Bryan Fuller On The Challenge Of HANNIBAL
Transcript
They come from the past and the future. There is nothing wrong with your radio. The message. With the single most important interviews in Scott Talk-a-Mosis. The voices you are hearing are…
The voices from Krypton. This is Ed Gross and this serving of voices from Krypton is being offered in tribute to Haddell, which launches its third season June 4th on NBC. Based on the written works of Thomas Harris, most notably Red Dragon, the series continues the psychological games of Cana Mouse between FBI Special Investigator Will Graham and forensic
psychiatrist slash Cannibal, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Who is the cat and who is the mouse in this particular scenario is, shall we say, open to interpretation. I recently had the opportunity to speak with series executive producer Brian Fuller, who offered up some clues regarding the new season that merely whet our appetite for more.
Yeah, we went there. It's a different season. It's such a different season than what we've done before in a great way, but it's sort of uncharted territory at the same time because I look at the first seven episodes and I'm polishing episode seven and starts filming next week and that completes the first half
of our season. It really is so different that we're out of the FBI and we are using characters to construct storylines that are absolutely organic given the first two seasons, but so totally different than anything that we've been doing before on the show. So it's scary on one hand because it's like, it's just going to work.
On the other hand, it's exciting because we haven't done it before. We get into the second half of the season, which is Red Dragon. There's so much about that world that is unexplored that we're subverting things that, okay, there have been two movies in the past that have been relatively faithful adaptations of the source material.
Now we have to start subverting the source material in certain ways and then upholding it in others. So it's kind of a fascinating cherry pick the ideas that we're going to stay true to and then the ideas that we need to subvert in order to give the audience a new viewing experience in what they've had in the previous two movies.
So it's exciting on that front because I think anybody who knows the material will be pleasantly surprised or actually horrifically surprised by some of the turns that we make and then there are those who don't know the material who are going to feel like, okay, this seems like a natural extension of the story that's being told for two seasons now. And so now we're, you know, by the end of season three, we'll have 39 episodes under
our belt and it just seems so bizarre. Despite the fact that it's Hannibal's third season, the challenge of producing the show hasn't diminished at all, which Brian takes full responsibility for. It's never easy. Television is very challenging, particularly when you have OCD as I am.
It's, you know, everything has to be great in terms of the aesthetic, in terms of the production value, in terms of how the show is pulled together and in terms of how we write it. So it's very, very challenging. It's very difficult.
I hate it when I'm doing it and then when I'm done doing it, I love having done it, and when I'm in the middle of it, it can be a lot of no fun. It's so, like, I just want it to be as great as it possibly can and that worry is definitely a cloud that follows me over the course of the season. It's all the, you know, it just has to be good.
I'm terrified of mediocrity, terrified of mediocrity. As difficult as it can be to craft a season of Hannibal, Brian says it's worth every minute of it. It is. It is.
It's wonderful. It's exciting to be able to make a living with my imagination and it's wonderful to work with such amazing craftspeople that can pull a show together with the aesthetic and the production value that we demand on Hannibal. And it's also terrifying when things go wrong and then you have to fight to make it right
again. And there's a lot of battles. You know, I sort of, I took my show running cues from Ira, like you fight the battles. Well, otherwise you don't have something that you're as proud of and you worked that hard for something that is mediocre, is fucking depressing.
Very challenging to make sure that translates to an audience and that they get something out of it. And Hannibal is such a peculiar beast because we have such a wonderfully enthusiastic fan base that we get very poor ratings and we're kind of limping by on our critical acclaim. And it's a, you know, you raise a child and you work very hard to cultivate the child
and then you just want everybody to like the child. It grew a little bit in the second season. You know, we came out sort of, you know, what's interesting with it is that I guess I wasn't as aware in my fandom for the character and the Thomas Harris literature, how much it had been over how tired other people were of the franchise.
And now that we've worked very hard to reinvent the franchise in many ways, that people are kind of waking up and going like, oh, it's not the overextension that we saw on Hannibal rising and Red Dragon. It is actually a new story altogether. Season three of Hannibal premieres on NBC June 4th.
This is Ed Gross. Thanks for listening to Voices from Krypton. Bon appétit. For Voices from Krypton.
