You want the audience to be in the character's shoes. The more deeply into the character's shoes the audience is, the more they're going to care about what's going on.

It was so easy for me to see that Anthony would be a superb Dr. Lecter because he had been such an amazing good doctor in 'The Elephant Man'. He had been as believable a doctor as you can imagine, and he was good.

The whole Orion zeitgeist, of treating filmmakers as partners, to me it's inseparable from the success of 'Silence of the Lambs'.

Jonathan Demme Quotes