The scene that traumatised Ray Liotta: “I was hearing about people walking out”
Throughout his remarkable career, Ray Liotta appeared in several noteworthy films. He portrayed violent mobster Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, served as a guiding influence on Tony Soprano in The Many Saints of Newark, embodied the ghost of a legendary baseball player in Field of Dreams, and played an exhausted hitman in Smokin’ Aces. Liotta’s diverse roles took him to a wide variety of cinematic landscapes.
A movie that often gets overlooked in Liotta’s filmography, however, is 2001’s Hannibal, the Ridley Scott-directed successor to The Silence of the Lambs. Alongside Anthony Hopkins, Julianne Moore, and Gary Oldman, Liotta appears as Clarice Starling’s crooked superior officer, who attempts to blackmail her into sleeping with him. Those who have seen the film will remember his character, Paul Krendler, is forced to eat part of his own brain by the titular Dr Lecter. That’s not the sort of thing you forget in a hurry.
“It traumatized me too!” Liotta told Movieline when they reminded him of how impactful the scene was. “I knew when I got it, I said – with Ridley Scott directing – I knew it was going to be realistic. I remember when it first opened, I was working in Toronto and I was hearing about people walking out or getting sick. A couple people fainted? It’s always good to have an impact.”
Hannibal isn’t the most fondly remembered movie in either Liotta or Scott’s arsenal, but that scene is definitely one of the most memorable involving either one of them. It actually contributed to Scott taking the reins of the series, as The Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme turned the sequel down over its gorier elements. “Tom Harris, as unpredictable as ever, took Clarice and Dr Lecter’s relationship in a direction that just didn’t compute for me,” he said in the documentary Inside Story: The Silence of the Lambs. “Clarice is drugged up, and she’s eating brains with him, and I just thought, ‘I can’t do this.’”
Much effort was put into making this stomach-churning moment seem as realistic as possible. A lifesize puppet of Liotta was created and given a removable scalp, which Lecter uses to access its grey matter. Shots of Liotta, the puppet, and CGI were all mixed together to make it appear that Hannibal really was committing this horrendous act on a living victim. This wasn’t the only impressive use of visual effects in the movie. Gary Oldman wore several prosthetic heads to play Mason Verger, a former victim of Lecter. He even wanted his name omitted from the film’s credits to create an air of mystique around the character.
Hannibal was the second film in the Silence of the Lambs series and the third overall adaptation of Thomas Harris’ novels. A prequel, Red Dragon, followed the next year, with Hopkins reprising his iconic role as Dr Hannibal Lecter. In 2007, another prequel, Hannibal Rising, was released, featuring a younger version of the character portrayed by French actor Gaspard Ulliel.
The brain eating scene is one of the many moments fans of Liotta reminisced about following the star’s passing in 2022. It might have put some people off their lunch and Jonathan Demme might not have enjoyed it, but it will go down as one of the most visceral scenes to ever come from a relatively mainstream horror.
