Hannibal season 3 episode 3 transcript

Hannibal Season 3, Episode 3 –  Commentary with Brian Fuller and Richard Armitage (2015)

BF:  Hi.  I’m Brian Fuller, Executive Producer and creator of the television show “Hannibal”, and I am here with –

RA:  Hi.  I’m Richard Armitage, and I’m playing Francis Dolarhyde.

BF:  Are you sure it’s not pronounced Armitaage?

RA:  I’m pretty certain. (laughs)  If you’re in France it’s Armitaage or certain parts of America where they try to Frenchify it, but definitely Armitage [pronounces it, “Armitige”].

BF:  (laughs)

RA:  It was perfectly timed.  Look.

BF:  Yes.  So, in doing this adaptation of Red Dragon one of the most exciting things for us, on the writing side, was to really dig into all of those passages in the Thomas Harris novel that had never made it to the screen before – specifically, so much detail in Francis Dolarhyde’s backstory – so it’s exciting to get to work with Richard on this because Richard is one of the most thorough actors I’ve ever worked with, in terms of preparation.

RA:  Well, thanks, Brian.  That’s very, very nice of you to say that.  I was actually just looking at that moment with the hand, which was one of my favorite little passages in the, in the book when I think it … there’s a little bell that rings inside his mind, which, when he realizes he’s aging and he sees the kind of cracks in his hand, and I think you’d written that into one of the stage directions for, for this scene, which was really great.  It’s like a very visual moment for me.

BF:  It, it’s an interesting beginning of a mid-life crisis for, for Francis Dolarhyde, where it’s like, “oh, I’m, I’m getting older” and so so much of his story –

RA:  Which I think we can both relate to, Brian, can’t we?

BF:  (laughter)  Yes, yes.  I’ve got to get that gray out of my hair.  (sings)  I’m gonna wash that gray right out of my hair!  So, this, this sequence you, you did a lot of research on different body movements for this stuff.

RA:  I did.  I remember you talking about wanting something which was not like a montage of bench pressing.  I felt the same, and there was something in the book that they talk about him moving in a very stylistic way so I’d looked at, it’s a Japanese style of an art form called Butoh in combination with Pilates and Yoga, so I sort of invented this a little bit and didn’t really know what I was gonna do, but just winged it on the day.

BF:  It was incredible.  I had so much feedback from this sequence with people asking if there were visual effects/components to your ribs bulging and the, you know, the plate of your scapula moving down your back, and I was like, nope, that’s all Richard.

RA:  Yeah.  I mean, it’s interesting.  This was a great … this is … all these little things that you pick up along the way.  Like, when I trained for The Hobbit we had, we worked with a trainer in New Zealand who used to do a very, very slow descent from, from these two bars that you’re seeing now and it was incredibly kind of painful but very centering and he used to put a metronome on so I just thought, oh, I’ll, I’ll use that.  I thought that was a really … I thought anything that was slow and sustained and, you know, had a sense of stamina about it would be interesting to look at rather than just, you know, repetitions.  So …

BF:  We wanted to get away from the sort of pumping iron aspect of Francis Dolarhyde and take him into something that was a little more cerebral and also that, that sequence when you were doing those moves reminds me, in the best possible way, of a “American Werewolf in London” transformation and that was, that was what was so cool, seeing your body shift and contort as if Rob Bottin was operating you off camera.

RA:  Yeah, very cool that you should say that as well.  I mean as we get into this tattoo section because I pulled up a load of pictures as a reference of people that have quite extreme tattoos, and they also have little implants under their skin, which I thought as a sort of visual reference for myself that he has the structure of the dragon under his skin and it’s somehow breaking through and rippling down his body, which is also described in the stage directions, you know, when the tattoo starts to move.  You know, all of these things just end up as a, as something, you know, like this onscreen.  I love this sequence with the, with the tattoo pen as well.  I think it’s really extraordinary.

BF:  We actually, the … originally scored this to an adaptation of Thunderstruck, a cover of Thunderstruck by Two Cellos. That was the original track that we laid down for this and it gave it kind of a Rocky, triumphant tone to it that Brian Reitzell then took and made much more creepy and  terrifying – as he does.

RA:  I think I just saw a butt crack, Brian.  I’m sure you promised me no butt cracks allowed on NBC – I’m pretty sure I just saw one.

BF:  I think that was a blurry butt crack.  (laughter)

This title sequence, I have to say every time done by MOMOCO in the UK, and absolutely fantastic.  This sequence, I remember, we were having such trouble with scheduling and we were at the end of the season and this was shot, one of the last things that we shot for the show in this episode because we kept on putting it off and putting it off and then finally the studio was like, we can’t afford to shoot this; and then I was like, okay, I’ll pay for it.  So I paid for this sequence (laughing) just to get it in there.  All of the things you do for television.  And this –

RA:  And I actually did the singing for this sequence, as well. I think that was, that was very good of me to …  (laughter)  [The sequence features a child’s falsetto/soprano vocal – clearly not Richard’s voice.]

BF:  Were you a Hannibal fan beforehand, Richard?

RA:  I was. Um … “Silence of the Lamb” – I remember going to see “Silence of the Lambs” when it first came out at the cinema.  I think it’s the first time I’ve ever been frightened to the point of putting my hands over my face in a cinema before.  It was at the same time as “Misery” came out and “Silence of the Lambs” definitely, definitely tipped it.   So it was one of those things that really informed the way that I came in to to create Dolarhyde.  I just knew the world and I, you know, I think your reinvention of it is a very interesting place to come and play in it.

BF:  It, well I, I can’t thank you enough for joining us at this, this table because you brought such authenticity to a role that I was terrified of bringing to the screen because I had fetishized this novel and this character and you gave it the right weight and gravity for him to be realized.  It was, I think your performance is wonderful and one of my favorite things that you’ve ever done.  Sorry Peter Jackson.

RA: (laughs) Well, now, that’s, that’s very good of you to say.  I mean, the, the thing that was interesting for me is that I really didn’t go and look at too many of the other movies, I just took your work and I took the novel and let it become, you know, let it grow from there, which, I love working from literature, and I think Thomas Harris writes in a really visual way and a visceral way as well.

BF:  Well, one of the things that I loved about working with you is the detail of your journals for, for Dolarhyde, and if you notice, there was, there was passages and, and some wordplay that you used in those journals that I put into scripts that I …  ‘cause I found them as poetic and purple in their prose as Thomas Harris’ literature, so it seemed like a symbiotic relationship.

RA:   You’re gonna have to remind me which, which lines they are.

BF:  (laughing)  I’ll have to remind myself!

RA:  Can you remember?

BF:  Ah … there was –

RA:  It’s interesting though because I, I never felt like I had to sit down and learn any of Dolarhyde’s dialog and that, that rarely happens that you, you know, I’d read a scene and I’d know the scene, obviously, from the book, but I wouldn’t have to, to sort of memorize the lines.  The lines just fell into the mind and that’s, I guess, the sign of good writing, and also ‘cause I knew, I knew Thomas Harris’ work, but maybe there are a couple of my own words in there somewhere.

BF:  Well, one of my favorite things about this episode, in particular, is you have all of your lines memorized.  You could repeat them verbatim ‘cause I think –

RA:  In this episode – (laughter)

BF:  Yes (laughs)

RA:  This, this sequence came about because I was working with a dialect coach and trying to study the accent, the Missouri accent, and also the speech impediment, and I found some footage of a young girl, I think she was about 9 years old, maybe younger, who was in speech therapy and was really struggling to speak, and every time she got to the difficult letters, like “s”, she would flinch and look at her mother and try and correct herself and it was so, it was so painful to watch; but I really felt the stress coming from the parents, as well, that they wanted their child to speak normally and, I mean her speech was fine, really, it just had this slight lisp, so that was what I used for this scene.

BF:  That, that little wail that you do in that scene, there’s so many bizarre, thoughtful ticks that you’ve given Francis Dolarhyde that give the audience so much sympathy for this character, and I think previously we have seen Tom Noonan play it, and we’ve seen Ralph Fiennes play it, and everyone has come to this, this character with a different perspective, and I loved the creepy little wounded specificity of your performance – haunting!

RA:  Thank you!

Yeah, I mean, I think there was, there was something written about him wearing cotton woollen or cotton wool that became wire wool in his ears that made his ears bleed because he felt that his thoughts were leaking out of his mind through his ears, and when you, if you put your fingers in your ears and try to make sound, some of the sounds that come out are more about resonance in your head rather than actually what they sound like, so I feel like he’s in that weird place at the moment.  He’s so in his own head and the voices in his head are, are very loud.

BF:  That, it, it’s such a chilling and  –

RA:  Totally just rode over the blood.

BF:  Yes!  (laughing)  Well, how did you like –  yeah

RA:  Sorry! There’s just a great deal of blood there.

BF:  And, it was, it was warmed though ‘cause that night was freezing when you shot that, wasn’t it?

RA:  That was, that was one of my very first shots, as well, so I was kind of firstly very nervous about joining the new crew and being naked in front of a new crew in -15 temperature where your body isn’t gonna necessarily going to look its best  – (laughs)

BF:  It’s cold!

RA:  But they were very good to me!

BF:  Trust me! It’s cold!

RA:  I asked for a “fluffer” but, but one, one didn’t arrive. (laughter) Um … but they did, they were very good.  They, they warmed the blood for me and, and caked it all over me and then we did two or three takes and that was it, but … and it’s amazing how, how the body responds in that temperature because I just did not feel the cold at all until the soles of my feet when I went inside and – but yeah, it, that kind of thing is thrilling.  When do you ever get to stand naked in a garden at -14 temperature and be covered in blood and, pretty, pretty awesome.

BF:  And, hilariously, in the next episode Hugh had to repeat the exact movement ‘cause he was putting,  putting himself in Francis Dolarhyde’s shoes and he, he was like, ‘I am not going out in the cold’.

RA:  Oh, ‘cause he came and asked me and I was like, it was, it was hell on earth, don’t do it!

BF:  (laughing) Yes, it –

RA:  Don’t let them do that to you!  No, I didn’t really, I’m kidding.

BF:  Well, we, we got a body double for Hugh in that episode and had to map his face on, onto the body and the body double didn’t have as nice a body as Hugh did and it, it kind of cracked me up where I was like, well, if you wanted to be represented, you should have got out there in the cold.  (laughs) But he was like, no!

RA:  You see, I am a real bugbear about that.  I find it very difficult to hand over anything to a stunt double or a body double.  Luckily, we didn’t have to do that very much in this at all, apart from the fight sequence coming up at the, at the end of the series, and I get very itchy.  I mean, no matter how brilliant they are, and they always are, you know, stunt doubles are always great but never quite, you know, they’re not quite in there.  They haven’t done the character work that you’ve done and I, I’m as much about how the character moves as, you know, what they say.

BF:  Well, they, they also, I find stuntmen move like stuntmen.  They’re so practiced in their physical performance that they’re moving to protect their bodies in very specific ways and it often times doesn’t match how an actor moves so I, I appreciate when somebody wants to do as much as possible.  And here we have Raúl Esparza, who you had some pretty ridiculous scenes in, in a couple of episodes, which –

RA:  You didn’t give me any of that chocolate mousse –

BF:  That chocolate mousse –

RA:  If that – now I know –

BF:  That chocolate mousse … the, the blood and chocolate –

RA:  Yes (laughs)

BF:  evidently was the most delicious thing than Janice Poon has cooked and everyone was wanting to do more takes because it was so delicious.

RA:  And it’s a real dish, right?

BF:  Oh, yeah, yeah.  They use cow’s blood and, or pig’s blood, and it alters the flavor profile of the chocolate in the most fantastic way so that  –

RA:  It looked delicious.

BF:  Did you get any? You didn’t get any of the fancy food that Janice Poon prepares for –

RA:  I didn’t get any food, period!

BF:  I think he ate.  Did we see him eat?

RA:  Well, not really.  I mean, I think, no, I did eat something.  I ate a lot of pie, I seem to remember. That’s how I told each episode.

BF:  Oh, yes! (laughs)

RA:  A lot of pie.

BF:  Was it good pie?

RA:  It was good pie, as well.  It, it was, it was shop bought but it, it’s still pretty tasty.

BF:  (laughing)

So, as is, you hadn’t watched the show before you, you came aboard, did you –

RA:  I’d um … I … um … binge-fested on series one and then I didn’t watch series two until we were, I was watching it as we were filming just to, you know, figure out who all the characters were.  It did, it didn’t really, it got me into the sense and flavor of the show, but actually knowing who all the characters were sometimes can be,  can be, you know, destructive, and you have to un-know things because, obviously, Dolarhyde doesn’t know any of them –

BF:  Right!

RA:  so, and I, even reading scripts of what’s happening outside of his own journey can be, can be difficult.

BF:  This sequence, you know, we were –

RA:  Oh … something’s coming on here.

BF:  and we, there, these sequences, I loved working with Neil Marshall and he was such a fantastic collaborator and we, we had to choose because it’s modern times and people don’t use celluloid the way they did when this was written or when the previous adaptations were filmed, so it was fantastic to fetishize it and give it a retro quality; and the horror and the mechanics of a film projector being the, the guts and inner workings of the dragon felt like a real interesting symbolic madness for him, and all of this, we wrapped you, we wrapped a … a prosthetic head with all the film set so that wasn’t you getting all cocooned in film.

RA:  We did do, we did do a couple of takes where they, they wrapped the tape around me but I, I guess it was just to get the body movement and to sort of restrict my head in a way that would, would do it, but obviously that light shining out of my eyes and mouth is something that I’m not capable of.

BF:  Oh, I think you shine bright from the inside, Richard.

RA:  (laughing) Only through, only through the rear end.  (laughter)

BF:  Yeah!  That, is that the candle on the water, as it were?

RA:  The sun shines out of one’s butt. I’m kidding. (laughter)

BF: (laughing) Often, often.  Ah, this –

RA:  Look at that heavy book.  That is a heavy book.

BF:  They got an actual ledger that they rented, and I was so annoyed because I wanted to keep it ‘cause  I have your dentures in my office in that little oriental box –  and I love keeping props from the shows that I work on and I really wanted this ledger and I couldn’t have it because we had to return it to the rental house.  Dammit!

RA:  That was a beautiful book and really genuinely heavy as well, which I thought was, I love props that really, that don’t feel like props, they actually feel like the real thing, and that room was absolutely peppered with fantastic props.  I remember spending a lot of time just sitting in there between takes and making it feel like my own house and handling all the little pieces of equipment on the side; it was a, it was a real gift for an actor to go in there and have all that stuff to play with.

BF:  One of the things that I loved about shooting this arc with you is the response of the crew to your performance and your presence as Francis Dolarhyde on the set, and then your presence as Rich on the set were so dynamically opposite to each other that, that people were both in love with you and also terrified of you. (laughter)

RA:  That’s interesting.  Yeah, it’s, I find it tricky.  I find it tricky to snap in-and-out of a character like this and, you know, when people, people do want to chat and socialize and have fun with you, and it, it’s, I find it difficult to be that person as Dolarhyde, so rather than be obstructive about it I tended to hide away or just go find a quiet corner to sit in, which isn’t the first time I’ve done that, but it just helps me so that when they, when they call “action” you don’t have to sort of run up again, run up the ramp again, you’re just, you’re just already in and it’s much more useful to me.  And it helps me that, that the crew see, see me as Dolarhyde rather than as me.  You know, it helps me.

BF:  Was it … I mean, that’s a, he’s such a heavy character and such a tortured character, did it take you a while to shake him after you finished filming, or did you just slide him off like a coat?

RA:  You know what’s interesting is the very damaged side of the character was revealed much more at the beginning and then as we get into episodes 12 and 13 he’d sort of, he was more galvanized in the dragon, and I had actually separated myself from that side of him, too.   I, I left the, the fragile Dolarhyde behind in episode 11 and through episodes 12 and 13 it was, it was a little bit …  he, he, you know, I was shedding him as I went along, I think.

BF:  Well, the, the importance of making him vulnerable for me as a fan of the, the literature, I was so drawn to Francis Dolarhyde as a broken human being and felt such compassion for him and was able somehow to compartmentalize his, his wounds to the wounds that he inflicted and I, I wanted the audience to experience that confusion as well, where you actually felt for this man yet he was capable of horrible, horrible things.  He was a murderer of families and yet you’re rooting for him to, to win in his romance.  It was such an interesting place to take a character that, that Thomas Harris created.

RA:  Yeah, and you know, it, it, there’s been a lot of very good discussion about the character, about those things outside of the, of the show and, you know, online on social media and stuff, and one of the things which has come up is a lot of people saying, you know, he’s not as disfigured, you know, as he thinks he is and that was really very much the point, is that his disfigurement is as much in his mind as it is physically.  You know, it’s … um … it’s very minor, really, what you see on his face, but in his mind it’s, it’s like half of his face is missing he’s so … the deformity is very much within himself, and, actually, as we get into the next episode and we see, we see what he does with Reba and the romance, the way that he can, you know, woo that lady is – it has such an artistic, poetic side to it, which I think is unconscious in this character and were it not for outcome of the terrible, monstrous crimes he does, that the approach to it has real artistry and sensual poetry to it, you know, but unfortunately it, it’s corrupt at the roots so it, it manifests itself in a horrible, you know, end.

BF:  Were there, was there anything in the book that you, you missed that we didn’t get in the show, ‘cause one of the things that I loved, loved, loved about our collaboration in working with you is that you are so attentive to detail, and there were things in the book that you were, you were catching and asking if we were gonna to be putting them in, and sometimes there wasn’t a plan to put them in but because of your passion for those details I found a way to wove them in because it was, I was being re-inspired for the character through your inspiration.

RA:  Yeah, I mean, and one of those moments I think, I don’t know if it’s in this episode or the next one, is the, is the grandmother and the, the “dinner party of the grotesques”, I think we ended it terming it.  A lot of his childhood, which is a large part of the book, was something that I, I yearned to visit but it didn’t necessarily have to be shown in the show as, as, you know, just to be known to me and I would visit it in my imagination a lot of the time during scenes … one of the key scenes that I love in the book is when – I think it’s Dolarhyde’s first sexual encounter with a young girl and the, the slaughtering of chickens that happened at the same time and his legs gets splashed with blood and his grandmother’s watching from an upstairs window and, you know, that whole event was very useful to me to program as a memory for the character, especially with regards to, as the relationship with Reba became physical.  You know, those were the memory recalls that he would have been having.  As he says to Hannibal, he, you know, he’s never really, you know, been with a real live woman before, apart from that first encounter with this young girl and, but the little glimpse of his childhood was, was probably enough to, to suggest that.

BF:  The, the, you know, there was a tricky balance because I’m generally terrified of child actors, and I’ve worked with a couple of amazing child actors, but I was really concerned about Jake loiding Dolarhyde in the way … you know, the “Star Wars” prequel is you see a young child  and who’s supposed to be Darth Vader and the child actor just doesn’t have the sophistication to pull off the depth of what needs to be addressed for the story; so that was, that was my hesitation of bringing into a story where, bringing in components of Francis Dolarhyde’s childhood, because I just worried about the distraction of, of a child actor and – maybe, maybe I’m a little prejudiced –

RA:  Yeah. No, no, but speaking of which, the little chap that’s playing Will and Molly’s son is probably a, an exception to that rule.  I think he’s –

BF:  Absolutely!

RA: really spectacular in this and strangely, and I don’t know whether it was deliberate, but in that scene that we’re talking about with the grandmother, the, the little boy that plays the young Dolarhyde there is just the echo of a similarity with this little chap who’s playing –

BF:  Yeah, they have a, they have –

RA:  It’s Walter, isn’t it?

BF:  Yes.

RA:  Walter

BF:  They, they have a similar sense to them and it was, it was interesting to get a glimpse of him, and we see a glimpse of young Dolarhyde in this episode where you see a picture – which you didn’t see when we were filming it because we digitally added it, but there is a picture of Dolarhyde and his grandmother that he pulls out of the ledger before he starts pasting in the newspaper articles –

RA:  That’s right, yes –

BF:  and –

RA:  It was just a green piece of paper when I looked. (laughter)

BF:  Right!  And you know I, that was hoping that the, the hardcore Fannibals who know the literature so well would get that impression and know that there’s a great history between those two characters and, and that would be enough to understand that there is, there’s trauma in, in Dolarhyde’s past, so it was, it’s a, it’s a trick.

RA:  Yeah.  It’s interesting that  when you, when you do, you know, you kind of always question, you know, do you need to read the book, do you need to know all of these things, but the minute I walked into that attic there was – I think it was like a dressmaker’s dummy standing in the window behind, in front of lighting, and it just – the first thing I thought of when I saw it just, I was like his grandmother was standing in the corner watching him and because I knew so much about that relationship it was always there in the corner, she was always looming in, in the back of his mind mentally and physically because of this shop dummy in the room, and it was useful to me.

BF:  Now, have you, have you seen this sequence previously, when you saw the episode?  It’s –

RA:  I have and, actually, when I saw the episode I was so horrified by what he’d done because I hadn’t really seen it before and then when I saw it I was like, oh, what have I done? What have we done?

BF:  (laughs) You’re a bad, bad man, Francis Dolarhyde.

That, that was one of the, you know, the … tricks of this series is that we don’t see the killers killing.  We see Will Graham killing in their stead, and it must be interesting as a, as an actor not to have that experiential memory of those events because you never actually filmed any of them.

RA:  Yeah, I remember actively not wanting to have to go through that experience.  I think I, I think I’ve  talked about this perhaps before that where there’s a scene in the script that,  where, whereby I would have had to attemptd to commit those murders, it would have definitely been a difficult thing for me to, to sign up to.  Even when I, I think I walked on, onto set one day and there were the remnants of the, of the murder bedroom and I couldn’t look in the door.  I just, I had to stay away from it, which again was just something I thought, okay I’m feeling this so I will let the character feel this.  It’s almost like I was wanting to remove him from, you know, actor inside of character wanting to remove him and protect him from what he’d done and not let him look at it.

BF:  It, it is … I wonder if Francis Dolorhyde, how present Francis Dolarhyde is in those moments or if he does go into a trancelike state to carry out the dragon’s deeds.

RA:  Yeah.  I mean, I suspected that it was the same kind of ecstasy that, that he was in when he was experiencing the dragon as we see we do, you know, explore that in, in the subsequent episodes and even in the sequence whereby his character starts to split.  I feel that there’s a kind of ecstasy involved in that which, which may be the thrill of it is so high and hot that he is outside of his own body, not, not necessarily not feeling it and not doing it, but the experience for him is just different, I imagine.

BF:  This, you know, this sequence, I wanted to, I wanted the flashlight beam to be kind of a wormhole into the past of the murders, and I thought Neil pulled that off in such an interesting way to, to really give Will Graham a sense  of entering a history of, of these crimes.

I’ve never been in a –

RA:  Can I, can I ask you, is he, is this a flashback or is that murder house still, is it in his mind, what we’re seeing here?  Is the house actually empty?

BF:  The house is empty and you only see the bodies in the flashlight because this is a fresh kill, like it just happened two days ago when, when Will was brought back into the story with Jack Crawford.

RA:  I see.

BF:  And, you know, this has been done – so much of, of Red Dragon and the arc, you know, it’s been adapted twice before, so we were always looking at ways to try to do the story but make it our own, and the return of Will Graham’s, we call it the flume with the pendulum that, that erases time like a Langolier and takes him back to the, the moment of, of the murders.

RA:  I, I absolutely love the visual of that labyrinth of those, of those cotton threads.  The threads of blood, the blood splatter, I think it’s an incredible reference.

BF:  Well, that, I guess that’s what they do in crime scenes to track the arterial spray and the direction of where it’s coming from, and they’re so graphic and architectural that it’s strange to imagine what they’re representing.

RA:  Yeah

BF:  And, this is our first –

RA:  Oh, there you go.

BF:  our return to that device in the third season which we hadn’t used up until this time, so it was kind of like coming home again – to a horrible, horrible home, (laughs) a”see blood-stained” home.

So this is all what Francis did and it’s amazing to look at these sequences and see all of the little visual effects that we, that are seamless, that go into to the making of these episodes because a lot of times we’d get to a location that we can’t put blood down, so those bloody footprints on the floor that we saw earlier, those are all digital because we can’t, they’re either digital or they’re little vinyl shapes that we put down, ‘cause we can’t actually put any version of, of blood in the locations.

RA:  It’s so interesting watching this now, as well, because it sort of slingshots into the footsteps of where Dolarhyde’s gonna walk when he goes for Will’s family and as we look at these details we, we know how, what the outcome is because we’ve just seen it and so when he goes into, into Graham’s house to, to take his children we, it’s, it just heightens that horror of what’s potentially coming.

BF:  Yeah, the, the sequence is so upsetting (laughter) and, you know, interestingly in, in the very first episode of “Hannibal” the intention was to set up Francis Dolarhyde in a way that Will had been working on this case as a, as an unsolved mystery while he was teaching at the FBI, so a lot of details of Francis Dolarhyde were in that first lecture that we see Will Graham make back in the, the pilot episode of the series.

That’s pretty upsetting, to shoot a child.

RA:  I’m not feeling too well –

BF: (laughs)  Imagine how that dad feels!

RA:  I’m feeling a little bit queasy. A little bit queasy here. (laughing) I’m not good with blood.

BF:  At all?

RA:  Not good, no.  But look, these sequences, that’s exactly the same kind of shot that we had in the, in the house as he goes for Molly when it’s coming – it’s very, I don’t know whether it was deliberate, but it just, the pattern of the floor, the way, the speed that he’s moving, you’re gonna see this again.

BF:  All of these very artful inserts are shot by Chris Burn, who is our second-unit director, and so much detail is in this show that we can’t capture it in the schedule of an eight-day shoot so we, we have our maestro, Chris Burn, come in and pick up all of these detail works, and it allows us to string together a more subjective narrative.  And there’s one thing that I love about working on this show is that we are frequently in a unreliable narrator’s point of view ‘cause Will Graham is off his rocker and Francis Dolarhyde is certainly off his rocker, and I love representing a skewed view of the world through a character’s specific insanity.

RA:  Sorry, I’m just caught up in what I’m seeing here.  Um … yeah, this is all very, very close to, to the writing in the book in terms of the interpretation of that crime scene.  The powder from the glove, and I think that later we’re gonna find out that there was a fingerprint on the eyeball and teeth marks in the cheese, and it’s all very kind of faithfully represented here.

BF:  Well, we, we did de-rape it a bit ‘cause I have a, a personal problem with rape stories on television ‘cause they’re often so thinly told that they don’t accurately explore the trauma of that sort of event so I try to avoid them as opposed to compress them and give them short shrift because it’s,  it’s too real and too traumatic, so we … in the novel he rapes the corpse, he rapes the women while they’re dying and then likely rapes them again, and I just thought, do we need that aspect to understand Francis Dolarhyde’s story, and it does kind of lose sympathy for him in a way; and so I, I thinned all of those rapey details out just because I – it’s hard for me to find rape entertaining in any way.

RA:  But it’s also, it’s also about the perspective from which you’re gonna see this because we do see Dolarhyde attempting to explain it, deal with it, whatever you want to say, when he is in his imaginary therapy session with, with Hannibal and, not to soften it or trivialize it or in any way cushion it, but it is about the perspective of the, of the offender, and we certainly see Dolarhyde’s perspective in these stories – difficult as they are to, to view.

BF:  This, you know, Aaron and Scott are some of my favorite people and it was so nice to be working with them again in this show because they, they were absent from the first part of the season ‘cause we weren’t in the FBI crime procedural, so to be able to come back and play with them again was a delight ‘cause they’re both such lovely, hilarious people.  Did you meet them while you were up there – you didn’t have any scenes with them –

RA: I did.  I was interviewed, I was interviewed by Scott and I was very lucky enough to, to share a dinner with Aaron at the Saturn Awards, so I finally met everybody in the cast.

BF:  They’re … they’re goddamn delights is what they are.   Ahh, the … we made how many different dentures for you?

RA:  Oh, I, I’m not sure, really.  I think I, I only remember seeing two, two sets.  One was a, one was a visual set and one was the practical biting set, and I was very, very kindly offered, you know, which one of them, which pair of them was more comfortable, and that they’ll be the, they’ll be the biting set.  (laughs) So Dolarhyde’s comfort was considered at all times.

BF:  (laughs)  What … were they … was it odd to be chewing through things with those in your mouth?

RA:  Yeah.  I mean, it’s interesting because they, they sort of sit over the top of your own teeth so it’s really like having a mouth full of, like a double set of teeth, and I think we’ll see later on when Dolarhyde eats a painting that wearing them in a scene is, until the moment that they’re used, is quite difficult ‘cause it looks like I’m vomiting something or chewing on something rather big, but  –

BF:  Have you been naked this much on screen before?

RA:  No, never.

BF:  (laughing)

RA:  I was wondering, actually, did you, did you get the gift of the, of the modesty patch that I, I had quite a few of them over the course of the shoot and I sent them all to you in a little bag.  I was just wondering if you got them.

BF:  Noooo … I am so –

RA:  You didn’t?

BF: I’m so curious.

RA: Okay, [laughing] I’ll  find out from wardrobe what happened to them. Yeah, there was a –  no, there was a couple of modesty patches, but –

BF:  That’s hilarious.  (laughing)

RA:  they must have got lost in the post.  (laughing)

BF:  I’ll have to track those down because those are gonna go for a mint on eBay.  (laughter)  I hope they haven’t been washed.

RA:  They, they’re gross and they’ve got glue and a certain amount of makeup on them.

BF:  And pubic hair, I would imagine.

RA:  That’s, let’s not go there (laughter).

BF:  We can clone you from your modesty patches.

RA:  You totally could, couldn’t you?

BF:  I guess we could.  We  –

RA:  From a pubic hair –

BF:  Yeah

RA:  Like a kind of Dolarhyde/Jurassic Park.

BF:  Yes, yes, and I wonder if, because we’re cloning you from pubic hair, if you would have more of an abundance of pubic – like if your body would be covered –

RA:  Or less – (laughs)

BF:  with – well, that’s –

RA:  Or he might just be a single-strander – the guys on the outside are really laughing.

BF:  (Laughter) Well, we’ll find, there’s one way to really find out, we’ll just have to send it off to – I’m gonna send your pubic hair to 23andme and find out what you’re made of, DNA-wise.

RA:  Talking of hair, I, I initially removed hair from my legs for Dolarhyde and primarily ‘cause I knew we were having this big tattoo going around the leg and down the back and it was, it was something I wasn’t sure about doing, but I wanted him to have like a, quite an innocent looking body, if you know what I mean –

BF:  Right, right

RA:   I didn’t want any trappings of extreme masculinity or extreme femininity, so, so yeah, I also kept all of that hair, which I can, I can also pop in a bag for you.

BF:  (laughter)  So you, so Dolarhyde doesn’t have painted toenails or anything like that.  No, no –

RA:  No, he doesn’t.  He, he doesn’t have any of that. It would have been a good idea, wouldn’t it – claws.

BF:  If Francis Dolarhyde, if he were going to paint his toenails, what would he paint them, Jungle Red?

RA:  I think probably black.

BF:  Black would be good.  It’s a safe, masculine color.

RA:  Yeah.  I think he’s probably got quite nasty, webby feet with claws that cut through his shoes.  (laughter)

BF:  He’s probably a fantastic swimmer with the webbed feet.

RA:  Like the “Man From Atlantis”.

BF:  That, I lov-   – don’t get me started on the “Man From Atlantis”.   I love that series.

RA:  Didn’t we  – do we see his tail in this episode or is that in the next episode?

BF:  That’s in the next episode.

RA:  It is –

BF:  It was interesting, we were, we were arcing out the different stages of the transformation – the tail, the wings –

RA:  I did try to grow a tail for that.

BF:  A vestigial tail?

RA:  I really tried hard, but it’s, that was one thing I couldn’t do.  But we did – (laughs) we did bring in a really – well, maybe we’ll talk about it when we get to it, actually.

BF:  We will talk about it when we get to it.  That was –

RA:  That went quick, didn’t it?

BF:  It whizzes by.

RA:  Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?

BF:  Yes!  We’re, we’re “Chatty Cathie’s” here on the DVD commentaries, and thank you so much for listening to this commentary, and we’ve got more to come and more Richard Armitage, or, if you’re French, Armitaage, and thank you for listening,  and off we go.

RA: Thank you. See you next time.