In early 1999, the Oscar-winning screenwriter Ted Tally made a trip to Miami, where he visited the author Thomas Harris. They were celebrating: Harris had finally completed his third Hannibal Lecter novel, titled simply Hannibal, after more than a decade of writing. But the Miami get-together, Tally remembers, felt “awkward”. It was long assumed that Tally and the filmmaker Jonathan Demme would adapt Hannibal for the screen, having previously adapted The Silence of the Lambs in 1991 – it grossed nearly $300m worldwide and won five Oscars. But there was a problem. Neither man liked Harris’s new book – all 500 operatic, grisly and occasionally bonkers pages of it – and didn’t want to make it into a movie.
“We were having this celebratory dinner and we all knew we would have to break his heart the next day,” Tally tells me. “He was shocked. He had worked so hard to complete it. He was blocked for a long time to find an ending that he could make it work for him. But it didn’t work for us.”
