De Laurentiis Rising
I’m all for artistic integrity, but I can’t help but get a little nostalgic for the old studio system, where movies were cranked out with little regard for individual expression. At a recent press junket, Dino De Laurentiis brought back a little of that old flavour by relating how Hannibal Rising came to be.
“When I did the promotion all around the world for Hannibal and Red Dragon, everybody asked me ‘Dino, we need to know when and where Hannibal Lecter started.’ I don’t give it much attention. But then I receive so much mail in a few years, with the same question, and I come to the conclusion that the audience wants to see the beginning of life for Hannibal Lecter. Anthony Hopkins, seventeen years old? We need a boy, nineteen years old. Ha! Now, I start to say ‘maybe this is an idea, to create a new franchise, with a new story, and tell the audience how Hannibal Lecter started. It was not so easy a problem. My first call to Tom Harris, he said ‘Dino, really, I don’t know…’ To make the story short, little by little, I convinced Tom Harris to create a new story.”
Now that’s how they did things back in the day.