Sorry to continue the hijack, but according to Ridley Scott the reason for Jodie Foster not being in the film was because of her other project.
Around the time that Hannibal started production, there was a press conference with the director and the cast in Italy. I heard sound clips on a site on the web.
Anyway, someone asked and Scott said something to the affect that Foster had been waiting years and years to do the Riefenstahl film, but financing had continually fallen through. She got financing for the film right around the same time that she got the script for Hannibal. The Riefenstahl thing has apparently been her passion for a long time, so she went for it.
Though, due to an injury (to Russel Crowe, I believe), it’s on semi-permenent hiatus.
As I’ve mentioned before, if you want the straight dope on everything related to upcoming movies, hie thee to Corona Coming Attractions.
There you will learn that Ben Affleck has indeed taken over the Jack Ryan role for the next movie in the series, The Sum of All Fears, after work on The Cardinal of the Kremlin was abandoned. You can find out who’s writing it, what the status of the production is, and so on.
You’ll also find out that Jodie Foster hated the Thomas Harris novel, and waited to see how much the producers would change it in the screenplay before she decided whether or not to do the film. The originally commissioned adaptation (by David Mamet, no less) was reasonably faithful to the book, so Foster opted out in favor of a circus drama she had long contemplated, Flora Plum, starring Russell Crowe and Claire Danes. (Incidentally, the grisliness of the Harris novel is also why Ted Tally and Jonathan Demme, who respectively wrote and directed Silence, opted out of the sequel.) Now, of course, Flora Plum has been sidetracked temporarily, as Crowe has an injured shoulder, so Foster has dropped out of chairing the Cannes jury to take over the lead in Panic Room, directed by David Fincher, a role Nicole Kidman had to abandon because of her own injury sustained during the shooting of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge.
So, anyway, that’s where things stand. Go read Corona, or check out the brand-new movie news update on my own site (see link in sig).
(Pumping more rumor into the fire until cervaise comes by with the chit.) I read that neither Foster nor Hopkins wanted to do this one, due to the graphic and disturbing nature of the story. Hopkins was considered indispensable and was paid whatever it took, which apparently precluded a similar offer to Foster.
Thomas Harris is a kind of a weird author. My friends in the publishing industry say he’s one of the least accomodating authors out there, in that he demands a lucrative deal up front with an open-ended time frame. Once signed, you don’t hear from the guy for years until one day, a completed manuscript shows up in the mail. Hannibal was rather typical for Harris; he has published exactly four books, Black Sunday, Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal under that name since 1976.
I’m not sure what Harris was up to with this one. I caught Red Dragon just after it came out and found it to be a tricky and interesting novelization of the rather new “profiling” phenomenon that was finding its way into the culture. It borrowed heavily from real-life examples of Kemper and Gacey, Ramirez and Berkowitz, Roesller and Douglass. SOTL was a nice piece that followed up on the original while focusing once again on Harris’ classic theme of the minority outsider hero.
This one, however, just goes way over the top. It’s manipulative in a way that the others weren’t. It’s malicious where the others were triumphant, and it seems largely designed to be just good enough to kill something the author is no longer interested in, while forcing Hollywood to deal with some shit they normally wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. If the film remains remotely true to the book, it’s going to freak a lot of people out, maybe even hurt them. I wish Kubrick were still around.
Has he ever spoken about this? Do we even know who Thomas Harris is, besides a former journalist? What does this fellow do with his spare time?
Hey, cervaise! I’m always glad to see you lay down the smack; I just wish I could type faster.
My understanding from all the buzz and the recent coverage is that Steve Zaillian’s script abandons a lot of the material from the novel, including Lector’s “memory palaces,” Verger’s sister, and Lector’s wartime experiences and relationship with his sister, just to concentrate on Hannibal’s throughline in the story. Most of Starling’s home life and relationship with her roommate are gone, too.
It’s also been intimated that the ending has been changed, but not significantly enough to detract from the moral implications and the shock value.
Topic titles can be misleading. I thought “original Hannibal” meant the guy who crossed the Alps with elephants (getting some very cross elephants, and leading to the popular expression that the Lord alps those who alp themselves.)
I read somewhere that Jodie Foster didn’t merely “dislike” the script; but was absolutely revolted by it. She would not tolerate [spoiler deleted].
[Edited by Chronos on 02-06-2001 at 01:30 PM]
Galen, it would be very nice of you to ask a moderator to delete your post, since it contains a plot point that could be considered a spoiler to the book and/or movie.
Incidentally, this was Ridley Scott’s thinking, too, when he first saw Dino de Laurentiis (the producer) show up on the set of Gladiator in Malta.
“Hannibal? I’m already doing one Roman film. I don’t want elephants in Alps!” (paraphrased from the current Premiere magazine article of the film).
Well, I thought the book was the best yet-
was thrilled at events re: HL & CS.
And loved the particular sequences- done just so, I thought.
Lecter is one of my heroes, even though he is revealed to have some, in my opinion, reasoning flaws (re: his sis). I thought it all the more charming, since this revealed his humanity.
I hear the movie doesn’t follow the book on several important aspects- I am pre-disappointed, but will see it anyway, and am still anticipatory, if that can be reconciled with the above statement…
Anyway, to me, it was triumphant…
Huh. I could have sworn I just posted a link that comprehensively explains all of this, and provides concrete details that will inform what otherwise amounts to half-remembered news coverage and rampant speculation. Maybe I’m just imagining things.
…No, there it is, a couple of messages above. I knew I couldn’t have imagined it. :rolleyes:
I’ve heard, now, that they are going to do another movie based on the first novel Red Dragon (or re-make of Manhunter, whichever you prefer) and it’ll star Hopkins. In the recent TVGuide interview, the interviewer asks if he’ll be in “the third one” and Hopkins says yes.
What else was he going to say? “The reason Jody’s not making this movie is because our script sucks and she’s not a total whore like the rest of us.”
That’s interesting–this showed up on the Internet Movie Database on 1/21/01:
Hopkins Refuses To Play Hannibal In Third Film
Welsh actor Sir Anthony Hopkins is refusing to reprise his Oscar- winning role as Hannibal Lecter in a prequel to Silence of the Lambs, The (1991). The star believes he has taken the role as far as it will go - even though he has been offered a reported $20 million to carry on the vicious slaughtering. Producer Dino De Laurentiis is keen to make another thriller based on Thomas Harris’ first book containing Lecter, Red Dragon. But Hopkins has said to close friends, “I think we’ve gone to the line with Hannibal, with the jokes and the gore. I think people would think we were being greedy if we went on any further.” Red Dragon was previously adapted into the movie Manhunter (1986) by director Michael Mann with British actor Brian Cox in the lead role as the flesh-eating killer. De Laurentiis insists, “Everyone wants to see what happened before Lecter was originally caught. There is room for more than Harris put in his first novel. The entertainment factor is still very high, as is the demand.”
You fucking ROCK 
<–wiping shit off of nose happily.
Cartooniverse
[Moderator watch ON]
galen, I realize that the purpose of this board is to eradicate ignorance, but in some cases, that can be a bit impolite. Those who haven’t yet read the book or saw the movie Hannibal probably weren’t aware of the plot point you mentioned above, and the book or movie would probably have the best impact if they remained unaware of it until the appropriate point in the story, so I edited that out. If you can think of some other workable solution (does anybody actually use Rot-13 anymore?), e-mail me and I’ll see about putting it back in.
I heard that they were going to get Mr. Bean to play Lector in SOTL, but between takes he kept wandering around the studio after bright, shiny things.