Author Brian Raftery – Hannibal Lecter A Life

Hannibal Lecter A Life – Rough Transcript

John (00:00)
We were very fortunate to have a visit by Brian Raftery and he has just finished this book, Hannibal Lecter, a life. It is coming out on the 10th and we got to spend a few minutes talking with him. Here’s the conversation. Hello everyone. Welcome to the show today. I’m excited. we’re here with author Brian Raftery and his new book Hannibal Lecter, a life is about to come out and we’re very excited to talk to him today. I brought in Katherine because this is so far out of my wheelhouse. ⁓

I’m afraid to watch scary movies, so I’m going to turn a lot of things over to Catherine. So welcome today, Brian.

Brian (00:36)
Thank you so much for having me. And I’m kind of a frady cat too. I love horror movies, but I also get scared very easily. So I don’t take it personally. No shame.

Katherine (00:46)
definitely call myself ⁓ a horror fan. ⁓ pretty much that’s all I watch and a lot of what I consume. So but yeah, me and my husband, we we watch some pretty schlocky stuff. You know what I mean? We we we love the 80s and all that sort of stuff. But of course, of course, I’ve you know, I’ve seen the Hannibal movies and all that sort of stuff. But I actually, John, I was curious because kind of the beginning of the book starts talking about

⁓ Hannibal as kind of, you a cultural figure, part of the zeitgeist and stuff, and there was a really kind of big wave of it in the 90s with the movies coming out. Did you watch them at the time? I was a child. I was born in 93, so I did not watch them as a child.

John (01:33)
Who you asking that to, Catherine? You. ⁓ no, I absolutely have never seen this movie, even though people have told me it’s so good that I need to watch it. But I just have refused. So, no, I have no background.

Katherine (01:34)
Good job.

But you still you still know if somebody said a nice Chianti and fava beans, you know that line, right? I do. I think everybody everybody knows that.

John (01:55)
Yes.

Yes.

Brian (01:59)
Yeah, think sort of trans, I think Hannah Black was kind of transcended the movies in the books to a point where even if don’t know him, you know him.

Katherine (02:07)
Absolutely, absolutely. The other thing that I didn’t know about the author of the Handlebooks was ⁓ that he’s actually from Mississippi. Did you know that, John?

John (02:19)
No, interviewing me, Catherine. No, I didn’t know that.

Katherine (02:24)
I just thought it was interesting because you’re also from Mississippi. So I thought maybe that, you know, I mean, you could kind of relate in the sense that he kind of grew up in a small town. He grew up, you know, in a southern way and kind of a similar way that you did and stuff like that. So just thought that was interesting.

John (02:43)
I didn’t know that.

Katherine (02:45)
So let’s jump into some questions. I mean, my first question, of course, is what compelled you to write about Hannibal Lecter in the first place? I mean, I love it. I think it’s great, but I’m just I was curious.

Brian (02:58)
Well, you know, I’m a little bit older than you many years old. So I remember when Salads of Lambs came out. I did not see it actually. I was 14 or 15 and I didn’t see it. I can’t remember. I didn’t see it because I was a little afraid, which I definitely was. Or if I, my mom wouldn’t let me see it, which may have also been, it was probably that I was afraid. I wasn’t seeing a lot of R rated movies at that point. But you know, I loved the Salads of Lambs when I finally saw it. was, you know, it’s a movie that I’ve watched.

many, many times in the last couple of decades. And I always knew the story of the making of the movie and the story of how its release would be maybe a great book. So at first I just thought about doing a book on the silence of the lands. But then after talking to my editor, we talked more about this idea of, well, Hannibal Lecter now is almost, mean, Hannibal Lecter was introduced in 1981, so he’s almost 50 years old now. So at the time we were talking though, he’d been around for 40 years.

He’d been out of the culture for many years. The TV show went off the air a long time ago, and yet he still kind of was looming large. And we were kind of talking about this idea of like, okay, Hannibal Lecter, how did this character who goes from making, in his first book, Hannibal Lecter only appears for about 12 pages, the entire book. Super tiny, you know. Even Silence of the Lambs, the movie that won Anthony Hopkins an Oscar, he’s barely in it for more than half an hour. And he disappears for large chunks in the movie.

And even the NBC show, was a cult, which people love, you it wasn’t a smash hit, yet everyone knows who Hannibal Lecter is. So we were kind of talking about like, okay, what if we tell the story of this character, how he was created, who invented him, where he came from, and then looked at how all these kind of landmark movies and books were put together. And then also kind of looked at a bigger picture question of, well, what does it mean that we all love, like this guy has become a genuine anti-hero, this guy who he’s like, you know,

He’s cannibal. eats people. He disembowels a cop in his most famous movie. How did he become like an action figure? How did he become someone that’s like so recognizable that even like a 10 year old kid would know what a Hannibal Lecter mask was? So it kind of became a mix of history and cultural analysis, but also trying to have kind of fun with the idea of like, what does it mean? What does it say about us that we created Hannibal Lecter in a way this country embraced him and that he still

so huge today, you

Katherine (05:23)
Yeah. A quote that you quoted of Truman Capote and I’ve read like in cold blood and stuff. I was definitely a really big like true crime person. Yeah. And I think that this quote is like so perfect. It says the human heart being what it is. Murder is a theme not likely to darken and yellow with time. Yeah. You know, I think there’s always kind of this question of why true crime now. I used to I used to listen to this podcast that was

You know, mainly true crime podcasts. And that was kind of always the question that people were asking them why true crime now. But I think that kind of says it all. It’s evergreen. We’re so curious and we’re so interested. You know, I mean, like one one of the the main kind of not the main, but one of the influences like was the Ed Gein case. Right. And how that took the country by storm. And that was in the 50s. You know, we always try to think of.

The 50s is like this very, you know, conformist time. Everybody is like, you know, it’s very taboo to talk about these things, but everybody was incredibly interested in that case. John, can’t imagine you know much about that, do you?

John (06:35)
No, no, but I’m from the fifties.

Katherine (06:38)
Okay.

Brian (06:39)
It

is interesting because in the 50s, when you look back, it has always been portrayed in media. I wasn’t around in the 50s, but it was always kind of portrayed as the Eisenhower suburban, everything is hunky dory. And then the 60s America went crazy. But you look at what in the 50s, all these pulp magazines were not only covering true crime, like incredibly salientiously. And yeah, as you mentioned, like Ed Gein was not like a story that was relegated to like the back of the newspaper.

It was like an 11 or 12 page story in Life magazine. was covered, his life was covered ⁓ in mainstream publications across the country. And it’s been interesting because we are definitely in the last 10 years has definitely been a true crime boom. Thanks for podcasting. But it’s not like true crime was invented the last 10 years. It’s definitely, it’s been around forever. And I remember in the nineties, after the Silence of the Lambs, and I think in some ways, possibly because of Silence of the Lambs, afternoon TV was all these shows.

like Inside Edition and Access Hollywood. Forensic files. Yeah, I mean, well, there was these entertainment shows that when they started in late 80s, they were about like, know, Farrah Foster and Michael Jackson at the Grammys. And now then all of sudden, at a certain point in 90s, it all became Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy. Like it’s it’s they totally shifted to the point where serial killers were kind of becoming celebrities in a very strange way. And I think that’s absolutely partly because Hannibal Lecter.

Again, a killer, a cannibal. did make being a serial killer not seem cool, but he did make it seem a little less creepy. Like he’s a very intelligent guy. He’s very charming at times and he wants to be. He’s clearly talented. He’s a pretty good therapist based on his relationship with Clarice Starling. He’s got some real, he’s much smarter and much more quietly, I would say, I used to be charismatic than an actual real life serial killer.

Katherine (08:28)
Yeah, that actually makes me well reminds me of one of the questions that I wrote was basically do we think that Hannibal could actually exist with his like real psychology like is a serial killer really somebody who would exist in that way where they’re so like they’re charismatic and they’re smart because everything that I know about them is that like they have a little bit like just a veneer enough to trick people but everything underneath is is

⁓ insecurities and inability to really interact with people on like a human level. So do we think that?

Brian (09:09)
That’s interesting. mean, could Hannibal be, I mean, you know, there are serial killers who certainly have enough charisma to actually talk their way into people’s lives. So there is a little bit of that, but I don’t know if there’s ever been any real life killer as intelligent and as kind of hmm. I don’t want to say sociable because I don’t know how much is always sociable. If he doesn’t like you, he makes it pretty clear. But he is someone who through Silence of the Lambs and Clarice can actually connect with human beings in kind of a genuine way. I think

You know, it’s interesting when you look at what happened in popular culture after the Silence of the Lambs, you got, ⁓ you know, movies like Seven where Kevin Spacey is this kind of genius, like he can outwit the cops for weeks or months on end. Or you have, you know, Harry Connick Jr. in Copycat who’s like, you know, not a lot of serial killers look like young Harry Connick Jr. I mean, it’s kind of a, it’s a little bit of a wish fulfillment on Hollywood. So I do think after Silence of the Lambs, was a perception of serial killers being a little more glamorous.

and a little more intelligent than the real life evidence would bear. think, know, Donald Gacy was not a charismatic, cool dude, you know? No, and I don’t think all of them aren’t particularly intelligent either, but I think Lector, you know, Lector is the top of a very, admittedly low pyramid, I think, of human behavior.

Katherine (10:34)
Definitely. That does remind me of the guy you kind of talked about in the book, Dr. Salazar that Harris had met early on. Yeah. If you want to talk a little bit about that, because I found that really fascinating.

Brian (10:47)
Yeah, so Tom Harris, wrote the four novels, the four Hannibal Lecter novels and obviously created the character, ⁓ he was a crime reporter. was raised in Mississippi, and then he moved to Waco to be a crime reporter for many years. And then he decided to become a freelance writer based in Texas. So he went to Mexico for a couple of stories for ⁓ Argosy, which is a big men’s magazine that was not a true crime magazine, but like a lot of magazines in the 60s was starting to pump out more true crime stuff. And as you noted, like,

Drew McCapote was doing stuff for the New Yorker. It was moving kind of out of the pulps. he went and, Tom Harris went to Mexico to interview a guy, an American who’d been arrested down there. And while he was in this prison in Mexico, he met this guy who was a prison doctor who was very, very magnetic. had maroon eyes, a little cold. And he sort of talked to Tom Harris and as Tom Harris was leaving, one of the guards was like, he’s…

he’s not a doctor here. He’s an inmate. He helps some of the patients, but he’s an inmate. And this guy who was called, who apparently was Dr. Salazar, that was the name Harris gave, ⁓ was a real guy who ⁓ apparently had chopped up a lover and put his remains in a box and was now in prison. And there was, at some point I found some police reports that he may have been believed to have been involved in another murder. ⁓ So that was certainly someone who, Tom Harris,

could recognize Hannibal Lecter in that character or vice versa. I don’t think that character was the inspiration for Hannibal Lecter. I think Hannibal Lecter comes from a whole bunch of killers that Tom Harris either read about or studied or was told about. And he just kind of took elements from here and there and created someone who is Hannibal, who was very singular. But certainly those kinds of encounters, and I think Tom Harris’s career writing about crime and a job that put him in the vicinity of a lot of

FBI agents put him in a lot of police officers. He learned a lot about criminal behavior kind of as a student. He never stopped being a reporter in a way. He just stopped writing newspaper stories and started incorporating his reporting into novels, which is a really ⁓ unique skill.

Katherine (12:59)
Absolutely. And on that note, ⁓ can you tell us a little bit more about your research process? Because this was jam-packed with all kinds of research.

Brian (13:09)
Yeah, I I did a lot of interviews, know, unfortunately, you know, Tom Harris is still alive. He’s in his eighties. A lot of his contemporaries aren’t alive. So a lot of his former newspaper bosses and colleagues that I couldn’t reach. And Tom Harris has only given, I think, three interviews in last 50 years. I knew he was never going to talk to me. I I actually respect him. He’s sold 10 million books and he’s a complete unknown, which is amazing. He can go wherever he wants to in the world and not be bothered, you know.

If Stephen King were to walk down the street in any city in the world, he’d be shot by 50 people. Yeah. So what I went with, I did do a lot of interviews. spoke with Michael Mann, who directed the movie Man Hunter, which is based on one of his books. I interviewed Ed Saxon, who produced Silence of the Lambs. I interviewed John Douglas, who was one of the main FBI profilers. So it’s a mix of people from entertainment, from publishing, and from law enforcement that I spoke with. And I also had access

to the archives of Jonathan Demme, the director who did Silence of the Lands. And they have about 12 or 13 boxes of his material from that movie, including, know, memos from the FBI about what they like to see in the movie or trying to figure out how they can be involved in the movie. ⁓ know, Jodie Foster’s contract for the movie, ⁓ faxes from Tom Harris to Jonathan Demme, ⁓ photos from behind the set that no one’s ever seen. So I was able to find a lot of stuff, even though…

You know, I turned the book around in a relatively quick amount of time and didn’t get, I didn’t get a third of as many interviews as I did for my last book. ⁓ but I still managed to get a lot of stuff mostly because thankfully so much of the archival material had been preserved and because the people who were still around were, were willing to talk, which was great.

Katherine (14:48)
Yeah, I mean, so you didn’t really run into any problems with people who were like, no, they were very happy to speak to you and

Brian (14:54)
Yeah,

I mean, I never got to talk to Foster or Hopkins, which I thought, which I was pretty sure I would not get to talk to them. But yeah, but you know, I did talk to Brian Cox, who played Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter, who was great. Yeah. And when it comes to Foster and Hopkins, you know, I would love to talk to them and I would still talk to them today if they wanted to. Yeah. They left behind, you know, 20, 30 in Hopkins cases, you know, 40 years of interviews. So there’s tons of material. found tons of quotes from

know, newspaper stories that hadn’t surfaced in a long time. So because I love this movie and these characters and this world, I do know a lot of what’s already been reported and what’s been out there. So every time I could find something that was new to me, I figured, well, this is hopefully gonna be new to readers in general. If I’m discovering this now, that means most other people will discover it as well.

Katherine (15:46)
Yeah, absolutely. I think that would be very fascinating because yeah, of course there’s plenty of stuff out there, but I mean, if you were able to find those things that haven’t really been talked about, that’s really awesome. I’m very jealous.

Brian (16:01)
The

research is the fun part because you’re learning is for two reasons. One is because you’re learning and you’re super interested. The second reason is because the more you research, the more you can put off the actual writing, which is the real painful part of it. research as procrastination, I highly recommend. That’s why I have friends who write fiction and they look at me and they’re like, yeah, but you can, you you don’t have to make up stuff. can like, you can look things up. And if you get writer’s block, I’m like.

Yeah, but you can make up anything. Like I have to go. It’s like we both think the other way of doing it is great because I’m like, I would love to just make up stuff. I can’t. And they would love to have something to lean on once in a while. So for me, I do enjoy writing, but I don’t love it so much that I don’t like procrastinating more. know. Rabbit holes are my friend.

Katherine (16:44)
do dabble a little bit in writing myself and mostly it’s fiction, but I definitely do the same thing. I definitely like to just like, oh, and how were uh, lamp lights in 1885? You know what I mean? Like I just need to know this for accuracy and this will take me two hours.

Brian (17:00)
And then five days later you’re ordering like lamp lights magazines off eBay. You’re like, I just need this one article. I just need this then I’ll be done.

Katherine (17:06)
I know I was looking up Tupperware ⁓ like not magazines what are those like just like leaflets and stuff I was like looking at them on eBay one time like from a certain year so I totally understand but

Brian (17:20)
My search

history for this book on eBay is nuts. Like, if anyone ever finds it, it’s like, why were you looking up obscure cooking guides and then weird 50s horror magazine? Yeah, there’s a lot of weird stuff to go through. Yeah.

Katherine (17:32)
Was there anything that was surprising to you when you found out or anything that like really stood out to you?

Brian (17:39)
There were a lot of things. mean, you the actual production of Sounds of the Lambs, those boxes had stuff that I don’t think is ever seen in a light of day. mean, one of my favorite things I found was, you know, in the 80s and 90s, when an actor or a director would go do press, a lot of times it wasn’t recorded or it was on a broadcast TV or they don’t have a tape of it. So there were these transcript services. So, you know, there was entire folders of just TV and radio interviews that Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins had done, which…

the audio and video is gone. But one of them was, my favorite thing was right after Silence of the Lands came out, Anthony Hopkins did, I mean, I guess kind of like a morning zoo type radio interview in Los Angeles with these two DJs. And women were calling in to have him talk to them as Hannibal Lecter. Like they found him so kind of like alluring. And just reading the transcript of that, I the audio of that is probably long gone, but just what I’m reading, I’m like, oh my gosh.

Just to read that is hilarious. Stuff like that is great. And then also, you know, I talked to Ted Talley, who is a screenwriter of Silence of the Lambs. We talked for two hours about every, you the aspects of making, working on all these films. You can still find new material from people who have even people have been interviewed hundreds of times before. And again, like that’s, that’s the most fun thing for me. Cause once you, you don’t always know what you’re looking for. Once you find that unexpected sort of twist or idea or detail that you, you, there’s just no one else has thought of, or you haven’t seen before.

that becomes, you become really fixed in.

Katherine (19:09)
Was there anything you kind of fixated on, you think?

Brian (19:13)
⁓ I think I really, got very fascinated by the making of the 2001 movie, Hannibal, which was a huge blockbuster. It’s no one’s favorite Lector movie, I don’t think. ⁓ But I just, I started getting so interested in it as a kind of a movie about security, about the security state, about cameras being everywhere, about overseas threats that came out.

before 9-11. Like it’s a very pre-9-11 movies and lot of the movies in a lot of ways. But also the making of it is fascinating. Dino De Laurentiis, who was this decades and decades and decades successful Italian movie producer and also a very big personality. You know, his whole struggle to hold on to Hannibal Lecter as a character, he owned the rights to this character, to make a movie like Hannibal. You know, him trying to convince Jodie Foster to come back and play Corice and…

kind of being a jerk to her in the press about it. All that stuff fascinated me. And again, it’s not a movie I love. It’s a movie that has some fans, but it’s not like Silence of the Lambs where everyone loves it and rewatches it. But sometimes the movies that are maybe not your favorite movie or maybe not your favorite book, you just get interested in the behind the scenes because it’s really saying something bigger about the culture or about the entertainment industry at the time. So I love that kind of stuff.

Katherine (20:31)
⁓ Sometimes my husband and I will watch a movie one time and then we’ll watch the commentary track on it and just hearing that behind the scenes stuff of just people who like really worked on this and cared about it even if it’s not a good movie and arguably a lot of them are not. ⁓

Brian (20:51)
I have a big Blu-ray collection and I do a lot of what’s called blind Blu-ray buys where I buy a movie I’ve never watched it because I’m kind of fascinated by it and a lot of times if they’re on sale and there’s been a lot of like schlocky 60s 70s 80s thrillers or horror movies that I’ll watch and I’m like this is really not good but I immediately watch the making of because I’m almost as interested in the making of a bad movie as I am than I am of a great movie I know how great movies are made I’ve heard the stories but like

How did this kind of crummy Richard Burton 1970s bad exorcism rip off? How did this get made? What were they thinking when they did it? Where did it come from? I love that kind of stuff. I’m definitely someone else who dives into the making of things.

John (21:33)
Did this book, in the process of the book, did it make Hannibal Lecter more understandable or more terrifying to you as you were writing this?

Brian (21:42)
question.

mean, I think at a certain point, um, do I understand him as a character more? Yeah, I think so. I think I understand a little bit why we gravitated toward him. I kind of understand why we would, why we would want an anti-hero like this because we like anti-heroes who are smart, who are in some ways, you know, the same way that like, I would never want to be a meth dealer, but if I were a meth dealer, I’d want to be like Walter White. You know what I mean? Like I, you know, these are the anti, I would never want to be a gangster, but if I was going be a gangster,

mean, Tony Soprano is like, when he’s not in a bad mood, he’s the life of the party. He’s an interesting guy. I think, so I think understanding why Lecter is so appealing to people, understanding why we kind of like these bad people if they represent some sort of like, if we can connect to them even the weirdest way, if they feel somewhat relatable. And I would say one thing that did kind of freak me out about this character is, again, I grew up aware of serial killers, always surrounded by true crime.

But when you start going through newspapers from like the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, and I was doing a lot of research about true crime and serial killers, and you realize, yes, there are people like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer and BTK and Green River that we’ve all heard of and have had books and movies and TV shows. But there’s also just so many terrifyingly smaller unsolved crimes that are just in these old newspaper archives where you read a headline, you’re like, oh, someone killed three women this year in Oklahoma City in like whatever decade.

and they never caught it. And it never becomes a big thing. think just realizing how deeply violent this country can be on a day-to-day basis and how victims can just kind of disappear unless someone’s kind of championing them or looking out for them writing about them, that was a little scary for me to realize that, even though I’ve kind of always known that. Not that the book gets too much into real serial killings, but I did have to research some of that and fact check stuff. And yeah, that’s…

That’s not a good rabbit hole. That’s the rabbit hole where like, I’m like, by the end the day, I’m like, yeah, I need to put on like, singing in the rain or the Muppets or something. need to like completely absolve my brain of all of this unpleasant stuff that’s been going through it all day.

Katherine (23:47)
Need a little rainbow connection.

Brian (23:49)
Absolutely, yeah. Or Graham of a caper. That’s often my go-to. Or I will sometimes just watch clips from the Jackass movies or the Naked Gun. I’m like, what is the dumbest, stupidest, purely funny thing to distract me from? Yeah, yeah.

Katherine (24:02)
Peace.

John (24:05)
There’s another Anthony Hopkins character. think the movie is Deadfall. He’s ⁓ on a canoe trip. He’s up in Canada. They get lost and he’s kind of the same. He’s so much more intelligent than Alec Baldwin’s in the movie. He’s so much more intelligent than everybody around him. He’s a millionaire. The Edge, right?

Brian (24:25)
the edge? Yeah,

yeah, that’s great. I love that movie. It’s one of my favorite Hopkins deep cuts. One of my favorite balling movies too, yeah, yeah.

John (24:33)
I wonder if the character kind of overlaps with the super smart, but I can’t really legitimately connect with anybody because I am so much smarter with the Hannibal.

Brian (24:44)
part

of it. Yeah. And I think, you know, it’s interesting because you look at Hopkins career, um, you know, he was obviously very well respected. He’d won a couple of Emmy awards. I he played Hitler and won Emmys and he was very respected as a stage actor in England, obviously. Um, but he’d spent the seventies and eighties, you know, really, especially the seventies really trying to make it in Hollywood. And he got some really amazing roles. got like, you know, he’s in the elephant man. Um, he’s in that movie magic, which is kind of trashy, but very fun.

but he did a lot of ⁓ really kind of shloky stuff where they were almost trying to make him a leading man in a way that’s not super convincing because he is a little remote. He is a little aloof. And I think that’s very necessary for his performance in Silence of the Lands because he’s someone who, you know, I don’t know him. I read some of his memoir. It does sound like he has had trouble at times connecting with people in his real life. And I think that’s what makes his performance a sign of a lector.

especially in the first two thirds, before he starts warming up a little bit to Clarice, I do think that’s why it’s such a spot on role. And I also think it’s why Brian Cox in Manhunter plays it very differently. He plays it much more, almost like a kind of, almost cat-like. He’s kind of purring a little bit. He’s a little, a little bit more sarcastic, a little more openly manipulative. But I think, you know, in all those performances, you know, Hannibal, one of the things about Hannibal Lecter is that in one of the books they say,

Is he a psychopath? Is he a sociopath? We don’t know. And in all these performances, the actors are playing a character who’s not on any wavelength of humanity that we can recognize. It’s it’s not, you can’t just say, he’s a little awkward or, he’s a sociopath or he’s a psychopath. Like he’s something else. He’s his own entire character, which I think is what makes him so open to reinterpretation by so many different performers.

Katherine (26:35)
Did you ever watch the TV show? I think it was on NBC.

Brian (26:39)
Yeah,

yeah, and I interviewed Brian Fuller about it. I started watching it ⁓ when it came out, but I just had my first kid and it was just too gruesome and I was not watching a lot of But I rewatched all of it while working on the book multiple times. I mean, it’s pretty extraordinary. an adaptation, it’s remarkable how Brian Fuller manages to take Tom Harris’s characters and writing and narratives and…

brings them all together, also makes it feel very much his own. like, really feels like, it almost feels like they collaborated together, but they never spoke or met. So it’s kind of a mind meld. It’s a really interesting mind meld. It doesn’t happen a lot with adaptations. You really need someone who can understand a writer’s material and kind of make it their own. And he really does that in that show.

Katherine (27:24)
Absolutely. What do you think about ⁓ Mass Mickelson? He plays Hannibal.

Brian (27:30)
Yeah,

I loved it. mean, I think it’s, you it was very smart to play it that way because obviously at that point Hopkins was so big. Like how could you possibly, you know, I don’t want to redo it, but I think when he, what Mikkelson is really well is, you know, he, really kind of plays Hannibal almost as like a very charming alien. Like he’s, he plays like, someone he’s almost like an evil ET where it’s like he’s here on earth.

Katherine (27:42)
same thing yeah

Brian (27:58)
He wants to like humans, he kind of understands them, he’s trying to understand them more. And so he does make these actual connections, these attempts to really connect and to understand what it’s like to be human. And sometimes then he just kills someone, just eats someone. doesn’t work out if you find someone irritating or they get in his way, he just makes a very- of rude. Yeah, yeah, he just kind of, he eats the rude and he just kind of eliminates that person from his particular-

⁓ science project that he’s working on, which is kind of like studying humanity. I think, you know, Brian Fuller cast, him, you know, he’s a Danish actor. And I do think having a European actor ⁓ and an actor who is also a former dancer who just carries himself and comports himself differently than maybe a lot of regular, you know, FBI agents would or work a day Americans would. It does make Hannibal feel kind of like the other. There is something otherworldly about him. Even when he’s working with these FBI agents on the show.

as their peer, you know? the show He dresses different. Yeah, he wears like, not shark skin, but he wears incredibly nice suits to these murders things. like, why are you dressed up? It’s like, there’s like a severed head here. Like you don’t, it’s not a black tie. It’s not a formal event, but yeah, it’s what makes it more interesting and kind of weird to the people around him.

Katherine (29:15)
Yeah, ⁓ well, I think we’re about at time, so I wanted to ask if there’s anything that we forgot to ask you that maybe you wanted to share before we sign off.

Brian (29:28)
Oh, it’s funny. You know, I mean, think I would just, I would encourage, encourage you, John. think it’s time your regency sounds the land. I think, I think, I think, I think you can handle it. Catherine can tell you the scary scenes if you need to close your eyes. But what you do, let me know what you think. It is a really remarkably, I hate the word tasteful, but it’s a very elegant movie in a lot of ways. And the performances are pretty extraordinary. And I, again, as someone who gets creeped out somewhat easily,

It will creep you out a little bit, I think ⁓ also it’s a very intelligent movie. So if you’re going to watch something kind of spooky, why not watch one of the best?

John (30:06)
Okay, I think, know, I sitting here listening to you talk about this and I’m like, I gotta watch this movie finally. So I was already. ⁓

Brian (30:13)
It’s 35 years at this point. 35, 36 years, something like that.

John (30:17)
Yeah, but let me just tell a real quick story. don’t, uh, we were, had a crew and we were working out on an Island and it was hot and this young lady was putting on suntan lotion and one of the guys goes, it puts the lotion on its skin or it gets the hose. And I said, I’m going to send you to HR for that. That’s sexual harassment. He’s like, Oh, that’s, from the movie. I had no clue.

Brian (30:42)
Yeah, it’s a very heavily quoted line. I wouldn’t quote it to a co-worker.

John (30:50)
⁓ Okay. Well, Brian, thank you very much for being here with us today. The book is coming out on the 11th of February. Correct.

Brian (30:55)
This is great, we appreciate it.

I think it’s a tenth, it’ll still be on the 11th too, hopefully.

John (31:04)
So

animal lector, a life, and we will put in links. This will come out on two podcasts and it will also come out on YouTube as a video. So we’ll market it and put the links.

Brian (31:17)
Fantastic and let me know if you need anything else. I’m happy to help. Okay

John (31:20)
I really appreciate you.

Katherine (31:21)
you

so much.

Brian (31:22)
Well, take care, enjoy the rest of your day.

John (31:23)
Thanks.