Meet me again in Chicago,” where he was shooting a movie with Tommy Lee Jones. I met him at his vacation house in Santa Fe and I pitched my ass off. So if you can meet with him and convince him that you’re the right guy for it, you’ll have the job.” So I had to pitch Gene Hackman to get the job. He said, “Gene thinks he’s going to write this, but don’t worry, he’ll find out how hard that is, and we’ll get back to you.” Mike later called my agent and said, “Gene’s written 50 pages of the script, and he’s only 50 pages into the book. I remember having a conversation with Mike Medavoy. I soon found out Orion Pictures was in the process of buying the rights for Gene Hackman to write, direct and star in it. Call your agent.” She still takes credit to this day for the entire thing. I just thought, “This is a dream.” My wife actually said, “ William Goldman or somebody must already be writing this. It has intricate plotting, it has incredible characters, it has great twists. It’s a book that’s so smart and so well-crafted that the critics are going to admire it and it has such sheer excitement that a mass audience is going to respond to it, too. This was the kind of book that comes along once every 10 or 20 years. The advance copy left an impression on you. I devoured it in one or two days and thought, “This is unbelievable. A few weeks later, I got an advance copy of The Silence of the Lambs. He said, “Well I’m working on a new one, maybe you’d like to see that.” I thought, “Yes!” but I didn’t think anything would come of it. So I had met him and had dinner with him once or twice. He was a client of the art gallery where my wife worked. Well, I knew Tom Harris slightly, socially, in New York. How involved was Thomas Harris in the process? I’ve had a lot of other movies made since then, but no script that I’ve written came out so much like the movie in my head as this one did. Ed Saxon looked at me and laughed and said, “What hath Ted wrought?”Įverything matched to an astonishing degree. There were hundreds of people swarming all over this structure, literally painting dust onto fake stones.
Even though there were only one or two shots with the camera coming down through the railings and stairs, they wanted to have a scale for those two shots. Inside it was a three- or four-story set being built that was Lecter’s prison. You could have landed a plane in this building. It was, like, the single biggest building I had ever been in. It was in Pittsburgh in a jet turbine factory. What do you think of first when you look back at making The Silence of the Lambs? “I thought, ‘Wow, this holds up pretty well,'” he says. The last time he watched it was in 2014 at the London Screenwriters Festival. Here, Tally goes deep on one of the most celebrated movies of all time with revealing, behind-the-scenes stories that are often as fascinating as the movie itself, from Gene Hackman’s early interest in making the film to insights into Hopkins’ eerie performance.