We're grateful for the existence of Jesse McClean's new book The Art and Making of Hannibal for two reasons. One: it's a pretty beautiful collector's item which delves into the craft and artistry of the show in thrilling detail, dedicating several pages to each character and each major set piece in the show's history (look out for excellent chapter headings like 'The Bee Man' and 'Mushrooms').

And two: it gave us an excuse to get on the phone with Bryan Fuller last week.

Following on from the 11 tidbits we released last weekend, below is the full transcript of our in-depth conversation with Fuller about Hannibal's upcoming third season.



Are you still in the thick of production on season three?

"Today and tomorrow [April 23 and 24] are our last days of main unit, and then we'll have second unit pickups for all the episodes after that, so we're in a bit of a scramble to get it all done and make it right. It's so interesting because it's essentially two seasons. You know, there have been so many versions of the Hannibal story, from Manhunter to Silence of the Lambs to Hannibal Rising to Hannibal to Red Dragon again, and most of those I thoroughly enjoyed, my favourites being Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal.

"I love Ridley Scott's Hannibal, I just think it's such a fun, gruesome movie that kind of harkens back to Hammer films, and it's Hannibal as James Bond. There's qualities of that that we wanted to bring into the first chapter of the third season, which is all the Italian-based material, a lot of which we culled from the novel and a lot of which we fabricated ourselves based on extrapolating where the characters have gone, given the first two seasons of the show.

"It's just so nice to get out of the FBI, it's so nice to get into a purely character-driven story when you have players like Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy and Gillian Anderson."

And Gillian is a regular for the new season…

"Yes, she has quite a big role in the first half of the season, and she's hilarious. There's one episode in particular, episode six, where she is laugh-out-loud funny, and it's such a treat because you don't see a lot of comedy from Gillian Anderson in her roles, but she's very funny as a human being and incredibly funny as an actress when she turns it on. So that was really fun to see, and I can't wait for people to see that episode in particular because she's just a delight.

"And then episode one ['Antipasto'] is all about Bedelia and her relationship with Hannibal Lecter, so it really does feel like 'What are we watching?' Will Graham isn't in it, none of the other characters that you've been familiar with, it's just Hannibal and Bedelia, and their history over three different periods of time.

"There's four different periods in the episode, but three of them are different parts of Hannibal and Bedelia's history. So that was a lot of fun to explore, and it felt like a breath of fresh air from not being in Quantico, and not having FBI scenes where they're talking about the murder clues. It was so liberating that I think if we do get a season four, there's going to be a lot more of that than there will be anything FBI-oriented."

The title of episode 8 is 'The Great Red Dragon', so that does mean you're dropping the cuisine-based titles midway through season three?

"Yes! We go right into the Blakes, so it's 'The Great Red Dragon…', then the second episode is '…And The Woman Clothed In Sun', the third episode is '…And The Woman Clothed With The Sun', and then '…And The Beast From The Sea', and they're all either Blake titles or Revelations quotes, because it's all about that. With the Italian course names, I was like 'Well, we don't have 13 of these!' It was kind of a happy coincidence, because we get up to episode seven which is 'Digestivo', for dessert, and then we don't have anywhere to go after! I guess we could have had 'Coffee'…

"But that kind of rounded out our first seven episodes which were all Italian courses, and then going into the Red Dragon chapter it felt like, 'Well, let's do Red Dragon and let's fetishize all the inspiration material for that'. The first episode had to be called 'The Great Red Dragon', and when you see what Neil Marshall has done with the episode, and how wonderful Richard Armitage is in the role – we were so lucky to get him.

"He really embraced the insanity of it, and he would send me his journals, his actor's journals of the character and how he was interpreting the text, and it was just fascinating to be let in on his process in that way. He was so thorough, and he's such a professional, and he and Rutina Wesley are wonderful together.

"At its core, one of the things I love so much about Red Dragon is that it's a beautiful love story. I mean, it's f**ked up in all sorts of wonderful ways, but one of the most romantic things I've ever read was this idea of a man taking a blind woman to the zoo who can't see the animals, and facilitating her touching the animals so that she can have that experience. Ever since I saw that for the first time in Manhunter, in '86, I just thought, 'What a beautiful, eloquent gesture of love. And at the same time, this is a horrible killer of families!'"

The show has a track record with twisted romances between troubled people, and on that note I have to ask about Will and Hannibal…

"[Laughs] Well it's interesting, because the first episode is really about Bedelia and Hannibal, and there's just a hint of... 'Wouldn't this be better if it were me and Will Graham?' In terms of Hannibal thinking that, and what he misses. Because Bedelia will always be Hannibal's psychiatrist, she'll never be necessarily as intimate and passionate in her relationship with Hannibal as Will and Hannibal are. You get a sense of yearning that these two men have for each other and their friendship, and what it meant to them and how much they miss.

"It progresses nicely, and when we finally get to them in scenes together, there's a scene in an episode that is so touching, when they're finally reunited and able to have a conversation.

"Mads and Hugh and their friendship are such amazing assets to this show, and you see all of that. It's like, 'Oh, it's really good to see you, but it's a terrible situation we're in, and you're actually a terrible person, but I've found a way to forgive you in the way you forgive a shark for being a shark'. So it was satisfying for us as storytellers to be able to break down that relationship, and the fascination of brotherhood.

"As a gay man I am fascinated with the brotherhood of heterosexual men, and the barriers of intimacy and also those things that penetrate the barriers of intimacy. It's a fascinating dynamic because sexuality and physical intimacy are relatively removed from the equation, yet you have all of the indicators outside of the physical to play with, and to have these characters react to.

"I definitely think that we're continuing to trade on the complexities of this relationship, where you realise that somebody who you understand so thoroughly... We've all had those moments where we're chatting with somebody and going, 'I'm really enjoying being here in this moment, with this person who's stimulating me intellectually', and you just become cognizant of the formation of friendship.

"That moment in a conversation where you're like, 'oh, we're friends now, this has gone beyond anything casual to something that is a greater understanding of each other'. It's a very cool thing to experience as a human being, and it's an interesting thing to write about through the prism of a cannibal and a beautiful, empathetic human being who he's become smitten with."



The first trailer kind of pivots on that 'I forgive you' moment from Will, and the idea of forgiveness was central to the season two finale, so I assume that continues into the season?

"Yes, absolutely, it does become part of the language of it. Forgiveness is such a fascinating thing, and we do talk quite a bit about what is the nature of forgiveness, and is it something that just visits you when it chooses to visit you, or is it something that you have to conjure? If you break down a moment where you feel betrayed or slighted in some way, and then try to rationalise, 'OK, how can I get past this, can I forgive that person? Can I move on with our relationship and sort of accept the flaws of what it is to be human?'

"Because the older I get, the more I am able to forgive and accept that it's hard to be a human being, and we're flooded with choices at any given moment, and it's nearly impossible to make the best choice every time, so you have to cut people a certain amount of slack. But that is talking about relationships that exist outside of mass and serial murders!

"There's a great re-quote in Hannibal [the novel], where Barney is quoting Hannibal who's quoting Socrates, about 'Good things and bad things exist in human beings simultaneously, and one does not negate the other'. We are all, as human beings, capable of doing beautiful things and we're all capable of doing horrible things, and those elements exist side by side, and it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in those moral quandaries. So you do have to forgive a little bit, particularly when we're living in an age of outrage, where it is so easy to be offended and everybody gets to feel that rush of 'How dare you!'"

Oh God, don't get me started on internet outrage…

"It's so dull, and entitled, and actually adolescent in its knee-jerk reactionary quality, whereas if you just stop and say 'OK, this person made a mistake' as opposed to 'Burn them! Burn them all!' A person that you like can do something incredibly shitty and heartless, and they also can save a puppy, and love that puppy, and it's hard to separate those things. It really is kind of that hormonal adolescence run rampant on the internet, because I remember as a kid going off to college, when your eyes are opened to so many things, and if somebody said 'Merry Christmas' to me, I would go 'Well, what if I was Jewish? You should say Happy Holidays!'

"It's strictly hormonal, that kind of response, it's adolescent, it's peaks and valleys as you're going through this crazy hormonal flux that makes it impossible for you to stop and go, 'Well, you could just say thank you, and accept Merry Christmas for what it is'. Instead we choose to get upset, because there's an adrenal rush from being offended, and I think that's why there is so much of it.

"And because it's on the internet, you have no social parameters to curtail big reactions into something that's more motivated by the intent of the statement – instead we break things down into semantics and say 'Well, you said this specifically which means that you are a bad person and you should burn in hell'. I could go on. I'm sorry, I'm ranting!"



Your mention of saving a puppy does remind me – who's taking care of Will's dogs now?!

"While he's away, we indicate that... We indicate who's taking care of them. We answer that without overly answering it, but it is addressed in some way."

Last time we spoke you were describing the ongoing rights issues with MGM and Silence of the Lambs – are you any further along in those conversations than you were then?

"Well, we're gonna do another full-court press when I get back into Los Angeles, in considerations of a fourth season, if that is to be. But actually the way we end the third season - and we end every season as though it's the last one, so it sort of has to function in two ways - one that it's a finale for the audience that feels somewhat satisfying, even if it is a cliffhanger, and also painting ourselves into a corner with the storyline that actually, in a great way, blows up all of the intentions of the previous seasons and reinvents them.

"So if there is a fourth season, it will be probably our most ambitious and most serialised that we've done thus far, and really the first half of season three was a great experiment of 'does this work on our show?' It turns out for me anyway, as an audience member and Fannibal, I loved it.

"I loved the first part of season three, and then I loved the Red Dragon stuff, but there was a certain amount of feeling that we've seen this story a couple of times before, and so we're changing a lot of stuff up so that it feels fresh to the audience. But there's also a lot of stuff that has been seen before that we still wanted to hit, we wanted to hit those sweet spots for the fandom. I wanted to see the tiger scene, I wanted to see more of the relationship between Francis Dolarhyde and Reba McClane, and I would say Richard Armitage is in the show almost as much as Hugh and Mads are in the second half of the season. So we really spend a lot of time with Dolarhyde, in a way that neither of the movies have had the real estate to."

How did the casting of Richard come about? Did you have him in mind from the beginning?

"Well, through friends of friends I had always been aware of Richard, and we know a lot of the same people and have a lot of friends in common, but had never met each other. Everybody always spoke so highly of him in terms of his professionalism and his ability, and so when we first started talking about Dolarhyde he was in the back of my mind as somebody I thought would be great.

"He's got the right physical appearance for the character - tall and handsome - and when we put the cleft palate on him, it changes his look in a really fascinating way. You have this handsome man with this scar, and the scar doesn't detract from the handsomeness, but you understand how from this character's point of view, it is much more prominent and debilitating than what anyone outside of his mental state would perceive.

"There was just a strength to Richard, and the fact that he is so well-trained and has a Shakespearean presence was so important, because a lot of what we see with Dolarhyde is just him alone in a room struggling with his insanity. I wanted the audience to be so confused with this character that we get to know him, and we get to see this man who is suffering, from his mind eating him alive from the inside out. You see him as a vulnerable man trying to make his way in the world first, before you see him as a horrible killer."

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I guess it becomes a tragedy then, as opposed to a serial killer yarn.

"Yeah, where he's less of a monster and more of a flawed man who is really victim to his own insanity. You look at the different portrayals of Dolarhyde, and Tom Noonan is primarily a monster but there are great moments of such vulnerability where he breaks your heart, and Ralph Fiennes again is a different interpretation of that role. In some ways, everybody who has played that role has done something close to the books and then interpreted it through their own skill set, but Richard blew me away and just made it his own in the way that Mads has made Hannibal Lecter his own.

"The crew love this guy, but they were also terrified of him, because when he was in character and he was doing some insane stuff, he's a big man who does some scary things very well. There's one bit in particular that is from the books, and we see it probably more graphically on our show than you have in any of the movies. When we did that scene, you're supposed to be silent on set and you're watching, but the entire crew gasped and shrieked. So you're watching the dailies and you're seeing this horrible thing happen, and you just hear all these gasps coming from behind the camera, and it's so much fun! It's so disturbing that it affected the crew."

That's saying something, because the Hannibal crew are surely pretty hardened to gore by now…

"Yeah, I would say episode twelve is... episodes seven and twelve are the ones where we do probably the freakiest stuff."

Re-watching the season two finale, I was struck again by how sad Abigail Hobbs's story is. Are we going to see more of her, and what happened in that interim after season one?

"Yes, and part of it is motivated by just how much we all love Kacey Rohl as a human being and as that character. It is such a tragic feel, and there is something that happens in episode two that… We'll have to talk after you see it, because there is a moment that is actually the first time we've kind of actively stepped outside of the parameters of reality in the show, into something that could arguably… I'm gonna stop talking! I don't want to give it away, it's better to have a conversation when you've seen the episode, and you can say 'That moment, was that happening?' and I'll be like 'Yep!' It sort of brings up a different angle of the conversation."

Did the decision to move back to summer from the usual spring slot come from you or from NBC?

"It was really a production reason, because we started out the third season, which was our most ambitious yet, and previously we barely were able to produce the show by the skin of our teeth, with a lot of hard work and a lot of people bending over backwards and contorting to make the show, because it's so hard to do a crafted television show in eight days [per episode]. For the first two seasons we actually had eight-day episodes, and then an additional day or two of second unit, and massive overtime.

"That was how we barely pulled off the first two seasons, and then coming into the third season, it was essentially trying to squeeze all of that into seven days, with no overtime and no second unit, and it blew up in everybody's faces. I was saying, 'This isn't gonna work, this isn't gonna work', and then on day 3 of production I was like, 'This really does not work', because we were not completing episodes.

"Scenes were getting dropped, shots were dropped, so in the editing room I was like, 'I can't even put this together because there's not enough material'. And I'd been squawking about that for four months, saying we're in trouble, and then finally after four months we realised where we were and had to push back, because the show wasn't done."

June is actually pretty great for TV this year – Hannibal and True Detective and Orange is the New Black all have new seasons starting then.

"Yeah, I don't mind a summer schedule at all, and it actually allowed us to fix our mistakes, of trying to simplify how we were producing the show, which was misguided. I'm just glad that when it came down to it, even though it took a long time and many years off my life, that we were finally given the ability to fix the problems that we had created for ourselves by ignoring how the show was produced for two years, and thinking that it could be done differently... and when I say we, I mean they!"

Season three of Hannibal premieres on NBC on June 4, and in the UK on Sky Living on June 8.

The Art and Making of Hannibal by Jesse McLean is released on May 8 from Titan Books.

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