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This check was for around $10 million. With two wary studios (Universal and MGM) sharing the cost of the rocky production, everyone else involved with Hannibal has been rather tense for quite some time. As soon as Silence became a hit, legendary producer Dino De Laurentiis, 81, began his vigil for novelist Thomas Harris' next Hannibal Lecter book. De Laurentiis had "first negotiation, last refusal" rights for any movie containing the Lecter character, as he had produced Manhunter, the 1986 adaptation of Harris' Red Dragon, in which Lecter made his first screen appearance in the form of actor Brian Cox. Manhunter didn't perform at the box office, so De Laurentiis later passed on Silence. Should you get invited to the De Laurentiises' for dinner, don't bring that up.
Harris finally turned in Hannibal in 1999. De Laurentiis quickly bought the book for $10 million. "Worth every penny!" says De Laurentiis, whose English is obscured by his ornate Italian accent. After six decades in the movie industry (his credits include La Strada, Barbarella and the 1990 remake of The Desperate Hours, in which Hopkins co-starred), De Laurentiis is, like Hannibal, unstoppable. Asked what would have happened if his old friend Hopkins had turned down the sequel, he answers quickly, "We open with Hannibal in plastic surgery!"
One's affinity for the novel (and the movie) depends on one's taste for violent, rather sophisticated camp. Lecter is now on the loose in Florence, Italy. Back in the States, there's a crazy, deformed, jillionaire pedophile named Mason Verger (Gary Oldman), who years earlier peeled off his own face while under the spell of Lecter. Verger plans to capture Lecter and feed him to a herd of vicious swine. Verger will use Clarice Starling, the FBI agent who has a mysterious bond with the fugitive, as bait. Lecter is up to his usual tricks: shopping, disemboweling, forcing a victim to eat his own brains, that kind of thing. Finally, in the novel Clarice apparently becomes a cannibal herself. Don't worry: we haven't given away the ending of the film; screenwriters David Mamet (State and Main) and Steven Zaillian (Schindler's List) have changed it, but it's still really gross.
Critics bruised the novel pretty badly, but Hopkins got a kick out of it: "I thought it was way over the top but interesting." Foster wasn't so taken. Early on, De Laurentiis refused to pay her $20 million asking price, then after she read the screenplay, she opted out, saying she preferred to direct a movie of her own. "She need the picture more than we need her," scoffs the producer. "I believe she's wrong for this movie. We have a different story, mature woman with sex appeal, and I don't think it's right for Jodie Foster."
The book also failed to seduce Jonathan Demme and Ted Tally, the Oscar-winning director and writer of Silence. Director Ridley Scott, however, read Harris' manuscript while shooting Gladiator in Malta and signed on right away. "I saw in the material humor and romanticism," says Scott. "I think the first team missed that." Zaillian says he took on the writing challenge "because it sounded like fun."