6 Regrets Filmmakers Had Over Their Oscar Winning Movies

5. Jonathan Demme Wishes He'd Explored Hannibal's Childhood

Orion Pictures

The Silence of the Lambs is one of the best thrillers going, and launched Jodie Foster into a whole other level of prominence with her performance as FBI agent Clarice Starling. Foster won an Academy Award for her performance, while the film's director - the late Jonathan Demme - won the Academy's Best Director Oscar. The film itself went on to win Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, Anthony Hopkins would the Award for Best Actor, while losing to Terminator 2 in the Best Sound Mixing Category.

Demme wasn't entirely satisfied with the finished product. While the director bemoaned the infamous 'dance' sequence involving Buffalo Bill for obfuscating the character's motivations, more interesting, perhaps, is his wish that the film had explored Hannibal Lecter's own traumatic childhood.

As Roger Ebert noted in his 2001 retrospective on the second Hannibal film, Demme had aimed to reiterate the link between Hopkins' Lecter and Foster's Starling. "Both are ostracized by the worlds they want to inhabit", Ebert wrote, and in wanting to hammer that point home further, Demme himself had wanted to illustrate that Hannibal - like Clarice - had experienced trauma at an early age.

Though subsequent features starring Thomas Harris' famous serial killer would explore this element, it's fascinating to consider what Demme would've portrayed - even if Silence remains one of the finest thrillers of the 20th century.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.