Mads Mikkelsen and Bryan Fuller reveal the road from 'Hannibal' to 'Dust Bunny'

I love the way Maz pines and yearns, and that's not something that a lot of X pines..

Say it's late, please. Wants. Okay, I love it. Wants, dreams, desires

Okay, I got it. I'm pining for the woods. Yeah. That's a multi-pine

Exactly. We're here to talk about Dust Bunny, but I'd like to talk a little bit about the journey to Dust Bunny

because obviously it's not your first collaboration. So can you tell me a little bit about how you got from Hannibal to Dust Bunny as a collaboration team

It wasn't. It was his journey in the sense that, I mean, I've been part of his journey for three years

And then we split up and he went into Dust Bunny mode

And at a certain point, I popped up in your mind. Well, I remember pitching it to you at the premiere of Rogue One when it was going to be an episode of TV

and you were like, great, send me the script, sounds fun. And then years later, it was no longer a TV show, wrote it as a feature, and sent it to Maz

and he was like oh yeah you can call me about this So that was kind of our and it was always Maz in my mind so it was going to be Maz in the TV show and it was going to be Maz in the feature And it was just there was nobody else in my mind

Well, this is also your first directorial feature effort. So what made this story be something you said

I want to tell this myself. It started as an amazing stories

So it was developed with Steven Spielberg. You know, lots of notes from Steven on the story that all got integrated

And then it wasn't making it through the process of that TV show

And I said, just let me have it back so I can do it as a feature. Because all of those episodes that we were working on were designed to be Amblin movies, callbacks to 80s summer movies that I loved, Goonies and Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

And those types of kids in peril that become their own heroes with unwitting adults pulled into their drama

And so that was the inspiration was to go back to the 80s and those big tent full summer movies that had high concepts and were kind of gateway horror

Let talk a little bit about Dust Bunny and the creating of this monster I like the way within the film it reminded me of Jaws where we only seeing like snippets of it and there like indications of it but like actually seeing it is very smartly reserved But I curious for you like at what

point is the monster developed so you can show the cast what they're interacting with and like

how did building that, how did that affect you? I think one of the things that was exciting about

But having a monster is building a monster, practically, for the actors, particularly Sophie, to see

And one of my favorite days on set is when we introduced her to Dusty, which is this massive 12-foot tall puppet

And so we had a puppet for a lot of things. And it was important to have that physicality, particularly for a child, to see what it looks like and to know what she's imagining in those instances

And I think that was, you know, despite like the financial challenges of building a huge puppet, it's so useful in the world building for a kid and to see Sophie giddy at seeing him and how cute that she thought he was

And she wasn't afraid of him at all. Until. Until He opens his mouth Yeah And the development of the monster was a fantastic comic book artist named John Wayshack who

I had done an abandoned Pushing Daisies comic book with. And I called him up and said, we're making a monster

Do you want to do some initial sketches? And he was like, what does it look like? And I was like, it's part Highland cow, part piranha, part hippopotamus and all bunny

And he drew what we got. I love that. Oh, that's just the throwback to the Pushing Davies comic

That hits me in the heart a little bit because I'm still I'm still smarting about the cancellation

It's fine. We'll move. We're talking about a season three. So, yeah, everybody wants to come back and we've got a great story and we just need somebody to want to do it

OK, I'm going to start. I don't know. I don't I'm not bringing on prayer, lapsed Catholic and all, but I'll manifest or whatever people do nowadays

I love that idea. Does it also feel kind of validating to know that you were caught on to the leap pace of it all before everyone else

Yes. Yes. It's an affirmation of my great taste in casting. That was not a politician's answer

That was really interesting. A lot of people are just like, yeah, no, I feel great about that

I feel validated