As NBC’s Hannibal prepares to bring some bite to the network television schedule, its showrunner and director shed some light on how they make arguably the best (and most gruesome) show on TV

Talking to Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller, you start to see why the project is unlike any other show on television.

“Every director who comes to the show gets the same lecture,” says Fuller. “We are not making television. We are making a pretentious art film from the 80s.”

It might not have the same black-and-white, surreal aesthetic of Eraserhead but, like Lynch’s arthouse classic: once you’ve seen an episode of Hannibal, it’s hard to scrub from your unconscious.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Foxy: Bryan Fuller. Photograph: Gabriel Goldberg/NBC

Certainly, all of its most baroque visual elements – corpses, nightmares and, of course, Hannibal Lecter’s cooking – are present in the first three episodes of the upcoming third season, which find a broken Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) hunting Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) in Europe – diverging further from both the twisted cop show of the pilot, and from Thomas Harris’s novels. (It will incorporate elements of Red Dragon, Hannibal, and Hannibal Rising.) The season premiere, which airs on 4 June, finds Hannibal taking up residence in Florence with Bedelia Du Maurier (Gillian Anderson), his therapist turned reluctant accessory. Precise, leisurely paced and directed with aplomb by Vincenzo Natali, “Antipasto” plays like a muted New Wave film (with more cannibalism).

Still, there’s a constant method to the show’s aesthetic madness. “I think the role of the camera in Hannibal is to provide point-of-view for the characters,” Fuller says. “And that’s why we’ll often choose non-traditional coverage.” That’s putting it lightly.

Fuller takes great pains to maintain the aggressive, hypnotic visual style of the show, alternately describing the camera as a “drone” and “a veil of surreality through which we see the show”. With notable exceptions, the characters’ subjective experience is presented with little difference from their objective, ostensible reality – actually being able to determine fact from fiction would be counter to the purpose of the show. “We like those transitions in tone and style to sneak up on the audience,” Fuller says. “So we Freddy Krueger them, where they don’t know they’re dreaming until they’re well within the dream.”

And, like Nightmare on Elm Street, the show’s disregard for the boundaries of “reality” is sinister and far-reaching. There are vividly depicted dreams and violent fantasies that wear their overtly Freudian, erotic hearts on their bloody sleeves. There are many trips, both drug-related and inside “memory palaces”, Will and Hannibal’s rich, imaginary retreats. And Will experiences empathy-fuelled recreations of the murders he tries to solve – a borderline superpower that would signify a rare concession to cop show tropes if it were not also one of the many ways Fuller and his team implicate the viewer in the characters’ many crimes.

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Hannibal is about art and bodies. Skin, hair, blood, bone, when seen through the lens of Hannibal’s directors, are transformed into aesthetic objects that are then used in paintings of a sort. Like the pyramids, Hannibal’s murder tableaus acquire a certain level of sick profundity from your knowledge that people died during construction. “I want to put the audience in the point of view of the killer, who doesn’t feel that what they’re doing, in most of these instances, is ugly,” Fuller says. “I want to make it difficult to look away from horror by making horror beautiful.”

Perhaps this is part of the reason why Hannibal, though it has an extremely devoted, practically religious fanbase (including a sizeable contingent of “Hannigram” shippers), has failed to achieve quite the level of widespread success attained by similarly lurid series like American Horror Story or The Walking Dead. It’s hard to be told, week after week, that though you might become a better person by watching a show, you’re a bad one for wanting to watch it in the first place. And this new season, which finds the show essentially done digesting its original police procedural elements, is even less visually accessible. “There’s a real attempt to take this material to another level in terms of how poetic and abstract and surrealistic we can be,” Natali says, sounding like a network executive’s worst nightmare.

Still, those who stick around won’t be disappointed. The mood of these new episodes is starkly contemplative – Will and Hannibal relive the events of the second season finale repeatedly, imprinting their grieving on to the other inhabitants of their worlds. That includes flashbacks shot in black and white and with altered aspect ratios, an idea pushed by Natali. “I really strongly felt that kind of aggressively bold aesthetic choice was right for the new season, and kind of made a statement that this wasn’t in any way going to rehash what had come before.”

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The show does appear to be intent on one-upping its own visual invention. Natali, who has become Hannibal’s go-to guy for sex scenes (including a hallucinatory five-way), filmed another one for the sixth episode of the season, which is apparently even more unsettling. He recounts Fuller’s directive: “You’ve got to do something that tops the previous ones, and you’ve got to do something that shocks people, and pushes the boundaries of what is showable on network television.”

These shifts have happened for a reason – Fuller claims that the changes and challenges happen to “prevent my own internal boredom of storytelling” – but where do you go from something like a man eating his own nose? If the new episodes are any indication, the answer is “deeper, darker and weirder”. While the contortions of the deceased human form are old hat by now for the man who directed the “horse birth” scene from last season, Natali kept busy by creating a new (and far grosser) manifestation of the stag that represents Hannibal in Will’s mind (what Fuller describes as “a skinned, antlered thing that is more of a nightmarish ablution of what he experienced in the first two seasons”).

Somehow, he managed to do all this shooting his first three episodes over only 21 days, while, for the most part, substituting Toronto for Florence. This process was deeply stressful for the entire crew. The members of the Hannibal team try to actualize Fuller’s vision to the best of their ability with limited time and resources, and they manage to succeed. “It is an intensely difficult show that breaks people,” Natali admits. When I note that this makes Fuller sound suspiciously similar to the title character, he laughs. “That’s right, exactly. We’re all part of his design.”