how to talk to Lecter in his cell, is fun to write because, even though it’s all exposition, if you break it up enough and have it in an interesting visual space it doesn’t feel heavy. And this is such a creepy world we’re entering that I knew that a dry exposition would pay off against the setting.
So it’s like the audience takes in the exposition without knowing it?
Right, and there’s also something wonderfully creepy about layer upon layer upon layer of security here. It’s one of the longest build-ups to meeting a character you’ll ever see. The point is you want the audience so thoroughly rattled at the point they meet Lecter that anything will scare them.
There is a moment in that scene where we don’t see what she’s looking at, only her reaction. That’s the kind of thing we tried to do throughout the movie with violence. We wanted the audience’s imagination to be supplying images rather than having them on screen, if we could help it.
When Miggs says ‘I can smell your cunt’ – when that line comes out you know exactly where you are in the screenplay. Did you think it was really important?
We talked about that a lot, of course, and the throwing of the semen on her later – ‘Is it something we can really bear to have in here?’ And I thought, as disgusting as it is, it’s a way of absolutely pulling the rug out from the audience. If you do those things, they are going to now know for the rest of the movie that there are no rules – that anything might happen. So the unsettling effect of those moments carries over the next hour.
It was Tony Hopkins’ idea to discover Lecter standing upright in the middle of the cell, like he’s just been beamed down from a spaceship. But he also understood really well, after the enormous build-up to meeting this character, the value of now underplaying. I didn’t know what he was going to do with the part yet, I said, ‘I guess you have to pick and choose your moments where the madness is.’ He said, ‘If you’re mad, you’re mad all the time.’ So I was worried that we might get some hammy-ness or something if he played it mad all the time. He knew better, of course …
What about the moment when they first meet and he starts sniffing her through his Plexiglas, that wasn’t something written in the screenplay, was it?
No. The screenplay reflected the book, which had bars and netting in the cell. Jonathan made the discovery in the eleventh hour that they couldn’t shoot that effectively – you couldn’t get an unobstructed look at their faces, therefore the emotion was blunted. So the Plexiglas was a desperate improvisation on the set. And then they found the Plexiglas would help Jonathan visually but the actors couldn’t hear each other, so then the holes were an improvisation on the improvisation. It’s an interesting illustration of what happens when the screenplay turns into a movie, how you have to adapt to the physical reality. Also of course it feels much more dangerous if it seems like there’s no visual separation between them. It feels like they could touch each other and it’s much scarier.
And his famous line, ‘A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.’ Was that from the hook as well?
In the book it’s a nice Amarone, and I didn’t know what that was, but it turns out that it’s a very well-known Italian wine, big and heavy like a Cabernet. But I thought that if I don’t know that, and I like wine, then the audience is going to stop dead at that word. So I had to change it to something more conventional.
What sort of techniques did you use to write sexually? You always notice the sexual energy in the film because there are always people looking at Clarice in a sexual way even though there is no ‘love story’ in the film.
Well, Jodie Foster’s very beautiful … You know, another way in which this isn’t a conventional story is that there is no love story, no romance. It doesn’t interest Clarice to talk about pornographic scenes with Lecter or to imagine pornographic scenes with Crawford. I was very conscious that all of the events of this movie basically take place over a week, so there’s no way to cram a boyfriend in here, realistically. She’s got too much going on. Still, I like the sense that when she’s in a scene, the men are always checking her out.
There’s a nice moment when Clarice visits Lecter and she is wet … It’s wonderful, he sees her wet hair and sends the towel through his drawer … the whole way that their relationship evolves from the first scene up until the last, the way that they become a bit more intimate.
In a way that’s the love story.
Yes, it’s a kind of love story, controversially. And it’s the absolute heart and soul of the book. It’s almost like the whole Buffalo Bill investigation only exists to justify having these scenes.
Were you worried about Catherine Martin being the daughter of a senator – that it might put the audience off because it’s too convenient?
It seemed a bit coincidental, but I accepted that it would escalate the stakes for the plot in a way that nothing else could. You’ve got to have a ticking clock and now you have a ticking clock getting national attention, so it puts a lot more pressure on this rookie, that if she screws up now it could be her career going down the drain.
You said Thomas Harris really knows his police procedurals. Does he do a lot of research on serial-killers too?
Buffalo Bill’s method of abducting a potential victim came straight out of the book, but Tom Harris got it from the Ted Bundy case, the idea of a fake injury to illicit sympathy was something Ted Bundy used to do sometimes. I think, even though this is fictional, Tom Harris uses a lot of things from real life cases. Also, there was a famous serial-killer who had a basement where he kept women in Philadelphia. I think he’s put different pieces of different killers together to create someone like this.
Going back to violence off-screen, can you give me an example of that?
Yeah, people think that it’s a very violent movie but actually there’s only about a minute of on-screen violence in two hours. It’s usually off-screen completely or by implication. You just have to be extremely careful on a movie like this. Scaring an audience is a pleasure up to a point and then they just turn on you, they are repelled. And in fact the first time we saw the movie we were actually nervous, that it was too scary, that we’d miscalculated and made too scary a movie because there was such dead silence after the movie. Then we just realized that it was stunned silence, not unhappy silence …
How do you handle writing in reaction shots for actors? The off-screen violence is now transmitted through their faces.
You’re always trying to help actors with this. What’s important is not the emotion they’re playing but the emotion they’re trying to conceal, that’s what makes for a great scene.
How was your relationship with Thomas Harris as you were working on the screenplay?
Well, we didn’t know each other well and he was very polite and respectful about what I had to do. He stayed at arm’s length throughout the movie and said, ‘Do what you have to do and don’t worry about me.’ He was an unusual writer in that way, good at letting go and letting us do our thing without trying to manage the process. He offered to help me in any way I needed, he offered to read the script but not if I didn’t want to. He said, ‘I understand that movies have a different agenda from the book and if you want to do things differently, that’s OK.’
Can you tell me something about shooting the flashbacks and why you didn’t shoot more of them?
I could see that if we were going to have flashbacks, they should culminate, there should be some climactic thing, and we should see the child Clarice encountering the slaughter of the lambs and trying to save one of them. Jonathan was willing to shoot them, it was going to be the last thing we shot as we had to wait for the lambing season in spring, and it was going to cost a million dollars to set up the whole thing. Then Jonathan shot the scene where Clarice tells Lecter about the killing of the lambs. He sent the dailies to me and said to watch them and give him a call. So I watched these performances, and they were extraordinarily powerful, and Jonathan said, ‘How can I cut away from these performances to a flashback? It’s all there: she’s telling us the entire story in her face, in her words, we don’t need to see it as well.’ He said it’s just a primary rule of filmmaking that if you can show it instead of telling it, you show it, but don’t show it and tell it. He was right, but it was scary to me.
When did you realize it was right?
When I saw the dailies and saw it cut together. It was extraordinary. He actually said to me, ‘Watch Jodie’s performance, she could win an Academy Award because of this scene with Lecter.’ This was a year and a half before the movie opened. But it scared me because I hadn’t conceived it that way and I wasn’t actually sure that it could hold up without this flashback.
And then they did this very brilliant thing here where you’re aware of the bars of his temporary cell but as the scene gets more intense and more emotional they push the camera in so that the bars disappear and there’s just no space between them at all, which is just very good.
We also had a lot of discussions about this because Jonathan said, ‘We’ve had this enormous build-up to this revelation about her trying to save this little lamb. It’s not a person, it’s a lamb. And you like rack of lamb and so do I, so why should I care about this lamb?’ And I said, ‘I don’t care about the lamb, I care about her, and if she cares that deeply, I care too.’ He said, ‘I accept the logic of that’, and that sort of removed his last doubt about this scene.
The one thing we would have seen, which is very screenwriter-ly, is that at the end of the sequence of flashbacks when she got all the way to the barn and she sees somebody in an apron with a dead lamb in front of him, when the cowboy or rancher turns around to look at her, it’s Lecter. Which is the kind of thing screenwriters get excited about but directors don’t like because you’re trying too hard. It’s gilding the lily.
Yes, but in another way, when you’re writing a scene, you’re thinking about trying to get the story across so the reader understands it, not how the actors are going to deliver it.
Right, but you’re also trying to play all the parts in your own head. And I think some of the best preparation for being a writer is to have been an actor.
You found that useful?
It sort of informs you as you write because you think, ‘If I was playing this part, I would feel like I wanted a big scene, I haven’t had a big scene yet.’ Even if you were playing a small part, you’d think, ‘If I were playing this part I’d want something interesting to do even if it was in one scene, one page of the movie, I wouldn’t want to just be a spear-carrier.’ It forces more creativity. It makes you not take any character for granted if you try to play the parts in your own mind. Or you say, ‘If I were trying to read this line, I would have trouble trying to make this line clear.’
And do you find yourself speaking out loud?
Not out loud, because then they lock you up … but in my mind I’m saying, ‘I would stumble on this word, I should change this word.’
All screenwriting and all of movie writing seems to be coming back to the same thing, which is learning what you can do without. Screenplays are always longer than the finished movie, more footage is shot than can actually be used. Movies are actually quite wasteful, because nobody knows until it’s too late. It’s always striking in your own movies that it seems like eight hours’ work and it turns into thirty seconds in the movie.
You were saying sometimes you’ll write three pages a day and some times one day is spent erasing two-and-a-half pages?
Yeah, you’re right, two pages one day and then the next day your whole day of work is spent erasing one of those pages.
Were you ever worried that the audience would guess that Lecter was playing dead in the ambulance, under the mask of skin?
No, I don’t see how you could possibly guess. I’ve seen this trick imitated since in other movies, but this is just a stunningly imaginative leap on the part of Thomas Harris. There are two great leaps, two great twists, this is the first and the second is when Clarice turns up alone at Gumb’s house just as you think the SWAT team is at Gumb’s house. Those two great sleights of hand that he pulls off are something that I could never have done.
In our discussions working on this movie, Jonathan was always the one taking the big leap and I was always the logic maker. So I was saying, ‘OK, you need to kill the medic at the back of the van, but there’s the driver of the van and he’s got to take care of him too, can we at least see the van swerve violently?’ We shot it but we had to shut down the entire tunnel to do it, which wasn’t easy. And it was all cut.
Were you ever worried about the logic of Lecter’s escape scene not working?
No, I never worry about that kind of thing, what Jonathan called ‘refrigerator questions’. The first time I heard that, I asked Jonathan what he meant, and he said, ‘You’ve seen the movie, you’ve enjoyed it, you get home and open the refrigerator and say, “Wait a minute! How could that guy have done that?” He said, ‘If it doesn’t occur to you until you get to the refrigerator, it’s not important enough for us to worry about.’
Can you give me another example of a refrigerator question?
When I saw the house Gumb lives in, I thought the exterior location didn’t look big enough to have that gigantic basement, it would be confusing for the audience, and Jonathan said, ‘Refrigerator question!’
But you do need to make certain leaps of logic in filmmaking.
Sooner or later you do cheat in every movie; you just hope it’s not too glaring.
Talking about pacing, when you have a frenetic scene like Lecter’s violent escape, are you self-consciously letting the audience adjust and slow down now with a slower scene next?
Well, in the case of Lecter’s escape, which is the big action sequence in the movie, I thought that we’d really got to get off that. We’re well into the third act and you’ve got to move on. Enough noodling around with the clues, the characters and the audience need a breakthrough. So we were trying to jump forward to the breakthrough.
I’m very anxious because I know as a screenwriter here I’m adrift in the ocean! I’ve just had this great thing with Lecter and I know if I can just get Clarice to Gumb’s house, then that’s going to save me. But in between it’s hard. I know it’s going to work, even though it’s kind of very familiar madman in the basement chasing somebody in the dark, I know it’s going to work.
When I wrote this first draft I was borrowing an office from Robert Benton, the film director and writer, and he knew the book and once in a while I would try to talk to him, thinking that he’d have better ideas than me. He never wanted to talk about it that way. But I did one time sit there moaning about how hard it was, and I said, ‘You know what? All this work, this whole thing, it just adds up to a madman in a basement chasing a girl, and you’ve seen that a million times – is that going to be enough?’ And he said, ‘That’s what you’ve promised the audience, that’s what it sets up for two hours so you’ve got to deliver that whether it’s been in a million movies or not, that’s what you’ve promised.’ The two characters have been coming to this collision for the entire movie. And yeah, it’s a madman in a basement but the night-vision goggles will help.
It’s not where you go, it’s how you get there.
Right, it’s how you get there and how much you care about the character.
This is the other thing I love; Catherine Martin is not just a victim, Catherine Martin is working as hard as she can to save her own life, she’s not waiting for someone to come and save her. It’s typical Thomas Harris that he cares about every character and he cares about every character’s self-interest, and in this situation you would try to think of something, you wouldn’t just sit there and wait to be killed. It just gives you one more plot line going on here.
Gumb’s basement lair feels like something out of a horror film, it’s almost a grotesque funhouse.
Jonathan was told once by Roger Corman, ‘The scariest shot in all of movies is the camera approaching a closed door, that you know somebody’s got to open it. The anticipation is much scarier than anything, it’s the most terrifying shot in the movie, it’s not expensive, it’s not special effects.’ So that scene uses this theory with a vengeance. I like how chaotic it is, it’s just like neither Clarice nor Catherine is in control, they’re just upset and they’re angry, neither one of them has a clue, they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s a long way from an Arnold Schwarzenegger action sequence.
So, after the denouement, how do you bring Hannibal back in at the end so the audience can, in a way, say goodbye and thanks?
This was another question. At one point I was even toying with the idea that he was in the back of the audience of the graduation, then I thought, ‘I can’t get away with that, it’s pushing too far.’ Or that he makes some comment on the phone that indicates that he was physically there, ‘You look lovely today’ or something. I think it’s enough that he calls her. I thought, ‘How would he possibly get this number, at this moment?’ And then I thought, ‘Refrigerator question.’
But Hannibal ringing her at her graduation was written differently in the book …
Initially when he calls, it turns out that he’s at Chiltern’s house and as he talks he’s strolling across a lawn, you see the sea, he steps over a body into the house, walks down the hall, and at the end of the scene he’s in Chiltern’s study where Chiltern is all bound and gagged and just very terrified. And it ended up with Lecter hanging up from her and saying, ‘Well, Dr Chiltern, shall we begin?’ And Jonathan said, ‘It’s great but it’s too horrific; even though Chiltern’s a slime-bag we have to give him at least some vague fighting chance of getting away.’ Then we came up with the idea that he would try to escape to a tropical island and maybe Lecter is already there ahead of him. And we don’t know how but maybe that would be more fun. Jonathan loved that idea, especially because it meant he could get a trip to a tropical island at the end of shooting this movie; after a winter in Pittsburgh, he could take a cruise in this case to Bimini or somewhere. Of course then he went through all that and the weather didn’t co-operate, it stayed overcast for days and they couldn’t get that pretty tropical thing that the script called for. But Ed Saxon said, ‘It’s OK, it’s atmospheric, the wind blew a lot, it’s kind of strange and gloomy for the tropics but it’s still got atmosphere.’
And this was a joke throughout the entire shoot. I said, ‘Jonathan, can I have my crane shot at the end? Nobody ever lets me end a movie with a crane shot.’ He said, ‘I will give you your crane shot.’ And in fact they had to get a barge to haul the crane to Bimini, you can’t just go to Bimini and find a movie crane, you had to haul it there. But he had promised me a crane shot.
It’s a good thing you saved a million bucks on the last flashback sequence.
Exactly. The other frustrating thing was that I didn’t get to go to Bimini. It would have been a fun thing but it just didn’t fit into my schedule.
Could you have predicted that Silence of the Lambs would do as well as it did?
Well, I couldn’t have predicted. This movie now appears in books of the greatest films ever made, and the top hundred this and that. We couldn’t predict that but we knew it was a really good movie. We knew early on. I went to the set and they’d just shot that stuff in the storage unit where she finds the head. And I ran into Jonathan’s producer Kenneth Utt and asked, ‘How’s it going?’ He said, ‘We’re making a great movie.’ And this was only after three weeks; Anthony Hopkins hadn’t shot a single scene yet. Kenneth said, ‘I haven’t had this feeling on a movie since Midnight Cowboy; it’s going to be a classic’ So there was kind of that feeling throughout that something really cool was happening.
And Jonathan Demme, the way that he treated people – you were having fun?
You have to keep it light; you’re in Pittsburgh, it’s freezing, it’s February and you’re making a really dark movie. So there were a lot of practical jokes on set, a lot of goofing around, sometimes he would even make somebody deliberately do something wrong just to see if they could crack up Jodie Foster on camera, which is hard to do but he managed it once or twice. And dailies would be a thing where you’d bring popcorn and soda like going to a movie, even though it might only be fifteen minutes. People would see themselves on the screen and throw popcorn at the screen if it was bad. It was a great atmosphere and we knew, especially by the time Jodie and Anthony shot their scenes together, we knew it was amazingly powerful. The question was whether it was too powerful.
The first time I saw it other than in a screening room was at a private screening in New York with just people who were working on it. And then I came to Hollywood with Jonathan and wanted to show it to some friends here, just in a little screening room. I remember there were a few movie-star people there, who were just friends. Jonathan introduced me to Jessica Lange, and I said to her, ‘I just hope the critics allow Jonathan this movie, because it’s so different from his other work. They like to feel as if they determine what he does, and they like him doing comedies. I’m afraid they won’t allow him this movie.’ And Jessica Lange said, ‘I don’t think they have a choice …’
Lisa Cholodenko
‘Oh my fucking God, that was a trip that I just went through.’ Lucy (Ally Sheedy) considers her latest obsession.