Episode 3 Secondo

Two pins of light in the darkness

Star and Firefly. 

Capture the firefly in a jar

Briefly, it will light your way. 

Capture the star?

Never.

But it burns, white hot and constant

Long after you have turned and gone away.

Honey, grab your apron and your passport…

there’s going to be food, food, food in Episode 3!

Just reading the Location List of the new script makes me giddy: Florence, Baltimore, Lithuania. Palermo.  On the Interiors List: two kitchens and a dining room. Yesssss!

OK, and maybe a mauling or murder or two…

But what care I of such blood-letting. My food styling concerns come after the mayhem and violence. Albeit cooking is not a gentle art, comprised as it is of beating, chopping,whipping. Searing, rending, grinding.

It’s never smooth sailing. Not even the pheasants, souls dispatched, can have a quiet day on set.

two beauties waiting for their closeup

Not pleasant for pheasants or peasants

Plucked

I’m not sure how much I should tell you about prepping for Chiyo’s pheasant plucking scene. It starts out badly when I get to set and half of the pheasants have already been plucked by someone who didn’t know how delicate pheasant skin is. They thought they were helping me. But the pheasants look like they’ve gone 9 rounds with the Red Dragon – patchy feather-dotted skin torn from purple flesh. I had to beg more pheasants off the set decorator so I could clean pluck them for the scenes.

Chopped

We have a hand-double in to do the close-ups so that Tao Okamoto (Chiyo) doesn’t have to pluck and chop. Unfortunately, when it’s time for me to teach the hand-double actor how to handle the pheasants, we discover she has a bird phobia and can’t do the scene. So, in a moment of desperation, I am asked to stand in and the make-up woman applies her magic brushes my hands. Happily, the decision is made to shoot these another day and I can go back to food styling.

Tossed and Shot

There is much ado with getting the plucked feathers to float through the air and drift downward aesthetically. But nothing compared to the film magic applied to give pheasant dummies flight so they can be “shot” down by Chiyo. The prospect of rigging fake birds to soar like eagles is sobering, hilarious and tragic all at once. Tossing pheasants for a shoot seems like a scene from Monty Python. But it's all accomplished beautifully by our amazing 2nd Unit team who does all the iconic Hannibalistic “close-ups” and “inserts” such as blood seeping and engines combusting.

Chiyo's kitchen

And what became of Dimmond’s arm which was cut off so its stump could be shape into an aorta for the giant Heart murder tableau in the Chapel? Do I hear the dinner bell?

Yes, Hannibal is cooking again! 

Hannibal chopped the forearms and lower legs off Dimmond to make his heart murder tableau. So now he has these leftover limbs and Bryan Fuller wants to know what Hannibal can cook from an arm. I wanted to allude to the pheasant/feather motif in the script and suggest that he cure Dimmond's arm into a ham that would then be carved into feathers that could be reassembed into a wing and presented on a big silver tray.

Mads chopping Dimmond's arm

The way the scene was to be shot, we had to show Hannibal chopping the hand off the arm then curing it and carving it. So Francois Dageneau, the insanely talented prosthetic maker, and I decided between us who would provide what for which steps in the cooking process.

My grisly reshaping of a pork hock into a man's forearm for the arm-ham curing scenes 

The convo was something like this: FG: I’ll send you a severed arm… with a hand attached. Me: I’ll make some forearms out of pork for the curing scenes…FG: do you want some human skin with that? I could send you a few sheets. Me:  Yeah, OK. That would be good to have as a backup if I can’t stitch the pig skin back on.

Cleaver, arm carved from ham and prosthetic arm

I know the RCMP have not tapped my phone because they would have brought me for this conversation alone.

Arm Ham Wing concept art (fragment of concept sketch)

Ham feathers assembled into wing with nest of asps made from asparagus of course.
(fragment of on-set continuity photo)

All this complicated cooking calls for refreshments

Thank God there was something to drink after the Arm-Ham Wing. We made coupes of Punch Romaine. This is the cocktail that was served on the last voyage of the Titanic. Seems fitting to serve it to Sogliato before he is sunk.

Punch Romaine 

Snails and Fireflies

DYK: The main predator of snails is firefly larvae. Do not Google this -- the photos are horrifying. Mother Nature is ruthless. Just think: fireflies are enchanting and snails are cute.

Time for a "Cute Snail" break thanks to these pix tweeted to me by Patricia@Polanetta.

photo by Vyacheslav Mishchenko

photo by Vyacheslav Mishchenko

OK, stop the cuteness. (or check Mischenkos FB for more) Back to the top of the food chain with Hannibal.

I had made a dozen marzipan snails so Chiyo's “Caged man” could eat the whole snail, shell and all as called for in the script.  But snails are slow – so slow, they got stuck in traffic and didn’t make it to the sound stage in time for the shot.  They had to film the shot another way as my marzipan snails sat in a box in the delivery guy's van as it crept along the highway in rush hour traffic.

Marzipan snails

Hanging around the abattoir

Spent the morning poking around the abattoir amid a mountain of meat, selecting sides and butts and shoulders to stand in for Sogliato’s skinned carcass from which he draws the Quinto Quarto.

 

OK...starting to feel like becoming a vegetarian

Not whistling while we work

Lungs a-fryin’ and whistling a “sibilo caratteristico”. Or not. We fried and fried those things and no whistle. Maybe they have to be from Italy. Or maybe they were lungs only dogs can hear.  But we pushed on. They will have to add the whistle in post production. Served the Caratella con carciofi – the liver, lung and heart of “lamb” on skewers. Professor Sogliato was no lamb but he was certainly skewered.

 

non-whistling lungs

And Bedelia keeps eating oysters

Like Botticelli's Aphrodite on a Half-shell...

Here's a Giant Oyster I made out of rice flour dough for close-up. It fit into an abalone shell.

While all await their fate next week, why not eat!

This week in Hannimeals

Ornella M of Poupou Kitchen in Toulouse made this exceptional Truite saumonee au bleu from Season 2

Lots more sketches and food and behind-the-scenes shots

..but I'm saving them for the Hannibal cookbook...see you next week after Episode 4!



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