Question and answer between Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster 30 years after the release of "Silenzio degli Innocenti".
"I was in London in 1989, playing 'M. Butterfly' at the theater, when my agent sent me a script." What is it, a children's story? I asked him after seeing the title, "Hopkins tells the Foster in the virtual one-hour "reunion" organized by Variety ahead of February 14.
The rest is history. It was enough to read ten pages of the script from the novel by Thomas Harris to make the 83-year-old Welsh actor understand that the text was the best he had ever had. He absolutely "had" to play the character of the sadistic psychiatrist and serial killer Hannibal Lecter.
"I was afraid of you. You had won an Oscar," Hopkins told Foster who in the film directed by Jonathan Demme gives him a hard time as aspiring FBI agent Clarice Starling.
"I remember your voice, very specific, with a metallic tone. We were all inspired by the book," recalls the actress.
And she explains that for her, "with Clarice, it was also the voice, because she was traumatized by the lambs that bled as they were taken to the slaughterhouse (the image that inspired the original title of the film, ed) and there was no nothing he could do to help them. "
Jodie also reveals that her mother cannot understand why she accepted the role of a "so quiet, so dull" girl.
Hopkins and Foster talk with the familiarity of old friends even if they are not in frequent contact: "But does it ever happen - she asks - that someone approaches you and asks you if you want a bottle of Chianti?".
The most famous cannibal in the world of cinema and his nemesis may soon have the opportunity to meet again at the next Academy Awards.
Hopkins is in pole position for the nomination for best actor thanks to the role of a father with Alzheimer's disease in Florian Zeller's "The Father" with Olivia Colman.
While Foster has returned to star in Kevin Macdonald's "The Mauritanian" as a lawyer fighting to free her innocent client from Guantanamo Bay: another Oscar-winning performance, which would later be the actress's third after that of "Sotto Accusa" and obviously for "Silenzio degli Innocenti".
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