Comic-Con 2012: Bryan Fuller on ‘Mockingbird Lane’ and ‘Hannibal’

Bryan Fuller, the co-writer and executive producer of Hannibal paid a visit to this year’s Comc-Con in San Diego to discuss his upcoming projects.

Midway through, the panel shifted gears to discuss “Hannibal,” which will star Hugh Dancy as Will Graham (played in the movies by William Petersen, and then by Edward Norton) and “Casino Royale” villain Mads Mikkelsen as Lecter. It spins out of a brief passage from Thomas Harris’ first Hannibal novel, “Red Dragon,” in which we learn that Lecter served as an FBI consultant who helped Graham catch other serial killers, before Graham finally figured out who his partner was.

“We talk about season 1 being the bromance, and season 2 being the horrible break-up,” said Fuller. In success, the plan would be to follow a path where “season 4 is ‘Red Dragon.’ That’s probably the easiest way to think of it.”

Fuller thinks there’s value to putting these two famous characters into a TV format, because “you have the real estate to tell a much more complicated emotional story,” in which we see how profiling killers began to wear on Graham, and Lecter grow bolder in his homicidal activities.

By far the funniest part of the panel was Fuller discussing the involvement of José Andrés, the James Beard Award-winning chef who’s serving as the show’s “cannibal consultant.”

“The first time we met with him,” Fuller recalled, “he was a little too excited” to explain that you could easily cook almost any part of the human body, and to suggest recipes for smoked lungs, “emulsified eyeballs, stuffed body part things… we’re coming up with a lot of ways to cook people. They sound delicious!”

A fan noted that he was talking about arcs for many seasons down the line after he’s had a lot of bad luck with his previous network series.

“It’s just the way my mind works,” Fuller said. “I had those (later) seasons worked out on ‘Dead Like Me’ and ‘Wonderfalls’ and ‘Pushing Daisies,’ too. I just plan and hope we get to the bridge, and if we don’t get to the bridge, they’ll probably be spread out over other projects. If I have an idea, I like to use all the pieces of the buffalo.”

Hugh is scheduled to begin production on Hannibal in late-August, for which the series will be filmed in Toronto, Canada. A premiere date for the series has yet to be confirmed, but sources say that it’s slated for a mid-season 2013 date.