‘Stronger Than Reason’: Interview with Alfred Hitchcock (part one)

The Birds (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 American thriller The Birds, centres on a coastal Californian community that is subject to a strange, terrifying, unexplained attack by hordes of aggressive birds. The film was based loosely on a book by Daphne Du Maurier and adapted for the screen by Evan Hunter, who also wrote under the pen name Ed McBain, the distinguished crime writer.

The plot is set into motion by a chance meeting in a California pet store between a wealthy socialite Melanie Daniels (played by Tippi Hedren) with a lawyer, Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor). Mitch is a young lawyer who intends to purchase a pair of lovebirds for his younger sister, Cathy. Recognising Melanie he pretends to think she works there in order to make a joke at her expense. The first section of the film establishes character and background in some detail, heightening the anticipation.

Melanie is both annoyed by Mitch's mockery and fascinated by him as he departs without any lovebirds. She resolves to buy the pair of lovebirds herself and deliver them to Mitch's home, obtaining the location via her father's contacts at a San Francisco newspaper. When she discovers Mitch has returned home for the weekend, she resolves to transport the birds to the Brenner residence in Bodega Bay, 60 miles along the coast. She creeps up to the Brenner home in a boat, breaks in, and leaves the birds and a letter for Cathy. While returning across the water in a motorised boat, a bird swoops down on her, lacerating her forehead. 

Before any actual violence takes place, Hitchcock takes his time in The Birds, developing the personalities of Daniels and Brenner and emphasising their ties for increased tension. Both Jessica Tandy and Suzanne Pleshette have notable performances as Brenner's mother, Lydia, and his previous love, Annie. To great effect, Hitchcock uses synthetic noise rather than a musical soundtrack. In preparation for the film, Hitchcock studied an odd, real-life attack on a California town. The Birds is a meticulous film, with vibrant colours and exquisite production design, as well as settings that are both scenically expressive and practical for the plot. It conveys the impression of a methodically planned production in every way, from Melanie's conscientious physical movements, which serve as precursors to the careful manoeuvring required later in the film, to Hitchcock's assured pacing of the story, which, again reflecting Melanie's demeanour, conveys leisurely confidence. Naturally, this impeccably controlled behaviour will catch up with such security, just as it does for the sheltered community. Melanie, on the other hand, is well-suited to Mitch's apparent arrogance and has no qualms about following him to Bodega Bay, lovebirds in tow.

Shortly after Melanie is attacked, there are a flurry of escalating assaults by birds in the area, beginning with Cathy's birthday celebration, when the birds' destructive approach is irreversibly established. Hitchcock is adept at manipulating primal fears and throughout The Birds there is a meticulously crafted exposition of horror, that builds, for example, from Lydia's observation of broken cups in a kitchen, to her silent perusal of a bedroom in a state of devastation, to the final image of a neighbour collapsed, eyeless, pecked to death. 

Hitchcock made a deliberate attempt with The Birds to outdo Psycho's spectacular shocks. With its haunting electronic score and chilling special effects, it was both avant-garde and remorselessly inclusive in its playing on viewers’ communal fears. 

The films notorious ending, culminating in Brenner's family and Daniels driving away, under the watchful gaze of the birds, is an image that is both eerie and unfulfilling for viewers, since Hitchcock doesn't provide any explanation for the unusual and horrific events that have transpired. Yet it is, in a sense, appropriate in its sense of a pause, not an ending, a warning, not a conclusion. Hitchcock will punish his protagonists, and in a sense, the audience, no more. It is apocalypse forestalled, it’s threat still hanging literally in the air. 

Hitchcock was 63 when he worked on The Birds and felt secure enough to dispense with the normal gears of story logic. The MacGuffins that drive previous narratives, even the need for an “explanation” in the final scene of Psycho to explain Norman Bates split personality to the audience. The Birds, however, offers no such conclusions or anchor in psychiatric logic. It moves on its own terms, there is no score that tethers it, and nothing that gives solace to an audience. Hitchcock agonised over how to conclude the story. Rather than providing a well-rounded scripted finish, which would have been tidy, predictable, and formulaic, he opted for non-resolution instead, allowing for an open ending: a great closing image that leaves the future in limbo and the enigmas of the story still intact.

The following extract is from an interview with Alfred Hitchcock from 1963 prior to the release of The Birds in which the master of suspense discusses his recent films, his use of sound and the primacy of emotion over reason in the film-making process. 

Can you tell us something about ‘The Birds’?

It’s taken from a well-known short story by Daphne Du Maurier. It concerns the attack by domestic birds on a group of people living in a community; the film is laid in northern California, northern San Francisco. The series of attacks start very mildly and increase in seriousness as it goes on.

What would you say was the theme of the film?

If you like you can make it the theme of too much complacency in the world: that people are unaware that catastrophe surrounds us all.

The people are unwilling to believe that the birds are going to take over?

That’s true, yes.

What particularly attracted you to science fiction?

This isn’t science fiction at all, not at all. It’s treated quite naturally and quite straightforwardly. Many of the incidents in the film are based on actual fact. Birds have attacked and do attack, all the time. As a matter of fact, one of the incidents we have in the film was based on an actual incident which occurred at La Jolla, California; on April 30, 1960. A thousand swifts came down a chimney into the living room of some people. These are birds that nest in masonry rather than in trees, in roofs and chimneys and so forth. And the people were completely swamped with them for half an hour. Another incident occurred in the very place we were working, in Bodega Bay in northern San Francisco, where a farmer reported to the San Francisco Chronicle that he was losing a lot of lambs due to crows diving and pecking at their eyes and then killing them. So there are precedents for all these things. That’s what makes it more or less accurate, in terms of facts rather than science-fiction.

The Birds (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

There are also precedents. in your films for birds, aren’t there? Particularly in ‘Psycho’.

Oh yes.

Is this any particular fondness for birds?

Not particularly, no.

Do you find them threatening in some way?

No. No, not at all. I’m personally not interested in that side of content. I’m more interested in the technique of story telling by means of film rather than in what the film contains.

As far as telling this particular story goes, had you a lot of problems?

Oh, I wasn’t meaning technical problems. I was meaning the technique of story telling on film per se. Oh no, the technical problems are prodigious. I mean films like Ben Hur or Cleopatra are child’s play compared with this. After all we had to train birds for every shot practically.

You had some trouble with the American version of the R.S.P.C.A. . . .

Not really; that was a technicality. You’re allowed to catch so many birds. I think the bird trainer had about four over his quota, really.

The Birds (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Did you restrict yourself in the bird kingdom, or did every sort of bird take over?

Oh no. No birds of prey at all. Purely domestic birds. Seagulls. Birds you see every day. Seagulls, crows, ravens, finches, and canaries and that sort of bird.

You’re not using music?

No music at all, no. We’re using electronic sound, all the way through. A simulated sound of actual things. For example the sound of birds’ wings and birds’ cries will be stylised to some extent. And that will occur all the way through the picture.

You have used music a lot in your previous films. This is going to fulfill exactly the role of music?

Oh, it should do, yes. After all, when you put music to film, it’s really sound, it isn’t music per se. I mean there’s an abstract approach. The music serves as either a counterpoint or a comment on whatever scene is being played. I mean we don’t have what you call ‘tunes’ in it at all.

The shrilling in ‘Psycho’ is rather of that sort.

Yes, you see you have the screaming violins. It was a motif that went through the murder scenes.

You will use your strange sounds as motifs in that way? 

Yes.

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

I hear ‘Psycho’ made a lot of money.

Yes, that was a secondary consideration. Psycho is probably one of the most cinematic films I’ve made and there you get a clear example of the use of film to cause an audience to respond emotionally.

It was primarily an emotional response you were after from your audience?

Entirely. That’s the whole device. After all, the showing of a violent murder at the beginning was intended purely to instil into the minds of the audience a certain degree of fear of what is to come. Actually in the film, as it goes on, there’s less and less violence because it has been transferred to the minds of the audience.

The use of Janet Leigh to be killed early in the film is to upset one’s sense of security because the star is expected to survive to the end.

Oh, no question about it. The ordinary person would have said ‘Janet Leigh, she’s the leading lady, she must play the lead.’ But that was not the intention at all. The intention in that early part was to portray average people and in this particular case to deliberately divert the audience’s attention into a character in trouble, you see. And you follow the adventures of a girl deliberately detailed to keep you away from anything that’s going to turn up later on, you see.

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

‘North by Northwest’. Near the beginning, in the mad car chase, one knows that Cary Grant can’t be killed this early. So why is one excited?

That again is purely the use of film in terms of the substitution of the language of the camera for words. That is the most important function of film. As a substitute for words. I wouldn’t say substitute. I don’t think that does film even sufficient justice. It’s the mode of expression. And the use of the size of the image. And the juxtaposition of different pieces of film to create emotion in a person. And you can make it strong enough even to make them forget reason. You see when you say that Cary Grant can’t possibly be killed so early in the film, that’s the application of reason. But you’re not permitted to reason. Because the film should be stronger than reason.

Above all of your films the one that seems stronger than reason is Vertigo.

There you get, in a sense, a remote fantasy. In Vertigo you have a feeling of remoteness from ordinary worldly things. You see the attitude of the man, the woman’s behaviour. Of course behind it lies some kind of plot, which I think is quite secondary. I don’t bother about plot, or all that kind of thing.

You got rid of it very early in the film.

Yes, that’s, what shall I call it? That’s a necessary evil. But that’s why I’m always surprised at people and even critics who place so much reliance on logic and all that sort of thing. I have a little phrase to myself. I always say logic is dull.

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

You seem rather to distrust the psychiatrist’s explanation of Norman Bates in ‘Psycho’. It isn’t given all that much weight.

Possibly the details would have been too unpleasant. I think that there perhaps we’re skimming over... You have to remember that Psycho is a film made with quite a sense of amusement on my part. To me it’s a fun picture. The processes through which we take the audience, you see, it’s rather like taking them through the haunted house at the fairground or the roller-coaster, you know. After all it stands to reason that if one were seriously doing the Psycho story, it would be a case history. You would never present it in forms of mystery or the juxtaposition of characters, as they were placed in the film. They were all designed in a certain way to create this audience emotion. Probably the real Psycho story wouldn’t have been emotional at all; it would’ve been terribly clinical.

Psycho is, though, very honestly presented. There is a very striking shot of Norman Bates swinging his hips as he goes upstairs. When one sees the film for the second time, one realises one could have solved the mystery the first time.

Well, I’m a great believer in making sure that if people see the film a second time they don’t feel cheated. That is a must. You must be honest about it and not merely keep things away from an audience. I’d call that cheating. You should never do that.

Was this shot meant deliberately as a clue?

Well, you might as well say that the basic clue was in the feminine nature of the character altogether.

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

The very complex montage of the murder of Janet Leigh was not just intended to avoid showing some things you couldn’t show . . .

Well, I did photograph a nude girl all the way through. In other words I covered in the shooting every aspect of the killing. Actually some of it was shot in slow motion. I had the camera slow and the, girl moving slowly so that I could measure out the movements and the covering of awkward parts of the body, the arm movement, gesture and so forth. I was actually seven days on that little thing; it’s only forty-five seconds really.

Is there a sexual reference in the compositions? It seemed that you were consciously cutting between soft round shapes and the hard, phallic shape of the knife to suggest copulation.

Well, I mean you would get that in any case, with any sense of intimate nudity those thoughts would emerge naturally. But the most obvious example of that is in North by Northwest, the last shot with the train going into the tunnel.

One feels of your later films that you have got much less interested in the mystery thriller element, much more interested in broadening things out.

Well, I think it’s a natural tendency to be less superficial, that’s Truffaut’s opinion—he’s been examining all these films. And he feels that the American period is much stronger than the English period. It’s a much stronger development. For example, I think it’s necessary to get a little deeper into these things as one goes along. For example The Birds—you see usually in these films, which I call an ‘event film’ you know, like On The Beach, or one of those things—I felt it was much more necessary to intensify the personal story so that you get, as a result, a greater identification with the people, and therefore the fire through which you put them is much stronger.

The interview by Ian Cameron and V. F. Perkins with Alfred Hitchcock originally appeared in Movie, No. 6, January 1963.

Alfred Hitchcock Discusses Screenwriting

North By Northwest (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

The legendary film director and ‘master of suspense’ Alfred Hitchcock shared his knowledge on film production in the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. His discussion was first published in 1965 as part of a larger entry on motion pictures written by a collection of experts. A captivating read, Hitchcock’s text offers insights on the different stages of filmmaking, the history of cinema, and the relation between a film’s technical and budgetary aspects and its fundamental purpose, telling stories through images. 

The following excerpt is from Hitchcock’s discussion of the craft and role of the screenplay. Hitchcock warns against the temptation for screenwriters of overusing the physical mobility afforded by the camera: ‘It is wrong,’ Hitchcock writes, ‘to suppose, as is all too commonly the case, that the screen of the motion picture lies in the fact that the camera can roam abroad, can go out of the room, for example, to show a taxi arriving. This is not necessarily an advantage and it can so easily be merely dull.’ 

Hitchcock also admonishes Hollywood to remember the distinct nature of the cinematic form and be true to it, instead of making films as if they were simply the transposition of a novel or a stage play onto film.

By far the greater majority of full-length films are fiction films. The fiction film is created from a screenplay, and all the resources and techniques of the cinema are directed toward the successful realization on the screen of the screenplay. Any treatment of motion-picture production will naturally and logically begin, therefore, with a discussion of the screenplay.

The screenplay, which is sometimes known, also, as the scenario or film script, resembles the blueprint of the architect. It is the verbal design of the finished film. In studios where films are made in great numbers, and under industrial conditions, the writer prepares the screenplay under the supervision of a producer, who represents the budgetary and box-office concerns of the front office, and who may be responsible for several scripts simultaneously. Under ideal conditions, the screenplay is prepared by the writer in collaboration with the director. This practice, long the custom in Europe, has become more common in the United States with the increase of independent production. Indeed, not infrequently, the writer may also be the director.

Strangers On A Train (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

In its progress toward completion, the screenplay normally passes through certain stages; these stages have been established over the years and depend on the working habits of those engaged in writing it. The practice of these years has come to establish three main stages: (1) the outline; (2) the treatment; (3) the screenplay. The outline, as the term implies, gives the essence of the action or story and may present either an original idea or, more usually, one derived from a successful stage play or novel. The outline is then built up into the treatment. This is a prose narrative, written in the present tense, in greater or less detail, that reads like a description of what will finally appear on the screen. This treatment is broken down into screenplay form, which, like its stage counterpart, sets out the dialogue, describes the movements and reactions of the actors and at the same time gives the breakdown of the individual scenes, with some indication of the role, in each scene, of the camera and the sound. It likewise serves as a guide to the various technical departments: to the art department for the sets, to the casting department for the actors, to the costume department, to makeup, to the music department, and so on.

The writer, who should be as skilled in the dialogue of images as of words, must have the capacity to anticipate, visually and in detail, the finished film. The detailed screenplay, prepared ahead, not only saves time and money in production but also enables the director to hold securely to the unity of form and to the cinematic structure of the action, while leaving him free to work intimately and concentratedly with the actors.

Unlike the screenplays of today, the first scripts had no dramatic form, being merely lists of proposed scenes, and their content when filmed was strung together in the order listed. Anything that called for further explanation was covered in a title.

Step by step, as the form and scope of the film developed, the screenplay grew more and more detailed. The pioneer of these detailed screenplays was Thomas Ince, whose remarkable capacity for visualizing the finally edited film made a detailed script possible. In contrast were the talents of D.W. Griffith, who contributed more than almost any other single individual to the establishment of the technique of filmmaking, and who never used a script.

Rear Window (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

By the early 1920s, the writer was meticulously indicating every shot, whereas today, when the scenarist writes less in images and gives more attention to dialogue, leaving the choice of images to the director, the tendency is to confine the script to the master scenes, so called because they are key scenes, covering whole sections of the action, as distinct from individual camera shots. This practice also follows on the increasingly common use of the novelist to adapt his own books; he is likely to be unfamiliar with the process of detailed dramatic and cinematic development. The dramatist, on the other hand, called onto adapt his play, is usually found to be more naturally disposed to do the work effectively. However, the scenarist is faced with a more difficult task than the dramatist. While the latter is, indeed, called upon to sustain the interest of an audience for three acts, these acts are broken up by intervals during which the audience can relax. The screenwriter is faced with the task of holding the attention of the audience for an uninterrupted two hours or longer. He must so grip their attention that they will stay on, held from scene to scene, till the climax is reached. Thus it is that, because screenwriting must build the action continuously, the stage dramatist, used to the building of successive climaxes, will tend to make a better film scenarist.

Sequences must never peter out but must carry the action forward, much as the car of a ratchet railway is carried forward, cog by cog. This is not to say that film is either theatre or novel. Its nearest parallel is the short story, which is as a rule concerned to sustain one idea and ends when the action has reached the highest point of the dramatic curve. A novel may be read at intervals and with interruptions; a play has breaks between the acts; but the short story is rarely put down and in this it resembles the film, which makes a unique demand for uninterrupted attention upon its audience. This unique demand explains the need for a steady development of a plot and the creation of gripping situations arising out of the plot, all of which must be presented, above all, with visual skill. The alternative is interminable dialogue, which must inevitably send a cinema audience to sleep. The most powerful means of gripping attention is suspense. It can be either the suspense inherent in a situation or the suspense that has the audience asking, ‘What will happen next?’ It is indeed vital that they should ask themselves this question. Suspense is created by the process of giving the audience information that the character in the scene does not have. In The Wages of Fear, for example, the audience knew that the truck being driven over dangerous ground contained dynamite. This moved the question from, ‘What will happen next?’ to, ‘Will it happen next?’ What happens next is a question concerned with the behaviour of characters in given circumstances.

Vertigo (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

In the theatre, the performance of the actor carries the audience along. Thus dialogue and ideas suffice. This is not so in the motion picture. The broad structural elements of the story on the screen must be cloaked in atmosphere and character and, finally, in dialogue. If it is strong enough, the basic structure, with its inherent developments, will suffice to take care of the emotions of the audience, provided the element represented by the question ‘What happens next?’ is present. Often a successful play fails to make a successful film because this element is missing.

It is a temptation in adapting stage plays for the screenwriter to use the wider resources of the cinema, that is to say, to go outside, to follow the actor offstage. On Broadway, the action of the play may take place in one room. The scenarist, however, feels free to open up the set, to go outside more often than not. This is wrong. It is better to stay with the play. The action was structurally related by the playwright to three walls and the proscenium arch. It may well be, for example, that much of his drama depends on the question, ‘Who is at the door?’ This effect is ruined if the camera goes outside the room. It dissipates the dramatic tension. The departure from the more or less straightforward photographing of plays came with the growth of techniques proper to film, and the most significant of these occurred when Griffith took the camera and moved it in from its position at the proscenium arch, where Georges Méliès had placed it, to a close-up of the actor. The next step came when, improving on the earlier attempts of Edwin S. Porter and others, Griffith began to set the strips of film together in a sequence and rhythm that came to be known as montage; it took the action outside the confines of time and space, even as they apply to the theatre.

The stage play provides the screenwriter with a certain basic dramatic structure that may call, in adaptation, for little more than the dividing up of its scenes into a number of shorter scenes. The novel, on the other hand, is not structurally dramatic in the sense in which the word is applied to stage or screen. Therefore, in adapting a novel that is entirely compounded of words, the screenwriter must completely forget them and ask himself what the novel is about. All else – including characters and locale – is momentarily put aside. When this basic question has been answered, the writer starts to build up the story again.

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

The screenwriter does not have the same leisure as the novelist to build up his characters. He must do this side by side with the unfolding of the first part of the narrative. However, by way of compensation, he has other resources not available to the novelist or the dramatist, in particular the use of things. This is one of the ingredients of true cinema. To put things together visually; to tell the story visually; to embody the action in the juxtaposition of images that have their own specific language and emotional impact – that is cinema. Thus, it is possible to be cinematic in the confined space of a telephone booth. The writer places a couple in the booth. Their hands, he reveals, are touching; their lips meet; the pressure of one against the other unhooks the receiver. Now the operator can hear what passes between them. A step forward in the unfolding of the drama has been taken. When the audience sees such things on the screen, it will derive from these images the equivalent of the words in the novel, or of the expositional dialogue of the stage. Thus the screenwriter is no more limited by the booth than is the novelist. Hence it is wrong to suppose, as is all too commonly the case, that the strength of the motion picture lies in the fact that the camera can roam abroad, can go out of the room, for example, to show a taxi arriving. This is not necessarily an advantage and it can so easily be merely dull.

Things, then, are as important as actors to the writer. They can richly illustrate character. For example, a man may hold a knife in a very strange way. If the audience is looking for a murderer, it may conclude from this that this is the man they are after, misjudging an idiosyncrasy of his character. The skilled writer will know how to make effective use of such things. He will not fall into the uncinematic habit of relying too much on the dialogue. This is what happened on the appearance of sound. Filmmakers went to the other extreme. They filmed stage plays straight. Some indeed there are who believe that the day the talking picture arrived the art of the motion picture, as applied to the fiction film, died and passed to other kinds of film.

The truth is that with the triumph of dialogue, the motion picture has been stabilized as theatre. The mobility of the camera does nothing to alter this fact. Even though the camera may move along the sidewalk, it is still theatre. The characters sit in taxis and talk. They sit in automobiles and make love, and talk continuously. One result of this is a loss of cinematic style. Another is the loss of fantasy. Dialogue was introduced because it is realistic. The consequence was a loss of the art of reproducing life entirely in pictures. Yet the compromise arrived at, although made in the cause of realism, is not really true to life. Therefore the skilled writer will separate the two elements. If it is to be a dialogue scene, then he will make it one. If it is not, then he will make it visual, and he will always rely more on the visual than on dialogue. Sometimes he will have to decide between the two; namely, if the scene is to end with a visual statement, or with a line of dialogue. Whatever the choice made at the actual staging of the action, it must be one to hold the audience...

– Excerpt from ‘Alfred Hitchcock on film production (motion picture)’.  In the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1973).

 

Alfred Hitchcock: On Making ‘The Birds’

The Birds (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 American thriller The Birds, centres on a coastal Californian community that is subject to a strange, terrifying, unexplained attack by hordes of aggressive birds. 

At the outset, a chance meeting in a California store between Melanie Daniels (played by Tippi Hedren) with a lawyer from her home town of Bodega Bay, Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), compels Daniels to impulsively follow him to Bodega Bay. A bird swoops down on her, lacerating her forehead as they are ready to embrace. Shortly after, there are a flurry of more assaults by birds in the area, culminating in Brenner's family and Daniels driving away, under the watchful gaze of the birds. The last image is both terrifying and unfulfilling for viewers, since Hitchcock doesn't provide any explanation for the unusual and horrific events that have transpired. 

Before any actual violence takes place, Hitchcock takes his time in The Birds, developing the personalities of Daniels and Brenner and emphasising their ties for increased tension. Both Jessica Tandy and Suzanne Pleshette have notable performances as Brenner's mother, Lydia, and his previous love, Annie. This Daphne Du Maurier book was turned into a feature film by screenwriter Evan Hunter, who wrote under the pen name Ed McBain. To great effect, Hitchcock used synthetic noise rather than using a musical soundtrack. In preparation for the film, Hitchcock studied an odd, real-life attack on a California town. 

Hitchcock was 63 when he worked on The Birds and felt secure enough to dispense with the normal gears of story logic. The MacGuffins that drive previous narratives, even the need for an “explanation” in the final scene of Psycho to explain Norman Bates split personality to the audience. The Birds, however, offers no such conclusions or anchor in psychiatric logic. It moves on its own terms, there is no score that tethers it, and nothing that gives solace to an audience. Hitchcock agonised over how to conclude the story. Rather than providing a well-rounded scripted finish, which would have been tidy, predictable, and formulaic, he opted for non-resolution instead, allowing for an open ending: a great closing image that leaves the future in limbo and the enigmas of the story still intact.

As part of the Alfred Hitchcock retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in 1963, the exhibition culminated with the American premiere of Hitchcock’s recently completed ‘The Birds’. As part of the retrospective, Peter Bogdanovich conducted an extensive interview with Alfred Hitchcock about his career. The interview concluded with Hitchcock discussing the making of ‘The Birds’, his preparations for his next film ‘Marnie’ and some unrealized projects.

In The Birds, as in a lot of your films, you take ordinary, basically average people, and put them into extraordinary situations.

This is for audience identification. In The Birds, there is a very light beginning, girl meets boy, and then she walks right into a complicated situation: the boy’s mother’s unnatural relationship to him, and the school teacher who’s carrying a torch for him. This girl, who is just a fly-by-night, a playgirl, comes up against reality for the first time. That transmits itself into a catastrophe, and the girl’s transition takes place.

What do you feel the picture is really about?

Generally speaking, that people are too complacent. The girl represents complacency. But I believe that when people rise to the occasion, when catastrophe comes, they are all right. The mother panics because she starts off being so strong, but she is not strong, it is a facade: she has been substituting her son for her husband. She is the weak character in the story. But the girl shows that people can be strong when they face up to the situation. It’s like the people in London, during the wartime air raids.

Isn’t the film also a vision of Judgment Day?

Yes, it is. And we don’t know how they are going to come out. Certainly, the mother was scared to the end. The girl was brave enough to face the birds and try to beat them off. But as a group they were the victims of Judgment Day. For the ordinary public – they got away to San Francisco – but I toyed with the idea of lap-dissolving on them in the car, looking, and there is the Golden Gate Bridge – covered in birds.

How did you come to choose The Birds as a vehicle?

I felt that after Psycho people would expect something to top it before going on to something else. I’ve noticed that in other ‘catastrophe’ films, such as On the Beach, the personal stories were never really part of it at all. I remember a film called The Pride and the Passion which was about pulling that huge gun. Well, they stopped every night to have a bit of personal story; then the next morning they went back to the gun again. It was terribly devised, no integration at all. They don’t realize that people are still living, emoting, while pushing the gun. That was one of the things I made up my mind to avoid in The Birds. I deliberately started off with light, ordinary, inconsequential behavior. I even compromised by the nature of the opening titles, making them ominous. I wanted to use very light, simple Chinese paintings of birds – delicate little drawings. I didn’t because I felt people might get impatient, having seen the advertising campaign and ask, ‘When are the birds coming on?’ That’s why I give them a sock now and again – the bird against the door, bang! Birds up on the wires, the bird that bites the girl. But I felt it was vital to get to know the people, the mother especially, she’s the key figure. And we must take our time, get absorbed in the atmosphere before the birds come. Once more, it is fantasy. But everything had to be as real as possible, the surroundings, the settings, the people. And the birds themselves had to be domestic birds – no vultures, no wild birds of any kind.

Aren’t there a lot of trick-shots in the picture?

Had to be. There are 371 trick-shots in it, and the most difficult one was the last shot. That took 32 different pieces of film. We had a limited number of gulls allowed. Therefore, the foreground was shot in three panel sections, left to right, up to the birds on the rail. The few gulls we had were in the first third, we re-shot it for the middle third, and for the right-hand third, using the same gulls. Just above the heads of the crows was a long, slender middle section where the gulls were spread again. Then the car going down the driveway, with the birds on each side of it, was another piece of film. The sky was another piece of film, as was the barn on the left, and so on. These were all put together in the lab.

How do you feel, on the whole, about using trick-effects and process-shots?

It is a means to an end. You must arrive at it somehow. A very important thing about The Birds: I never raised the point, ‘Can it be done?’ Because then it would never have been made. Any technician would have said ‘impossible’. So I didn’t even bring that up, I simply said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do.’ No one will ever realize that had the pioneering technical work on it not been attempted, the film would not have been made. Cleopatra or Ben Hur is nothing to this – just quantities of people and scenery. Just what the bird trainer has done is phenomenal. Look at the way the crows chase the children down the street, dive all around them, land on their backs. It took days to organize those birds on the hood of the car and to make them fly away at the right time. The Birds could easily have cost $5,000,000 if Bob Burks and the rest of us hadn’t been technicians ourselves.

Marnie (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

What will Marnie be like?

It is the story of a girl who doesn’t know who she is. She is a psychotic, a compulsive thief, and afraid of sex, and in the end she finds out why. In terms of style, it will be a bit like Notorious

Marnie is a thief, but evidently we are in sympathy with her. How is this achieved?

This comes under the heading of rooting for the evildoer to succeed – because in all of us we have that eleventh commandment nagging us: ‘Thou shalt not be found out.’ The average person looking at someone doing evil or wrong wants the person to get away with it. There’s something that makes them say, ‘Look out! Look out! They’re coming!’ I think it’s the most amazing instinct – doesn’t matter how evil it is, you know. Can’t go as far as murder, but anything up to that point. The audience can’t bear the suspense of the person being discovered. ‘Hurry up! Quick! You’re going to be caught!’

[Bogdanovich concludes by listing several ‘unrealized projects’, Frances Iles’ 1931 novel ‘Malice Afterthought’, David Duncan’s story ‘The Bramble Bush’, which Hitchcock worked on during 1953-54, ‘Life of a City’, and Ernest Raymond’s ‘We, the Accused’, based on the Crippen case. Hitchcock commented on the last two projects.]

Life of a City

This is something I’ve wanted to do since 1928. I want to do it in terms of what lies behind the face of a city – what makes it tick – in other words, backstage of a city. But it’s so enormous that it is practically impossible to get the story right. Two or three people had a go at it for me but all failed. It must be done in terms of personalities and people, and with my techniques, everything would have to be used dramatically.

We, the Accused

This was the story of a man who murdered his wife, ran off with his secretary, and was arrested on board ship, in about 1910. It is almost the definitive case of murder, trial and execution. It would be a very long picture, with detailed characterization, but I’m afraid it’s terribly downbeat – and the man is middle-aged – so it wouldn’t be very commercial. And you would have to spend some money on it.

– Alfred Hitchcock: 1963 interview with Peter Bogdanovich at MoMA.org

Patricia Highsmith I: Strangers On A Train

Strangers On A Train (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist and short-story writer, most notable for her psychologically gripping thrillers, in which she probed into the nature of guilt, innocence, good and evil.

Graduating from Barnard College, in New York City  in 1942, she journeyed to Europe finally settling in Switzerland. 

She wrote Strangers on a Train in 1950, which Alfred Hitchcock memorably filmed starring Farley Granger and Robert Walker. Two train passengers, Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno are on the same train. Haines is a wealthy architect who is going through a divorce, while Bruno is a mysterious and manipulative speaker, offering Bruno's father's life in exchange for Haines's wife. 

The climax of the novel takes place when Bruno launches his complicated plot and Guy finds himself stuck in Highsmith's sinister universe, where ordinary people are capable of doing great atrocities. 

The film launched her prodigious career, and established her as a master of the characteristically disquieting undercurrents beneath the surface of everyday life.

Her most well-known creation is Tom Ripley, a likeable killer who assumes the identities of his victims. He featured initially in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) winning several awards for mystery writing. Ripley also appeared in Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley’s Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), and Ripley Under Water (1991). 

Among her other books are The Price of Salt (1952; written under the pseudonym Claire Morgan), the story of a love affair between a married woman and a younger, unmarried woman (which was filmed in 2015 as Carol, the name under which the novel was published in 1990), and The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder (1975), about the killing of humans by animals. Highsmith’s collections of short stories include The Black House (1981) and Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (1987).

Patricia Highsmith gave a rare interview with Gerald Peary for Sight And Sound Magazine in 1988 where she discussed her writing process, Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train, and other adaptations of her work:

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Highsmith grew up in New York City. She took a degree at Barnard College. Then came years of traveling about Europe. Today she lives in Switzerland alone.‘I can’t write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman. I like to work for four or five hours a day. I aim for seven days a week. I have no television – I hate it. I listen to the BBC World Service starting at 2 in the morning until 4. I switch off the light and listen in bed. I don’t set the alarm to get up. I get up when I feel like it.’

She owns no copies of films made from her books, not even Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 version of her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950). ‘It seems to be entertaining after all these years,’ she acknowledges. ‘They keep playing it on American TV, ancient as it is. A few years ago, there were requests to me, “Can we make this?” I said that I have no rights. Contact the Hitchcock estate, which won’t release it for a remake.’

Strangers on a Train was sold outright for $7,500, with ten per cent of that to Highsmith’s agent. A meager recompense, some would say, but Highsmith disagrees. ‘That wasn't a bad price for a first book, and my agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment. I didn’t hang around films. I don’t know if I’d ever seen Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes." Anyway, she heard later that Robert Bloch was paid only $9,000 by Hitchcock for his novel Psycho.

About Strangers on a Train: she adores Robert Walker as the psychopathic Bruno. (‘He was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother.’) Highsmith is less pleased with Ruth Roman as Ann Morton, Guy’s love interest. (‘She should be much warmer.’) And she regrets Hithcock’s decision to turn Guy (Farley Granger), an architect in her novel, into a championship-winning tennis player. Highsmith: ‘I thought it was ludicrous that he’s aspiring to be a politician, and that he’s supposed to be in love with that stone angel.’ She only talked to Hitchcock once, while Strangers on a Train was in pre-production. ‘I was in New York. He was in California. He rang me to make a report on his progress and said, “I'm having trouble. I've just sacked my second screenwriter.’”

Hitchcock eventually hired Raymond Chandler to write the final script. Highsmith never met Chandler or seemingly any other writer of suspense novels. She doesn’t read them, she says, except, over and over again, the master: Dostoevsky. Also Graham Greene, a declared Highsmith admirer, with whom she exchanges occasional letters. ‘I have his telephone number but I wouldn’t dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.’

Highsmith has never seen Once You Kiss a Stranger, a 1969 Warners variation on Strangers on a Train, in which a crazy girl (Carol Lynley) offers to assassinate the chief competition of a golf pro (Paul Burke) if this golfer will bump off her psychiatrist.‘God knows, it was certainly done behind my back!’ Highsmith laughs. ‘Strangers on a Golf Course.’

The writer says she is ‘not mad about’ Claude Miller's 1997 Dites-lui que je l'aime from her novel, This Sweet Sickness, and she loathes Ediths Tagebuch, the 1983 West German film by Hans Geissendorfer, drawn from her Edith’s Diary, a rare Highsmith novel with a female protagonist. In the book, Edith Howland, a suburban Pennsylvania housewife, suffers mightily because her homebound son, Cliffie, is so passive, unambitious, mediocre. In the movie, which is set in Germany, Cliffie becomes a psychotic who lusts after Edith, his mom (Angela Winkler).  ‘It's dreadful!’ Highsmith says. ‘Making the son in love with the mother is a lot of Oedipal crap.’ She was taken aback because Geissendorfer’s version of The Glass Cell/Die Glaserne Zelle (1977) was a decent, sensitive film, a notable portrayal of the anguish of a man (Helmut Griem) out of prison for a white-collar crime, who suspects that his wife (Brigitte Fossey) is enmeshed in a love affair...

- Patricia Highsmith interviewed by Gerald Peary.