Ridley Scott became attached to Hannibal while directing Gladiator, after producer Dino De Laurentiis visited the set and pitched the project; Scott initially misunderstood and thought De Laurentiis meant a film about the Carthaginian general Hannibal.
Original Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme declined to direct the sequel, finding the novel's material too lurid and gory, particularly the drugged relationship between Clarice and Lecter and the brain-eating scene.
Screenwriter Ted Tally, who wrote The Silence of the Lambs, also declined to work on Hannibal due to his issues with the novel's excesses, leading David Mamet to write the first draft, which was reportedly deemed in need of major revisions before Steven Zaillian rewrote it.
Jodie Foster turned down reprising her role as Clarice Starling in December 1999, reportedly because she felt the character's portrayal in the novel betrayed the original character, and because she was committed to filming Flora Plum with Claire Danes.
After Foster's departure, several top actresses were considered for Clarice Starling, including Cate Blanchett, Angelina Jolie, Gillian Anderson, Hilary Swank, Ashley Judd and Helen Hunt, before Julianne Moore was cast, having given up a role in Unbreakable to take the part.
The role of Mason Verger was first offered to Christopher Reeve, who initially showed interest based on his own experience using a wheelchair, but declined once he realized Verger was a quadriplegic, facially-disfigured child rapist; Gary Oldman was cast instead.
Gary Oldman asked to be credited as 'unbilled' for playing Mason Verger, allowing him to perform the disfigured character anonymously under heavy makeup that left him without lips, cheeks or eyelids.
Filming lasted 83 working days over 16 weeks, beginning on 8 May 2000 in Florence, and used almost a hundred locations including the Palazzo Vecchio, Washington Union Station, Richmond's Farmer's Market, President James Madison's Montpelier estate, and the Biltmore Estate in Asheville.
For the boar pit scenes, a barn on President James Madison's estate in Orange, Virginia housed 15 trained Russian boars selected from a pool of around 6,000 animals observed by wranglers.
Julianne Moore underwent actual FBI training at the Bureau's headquarters in preparation for playing Clarice Starling.
Makeup artist Greg Cannom initially created 20 different prosthetic heads for Mason Verger that looked like zombies before settling on a more realistic, 'touching rather than monstrous' design based on photos of foetal deformities that Ridley Scott shared with the team; Gary Oldman spent six hours a day in makeup for the role.
The infamous brain-eating dinner scene involving Ray Liotta's character Paul Krendler used an exact duplicate of the actor created through a combination of makeup, puppetry and CGI, which Ridley Scott described as 'seamless'.
The film's title sequence, shot by designer Nick Livesey in an empty Florence square, showed pigeons morphing into Hannibal Lecter's face; originally created as a promotional trailer that the studio rejected, it ended up being used as the actual opening titles, said to be influenced by the film Seven.
A UK promotional poster showing Lecter with a 'skin mask' covering part of his face was pulled from circulation for being too shocking and disturbing for the public.
Hannibal opened to $58 million domestically, at the time the third-biggest opening weekend ever and the largest ever for an R-rated film, a record it held for two years until The Matrix Reloaded surpassed it in 2003.
The film grossed $351.6 million worldwide against an $87 million budget, becoming the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2001, despite receiving generally mixed to negative reviews from critics.
