No date, early/mid 2002
From About.com - click here
for link to original source
Exclusive Ted Tally Interview
Part One: Writing Red Dragon
Ted Tally returns to the world of Hannibal
Lecter with Red Dragon. He won an Oscar for adapting Silence of the Lambs, but opted out
of Hannibal. Red Dragon was not simply a matter of translating the book to a screenplay
though. Now that Hannibal Lecter is the marquee star, he had to beef up the role. The book
only had two Lecter scenes. The film has several, plus an opening that details his capture
by FBI Agent Will Graham (Edward Norton.)
Adaptation has been a big business for Tally. His three projects between the Hannibal
Lecter films - The Juror, Before and After and All the Pretty Horses - were based on
books, and his next projects, Alexander the Great and Mucho Mojo are also from books.
In person, Tally towers over most journalists, but relaxes with a welcoming demeanor.
Inquiring about my work before proceeding to the interview, he appealed to a common bond
between writers. A warning to those who have not yet see Red Dragon, there are some mild
spoilers in this interview as we discuss specifics of adapting Red Dragon.
Why didn't you adapt Hannibal?
I didn't know how to do that story as a movie. I
didn't know how to make it work to my satisfaction. It was also a feeling that Jonathan
[Demme] didn't want to do it, Ed Saxon, who produced Silence, didn't want to do it.
Eventually, Jodie didn't want to do it and I felt like we should all work together or not
do it. Ridley Scott asked me if I would do it and Dino [de Laurentiis] asked me if I would
do it, but it became kind of a loyalty thing to Jonathan.
How did that change for Red Dragon?
It still wasn't Jonathan It still wasn't
Jonathan but it was a book that I'd always loved. Also, it had been longer. I didn't feel
like it was going to be a direct comparison to Silence of the Lambs this time. We all felt
like if we do Hannibal, we're going to be competing with ourselves and we probably can't
win that competition. It's going to be a thankless feeling to work on this for two years
and then have people say, "Well, it's not as good as Silence of the Lambs." This
has more of a cushion around it to me. I just feel more comfortable with the book.
Why was it important to set up things and lead into Silence of the Lambs with certain
characters?
Well, because Chilton is in the book and the
audience loves to hate Anthony Heald, who's a great character and a wonderful actor. And I
just couldn't resist. I just thought it's fun for me to walk back down that corridor again
with Anthony Heald weedle in and try to get credit for publishing articles about Lecter.
It's a reprise of things in Silence of the Lambs that I thought the audience would enjoy
reprising. [And some of it] was just for my own fun.
What did you think of Manhunter?
I think Manhunter's a pretty good movie, but it
leaves out so much of the book that I didn't think it was a sacred cow that was the last
word on this book. And Thom Harris was very disappointed in that movie and wanted to see
his book with his title done right from his point of view.
How did you approach Will Graham's monologues?
That's hard, and some of Edward Norton's best
work in this movie is when he's thinking out loud. It's a very hard thing for an actor to
do. I've had actors refuse to speak dialogue unless there was another actor there. They're
so afraid of looking silly. But he handled it very gracefully and it's very convincing.
You obviously can't do as much as the internal monologue as the book. The greatest luxury
that novelists have over screenwriters is the ability to write thoughts.
How did you develop the opening scene?
It was suggested in Silence of the Lambs that
Lecter killed this flutist to improve the sound of the orchestra. Actually, the flutist
was a patient of his in that book. It was referred to again in Hannibal. So, I just
thought if we start with a concert and with Tony Hopkins as this pained audience member,
it will have some scale and some drama. I like the idea of starting with an audience
watching an audience, and the music at the beginning of the movie. It has some size and
some style, some coloring and I liked that. And I thought it's nice to start on a slightly
comic note and it was a natural progression to go from that to the suggestion that he
served parts of that flutist to members of the symphony board. I think that's also in
Silence of the Lambs.
So, I thought, if we've gone that far, we've got to get Will Graham into this. The
original backstory that's in Red Dragon is that Will Graham first interviewed Lecter
because a patient of Lecter's had disappeared, I think a college student, not the flutist.
So, he's just interviewing Lecter because that's one of the follow-ups. Some little thing
that happens in that interview arouses some little degree of suspicion on Graham's part.
He can't even put his finger on it. So, he comes back for a second interview with Lecter,
and in that second interview he sees some medical text, or a drawing that suggests one of
the victims and he becomes suspicious of Lecter. Lecter knows he's suspicious of him and
attacks him. That's the backstory as it is in the book. I thought it would be more
interesting and richer if it wasn't their first acquaintance, if they actually knew each
other. It would be helpful for later parts of the story if Lecter is aware of Graham's
wife and son, for instance, and if he really knows him pretty well. It will help their
interplay throughout the movie. Then I thought ah, well, what if Lecter's playing one of
his mind games here? What if Lecter's pretending to help the investigation of a killer who
is in fact himself? That seems like something Lecter would do. What better ways to make
fools out of the police than to appear to be helping them search for himself? That just
struck me as Lecter's perverse wit and that was the origin of that scene.
How did you develop the exercise scene?
I was writing the script before there was a director, but I thought if I was directing this movie, I would certainly want to have a chance to get out of that corridor and away from that cell. Jonathan Demme was brilliant in finding ways to keep that fresh, but there's only so much you can do with that static situation. So, I thought if I were a director, I'd like to get him out of that cell. It gives him a chance to move, use his body. The way I originally wrote the scene was in an outdoor exercise yard, like a big dog run with an electrified fence and that's where they let Lecter exercise. Brett [Ratner], after looking at some locations, thought it was too hard to control the lighting and it wouldn't feel as claustrophobic as every scene with Lecter should always feel. Could it happen indoors? I said I guess he could be in some sort of gymnasium or something. And production designer Kristi Zea said, "I have a great idea." She's a genius. We worked it out between the three of us that he'd be tethered, but when you first see him you wouldn't know that he's been tethered so you can have this very scary moment where he appears to be approaching Will Graham as a free man and it's a scary little thrilling moment. It's great to see them have a scene with no bars and no plexi in between them. It's a whole different electricity in that scene, and it gave Dante Spinotti and everybody a chance to really show their stuff with the lighting and the whole look of that scene. I'm very pleased with how that scene came out and it's not a scene that's in the book.
Part Two: Alexander the Great, Mucho
Mojo and being the adaptation guy
Why was it five years from Silence to your next movie?
Well, I wrote a couple scripts that were not
produced for various reasons and I wrote a script that looked like it was going to get
made and then didn't, which was All the Pretty Horses. I don't know, things just happen.
Bad choices, bad luck. My career has been very odd that way. I either have nothing going
on or I have two or three movies going on at once. I can't control the timing of them. I
keep writing them, but sometimes they sit there for eight years before they get made.
How involved were you with The Juror and Before and After?
I was very much involved in Before and After. I
was dismissed from The Juror just as they were starting to shoot. Demi Moore and I had
issues with each other and I had no involvement whatever in the making of that movie.
What was your version of The Juror like?
It was pretty close to what you saw. I think it
would have been a better movie if the two women had switched parts, if Anne Heche had been
the main character and Demi Moore had been her tough, feisty friend.
A few years later, you could have cast that.
Exactly. I think that would have been a better
movie. But, I liked Alec Baldwin. I thought his performance was very good. James
Gandolfini was great. Some people told me it's their favorite movie of mine which is a
little odd to me.
I have a theory that every movie is somebody's favorite movie, somewhere.
Well, my favorite movie is All the Pretty Horses
which seven people saw. I don't go by box office popularity.
I was always surprised people were so hard on Before and After. They were hard on that.
I've had a lot of movies that took it on the chin and I'm never quite sure why. I can
understand Before and After was very upsetting material. Nobody ever thought that was
going to be a box office bonanza. But I'm sometimes surprised by how disrespectfully some
of these movies are received, as if we've set out to make some piece of sh*t, as if we
didn't have intelligent, worthwhile intentions. We're not making some bozo frat comedy. If
you make a movie like Before and After, obviously you're trying to make a serious
worthwhile adult drama. Yet, sometimes you can be brutally received. There's a lot of
incivility in criticism which I don't really understand.
Was that film close to your vision?
Yes. I wish it had been a little longer. We kept
cutting it back and making it shorter and shorter and shorter and I think maybe some of
the subtext was lost in there a little bit. Some of the family texture, we kept tinkering
with it because the [test] scores were not good and Barbet [Schroeder] kept trying to make
it shorter and shorter. But the same thing happened with All the Pretty Horses. I think
some texture is lost. Sometimes the movie wants to be two hours and 20 minutes, but it's
very hard for a studio to accept that unless it's obviously more commercial material.
What's Mucho Mojo?
Mucho Mojo is from a book by Joe Lansdale, a
Texas writer who is very prolific. He writes mysteries, comedies, comic books. He wrote a
series of books, I guess his most popular characters, are two guys, a black guy and a
white guy, Leonard Pine and Hap Collins who live in East Texas, not the part of Texas that
you normally see in movies. It's the sort of steamy, swampy, eastern shore of Texas, more
like Louisiana. In an imaginary county and imaginary town that he's set there, they're
good old boys except one's black and one's white. The black guy's gay and the white guy's
not, but they've been best friends since high school. They're blue collar and they're sort
of raunchy, rude, profane guys who are great fun as characters. The dialogue is hilarious.
They just keep getting in the way of trouble and they keep getting involved in having to
solve crimes, but they're not detectives. They work in the rose fields of Texas as migrant
workers, but they're great characters. It's the first book in that series and my favorite
one. I wrote the adaptation for New Line, it went into turnaround and it's at Studio Canal
now. David Goyer is going to direct that.
Will he do that before or after Darksiders?
I don't know. It was originally going to start
shooting in November. It's been pushed back to maybe January at this point. I don't know
what's going on with that project.
Any casting ideas?
Don Cheadle agreed to play one of the parts but
now with production pushed back, I don't know whether we'll lose Don or not.
On Alexander the Great, how closely does Baz Luhrmann work with you?
We haven't really worked together yet. We've met
and talked on the phone, but it's been so far more general. We haven't gotten down to nuts
and bolts of the revisions yet.
What has he asked for told you?
I think he's going to want more scenes of
Alexander's childhood, but we haven't really gotten down to the details yet. He's agreed
to do the movie and the studio greenlit it, but there's still script work to be done.
Are you the adaptation guy?
I'm the adaptation guy now. I didn't used to be
but I've sort of settled into that and I'm comfortable with that. I like to approach this
as a craft and I'm happy with that. I find I can work more efficiently that way than if
I'm trying to do original stuff. I can be more business-like. I have an assignment every
day. I can finish a script in four months instead of tearing my hair out for a year. And I
think adaptations tend to get made more often than original scripts.
Could you have done Alexander if there weren't books, and you just had to use history?
Yes, I could have although it would have taken a year or two of research. I did the research anyway, but I had the template of this trilogy of novels to work from. Alexander is a story where there's enough there that I probably could have done that as an original. In a way, doing a historical subject is an adaptation. You've got the plot and the characters.