CraveOnline: By placing Will Graham in, basically, Hannibal Lecter’s cell at the end of Season 1, were you setting up a cliffhanger or were you establishing a new status quo for Season 2?
Bryan Fuller: A new status quo for Season 2.
That is one ballsy move, sir.
It felt like we had to strike into new territory, and we had to really shake up the world because we had the slow boil in the first season of, will they realize that Hannibal Lecter is who is he is? Of course the only character who does realize is quickly discredited. So that game begins anew in Season 2, but under a completely different paradigm where you have Will institutionalized, Hannibal free, no one believing Will because he very clearly lost his mind and lost time, and so is an unreliable narrator in his own story. There’s a very exciting dynamic, Hitchcockian, in The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Are you treating each season as it’s own film, or story, and switching that paradigm every time?
Absolutely. Every season is its own novel, so there are three novels that existed before Red Dragon. We told the first novel in the first season, and then the second novel has a completely different flavor and structure and style of storytelling that still remains the show, but we shift everything so dramatically that it keeps the audience on their toes because they now don’t know what to expect. Because we’ve departed so significantly from what they know in the literature.
Are you planning to spend an entire season pulling apart Red Dragon, and treating it as an entire arc?
You know, looking at Red Dragon, one of the ideas was… Do we spend the whole season or do that as half a season? Because I don’t want to spread the story of Red Dragon too thin, where it becomes irksome to the audience, where they’re all like, “Land this plane already,” because it’s a relatively contained story. So I’m thinking, do we do a six-episode mini-series of Red Dragon, or do we do a full season? That’s one of the things I’m figuring out as we look at Seasons 3 and 4 from the standpoint of Season 2.
How eager are you to get Clarice Starling into the series? Would we have to wait until you get to The Silence of the Lambs, or were you thinking about teasing her earlier?
Well, right now we don’t have the rights to the character.
Oh, really?
No, no, because MGM has the rights to any character that originated in Silence of the Lambs, and Gaumont has the rights to any character that originated in Red Dragon. So there are a few characters that MGM has told us, “No, you cannot have [them], because we don’t know what we’re doing with them.” There was originally going to be a Clarice Starling series, but I’m not sure what the status of that is. I’m secretly hoping that by the time we get to Season 5, which would be the Silence of the Lambs era, maybe some deal could be brokered between Gaumont and MGM where we could co-produce a series that has both Will Graham and Clarice Starling in it, but I just don’t know if they’re ever going to let us do that.
You could offer them the spinoff.
Right? Right?!
They could just put that on their channel, and bam. Bob’s your uncle.
I would love it. I would love for this to be as canon as possible, given the departures that we make. But if we don’t get the rights to the Clarice Starling character, we will introduce a similar character, Shmarlice Shmarling, that won’t get us sued, that will give us the same dynamic that that character is. Because she’s such an important character to the canon, and it would be a shame not to get her, so we’re hoping. But that bridge is far, far off yet.
