Bryan Fuller serves up a Hannibal reunion in his directorial debut, Dust Bunny, a monster movie that makes delightful use of Mads Mikkelsen. The story follows a 10-year-old girl named Aurora (Sophie Sloan), who is haunted by the monster under her bed. But unlike the fleeting nightmares of other children her age, Aurora’s terror is very real, given that said monster quickly eats her parents.
Luckily, her next-door neighbor is an assassin (Mikkelsen), and he agrees to slay her dragon of a “dust bunny” after she tracks him down and offers him the alms from her church. While the two initially team up for their own individual purposes, they soon form a bond akin to found family thanks to their shared trauma and loneliness.
ScreenRant‘s Ash Crossan interviewed Fuller at TIFF to break down his approach to the darkly whimsical project, reflect on his steady fanbase on the heels of Hannibal, and look forward to his future film projects.
Bryan Fuller Expounds On The Dust Bunny Under His Bed
ScreenRant: This is your first foray into film, and I was blown away by the color and the visuals. Where did the idea originate?
Bryan Fuller: It was going to be part of Amazing Stories, and it was at a certain stage of development with Steven Spielberg, so it was neat to have a little bit of his sprinkle on the story. And after it didn’t make it through the Amazing Stories process, I decided to do something much more personal with it in telling Aurora’s story.
I think whenever I’m writing, I kind of have to break off a Horcrux chip and put it in things. It gives you a barometer on things, like, “I don’t know if the character would do that.” And writers know because there’s probably a chip of their soul in that character. That way, when an executive says, “I don’t believe the character would do that,” you’re like, “Yeah, they would.”
It really was about taking a high-concept storyline and making it as personal as possible, and going back to that Amblin era of high-concept summer movies and emotional gateway horror that I loved as a kid. I loved Poltergeist, I loved Gremlins, I loved The Goonies. There was something about those movies and kids in danger that felt like rites of passage by proxy for a lot of kids, and a way of building armor for real dangers in life. You’re preparing yourself through fictional dangers that allow you to have fun and also give yourself a perspective that’s in the story, but not of the story, if that makes sense.
ScreenRant: What were the personal elements that you inserted?
Bryan Fuller: I grew up in a tricky home, and so the monster wasn’t under my bed so much as it was under the same roof. There was something about the things that you wish for, that you think are the monsters, but those actually are the things that give you the power to defeat your monsters when you really know what they are. That wish fulfillment was very important and powerful for me as a storyteller because I’m like, “Okay, this is my first movie, so it has to be deeply personal.”
I mean, there’s nothing I’ve done that isn’t very personal in some way. We could do a whole analysis of why Hannibal is all of those things, but I think it was really about finding that mirror in Aurora that was going to give me the barometer to tell the story to the best of my ability and be the best person to tell the story. You want to be like, “I’ve got a point of view on this,” as opposed to squatting over a conveyor belt.
Gathering The Perfect Cast For Dust Bunny
ScreenRant: Sophie Sloan was amazing.
Bryan Fuller: Yeah, she was a real treasure. Margery Simkin, our fantastic casting director, saw a ton of girls. Sophie came in, she had a very thick Scottish brogue, and we were like, “We love you, but we won’t be able to understand you and Mads together.”
I was like, “She’s kind of the girl. But how do we parse the accent? How do we figure that out?” I showed her audition to Mads, and he was like, “She’s great. Just set it in Scotland.” It’s an American film, and it’s set in Brooklyn, but he was like, “Just set it in Scotland.” I was like, “We can’t!” But she took care of that problem. She watched TikTok videos for two weeks, taught herself a Mid-Atlantic American accent, and then she auditioned again.
But it was a very exhaustive process for the casting director. I had it easy. I only saw 12 kids because they had whittled down thousands to 12, and I kind of knew when I saw the first 12 that it was going to be Sophie. There were three that we met in person, and when she came in, she was minimalist in a way that I think is the trick with a lot of child actors. You want them to be children, but you also don’t want them to be annoying.
There’s something about kids in tricky home lives; they have a weight to them that other kids don’t have. There’s a sort of sobriety and stoicism that she has in the role. And also caution, because you have to convey that she’s witnessed three mass murders and is dealing with that trauma as well. So, she can’t be too much of a kid because that childhood has been taken away from her.
ScreenRant: You’re reuniting with Mads Mikkelsen, and I know that Hannibal fans are so excited. Can you tell me just a little bit about how long you’ve been talking about re-teaming and what that would look like?
Bryan Fuller: When this was an Amazing Stories project, I pitched it to Mads at the premiere of Rogue One, and he was like, “Great!”
Then it wasn’t going to be in Amazing Stories. But because I liked the story, and I sort of saw the Amblin moon and ET and Elliot riding across, I was just like, “This feels like a movie. This feels like it should have the Amblin logo on it and take us back to the ’80s and to that style of beautiful characterizations in high-concept genre movies.”
I can’t articulate enough how much he had my back as a partner and as a brother on the picture, and how he just continued to step up at every stage of the production because it was a challenging production. We were in a country where most of the crew didn’t speak English, and there were lots of stressors around that.
But between Mads and Sigourney Weaver and our cinematographer, visual effects supervisor, and costume designers, there was a more intimate relationship than working in television. That was inspiring and also allowed me to live in the moment more than you do in television, because you’re always like, “When I finish this one, I’ve got seven more.”
It’s hard to live in the present and be grateful for what we get to do, but working with those people really like an old-style theater troupe. It’s like a Judy Garland movie, where everybody’s putting on a show in the barn and coming together and supporting each other. There was a very close, tight-knit group of people on the crew that made it very wonderful, and I feel like I’ve made friends for life. I had their backs, they had my back, and that was really special.
Fuller’s Plate Is Full Between Film & Television
ScreenRant: You come from the TV world. Do you feel like you’re in the film world now, and that is what you want to continue to do?
Bryan Fuller: I love both, and I am working on a couple of TV things right now that I love,. But I feel like [whispers] making movies is easier.
I think television is more smartly produced because it has to be, because of the tonnage and the marathon that you’re running. Movies are a little bit of the Wild West. Hopefully, they will get less Wild West-y the more I do them, but I definitely love the filmmaking experience.
ScreenRant: Wasn’t there talk of more Hannibal?
Bryan Fuller: It’s complicated now because Martha De Laurentiis died, and she had a certain section of the rights. Thomas Harris is now trying to get the rights all under one umbrella, and I think that’s going to take a couple of years of straightening out.
But the entire cast wants to come back. Mads, Hugh Dancy, Laurence Fishburne, Caroline Dhavernas – everybody’s in. It’s just a matter of: will the rights be figured out again?
I mean, my dream project is to do a limited series of The Silence of the Lambs with Mads and Zendaya as Clarice Starling. If I could put anything out into the universe, I would put that into the universe.
ScreenRant: Speaking about filmmaking, you said movies were easier. Do you have an idea of what movies you’d want to do next?
Bryan Fuller: I am writing another movie script right now that is kind of following in the abandoned Amazing Stories footsteps. There were three or four of them where I was like, “These should make great movies.” I’m writing the next one in that line now, and I’m hoping to finish that script by the end of the year.
It’s similarly very emotional, high-concept storytelling. More about adult themes, but still with that kind of French cinema inspiration to it. The City of Lost Children, Delicatessen, and Amelie are huge influences; they kind of give you permission to wear that loud pattern and those crazy colors.
Dust Bunny is currently playing in theaters.
- Release Date
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December 12, 2025
- Runtime
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106 minutes
- Director
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Bryan Fuller
