Daily Dialogue — August 9, 2015

“A job’s come up and I thought about you. Well, not a job really, more of an interesting errand.”

— The Silence of the Lambs (1990), screenplay by Ted Tally, novel by Thomas Harris

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Call To Adventure.

Trivia: Originally, the film was to open with Clarice Starling and a male FBI agent in the middle of a drug bust. They were to burst into the room and make a number of arrests, then the bust would be revealed as a training exercise. Jodie Foster was able to convince Jonathan Demme to change the scene because it had been done so many times before. Foster came up with the idea of opening with Starling running through the assault course. The drug bust training idea was still used, but after Clarice’s first conversation with Lecter.

Dialogue On Dialogue: This is a classic Call to Adventure, offered by Jack Crawford to Clarice to meet with the imprisoned psychopath Hannibal Lecter. The really great thing about this scene is his later admonition: “You’re to tell him nothing personal, Starling. Believe me, you don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head.” And that is precisely what Starling ends up doing… and it’s precisely what she needs to do not only to elicit clues about Buffalo Bill from Lecter, but also dig down into her own inner ‘demons’… an exorcise them.