#*sotl

Anthony Hopkins: Jonathan showed some clips for my benefit, and I remember the one when you get into the elevator with all those big FBI guys, and I thought “That’s it, this is brilliant! This is brilliant,” because there you are, this smaller person in this big macho, male world, coming in as the hero; Campbell’s Hero. Jodie Foster: Yeah, there are certain images that kind of get seared into your imagination and you say, “Oh, that’s the character, that’s what it’s about.” [..] There was a lot of, not so much apology but, an almost...a shame that she wasn’t bigger, that she wasn’t stronger, that she wasn’t louder. That in her past she had failed. I think that was the part for me. Once I understood that sense of this person trying to overcome the failure of what they were born into, I understood that that was her strength.

Director Jonathan Demme said this would be “the perfect date movie” and chose February 14th, 1991, for its US release. This date made all involved believe the movie would have no chance of gaining any Academy Award nominations as it would be a full year before they were eligible. They were of course wrong and the movie still managed to sweep the 5 big categories in March, 1992.

I think Lecter’s amused by this buffoon. This man with the terrible checked jacket and the swagger.

Now that she was a veteran of the Bureau, veteran of many lateral assignments, she could see that her early triumph in catching the serial murderer Jame Gumb was part of her undoing in the Bureau. She was a rising star that stuck on the way up. In the process of catching Gumb, she had made at least one powerful enemy and excited the jealousy of a number of her male contemporaries. That, and a certain cross-grainedness, had led to years of jump-out squads, and reactive squads rolling on bank robberies and years of serving warrants, seeing Newark over a shotgun barrel. Finally, deemed too irascible to work with groups, she was a tech agent, bugging the telephones and cars of gangsters and child pornographers, keeping lonesome vigils over Title Three wiretaps. And she was forever on loan when a sister agency needed a reliable hand in a raid. She had wiry strength and she was fast and careful with the gun. — Hannibal, Thomas Harris

Ready when you are, Sergeant Pembry.

She's been the lone woman in a sea of men her whole life...she's been the one that was the smaller one her whole life, so she's comfortable in that position. And in some ways, that's what makes her the hero of the film. - Jodie Foster