6 Regrets Filmmakers Had Over Their Oscar Winning Movies

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

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.