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The prison ward of the Baltimore State Forensics Hospital isn't exactly the place a girl dreams of spending Valentine's Day. But a job's a job. I'm here to do an interview. (Quid pro quo and all that.) Standing at the end of Dr. Hannibal Lecter's dank hallway, tiny cells all in a row, one can't help but feel a bit Starling-eyed. Particularly after a first glance at the man I've come to speak with: hair slicked back, smile elegantly wolfish, his body stiff but graceful in a starchy prison jumpsuit. He moves toward me, and the greeting comes out in a half purr.

''Hello, Gillian.''

Yup, I'm officially creeped out.

Fortunately the mood is quickly broken on the buzzing L.A. soundstage housing the set for Red Dragon, the prequel to The Silence of the Lambs. We've got an actor you must call Sir (or so the Queen says), Anthony Hopkins, in his third go as the man-hungry shrink. We've got an actor you...should probably call sir too, Edward Norton, as Special Agent Will Graham, the man who landed Lecter in this room without a view.

Then there's 32-year-old director Brett Ratner, who's loving his jail time. He trots down the hall to his actors, canvassing the scene: Graham, on the trail of a new serial killer, is seeking the forensic psychiatrist's fearsome insight. Huddle break, and the director zips back to his seat to watch the two go at it. Giggling and jutting his thumbs up (''F -- -ing great...f -- -ing awesome,'' he mutters), so far Ratner likes what he sees. Still, the cast and crew can't be oblivious to the big questions hovering over them. Like, why do another Hannibal Lecter movie? Especially one based on Thomas Harris' novel Red Dragon, which Michael Mann already brought, quite slickly, to the big screen as 1986's Manhunter. Can the guy best known for directing the Rush Hour bang-'em-ups pull this off? Will the top-drawer cast -- which includes Ralph Fiennes, Emily Watson, Harvey Keitel, and Philip Seymour Hoffman -- make this another Silence, or raise hopes impossibly high?

Red Dragon follows films both sublime and ridiculed. The Silence of the Lambs, based on Harris' second Lecter novel, swept the 1992 Oscars, winning Best Picture, Actor (Hopkins), Actress (Jodie Foster), Director (Jonathan Demme), and Adapted Screenplay (Ted Tally). Hollywood waited...and waited...for Harris to write his follow-up. In 1999, he delivered Hannibal, which, despite many nasty reviews, became a bloody best-seller. Still, the Silence gang scattered. Foster begged off returning as FBI agent Clarice Starling, claiming a prior directorial assignment in the never-realized Flora Plum. Demme and Tally also declined. Word had it the trio were averse to the book's gore and its crowning Starling-Lecter amour. Hopkins, however, stuck (scoring a $10 million payday), and with Julianne Moore as Starling and Ridley Scott as director, Hannibal the movie became a love/hate phenomenon. Make that kinda-like/hate. Some took to its stylized carnage, killer pigs, and winking Lecter running amok through Italy. And others... ''He was walking around Rome,'' Ratner says. (Florence, actually.) ''It's nobody's fault, I mean, the book didn't work. He became a caricature.''


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