Across his 40-plus year career, Gene Hackman developed a menagerie of memorably malevolent villains that included Buck Barrow, Little Bill Daggett, and, of course, Lex Luthor. But the Oscar-winning actor — who died last year — nearly added another meaty bad guy role to his plate: Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter.

Back in 1987, Hackman was the first to recognize the cinematic potential in Thomas Harris’s about-to-be-published The Silence of the Lambs, the follow-up to the author’s blockbuster 1981 novel, Red Dragon, that introduced the man-eating psychiatrist. Orion acquired the movie rights to the book and The French Connection star the chance to direct and potentially star in the movie version. For screenwriting duties, the now-defunct studio turned to Ted Tally, a playwright who was making the leap to major motion pictures.

“We only met twice,” Tally tells Gold Derby now about those early conversations with Hackman. “I sort of auditioned for Gene. The first time was a general meeting, and for the second, I had to go into greater detail about how he was going to adapt the book.”

A scene from 'The Silence of the Lambs' Orion Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Tally describes Hackman as being “polite and cordial, but sort of distant” during those encounters, and remembers the fledgling director still undecided about whether he intended to play Hannibal or Jack Crawford, the FBI agent who enlists young trainee Clarice Starling to seek advice from Lecter about how to locate and capture a skin-flaying serial killer named Jame Gumb, aka Buffalo Bill.

“He didn’t talk to me about how he would play Lecter,” Tally says now, adding that Hackman’s visual approach to the material also seemed half-formed when they met for the second and final time in a Chicago hotel room while the actor was filming the Andrew Davis-directed 1989 action movie, The Package. “He had this strange conception of incorporating flashbacks that took place in the sky and would have shown Clarice as a young girl. I couldn’t make out what he was thinking and didn’t know what to say to that.”

It didn’t help that Hackman had other things on his mind during that meeting. “He had hurt his back on set, so he was lying down on the floor for our entire meeting,” Tally says. “That made it even more surrealistic!” The writer came away from his encounters with Hackman convinced of one thing. “Gene wasn’t committed fully to the project, and it became clear pretty quickly when I was writing the first draft that he was going to drop out.”

Sure enough, the actor let go of Lambs not long after that Chicago hotel room meeting, and Tally’s script eventually found its way to Jonathan Demme, who was all-in from their first sit-down. Meanwhile, the role of Lecter passed to Anthony Hopkins, who created a movie monster for the ages.

Interestingly, Hackman never did step behind the camera to direct a movie during his lifetime, and in the case of this particular film, Tally feels it was probably for the best. “I think it would have been much less subtle a movie,” he says diplomatically when asked what a Gene Hackman-directed Silence of the Lambs might have looked like.

Of course, few movies ever wind up on the big screen the exact way they appeared on the page — even a certified classic and statuette-carrying Best Picture winner like The Silence of the Lambs. Released in February 1991, Demme’s version of the film evolved during shooting through the director’s close collaboration with Tally, and Hopkins and Jodie Foster, all of whom won Oscars at the 1992 Academy Awards. To this day, it remains only one of three films in Oscar history to win the so-called “Big Five” statuettes, along with It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

With Lambs returning to theaters this weekend for its 35th anniversary courtesy of Fathom Entertainment, Tally shared some behind the scenes stories about what was lost — and found — on the road to the film’s release. Fry up some liver, steam a cup of fava beans, uncork a bottle of Chianti, and dig in.

First impressions

While Hopkins will forever be identified with Hannibal Lecter, he didn’t originate the role onscreen. That honor goes to Brian Cox, who played a very different version of the character — complete with a different spelling of his name — in Manhunter, Michael Mann’s 1986 movie version of Red Dragon.

“Brian was extraordinary in that part,” says Tally, who saw Manhunter prior to accepting the job to adapt Lambs. “But it was a totally different interpretation; Brian was very cold, analytical and humorless. Tony felt that the character was trying to fend of his own boredom by amusing himself whenever he could. He played him as someone with a savage sense of humor.”

That approach jibed with Tally’s own feelings about the character and helped him tailor Lecter to Hopkins’ specific dimensions. Both he and Demme also allowed the star to make specific dialogue and directorial requests. For example, when Clarice meets Lecter in his dungeon-like cell, the doctor was written as lying down on his cot, forcing her to have to make first contact. But Hopkins sold the duo on a different approach.

“Anthony said, ‘I want to be standing upright in the middle of the cell like I had just beamed down from a spaceship,’” Tally says, adding that the actor also had the idea of being the one to greet his visitor by simply saying, “Morning.”

“She’s a guest and he’s being polite to her,” Tally explains. “That’s an example of how collaboration changes what you though were originally going to do. And it also resulted in what some have the greatest entrance in movie history.”

For the record, there is one other key change to that scene that Tally — not Hopkins — can take credit for. In the book, Hannibal talks about enjoying a “big Amarone” alongside his dinner of census taker liver and fava beans. “When I read that, I thought, ‘What is an Amarone and how is it big?’” Tally confesses with a laugh about Harris’s choice of wine selection.

“And then I thought, ‘If I’m confused by that, I don’t want the audience getting hung up on it.’” So Tally swapped out a “big Amarone” for a “nice Chianti” and a million bad Hannibal Lecter impressions were born.

“I figured Tony would have fun with that line,” Tally says mischievously.

Horses for lambs

While Hackman’s idea for sky-set flashbacks struck Tally as strange, he wasn’t summarily opposed to depicting Clarice’s backstory onscreen. In fact, he originally wrote flashbacks into the now-famous sequence where Starling tells Lecter about witnessing the slaughtering of lambs on the farm where she spent a small portion of her childhood. The original plan was for Demme to film that material at the very end of the shoot, taking cameras to Montana to film on location during the spring lambing season.

“It would have cost a million dollars, and been filmed with a limited crew,” Tally says now. “I thought the whole experience that she had with the lambs and trying to rescue one of them was too much to just talk about. We needed to see something happen. I wrote flashbacks with young Clarice creeping through the dark to the barn, looking through the door, and seeing the slaughter of the lambs.”

But after Demme shot the sequence that appears in the finished film — with Foster staring directly down the barrel of the camera lens while reliving Clarice’s childhood trauma — the director reached out to Tally. “He sent me the dailies and said, “If I cut away from this for a flashback, I’ll be drummed out of the Director’s Guild. Jodie could win an Academy Award for this performance.’ And he was right!”

Devoted readers of the book will notice two other notable alterations to that sequence. In Harris’s version, Clarice steals a horse, not a lamb, from the farm. In fact, the lambs seem almost incidental compared to her concern for the horses. And when Hannibal asks if her pursuit of Buffalo Bill is intended to silence the screaming of those lambs, Book Clarice equivocates and answers “Yes. I don’t know. Maybe.” But Movie Clarice answers a simple and definitive, “Yes.”

“I thought it would be more moving if it were done that way,” Tally says about the reason for those changes. “I wanted to show that she had progressed and learned — like Lecter had helped her.

“Jodie only ever asked me if she could change one line of my script,” the writer adds. “And that was line where she says, ‘I’m a student, Dr. Lecter. I’m here to learn from you.’ That was an idea she got based on her research at the FBI Academy about how an agent may want to approach someone.”

By the way, Tally says that the million dollars that would have gone towards funding that Montana trip was instead put towards flying the crew to the Bahamas for that final scene of a free Lecter calling Clarice from an island paradise while stalking his former warden, Dr. Chilton (Anthony Heald). "The book ends with Clarice getting a letter from Lecter, which isn't very cinematic," he notes. "So I came up with the idea of Chilton escaping to a tropical island because he's so fearful of Lecter.

"Jonathan said, 'I guess we'll all have go to a tropical island at the end of shooting this for a vacation?'" Tally continues with a laugh. "And I said, 'Yeah, we have to got — and it's very important for the screenwriter to be there.'" Unfortunately, Tally ultimately wasn't able to join the tropical fun due to a personal conflict. "Everybody else got a nice vacation in the Bahamas while they shot that last scene. That was a better sayonara than Montana would have been."

One villain too many

On the page, Lecter and Gumb share equal billing as villains. But for the film, Tally made the conscious choice to jettison most of the Buffalo Bill material to prioritize keeping Clarice — and by extension Hannibal — at the center of the story.

“Every decision I made was about streamlining the narrative to make Clarice our guide through the movie,” he says. “Every scene had to be about her, unless he absolutely needed to cut away. That meant that Gumb, played by Ted Levine, would become more of a cipher, because I didn’t want the audience to get ahead of her as opposed to knowing things when she knows them.”

But reducing Gumb’s screentime also meant excising any of the novel’s backstory that could, in part, account for his very specific proclivities — like creating a human skin suit out of his female victims. The absence of those details left both the character and the film open to charges of transphobia at the time and still today. In fact, prominent LGBTQ groups famously organized a protest at the 1992 Oscars as Silence of the Lambs racked up its victories.

For his part, Levine has expressed his own regrets about the character. “There are certain aspects of the movie that don’t hold up too well,” he said in one recent interview. “We all know more, and I’m a lot wiser about transgender issues. There are some lines in that script and movie that are unfortunate.”

Asked about the controversy now, Tally acknowledges that he “took a chance” by reducing Gumb’s presence in the film. “I’ll take the blame if people didn’t like the interpretation,” he says. “At the time, we got in trouble with the gay community, even though we never said the character was gay. And then we got in trouble with the trans community, but the screenplay does say that he's not trans. He tried to be a lot of different things unsuccessfully. I just thought of him as crazy, homicidal maniac.”

Hannibal 2.0

Forget The Silence of the Lambs that never was: what about the Hannibal that never was? Demme, Tally, and Foster waited years for Harris to finish a Lambs follow-up in the hopes of re-teaming for another collaboration. But when they finally read 1999’s Hannibal, the divisive third entry in the Lecter series, all three quickly realized that they had to tender their letters of resignation.

“Apart from Tony — who had a chance to get a huge payday and be the title character — we were all in agreement that we couldn't see how to do it,” Tally admits now of the book, which ends with Clarice and Hannibal as lovers. “It seemed like too much of a betrayal of Clarice Starling. And yet we owed so much to Tom, so we were all in a very awkward position. Eventually, Jonathan and [producer] Ed Saxon told him. I chickened out and couldn’t face him.” (Demme died in 2017.)

Hannibal eventually arrived onscreen in 2001, with Julianne Moore as Clarice and Ridley Scott taking over the director’s chair. Needless to say, it was not nominated for any Oscars. But Harris didn’t hold a grudge. When Hannibal’s success inspired a Red Dragon remake the following year, Tally was brought onboard to write it. “Tom is an amazing benevolent and giving author,” he says of the reclusive Harris. “He always took a very hands-off attitude. It was great to have his blessing and not feel like he was tracking me from behind.”

And as part of his Red Dragon experience, Tally finally got to write a series of flashbacks that actually made the final cut. “The producer, Dino DeLaurentiis, wanted to have a glimpse of Lecter before he was captured,” the writer recalls. “So I was able to have some fun with that.”

You might say the sky wasn't the limit in that case.