(On Silence of the Lambs) I was working at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, doing Betrayal, and I got a call from my agent that Jonathan Demme wanted to see me for Silence of the Lambs. The agent said, "Read the book." So I went to the drugstore and got a paperback of Silence of the Lambs. Read it in one sitting. Sat up all night. Then I drove down to New York the next day, went into Jonathan's office, and he greeted me like and old friend and he said, "You know, I'm a New Yorker and I see theater all the time. I've seen everything you've done, and I really love your work. I'm very anxious to work with you. I want you to be in this movie." You never have an audition like that! He said, "What do you want to play? You know the book?" I said, "Yeah. I'd love to play Dr. Chilton." He said, "Well, Chilton needs to be in his late 50s, so we're going a good deal older than you. Is there anything else?" I said, "One of the Smithsonian bug guys, that'd be great fun." So, a couple weeks later, I get news. We're going to do a reading. Jodie Foster has been hired as Clarice, and Gene Hackman has been hired as Hannibal. The day before the reading, I get a call from Jonathan: "Gene Hackman has dropped out. His daughter doesn't think it's the right role for him. So we don't have a Hannibal. But we still want to do the reading. Jodie is flying in. This is not an audition, I would not cast you in this role, but to help us out, would you, tomorrow, at the reading, read the part of Hannibal Lecter?" Sure! So the first time we read the script, I was sitting across the table from Jodie Foster and I was playing Hannibal. I just had a great time. After the reading Jonathan took me aside and said, "You can play Chilton. You convinced me."
A few weeks later, we're going to do another reading. We now have the person who's going to play Hannibal Lecter: Robert Duvall. Well, that fell through, and finally it's going to be Tony Hopkins. And I thought, "Tony Hopkins?" Because his film career was in the toilet. Then we did a reading and I sat watching him doing it and I thought, "He's terrible. He's terrible! That's not the way to do it!" Because he wasn't doing it anything like the way I did it. Then during the shooting of it, I kept-I loved him. I found him a beautiful person to be around. But I just thought he was so wrong for the role. And I had a great time doing the movie, but when I saw the screening, I thought, "This is a disaster. They're all so excited about this film, but it's not scary to me, it's not believable." I still don't like it as much as everybody else. It was the reactions of other people that made me realize that maybe it was better than I thought.
