NBC’s Hannibal follows the psychiatrist, serial killer and cannibal (here played by Mads Mikkelsen) in a time before he was captured, as he works alongside Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), the man destined to capture him. While there was skepticism when the project was first announced, Hannibal is debuting this Thursday to a lot of positive buzz – and I for one loved it.
An integral reason for that is due to the work executive producer/showrunner Bryan Fuller, whose credits on series like Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls showed his gift for crafting strong, distinct characters and wildly imaginative scenarios to put them in. Fuller goes to a darker and creepier place with Hannibal, but it’s still obviously the same creative mind at work.
I spoke to Fuller about Hannibal, for what ended up being a lengthy, in-depth conversation about his approach to such an iconic character and the world he lives in. Fuller talks about his long term plans for the series, his take on Lecter and Graham and much more. Fans of the source material will also be quite intrigued by what Fuller had to say about using elements specifically created for The Silence of the Lambs.
IGN TV: Hannibal Lecter is obviously this beloved character, and there have been great movies about him in the past. But when you’re offered something like this, I’d imagine there might be some trepidation too, just because it comes with so much baggage and expectations.
Bryan Fuller: You know, it wasn’t so much trepidation as it was just excitement of the missing chapter, for me, and of when he was a practicing psychiatrist and a practicing cannibal. We had never seen that story. We had seen the prequel Hannibal Rising, when he was a young man around World War II, and certainly post-incarceration. But the unexplored chapter of the Hannibal Lecter story that doesn’t exist in literature or film or on television is when he was a practicing psychiatrist and cannibal. I thought that was a validity in and of itself, to bring this character back. I’m sure a lot of people were like, “Ugh, leave it alone.” But we ended on Hannibal Rising, which I wasn’t a huge fan of, and I wanted to get back into the heart of the character in a way that I saw him. I was never really connected to the Hannibal Rising version of the character because he was such a young man that I think who Hannibal Lecter is as a sophisticate and a man of the world just does not translate when you’re seeing a young man murderer. He seems more of a punk than someone who is well aware of life and stakes.
IGN: Of course, casting is always key, but here your main three characters have been played by multiple actors. And Hopkins’ especially was such an iconic performance. What was it you were looking for, and what was it you found with Mads to play this role?
Fuller: I think the key was we had to put up an orange cone where Anthony Hopkins had tread, as well as Brian Cox, because I think Brian Cox’s performance [in Manhunter] is as iconic as Anthony Hopkins. There’s much debate and hardcore Lecter-verse fans of who was the superior Hannibal Lecter, and for me both were excellent. I refuse to choose a favorite. Obviously Anthony Hopkins won the Academy Award, and Silence of the Lambs was a spectacular film, so he’s got more audience real estate than Brian Cox. But if we’re talking about performances, they’re both excellent performances. So we just wanted to make sure we weren’t going in either of those directions.
What I love about Mads and Mads’ approach is that when we first sat down -- first of all, he’s so charismatic, and he is so excited about what he does and his meticulous approach to crafting a character that I just knew was in great hands of a fantastic performer. But also, one of the things that we talked about in our first meeting was not so much about playing Hannibal as the cannibal psychiatrist, as previously portrayed by other actors, but more like Lucifer and how he was a dark angel who had this affinity for mankind and a fascination with the human condition. But he also recognized when people were not respectful of their rules or place in society and were rude, and felt that they deserved to have those places revoked. So if you’re a pig of human being, you deserve to be Hannibal Lecter’s bacon. There was a simplicity to looking at the role, particularly Mads’ portrayal of the role through the lens of “this is a devil at work here.” And it kind of gives him a greater mythology -- not that we have to tap into any sort of Judeo-Christian context at all -- but if you just watch the show and think that this is a devil at work and not a man there is a consistency with Mads’ performance, particularly when he gets very emotionally involved. Because Hannibal Lecter is unique in his crazy. He’s not a psychopath, because he experiences regret. And he not a sociopath, because he experiences empathy. So he is unique in his crazy, and that gives him a higher sensibility than just a mortal man.
IGN: I’m very intrigued by the portrayal of Will Graham, another person who’s been played by a couple of great actors in the past. Here, obviously a big difference between previous versions is that we are seeing much more of Will’s career before anything happens with actually catching Hannibal. In Red Dragon, he's married, but here, he’s very much a loner. You’ve got this very intriguing thing where he talks about where he is "on the spectrum" and the fact that he really has some problems with interpersonal relationships. How did that come to you?
Fuller: Well, we were looking at our timeline and saying, “Season 4 is Red Dragon”, so where Will is psychologically in terms of his confidence and approach to solving these crimes? We would see Molly in Season 3, and that’s when we would introduce that character. Also, how Will Graham got to be in a relationship based on his idiosyncrasies, that would be part of the story that we’re telling with him, as going from a man who is on the outside looking in at the human condition -- because he is so vulnerable and sensitive to other people that he has to protect himself from that. There are a couple of things in the book that were indicative of certain personality disorders or neuroses that I thought, “Oh, he’s actually much more complicated than any of the kind of stoic heroes that we’ve seen portrayed by William Peterson and Ed Norton.” So it felt like there was, like with Hannibal, an opportunity to explore a chapter in Will Graham’s life that we hadn’t seen, but was indicated in the literature, whether it was when he’s talking to a police detective or Molly’s son about how he caught the Minnesota Shrike or Hannibal Lecter.
There was a very thin history that we could work within, which was we knew that Will Graham was investigating a serial killer called the Minnesota Shrike and after catching him was so traumatized by that event that he had to go into psychiatric care. Instead of positing that he was just with a random psychiatrist, the break in the canon of the literature that we took was that that psychiatrist would be Hannibal Lecter. Because he doesn’t really know Hannibal Lecter in the literature. He had two meetings with him. One was to question him about a murder, and the second was a follow up. Then in that follow up he realized, “This guy’s the killer,” and then Hannibal guts him with a carpet knife, and Will captures him. So that was the extent of their relationship. What I thought, there was so much promise in the line where Hannibal says, “You caught me because you’re more like me than you’re willing to admit.” I thought that was the heart of the television series.
Continue to Page 2 as Fuller talks about defying expectations and finding humor in the macabre.
Source : ign[dot]com
No comments:
Post a Comment