Mads has a terrifying subtlety and as the episodes go on, you start seeing the way a person can command other people by doing practically nothing and terrifying the sh*t out of you. He is the most astonishingly subtle performer with the most incredibly keen sense of what his face can do and how his words can form. He has a mission. Nothing is by chance. I truly believe as long as we have success in seasons that Mads will become the defining face of Hannibal Lecter.
Film becomes a living organism. After awhile, it begins to tell you what it needs and you're usually best listening.
I've always been very, very supportive of fan cultures. I'm a fan of all kinds of things.
With a DVD, you want something you can own, you can watch, you can come to grips with and you can explore. It's something larger than the film, when it's going out to a fan base.
I don't do commentaries on films because A) I'm not very good at it and B) it's an odd thing that I discovered, on my first film, that you go through this really intense experience of making a film and then you sit in a little room with a monitor and you reduce the thing to a bunch of silly anecdotes. It's really unfulfilling and I've never really enjoyed listening to them anyway, so I just don't do them.
As a director, you have to go in with a really, really, really clear picture of what you want. That's the point of my commentaries. It's so difficult because you're the harshest critic.
As the director, you're meant to be critical and you are, so there are loads of things. But the thing is, the way I look at it is, to try to get some measure of success, it's dangerous to look at financial or critical success, or positive response as a measure.
There's this point between conscious and subconscious when you realize you were asleep and resting, and you were having all kinds of anxiety dreams about the film and all the things that can go wrong. You get in this hypnagogic state, where you're waking up and realizing, "Oh, it was just a dream."
It's good to know where you've come from.
