Tag: Hannibal

Watch: In ‘Hannibal,’ The Script Is Only the Beginning

Watch: In ‘Hannibal,’ The Script Is Only the Beginning

The script is everything and nothing at the the same time. In this video essay, Vashi Nedomansky runs the script for the ‘Hannibal‘ pilot below 5 minutes of the actual episode. And what do we learn? We learn that, to work with Bryan Fuller’s script, DP James Hawkinson had to listen to it. David Slade, the director, could only help him so much–and the vision Fuller might have had in mind was only as executable as he made it on the page. We can see, from the samples we have here, that the script was explicit–but we can also see that scripts don’t move or make noise. For the show to come to terrifying, pristine life, as it has, the visions of the DP and director had to catch fire, somehow. And, judging from the show we have in front of us, that fire was one that would burn for a long time.     

Watch: Hannibal Lecter: Three Actors, One Mutating Identity

Watch: Hannibal Lecter: Three Actors, One Mutating Identity

Who’s your Lecter? A more serious question than it might seem, posed in this excellent montage by Matthew Morettini. Morettini has taken the three people to play Thomas Harris’s famous villain–Brian Cox, Anthony Hopkins, and Mads Mikkelsen, in chronological order–and interwoven their portrayals around a famous scene in which profiler Will Graham goes to interview Lecter about a serial killing. The idea behind the scene is clear; the characters are not so much talking to each other as dancing around each other, each man trying to find out how the other man ticks, neither man getting an entirely satisfying result, both men heading off into the abysses of their own selves after the conversation is over.  In this survey of Michael Mann’s exploration in ‘Manhunter,’ Brett Ratner’s exploration in ‘Red Dragon," and Bryan Fuller’s examination in ‘Hannibal,’ we see three faces attached to one rotting core, all saying something slightly different when interrogated–not different in the words they say, but in the way they say those words, which ends up making all the difference.