On March 30, 1992, when Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor opened the envelope with the last Oscar of the night, The silence of the lambs made history. The Best Picture statuette not only made it the first horror film to win the highest award. The other four he took – Best Director for Jonathan Demme, Best Actor for Anthony Hopkins, Best Actress for Jodie Foster and Best Adapted Screenplay for Ted Tally – made it the third film, after It happened one night (F. Capra, 1934) y Some one flies over the cuco’s nidus (M. Forman, 1975) in sweeping the five main categories, the Big Five, a milestone that has not been repeated since then. But the first step in the journey of The silence of the lambs to establish itself as the modern classic that it is today began three years earlier. And it was in that same Shrine Auditorium, when the actor who had bought the rights to the Thomas Harris novel to make his directorial debut decided to abandon the project.
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“Are you easily scared?”
At the 61st Oscars, Gene Hackman lost the Oscar for Best Actor – it went to Dustin Hoffman for Rain Man (B. Levinson, 1988) – and the desire to direct a project that he had been working on for months. Overwhelmed by the images of violence shown in the clips of Arde Mississippi (A. Parker, 1988) that were taught at the gala, Hackman thought that the script that had just been given to him was too harsh and extreme: he could not do it. There are those who say that it was their daughter’s thing, that by reading the script she convinced her father to park that story “So rugged and terrifying. Gene still didn’t know if he was going to be able to direct and play Lecter. “recalls screenwriter Ted Tally, who at that time only had one title on his resume, the torrid Passion without barriers (L. Mandoki, 1990). “He was thinking about saving the character of Jack Crawford and he told me that Bobby could be Hannibal. Today I still don’t know what Bobby was referring to. Duvall? From Niro? Redford? He assumed he knew who he was talking about. And soon after, he left it. He didn’t even call me. I found out from my agent “. The project, without a director and without a star, returned to Orion Pictures, the studio that shared the rights with Hackman. The problem? The label, whose catalog featured hits like Amadeus, Platoon The Dancing with Wolves, was on the verge of bankruptcy. Maybe that’s why Jonathan Demme, who with Something wild (1986) and Married to everyone (1988) had helped to clean up the battered accounts of the producer, ended up taking over the film. “I wouldn’t have thought of myself”joked the New York filmmaker, who died in 2017. “I had a thriller in my hands for which I wanted Danny Glover. But before they gave me the green light, they handed me Harris’s novel and Ted’s script to read. I loved them. I knew it was going to be an incredible film, terrifying like no other “. With Demme on board, the name dance began. Dustin Hoffman, Morgan Freeman … All of Hollywood wanted to play Lecter, the filmmaker recalled, who, however, was very clear about who he wanted to play Clarice Starling: Michelle Pfeiffer.
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“Good evening, Clarice.”
“Jonathan thought of Pfeiffer because they had just finished working together, but for me she was too pretty and 10 years older to be Starling”Tally says she had another candidate in mind: “Jodie Foster called me when I started writing the script. It was perfect ”. The interest of the former child prodigy, who had just won an Oscar for Accused (J. Kaplan, 1988), came from afar: “I read the novel and tried to buy the rights, but I was late”recalls the actress. His plan, initially and as he told FOTOGRAMAS in 2017, was to direct “An adaptation that would have been very different and much smaller. A tiny film, with a meager budget, with a tiny cell as the only setting in which two characters speak and that’s it ”. Discarded Plan A, Foster went to Plan B: “For me it was very important to get the role through the healing process, the growth of the character. She had already played many victims, she wanted to embody a woman who saves another woman, in which she sees herself. That’s when the studio told me that Jonathan was not interested in me. I was devastated. But I decided to fly to New York, show up at his office and ask him directly. ‘I want to be your second choice’, I said “. Before long, Pfeiffer, also concerned about the story’s potential for violence, declined the offer. It would not be the last.
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“It is a monster. An absolute psychopath ”
“Disgusting”. That’s what the character of Hannibal Lecter thought to Sean Connery, “The only actor I thought of besides Anthony Hopkins to embody it”, Demme would tell years later. Those virulent reactions to that particular role and the plot and style suggested by the script in general were the usual response since Manhunter (M. Mann, 1986), the adaptation of Red Dragon, Harris’s first novel produced by Dino De Laurentiis, failed at the box office. Nobody dared, or rather, nobody knew what to do with a material that years later would give rise to three more films and a couple of TV series, in addition to forever marking the genre and the figure of the serial killer for the screen. Perhaps that is why Hopkins’ reaction is even more shocking, to which Demme went with a clear conscience after the rejection of Connery, the more commercial alternative: “When I saw the title, I thought it was a children’s movie”, He said. The director thought of the Briton, an actor respected in the industry, but without appeal at the box office, for his work in The elephant Man (D. Lynch, 1980). “In it, he embodied the best of doctors you can imagine”Demme claimed. “What if Lecter was someone like Dr. Teves… but lost his way and turned into Evil? That was my idea. “ Hopkins, for his part, said he knew how to approach the character “Just reading the script: it was instinctive. I was inspired by HAL 9000, the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey (S. Kubrick, 1968). As if voice and body did not fit, a killing machine. The trick was to play it very normally … and let the viewer do all the work ”.
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“Quid Pro Quo, Agent Starling”
That approach was also the one that Demme and his team adopted when it comes to staging: suggest rather than show. Something that the filmmaker was clear after the first reading of the script, a week before starting to shoot in the fall of 1989. “When Hopkins read his last sentence, you could feel the electricity in the environment. I knew we had an extraordinary material, a superlative horror film at the height of Psychosis (A. Hitchcock, 1960) ”, declared the director, who quoted the magician of the suspense, Samuel Fuller and his time at the Corman factory –“Because we never had time to shoot them”– among his influences on the film’s most striking visual bet: the disturbing use of subjective close-ups. This technique, in addition to conveying an unsettling sense of intimacy and closeness to the relationship between Lecter and Starling, helped cement one of the urban legends around the film: that Foster and Hopkins avoided each other during filming. “We don’t shoot that much together either”, clarifies Foster. “He completed his role in about 10 days, and he was always well behind the bars or the Plexiglas wall, which took forever to set up, and I was on the other side. Our scenes were very long, sometimes 10 pages of dialogue, and we shared the shots on different days: his one, mine another. And when we acted, the other was just a voice in the distance. On his last day, I realized that we had not exchanged a word. So I said, ‘You know? You scared me a little. ‘ And he replied: ‘You scared me!’ We laughed, we hugged each other and that was the end of it ”.
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John T. Barr
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“An old friend is waiting for me for dinner”
Filming ended in March 1989, in one of the coldest winters in years in Pittsburgh, where most of the film was shot. The atmosphere, however, was warm and cheerful, with surprising friendships, such as Ted Levine (Buffalo Bill) and Brooke Smith (Catherine, the kidnapped girl), who became close. The set was filled with friends making cameos – Roger Corman, George A. Romero – and also members of the crew – producer Kenneth Utt, Demme himself, screenwriter Tally. “Do you know when everything is perfect? The script, the casting, the filming … “explained Foster. “I was 29 when I shot it. While we were doing it, I was not aware that I would never have an experience like this again. We all had the feeling that we were doing something special. My only fear was that we would screw it up. I was scared by Jonathan’s humor, who shot many funny scenes, funny situations that later, in the editing, he eliminated. It was great to see how Jonathan found the film in the editing room. “. With just a few tweaks to the first script – like that different ending in the Caribbean, for which Harris pointed out that Lecter should not sweat anything -, from the first test pass it was seen that “The film was flying and it could work, but we were not expecting the nominations or, of course, the awards”, confessed Demme, one of the architects of this cinematographic miracle that, 30 years later, still does not silence the screams of terror of those lambs.
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