The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee, is given a task as part of the hunt for a serial killer known as “Buffalo Bill.” She needs to speak with a man who is being held in a secure facility for criminally insane people.
The person in question is Dr Hannibal Lecter, a former psychiatrist with peculiar interests and a keen interest in the murkier parts of the human psyche. The essence of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs, an iconic work of suspense fiction, is his intimate knowledge of both the murderer and Clarice.
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
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- Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs, paperback
No matter how you look at it, the 1988 Thomas Harris novel, the working screenplay and storybook by Ted Tally, the 1991 Jonathan Demme-helmed adaptation, or the spellbinding performances of the film’s leading actors, “Silence of the Lambs” is an American classic. Although the majority of people merely enjoy watching it, it’s intriguing to learn where the genius originated. I believe the harder it is to adapt a book into a screenplay the better the book is. A movie is primarily about what people do, but a novel is primarily about what people think.
Harris deserves credit for drawing 95% of the screenplay’s material from the book, but Talley and Demme abandoned substantial portions of the screenplay on the cutting room floor since a gesture or a fast camera shot can express the meaning of several pages of text. The difficulty is to convey all of that reasoning and background information via movement, gestures, inflexion, and action. Maintaining a tight script is harder said than done, but I have written screenplays for three of my own suspense novels.
The plot and characters that Harris created are faithfully maintained in both the screenplay and the film. However, Tally and Deme both added a few little but magical changes. The best part is the last scene where Lecter is on the phone congratulating Clarice Starling on graduating from the FBI Academy while he watches his arch-enemy Dr Chilton arrive at a little Caribbean airport. We all know what Lecter is having for supper as he hangs up and starts to follow Chilton up the street. As the book comes to a close, Lecter sends Starling a message of congratulations and promises not to pursue her because she makes the world a better place.
The phone conversation between Chilton and Lecter and Starling in the airport scene from Tally’s screenplay takes place at night. Demme films the incident in broad daylight so that we can see Chilton’s tense terror and the sparkle of impending retribution in Lecter’s eyes. Before the closing credits, that moment of genius sends one last shiver down the spine of the moviegoer. You can find countless more instances when Tally improved upon the novel and contributed to it in the working script, and you can also find other instances where Demme made more cuts and added some fantastic flourishes.
Some of them may be seen in the storyboards where Demme drew the mood he desired for specific sequences. It is hard to disregard Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, and Ted Levine’s contributions to their characters while praising Harris, Tally, and Demme for their brilliance. Hopkins scares the crap out of us in his opening scene by simply remaining motionless and gazing out the bars of his cage with a deadpan expression, while Foster uses accent, mannerisms, and phrasing to create a memorable character of a backwoods country girl…
