In Silence, Hopkins was 53. The scenes in the dungeon make him look far younger than his years due to the very bright lighting in his cell (a nice cinematic contrast to the other madmen hiding in their respective shadows around him). His face is made to look very pale and bleached out under the lights. His wrinkles are not visible because there are no shadows to highlight them. If one were to put an age on Lecter based on this first scene it might be about 45. However, in the later scenes in the makeshift cage Lecter looks completely different. The lighting is coming from directly above and Lecter's face looks wider and more heavily lined than in the dungeon scenes. All of the wrinkles Lecter sports in Hannibal are clearly evident in the cage scene, making him look very much like a man in his mid-fifties. Once again, however, when Hopkins turns his face to the overhead light while he listens to the Goldberg Variations he is wearing very pale make-up that gives him a ghostly washed out look (watch the scene and notice how the color of his face does not match his neck or arms when he is enthralled with the music). The lighting choices in Silence of the Lambs were genius. Only in the very last scene in natural lighting ("I'm having an old friend for dinner") does Hopkins look like Hopkins.

Hannibal, however, almost never lights Hopkins in a favorable manner. Ridley Scott uses light and shadow for effect (such as when Lecter stands in his apartment in a ray of sunlight) but these only make the Florence Lecter look much older than he ought to. When Lecter sits in the open air cafe in bright sunlight he looks much younger, as he does in the later scenes in America where his hair is cut shorter, he is shown wearing dark suits (rather than tan jackets and pajamas), and his face is lit by diffuse light. In the dinner scene Hopkins looks "more like Lecter" than earlier in the film. He and Clarice look like a "believable couple" in that scene.

Although I've only seen the preview for Red Dragon, this too looks like it might be a mixed bag of lighting. The opening shot of Lecter grinning at Will Graham in the preview is excellent. Again, here he looks almost nothing like the everyday Hopkins we see in other films and much younger than he usually did in Hannibal. The grin is reminiscent of the grin he gives Clarice in the first dungeon scene in Silence ("No, no. You were doing so well. . .). One shot later we have Lecter coming towards Graham, showing his face and torso. True, he does look slightly heavier than in Silence, but the lighting is not the same as in the original Silence dungeon scene. The cell is darker and more "atmospheric" than in Silence. Ratner mentioned that he wanted those scenes to look "Gothic," while he should have realized that fans of the series would notice only the differences in lighting (and how they make the actors look) between Dragon and Silence. The next shot is again a close-up of Lecter. Again he looks like the Lecter we remember from Silence. The other scene of Hopkins in his white t-shirt and pants makes Lecter look thinner and younger than the wide-shot scene in the dungeon. Overall we are left with the impression that the Lecter in Red Dragon is slightly older than in Silence of the Lambs, but not as old as in Hannibal. There was a comment that the pre-capture Lecter was successfully "de-aged" through good make-up and some extra hair. Perhaps Ratner felt the need to age Lecter over the course of the film to show the passing of time within Red Dragon, choosing internal consistency within the film over consistency in the series. However, watching the preview I was caught up in the spirit of the scenes--hearing Hopkins deliver the lines with the famous Lecter rasp (noticeably absent in Hannibal) makes you forget about the other films. At least momentarily. We can only hope the whole film lives up to the preview.

Sincerely,
The Mad Doctor
(Derrick Hassert)