Jodie Foster on the Unscripted Moment in The Silence of the Lambs | MasterClass

There's an interesting moment in that scene, The Sounds of the Lambs, where Lecter makes fun of Clarice's accent. That was not rehearsed. That was just something that Anthony Hopkins came up with. I was an actress learning how to speak in a West Virginia accent, and when I heard him make fun of my accent, it really made me mad. And it's an interesting thing that happens, I think, that you can feel that. You can feel this kind of shame of having tried so hard to be something, and having somebody humiliate you, and not being able to do anything about it because you're smaller, more fragile, and you're scared. Lecter is telling her, is kind of reading her her beads and saying, you know, you with your good bag and your cheap shoes, and the camera pushes in very slowly, and we see her change from being steely and above it all, to being touched by his violence, to finally acquiescing and agreeing that he's hurt her, and trying to turn that in to go back to what her mission as an FBI agent was. But we get to see the pain and the hurt of a past that is working in her present that even she doesn't understand. Very often with independent movies, maybe you'll be doing a scene that's eight, ten pages long, and you've got dialogue between characters. It's very long. How are you going to know or remember which take is good and which take isn't? How are you going to remember whether you had that line really good on that angle? What I like to do is, it looks really dumb. I will put the scene number, and then I'll put the letter number of the angle. And then on this particular line, for example, you can tell that I liked the first take, the second take, the third take, and the fourth take. The third is starred, so the third take must have been good. And then I like for this line, I like four and two, and three and four, and so forth. If let's just say we get to a line, and we get to a line, and we've gone through five different takes, and I realize that I don't have anything circled for that one particular line that I was really hoping for, then I might pick it up in the angle that I'm hoping for. So I might pick it up and just do that one line, because it's the one line that I don't have exactly the way that I want it. This sounds as if every time somebody speaks, I'm going to be on their face. Well, I'm not. Not necessarily. Sometimes a character is speaking, and I'm on somebody else. I'm on a reaction shot. I want to make sure that just in case I happen to be on their face, that I'm comfortable with that particular take. And when you're looking at scenes that are 13 or 14 pages long, if you hadn't made these type of notes, you might be lost. You might get to the cutting room and realize that you don't have the take that you needed.