Word: zaillian
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What the film, which was written largely in cries, whispers and expletives by Ken Nolan and Steven Zaillian, stresses instead is the sheer anarchy of war: bloody, terrifying, tragic and meaningless except as a test of a fighting man's virtue. Like every other great war movie, Black Hawk Down succeeds because it becomes, almost unintentionally, an antiwar movie--or at least one that can be read that way by anyone so inclined--a relentless catalog of the many absurd and accidental ways you can die when you are ordered into harm...
...film Silence of the Lambs, for all its Oscars, only skimmed the lower depths in which Harris' novel swam with a spooky understanding of every bottom-dwelling creature. Hannibal, adapted by David Mamet and Steven Zaillian, fiddles more with its source and reworks--improves upon--that novel's ending. Director Ridley Scott is nicely attuned to Harris' depiction of evil, of the strength and seduction in depravity. Each gargoyle gets his due: greedy detective Pazzi (Giancarlo Giannini), the venal official Krendler (Ray Liotta). Even Mason Verger, the pedophile with the skinless face (Gary Oldman, under a layer of Toussaud...
...usual tricks: shopping, disemboweling, forcing a victim to eat his own brains, that kind of thing. Finally, in the novel Clarice apparently becomes a cannibal herself. Don't worry: we haven't given away the ending of the film; screenwriters David Mamet (State and Main) and Steven Zaillian (Schindler's List) have changed it, but it's still really gross...
...seduce Jonathan Demme and Ted Tally, the Oscar-winning director and writer of Silence. Director Ridley Scott, however, read Harris' manuscript while shooting Gladiator in Malta and signed on right away. "I saw in the material humor and romanticism," says Scott. "I think the first team missed that." Zaillian says he took on the writing challenge "because it sounded like...
...thank heaven, a particularly magnificent one. Travolta and writer-director Steve Zaillian, compressing complex issues and characters with admirable craft, make it clear that greed and ego, more than compassion, drive Schlichtmann. Only when he reaches straits as dire as his clients' does he (non-melodramatically) achieve something like full humanity. Meantime, we've enjoyed a richly acted--see especially Robert Duvall's dreamy-fox opposition lawyer--subtly suspenseful, blessedly unmoralizing morality play...