FILM 2023: MANHUNTER
TRIVIA: This movie was originally going to be titled "Red Dragon", the same name as the novel. However, when Year of the Dragon (1985) became a box-office failure, Executive Producer Dino De Laurentiis decided to avoid a "dragon" title.
The translation of the French title is "The Sixth Sense".
David Lynch, who was considered to direct, ended up having a major effect on the future interpretation of the Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (Lecter) character: Sir Anthony Hopkins has said that Jonathan Demme was inspired to cast him after seeing his performance as Dr. Treves in Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980).
This is the only "Hannibal" movie where his last name is spelled "Lecktor", for some reason. In all other adaptations of the novels, it's spelled "Lecter".
In the scenes where Will Graham (William Petersen) is interviewing Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox) in his cell, Writer and Director Michael Mann took care to set up the shots so that the position of the bars of the cell do not move when the point of view switches between Graham and Lecktor.
The scene where Reba McClane (Joan Allen) touches a sedated tiger features a real sedated tiger. The veterinarian is played by a real veterinarian.
Curiously enough, Writer and Director Michael Mann had initially considered fellow filmmaker William Friedkin for the part of Dr. Hannibal Lecktor, but when Brian Dennehy, also a prospective Hannibal, insisted that Mann see Scotsman Brian Cox in the acclaimed 1984 off-Broadway production of "Rat in the Skull", Mann was instantly won over by Cox's award-winning performance. Cox's scenes as Dr. Hannibal Lecktor were shot over a three-day period.
When the production could not get permission to film on-board a commercial airplane, Writer and Director Michael Mann booked his actors, actresses, and crew onto a twilight flight from Chicago to Florida where the production was relocating anyway. A stripped-down camera, lighting and sound equipment were taken on board as carry-on luggage. Pilots and flight attendants were appeased with gifts of movie crew jackets.
In shooting the final confrontation between Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan) and Will Graham (William Petersen), Noonan had to lie in a pool of stage blood for several hours as the crew worked on other shots. After all of this time, the stage blood dried into a thick, cement-like adhesive that nearly fused Noonan to the carpet.
Tom Noonan (Francis Dollarhyde) spent many hours in make-up so that artists could paint fake tattoos on his back and torso modelled after William Blake's "Great Red Dragon" paintings. Though Noonan appeared with the tattoos in publicity photographs (available in a Special Edition DVD), Writer and Director Michael Mann concluded that the tattoos were too "over the top", and discarded the idea. Red Dragon (2002) features the tattoos on-screen.
Writer and Director Michael Mann was reportedly inspired to have Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" on the soundtrack by his correspondence with a convicted killer in Texas named Dennis Wayne Wallace, who claimed "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" was a love song that spiritually connected him to the woman he murdered.
Included amongst the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", edited by Steven Schneider.
