IGN: You mentioned the fourth season being the Red Dragon story. Do you think it’ll be 13 episodes a year? How do you see the whole thing going?
Fuller: Well, it’s absolutely 13 episodes a season. For me, Red Dragon is Season 4, and splitting the time over Season 5 and Season 6 would be the era of Silence of the Lambs -- we don’t have the rights to any of the characters that originate in Silence of the Lambs, but that’s not to say that Clarice Starling was the only trainee that Jack Crawford ever sent to interview a serial killer. You’ve seen the fifth episode, so you know that he’s done it before. So my dream is that -- because MGM has the rights to any character that originated in Silence of the Lambs, and we have the rights to any character that originated in Red Dragon or Hannibal or Hannibal Rising. We actually approached MGM because I desperately wanted to tell the story of how that head ended up in a jar in Silence of the Lambs. So we approached MGM -- who can’t use Hannibal Lecter in their Clarice Starling show -- and said, “If we let you have letters from Hannibal Lecter and have a relationship… You don’t necessarily see him on screen, but you can actually acknowledge the history of Clarice Starling. What if we got the rights to Benjamin Raspail and Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill. That way, we could be telling the definitive Hannibal Lecter stories and acknowledge his existence in both shows.” They were like, “No, what’s ours is ours, and what’s yours is yours.” Then we said, “Pretty please?” And they said, “No, what’s ours is ours, and what’s yours is yours.” So we said, “Can we sit down face-to-face and talk about this?” We did, and they said, “What’s ours is ours, and what’s yours is yours.” [Laughs] So they were very definitive about where they stood. So what we did in the arc that we had for Benjamin Raspail and Jame Gumb in the first season, we did a different story about a patient of Hannibal Lecter’s who had ties to a serial killer in a unique way. Instead of Benjamin Raspail, we did Franklin Froideveaux -- Benjamin Franklin and then Froideveaux is a street that runs parallel to Raspail in Paris. So we were acknowledging in some way that’s the role that we were filling in this season, with those characters and that story you’re going to see.
IGN: Knock on wood, this show continues into future seasons. Are you hoping that maybe they’ll change their mind and something can be worked out?
Fuller: Absolutely. I hope they look at the show and say, “Oh, this is really cool, and it’s a classy approach to the material, and we want to be associated with it,” and that maybe they will change their minds. But they sold the rights to a Clarice Starling story to Lifetime, and it’s been in development for a few years. It’s turned around and then redeveloped and turned around and redeveloped. I’m sticking pins in a voodoo doll of that show and hoping that it just goes away so they can see that, really, this is the best thing for the audience… Which is always my approach to these things, because I do feel my place in the audience, and as somebody who’s been given a the opportunity to have a voice in how things can proceed, I do have a responsibility, very heavily. So I, as an audience member, want Clarice Starling to be tied into Hannibal Lecter and see one definitive source for the Hannibal Lecter story, which would be this show. But time will tell. Maybe we’ll launch a letter-writing campaign to MGM!
