anthony hopkins screen time in silence of the lambs

ANTHONY HOPKINS SCREEN TIME IN SILENCE OF THE LAMBS MOVIE

Silence would soon, however, become a much-needed hit for Orion. “There’s no way Orion saw it as an awards contender,” says Katey Rich, who covers the Oscars and other awards for Vanity Fair. A few weeks after Silence’s release, Dances With Wolves would repeat the feat, but nothing about the studio’s treatment of Silence suggested it was being positioned to do the same. Orion Pictures, the studio behind The Silence of the Lambs, was no stranger to the Academy Awards, having won Best Picture prizes for Amadeus and Platoon. Silence entered wide release on February 14, 1991, a date far removed from the usual year-end window for awards contenders. But nothing about it suggested it would become a multi–award winning Oscar favorite, either. Nothing about the film’s pedigree suggested it would be a run-of-the-mill cop versus killer movie. It would soon add Anthony Hopkins as Lecter and-after Demme’s first choice, Michelle Pfeiffer, turned down the role-Jodie Foster, a recent Best Actress winner for The Accused, as Starling. When Demme joined, the film already had acclaimed playwright Ted Tally in place as screenwriter. How ‘Drive My Car’ Is Changing the Definition of Best Picture Make the Case: The Oscar Winners We Want to See in 2022 If The Silence of the Lambs wasn’t a film Demme previously seemed likely to make, it was one for which he was nonetheless unusually well suited. FBI agent Clarice Starling and psychiatrist–serial killer Hannibal Lecter share a tremendous gift for understanding other people, though they apply that gift differently. For all that sets it apart from Demme’s previous films, The Silence of the Lambs has that same empathy in abundance, as do its central characters. By film’s end, it’s taken a deadly, suspenseful turn, yet it plays like a Demme film throughout thanks largely to a pervasive sense of empathy. Something Wild begins as a madcap comedy but changes gears radically midway through with the arrival of a dangerous character played by Ray Liotta. In retrospect, however, the shift looks less shocking-and like less of a shift altogether. As Sheila Benson wrote in her Los Angeles Times review of The Silence of the Lambs, “The Jonathan Demme of Something Wild or Melvin and Howard or Stop Making Sense might not be the first director one would think of for suspense or bloody terror his touch has always seemed lighter, his interests more quirky and off the mainstream. Demme had made memorable digressions with the masterful Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense and an inventive film version of Spalding Gray’s monologue Swimming to Cambodia, but by the end of the ’80s, everyone knew he made warm, quirky, deceptively complex comedies. He made another thriller, 1979’s Last Embrace, and then moved on to Melvin and Howard, Swing Shift, Something Wild, and Married to the Mob. Handle with Care), an ensemble piece inspired by the Citizens’ Band craze, in which Demme came into his own as a director of eccentric comedies filled with memorable, carefully crafted characters. But it was the 1977 film Citizens Band (a.k.a. Demme got his start making exploitation films for Roger Corman like his directorial debut, 1974’s Caged Heat (one of the era’s best women-in-prison movies).

ANTHONY HOPKINS SCREEN TIME IN SILENCE OF THE LAMBS MOVIE

That Thomas Harris’s bestselling 1988 novel would be turned into a movie was probably inevitable that Jonathan Demme would direct the adaptation was not.

Then again, pretty much everything about The Silence of the Lambs seemed unlikely. It was, unexpectedly but undeniably, the year of the cannibal. Yet more than a year after it arrived in theaters, nothing could stand in the film’s way on Oscars night (not even noisy protests outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion). A grisly thriller filled with graphic violence, disturbing imagery, flung bodily fluids, and, yes, generous discussion of cannibalism, The Silence of the Lambs checked only a few of the boxes usually associated with Oscar-winning films.

But on March 30, 1992, for the first time since 1976 and only the third time in the history of the Academy Awards, one film won the “Big Five,” walking away with Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay (whether original or adapted), Best Actor, and Best Actress.

The Oscars didn’t traditionally give awards to cannibals.

Anthony hopkins screen time in silence of the lambs