I haven't seen "Hannibal," which is due to open early next month, but just the thought of the movie gives me the willies, reminding me of Anthony Hopkins's first turn as the cannibal-shrink. Maybe other people feel jumpy, too, but my case is unusual.
I was butchered by Hannibal Lecter.
That's me in the back of the ambulance with Anthony Hopkins in Jonathan Demme's "The Silence of the Lambs." Lecter makes his escape wearing the police uniform and filleted face of one of his unlucky keepers. Remember? I ride in the rear with the "patient," spewing medical lingo into the radio regarding the apparently eviscerated cop. Lecter rises above me, brandishing the knife and removing the face. Cut to exterior shot of the ambulance as it swerves violently across the three lanes of highway tunnel.
When the movie came out, friends in my Brooklyn neighborhood asked if I was scared during the shooting of that horrifying scene. I always said no. But the true answer was "Yes. Terrified." And I did feel in danger of being murdered, not by Hopkins, but by one of the 200 other pros on the set. It seemed possible that any of them -- from my friends, Jonathan and Ed Saxon, the director and producer, right down to the guy paid Hollywood dollars to jump on the ambulance bumper to simulate movement -- might grab Hannibal's knife and sink it into my heart. I didn't want to be killed, but I'd have welcomed a flesh wound if it would have gotten me off that set.
First let me tell you the fun stuff. It's the evening of the day I arrived on location for my first Hollywood movie. I'm at the dining room table in the house Demme and his wife, Joanne Howard, have rented in Pittsburgh. I'm one of six or seven dinner guests, including Anthony Hopkins. He's sitting right next to me and listening intently as I quietly deliver a filmography of Jonathan's career. "Tony" knows nothing about the director who has given him what will turn out to be his career-defining role. To Hopkins it's just another gig, a surprisingly pleasant one after the misery of the Michael Cimino shoot he's just finished in Utah ("Desperate Hours"). That job done, he'd hopped in a small Winnebago and driven himself cross-country to what he said was one of the most relaxed sets he's ever encountered.
Let me say I'm having a fine time myself. The whole junket's a gift from Jonathan. He's a fan of the ambitiously goofy theater ensemble I perform with back in New York. He'd invited others from my group to be in the movie. Not me. Uncharacteristically, I ginned up the nerve to ask for a part. Completely in character, Jonathan comes through.
They're shooting at night, so I spend my first full day checking out Pittsburgh. And I run into Tony. "Shall we have lunch?" Yeah. I guess I could squeeze that in.
Later that day I meet Jodie Foster. We're the only two to arrive at the scheduled start time for screening the afternoon dailies. She asks who I am and a few questions about my work in New York. She's warm and maybe a little shy.
Days pass and that's good news in itself. Filming is going more slowly than expected. I'm on a daily contract. Each of these days racks up another breathtaking jackpot and takes me closer to the dream of union-sponsored health insurance. Some nights they don't need me at all, in others I'm an overpaid extra, riding shotgun in an ambulance and hurrying my gurney indoors.
I get my first scare on one of those nights. I'm waiting in the ambulance as the second-unit director endlessly tweaks the choreography of the dozen emergency vehicles that are to converge on the building. I've got to pee. I shouldn't leave the set without permission, but I feel too insignificant amid all that machinery and logistics, so I just slip away. Suddenly they're ready to shoot. Where's Josh? Five furious production assistants, efficient women in their early twenties, burst upon me mid-stream and haul me out as I desperately pack and zip up.
That gift to my therapist aside, everything's going great. I spend my nights on the set and my days with Anthony Hopkins, enjoying a February thaw that allows us to wander Pittsburgh's districts and parks. A man whose working life is lived on the road, Tony doesn't hole up in his suite. He explores. Humbly -- always inviting, never assuming -- he's picked me for his sidekick.
Best news yet: The first shot where I speak is a triumph. I spend hours before my shot steeping in the surreal setting the designers have created in the great hall of the War Memorial building. There's smoke and the erratically pulsing arc light of a fallen power line. One of the cops, gutted and trussed, hangs from the cage that could not hold Lecter. The shots that precede mine set the desperate mood. A uniformed cop pleads with someone who appears to be a fallen comrade, his face slashed to ribbons. "Keep breathing, Pembrey. Please. The ambulance is almost here."
My turn, and it's easy. Easy to pretend when they make it so real. Even Jonathan, prepping us, speaks softly to the actor behind the massacred face, unconsciously employing the gentle tones you use on a victim who may be in shock. Circumstances have even provided me with the requisite urgency. It's approaching 2 in the morning and the crew is anticipating "golden time" pay rates kicking in. Jonathan and Ed are determined to get my shot and get out before they start shoveling gold.
The camera swirls around me and my crew as I shout orders. "I need that IV now. Get the strap. Buzz, where's the oxygen?" One take, good. Second take, better. Just time for a third. I slip in the "f" word. "Buzzy, where's the [expletive] oxygen?" "Cut! Print! That's it!"
That's it? But I'm having fun. No one cares. At least I've made my mark. The crew, packing up, has adopted my profane improvisation. "Gina, where's that [expletive] light cord!" Jonathan gives me a bear hug. I'm an all-echelon hit.
The dailies look great. Everything's rolling for my scene with Tony.
And I'm ready. Script in hand, I met weeks before with an EMS buddy, even rode the ambulances for a few hours one night. The vocabulary of my short line, shouted into a radio, is easy -- "comatose," "pulse," "convulsions" -- but I dissect their meanings and learn about the unspoken rules when the guy on the gurney's a cop.
From the eastern suburbs, access to Pittsburgh is obstructed by mountains. All the highways converge on two tunnels. Attracted by its dramatic lighting, the "Silence" production is shutting one tunnel down for the night. We have from the end of one rush hour until the start of the next to set up, get three shots -- my scene, the ambulance cruising and, most challenging and time-consuming, the stunt men doing a dangerous automotive ballet when, unseen, Lecter offs first me, then the driver -- and then get out of the way.
The crew looks like a small army setting up camp at the mouth of the tunnel. It's after 11 before anyone can give my scene much thought. Somebody realizes that the shot -- panning from me, to my patient, back to me, then widening out as Lecter looms up -- is lengthy, but my line is short. Far too short to cover the action.
A local hero emerges. He's a Pittsburgh native. A nice guy with a background in medicine who now owns a small fleet of ambulances, one of which he's rented to this big-time Hollywood production. He is thrilled just to be on the set. Now they are asking him for language to fill out my line. His face lights up and I try to head him off at the pass. Why don't I just improvise some technical gibberish? You know, like in "Star Trek"? No. It's a movie, so it's got to be real. His literary moment at hand, my new-found nemesis writes out an endless stream of incomprehensible, tongue-twisting medical gobbledygook. "Post dictal with lactated ringers running on a divided IV . . . viscose evisceration . . ." On and on and on. I'm handed the page and a half and told to learn it fast. Special effects is already working on Hopkins's makeup and the stunt driving is still to be done.
Back in my trailer cubby, I do learn it. Fast. But I can speak it with all the elan of a bar mitzvah boy who's blown off his Hebrew studies until the morning of the big day. I'm done for.
It's after midnight and the camera has yet to record a frame. The temperature has spiked up into the sixties. Tiny droplets of mist float in the air. Dead-man-walking through the knots of cops and crew. ("One take, Josh! One . . . take, so we can do the [expletive] stunt shot.") I clamber into the ambulance and am almost knocked back out by the heat. The film lights and humidity have turned the cramped cabin into a fiberglass sweat lodge. Hopeless, I find my place in the corner. Hopkins climbs in and lies down on the stretcher. The makeup crew adds Spaghetti-O viscera to the latex and tomato paste he wears on his face. Our hellhole takes on the ripe scent of a school cafeteria.
The first take's an embarrassment that everyone politely ignores, as you would a recovering stroke victim's torturous speech. My heart and adrenal gland start pounding and squirting a call and response. It takes 15 of the night's precious minutes to redo Tony's mask. I sit.
Take 2 is no better at all. Jonathan wedges his head between camera and door. "It's fine, Josh. But try to drive it. Just spit out the words." Take 3's a disaster. The stroke victim is having a seizure.
At the rear door, they set to re-ladling gunk onto Hopkins. I've been in here an hour. My adrenal gland's tanked but the heart's going strong. My brain takes up the rhythm. "You blew it / You'll blow it / You'll blow it / You blew it." I want to get out of this ambulance. Clear my mind. Run away. But I can't. The doors are all blocked by lights, camera and action.
Makeup in place once again, Tony quietly asks if he might speak to Jonathan, who's viewing the action through a monitor a few feet from the ambulance. He squeezes his way into the van. "Will we be much longer at this? I'm feeling a bit claustrophobic and this goo is making me nauseous."
Tony's unhappy! I imagine the fact is known instantaneously to the mob waiting outside my cell. Its hatred of sweet Tony's tormentor radiates through the ambulance walls.
Takes 4 through 7 are Civil War amputations. Jonathan hacks away at my line while Tak, the cinematographer, does the same to this pivotal shot that pays off the whole escape sequence. The line edits just addle my panic-spent brain. I'm dying.
Take 8 derails after just a few words. "Jonathan," I wail, though I know he can't help. "Don't cut. Keep rolling," I hear him yell. "Start again, Josh. Do it." He bangs on the ambulance wall. "Now!" Of all the highly successful people I've ever met, Jonathan Demme's the sweetest. Now I've forced him to try out tough love.
And it works. With flight an impossibility, he's put me back in the fight. Take 8 (continued) goes a little bit better. The mouth starts to master the words. My heart calms a mark. Take 9, even better. They start filling back in the details of the shot.
Tony never repeats his complaint. He knows he's not paid all that money just to purr at Jodie Foster.
Take 12 is the last and it's my payoff. The words may not be flying, but if it were a bar mitzvah, my parents could hold their heads up. The speech ends when I'm suddenly aware of movement behind me. I whip around and find Lecter up and holding the knife. Our eyes lock. Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter is looking deep into me and savoring my bewildered fear. No words, but I look a question, a plea. He looks an answer, "I'm going to eat you." No one calls "cut," so we keep going. I exhale in sadness. Lecter inhales my grief. I'm acting with Anthony Hopkins!
But it's not in the movie that won all the Oscars. I yammer into the radio and Lecter rises above me. Quick cut to the stunt shot of the van lurching this way and that. It was in the movie, in the director's "rough cut." I once saw a muddy, pirated copy. It was too blurry to tell if Tony and I, face-to-face, looked as good as it felt. I never knew why it was cut, but, ever self-affirming, I suspected my work smelled as bad as my body when, after four hours, I finally climbed out of that death box.
So five years pass and I'm sitting in a medical waiting room thumbing through a New Yorker magazine and I come to an essay by "Silence" screenwriter Ted Tally about working with Demme. Reading, I feel the old doubts stirring up in my stomach. Then Tally starts dissecting my shot!
"Then we cut to a shot of a racing ambulance, and we go inside it, where an EMS worker is speaking over the radio, and we see the disguised Lecter rise up behind him. The EMS worker turns and sees him as Lecter smiles, slowly raising the knife. That's how the little sequence is scripted, and that's how Jonathan faithfully shot it.
"But later, working with his editor, Craig McKay, Jonathan saw that by . . . leaving off . . . Lecter's raising of the knife . . . he could jump away an instant before the audience had quite grasped what was happening. . . . He could extend the [EMS worker's] sense of dislocation to the audience itself."
Thank you, God. That I can live with. With Tally's miraculous alibi tattooed onto my brain I can look my friends straight in the eye when they ask me what it was like. "I learned a whole lot. It was a whole lot of fun. And I made a whole lot of money."
Maybe "Hannibal" will reveal if the lambs are now silent in Clarice's dream. But I can tell you right now, it's been years since I've dreamt about a man-eating tunnel with Spaghetti-O breath.
Josh Broder now chases the Hollywood dollar from the safety of his apartment in Brooklyn, where he is a screenwriter.
