From S C R (I) P T Magazine:
His has not only been a distinguished career but a versatile one, encompassing significant stories - about mental illness (Awakenings),' a David vs. Goliath clash within the legal system (A Civil Action), real-life espionage ( The Falcon And The Snowman), and father/son tensions (Searching For Bobby Fischer); and, of course, the horrors and heroism of the Holocaust in his Academy Award@-winning screenplay for Schindlers List.
HANNIBAL
By Robert Verini
Just about the only things he hasn't written, it seems, are horror movies and sequels. Until now, that is. Hannibal the long-awaited adaptation of Thomas Harris' follow-up to The Silence of the Lambs, is set to open in February.
Why take Hannibalon? In discussing why Jodie Foster may have decided not to reprise her role as FBI Agent Clarice Starling, Zaillian voices perhaps some of his own initial doubts: "If I were her I'd probably have done the same thing. Why tempt the gods? You make a movie that's on everyone's list of great thrillers, does better, wins more awards, creates catchphrases that make it into the language-why go back there?" Which of course begs the ques- tion: Why would this fIlm be of interest to a screenwriter, heretofore associ- ated with stories of, shall we say, greater than average heft?
"It sounded like fun to me at the time," he says lightly, his words and manner oddly echoing those of Hannibal Lecter when he has offhandedly decided to court, or eat, someone. And it did prove to be fun. But as he talks about the experience, at first reluctantly, then animatedly, he reveals that it offered both opportunities and challenges different from those he'd run across before.
Part of the project's appeal, says Zaillian, was the prospect of working with director Ridley Scott. Theirs was a first-time partnership (though the writer had worked with Scott's brother Tony many years ago on an abortive version of the Andes plane-crash survivor story, Alive. "There you go! Another cannibalism story. There's the connection!" Zaillian chuckles}. The dense and detailed Italian portion of Hannibal intrigued him and of course; "Dino [de Laurentiis, the producer] can be very persuasive."
Yet he still needed more persuasion. "1 was concerned that I didn't know this genre, and I wanted to make sure I could bring some- thing to it." So he did something he has almost never done in his screenwriting career: talk the movie out. Over a three-week period, he and Scott explored the overall tone, scope, and mood of every sequence, identifying what they liked in the novel and what they didn't. "1 had never talked about a script so much before writing it," he says, out of a concern that "by the time I get down to writing it I'll have nothing left to discover." (By way of example, he estimates that his time talking through the Schindlers List story with Steven Spielberg was "oh. ..maybe a day or two?") Yet here the tactic proved to be wise. At the end of the three weeks, his doubts were assuaged; and Hannibal had its screenwriter.
The greatest challenge was time, never at a premium in the indus- try but especially tight here. David Mamet had submitted a draft that, for whatever reason, was not deemed suitable. (At press time, David Mamet and Steven Zaillian were to receive shared screen credit for HannibaL) "But he had written it fast, and I was inspired by that. If Mamet had done it so quickly, I figured I could too." Zaillian is known as a painstaking craftsman-"sometimes I'll take three months to think through a story before I write a word"-but here he was constrained by the goal of releasing the film in February, 2001, almost 10 years to the day after the release of Silence. As it was, he began work in October, 1999 and had a first draft ready the first week of December. 'And I did the best work in that first draft. After that it was just a matter of tightening it" so that it would be done for the February, 2000 start date.
Zaillian's approach to adapting the Harris novel did not differ markedly from the method he employs on other book-length nar- ratives. (He exempts such projects as Awakenings and Searchingfor Bobby Fischer, each based on an essay collection to which a narra- tive structure must be attached.) "I try to read [the source material] for the first time like a viewer. I rely a lot on my first reading of it because I figure most people are only going to see the movie once; so what will they remember from it? And I do mark it up as I go-might be a line, a scene, something that might be evocative of a mood or something in the film." Many pages will not be marked up at all after one or tWo readings. "Then I set it aside and basical- ly start over from memory and what I feel needs to happen which is ofren different from the book."
At the end of the first draft, he returns to the novel to see whether the elements he has left out or forgotten are significant. "Sometimes they are. Sometimes you get so wrapped up in telling a story a cer- tain way that you leave out something important, something you forgot. And it can even be something big, something related to theme." His outlining method is a similar mix of preparation and improvisation. "Sure, I oudine, but it's more like this;" and he points to the reporter's scribbled notes, a list of issues and questions lined up on one side of a page. "I know that these are the key things though I may not know what happens in between; and I know that this thing down here-I'll even underline that thing because I know that's where I'm going. These are the signposts along the way, and I find that it generally does break down into some traditional 3-act structure." But he keeps his oudine loose,out of a fear that if he structures it too carefully, "I'll create a pattern" that will impede his creativitY.
Zaillian was and is grateful that Thomas Harris's writing is so well- suited to film treatment to begin with. "When I first read Silence of the Lambs, I thought, 'This is a movie!' Hanniballess so, it's a little more meandering with many more characters. But it's still a highly cinematic style." Coincidentally, Zaillian had spent six months as a young man living in Italy not far from Hannibal's European set- ting, engaged in an "artistic" lifestyle. "I recommend it to writ- ers-you work for four hours, take a three-hour lunch, go back and work some more, nap. ...It's conducive to talk and friends, and family." Zaillian's Italian sojourn simplified this assignment. "It's nice that when someone mentions the Ponte Vecchio, you know what it looks like. You know how it feels when people brush up too close to you." The richness of detail of the Italian portion of the novel was easier to capture as a result.
In its broad outlines, the movie story will be eminently familiar to the many fans of Harris's 1999 best seller. Both book and film begin by renewing our acquaintance with Starling, no longer a fresh-faced FBI rookie, but now a world-weary senior agent still beset by personal demons and professional controversy. At the same time, Hannibal Lecter is comfortably ensconced in Florence under an assumed name as a museum curator. "He's pretty happy," Zaillian says; "hasn't killed or eaten anybody in a while. ..." But each is soon targeted-- Starling by a vengeful, rejected suitor within the FBI, and Dr. Lecter by Mason Verger, a multimillionaire seeking vengeance on the doctor for a past atrocity and Pazzi, a Florentine police chief who sees his chance for a big score. Throw in a drug dealer armed with an Uzi and an infant, some Italian henchmen, and a swarm of pigs bred for homicide, and you've got enough plot for two movies. Whittling it down became the prob- lem and the opportunity.
Since the book was so big and sprawling, some things clearly had to go. "But you can't just take out a line here or a character there. There's got to be a fabric." At the very least, the screenwriter had a welcome chance to remove things in the book that didn't work for him. Jack Crawford, the senior FBI agent played by Scott Glenn in the first film, won't appear ("He didn't do much anyway. He's sick, he dies, he's gone"); nor will Mason Verger's sister, central to a long subplot in the novel that neither Zaillian nor Scott "ever really liked anyway." Lecter's fascination with mental "memory palaces" of escape is gone, and there will be no backstory explaining his particular brand of insanity. "You take this wonderful villain who per- sonifies evil and then go back to find a reason to explain why he's that way. ...No matter what you do, I think it becomes simplistic. You make him more common." So Dr. Lecter will remain the inexplicable source of horror that he was in both the first film and the even earlier Manhunter, based upon Harris's Red Dragon.
What's left, Zaillian believes, is a tighter and more chilling tale. But beyond making the requisite deletions, he felt that certain key ele- ments had to be added, elements essential both to Hannibal's suc~ cess as a screen thriller and to his own satisfaction with the craftsmanship. Most important is the bond between the protagonists, which both he and many critics found somewhat superficial in the novel. It will be central in the film. When asked what the movie revolves around for him, Zaillian is at first unwilling to reduce his answer to something pat. But then he relents, identifying it as "the relationship between Hannibal and Clarice-it's a kind of bizarre love story. ...They are hardly ever together. They have very lirtle screen time together, but they're in each other's thoughts, a lot."
When Hannibal discovers that Clarice is in trouble back in the United States-psychologically and spiritually-he elects to help her "in his own strange way". It was the screenwriter's job to see that the "strange affection [Lecter) has for her" runs through the thriller, leavening the scares with a human dimension. Says Zaillian, "He helps her, yet knowing at the same time that she will craft his doom if she can. It's almost more dangerous for him to get involved."
"Scorsese once said about Raging Bull that he didn't know what the movie was about until, discussing it with [screenwriter] Paul Schrader, he began to think about a statement that Jake LaMotta makes very early in the film. He says, 'My hands were too small tObt, the champion of the world'. He was so aware of how small his hands were, and that became the key for Scorsese for the entire movie: that LaMotta was somehow doomed before he started. ...I bring that up as an example of something that seemed quite small, that to most people would be just another scene but that really became the thematic key" for Scorsese. In HannibaL that "small thing" for Zaillian "was that it's more dangerous for Hannibal to help Starling. [When he comes to her aid] it puts him in more jeopardy than it does her. That was something we don't expect from him. And that's love, isn't it?-putting yourself out, putting yourself on the line."
The "strange love story" is executed by means of crosscutting, something that "I expected would be in the novel but never was, really." With the exception of one letter from the doctor to Clarice, their stories are essentially separate. Harris permits no real contact between the central characters until the novel's last third, no sense of each one's involvement in the plight of the other. (The separation is so pronounced that Zaillian wonders whether Clarice may not even have appeared in one of Harris's many drafrs. The Pazzi story is so detailed and self -contained that it may well have been the entire novel at one time with Starling inserted in the first and last sequences later on.)
In any event, Zaillian was determined to make Clarice and Hannibal integral to each other's journey long before the third act; and he does so by connecting their stories almost at the outset. She discovers that he is still at large, narrows down the possible cities in which he could be residing, and even speaks by phone at one point to Pazzi, albeit unaware of how close to Lecter the policeman has gotten. "Now," Zaillian says, "she's actively involved in the detec- tive work. She's putting two and two together. And that's all new stUfF" -new that is, to the screenplay.
The deepened relationship of the two protagonists and the interconnection of their stories naturally comes to a head in the ending, and Zaillian admits that, "we discussed that a lot. I mean, the book's ending where Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling go off together and live happily ever after. It may have been right for Tom's three books; but in terms of the life that [the film of] Silence of the Lambs had taken on of its own, it wasn't right for our Clarice. ~ ..We felt that the character as pop- ularized in the Silence movie would not do what she did in the novel Hannibal so we changed it." He hastens to explain that the filmmakers felt that Thomas Harris should be involved and spent three days with him: "He was very personable and charming. ... He understood what we were talking about and wanted to participate" in the search for the right way to wrap up the film version.
At the end of the three-week preparation period they had their ending; and that is something that Zaillian feels is essential on any project. "In a good movie, all of the actions and the characters son of funnel down to this one place and you have to know what that is before you get started. I do, anyway." As a result, while he's writing, he may struggle at the beginning, one page a day or no pages; but as he gets going, he accelerates. In the end, "I've stripped away all the choices so that there's only one place it can all go." And where is that? Naturally, ~e won't say. But he can assure us that Hannibal and Clarice will not be going off together to the opera. ...
Now, mere weeks away from the unveiling of this long-anticipated motion pictUre event, how does Zaillian see Hannibal fitting into his career? "I see it as a detour, really," he says, eager to get back to adapting the Geoffrey Wolff memoir, The Duke ofDeception, which had hit a snag when the Hannibal offer came along. But after struggling for over a year with that difficult and intensely personal pro- ject, "coming home depressed every day, I was drawn to this one: something with some life to it, some energy; something that every- one's excited about." He's asked whether the new rum will featUre any memorable catch- phrases, like "liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti." Who knows, he replies. "It would be fun to come up sometime with a line that makes its way into the public consciousness, like that one, or 'Show me the money,' Qr 'I'll make him an offer he can't refuse' ...but it has to capture something that people are feeling. It has to be the right time too; the same line 10 years earlier or later wouldn't go." As always, the public will decide for itself what it will embrace.
I When all is said and done, one senses that Zaillian is proud of the sheer and rapid crafts- manship that he has brought to this tale. After so many weighty projects that take months and years to bring to the screen, it must be a kick to take on a job that can only be done boldly, fearlessly. The uncharacteristically speedy progress of Hannibal from page to multi- plex is, as it happens, very much in sync with Zaillian's fundamental belief that "the really important things happen not in the planning but in the writing. ...I doubt that Cameron Crowe, in his Jerry Maguire] outline, said, 'This is going to be the "Show Me the Money' scene." That's what I mean. The best things are unplannable." (i)