Writing ‘Psycho’: Interview with Joseph Stefano

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

When Alfred Hitchcock began pre-production on his forty-seventh picture, it was evident that he was no longer surrounded by the familiar certainties of recent productions. Gone were his long-term associates, high production values, major stars and established screenwriters of the calibre of Samuel Taylor (Vertigo) and Ernest Lehman (North by Northwest). Out of necessity Psycho would mark a significant break with Hitchcock's movie-making past and alert Hollywood that, at sixty years old, Hitchcock was still capable of producing work that was both shocking and innovative.

Adapted from Robert Bloch’s potboiler novel, Psycho was loosely based on the real-life exploits of serial killer Edward Gein. Hitchcock was disappointed by the first draft screenplay from tyro screenwriter James P. Cavanagh, so Hollywood agency MCA suggested to Hitchcock another young client, Joseph Stefano, a thirty-eight-year-old former lyricist-composer. Described by critic Stephen Rebello as ‘exuberantly cocky, volatile, and streetwise, Stefano, who had only owned a television for two years, had harbored no writing aspirations outside of music. Then, he had watched a live telecast of Playhouse 90, at the time a leading showcase for promising playwrights, directors, and actors, and thought; “I can do that.”’

After writing a one-hour teleplay, within two weeks, he had a deal with producer Carlo Ponti and won respectable notices for his first produced screenplay The Black Orchid, a Mafia soap opera, starring Anthony Quinn and Sophia Loren. He also won awards for his own Playhouse 90 script, Made in Japan, also a relationship story. 

Bemused by how quickly things happened, Stefano was offered a seven-year contract at Twentieth Century–Fox, and so abandoned his music career and moved to Hollywood. 

Screenwriter James P. Cavanagh was originally tasked with writing Psycho. The original draft submitted to Hitchcock was deemed "dull," perhaps due to the novel's gore and violence, but more likely it’s lack of originality.

Script-writing duties eventually passed to Stefano, who subsequently altered some portions of the original narrative that greatly appealed to Hitchcock. Stefano begins the film with Marion, whom he believes helped him get the job: 

“The idea excited Hitch. And I got the job. Killing the leading lady in the first 20 minutes had never been done before! Hitch suggested a name actress to play Marion because the bigger the star  the more unbelievable it would be that we would kill her. From there, the writing was easy. The only difficulty was switching the audience’s sympathies to Norman after Marion’s death.”

Marion, like the sinister Norman Bates, is portrayed by Stefano as a woman trapped in her own existence. Stefano continued by stating that the novel made it tough to empathise with Norman after Mary (Marion) was dead and gone — Bloch's Norman Bates was middle-aged, overweight, wore glasses, and drank – a stereotypically evil character. Stefano recognised that Norman's appearance and behaviour would have to shift to one of mildness, even deference, in order to maintain the audience's interest and sympathies. 

In an interview with Creative Screenwriting, Stefano discussed the process of adapting Bloch’s novel and working with the legendary master of suspense:

CS: In his famous interview with Francois Truffaut, Alfred Hitchcock explained that ‘Psycho’ was undertaken as a personal and professional challenge: ‘Could I make a feature film under the same conditions as a television show?’ Others have suggested that Hitchcock also wanted to ‘out do’ at the box office all those popular, low budget horror films of the late fifties like the ones produced by William Castle and Roger Corman while, at the same time, making a more intelligent and astonishing film in the vein of Clouzot’s ‘Les Diaboliques’. Were these objectives clear to you when you first became involved with the project in 1959?

JS: In our very first meeting, Hitchcock told me that he’d been impressed by a company called American International which was making movies for less than $200,000 apiece, and he was especially impressed with what the films were doing at the box office. His very words to me at the time were, ‘What if somebody good did one?’ In putting it that way, he wasn’t criticizing American International and the other low-budget production companies; he was just issuing a challenge to himself. Since he was already set up as a production company at Universal for his television series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he was in the perfect position to attempt such a project. So right from the beginning, every single consideration was guided by his idea of doing ‘a low-budget movie’ – not really to prove anything, but simply to make a lot of money. Hitchcock’s movies had always made astonishing amounts of money, but he felt that they were beginning to cost far too much to make. North by Northwest, which he made right before Psycho, starred Cary Grant and had a huge budget, and Hitchcock felt that he wasn’t being appropriately rewarded financially for what he was doing. So he decided that a low-budget success would change all that.

When you first became involved with the project and read Robert Bloch’s novel ‘Psycho’, you clearly disliked the fictional Norman Bates. He was an unpleasant, obese, and balding drunk not to mention his other problems. And you felt it was crucial to make him more sympathetic in the movie. You also felt the same way about the Mary character, later renamed Marion. Did Hitchcock agree with these changes from the start?

Absolutely. My take on how to adapt this book into a movie, which I explained to Hitch in our first meeting, was that it should be about a girl who’s in a dead-end love affair with a man who has serious financial problems. She loves him, but she doesn’t want things to continue as they are – shacking up in cheap hotel rooms over her lunch hour whenever he can get to town. So I described to Hitch what this woman was going through in her sordid life when a wealthy, smarmy man unexpectedly walks into her office at the bank and hands her $60,000 in cash to deposit. And the temptation is just too much for Marion as she later realizes in the parlor scene with Norman. As she says to Norman, we all dig our own little traps, and when she made the decision not to deposit the money, she sealed her fate. It’s a true moment of impulsive madness, but quite different from Norman Bates’s madness. Norman’s madness is a ‘convenient’ madness which works to keep him out of trouble, and which also works to prevent him from confronting his ghosts. Marion’s madness is more like one of those moments when somebody bumps into you on an elevator and you go temporarily mad. Marion irrationally thinks, at that moment, that she can solve all her problems by taking the money, packing her suitcase, and going to her lover and saying, ‘Look, everything’s O.K. now’, which is, of course, insane.

Since you wanted the film to begin with Marion unlike the novel which begins with Norman you conceived and wrote for Hitchcock the opening sequence in which a wide angle shot pans over the Phoenix skyline, gradually moves down to a seedy hotel, enters through one of the windows, and finally finds two lovers concluding their lunch break assignation. I understand that Hitchcock was very pleased with the sequence, but that, unaccustomed to praising writers, he used his wife, Alma, as a ploy to let you know how he felt?

Yes, the notion of starting with Marion was my idea. And before I wrote it, I described to Hitchcock how the film would begin from a POV moving over the city, then descending into a hotel room and revealing two people shacking up during lunch hour. Hitchcock liked the idea very much, and he also liked the idea that it was initially a movie about Marion. Eventually, of course, Marion was going to be killed and taken away from the audience, and then the film would encourage the viewers to sympathize with Norman – who would turn out to be the very person who’d actually killed her. So the film, as I’d initially conceived it, had a kind of structural trick going for it that the book didn’t have, and Hitch liked it very much. At the time, he was scheduled to take a two-week cruise with his wife, and he asked me to write the opening while he was gone. As soon as he got back, he took it home and read it, and the next day we had a meeting, and he said that ‘Alma loved it’. It just wasn’t his way to say it directly.

Subsequent to this, you had several weeks of story conferences with Hitchcock. Could you describe what happened at those meetings?

Strangely enough, we rarely talked about Psycho at all, but he always gave me the feeling that he somehow knew that I was going to write a good script which he could shoot effectively. This, of course, is the rarest gift that a producer or director can give to a writer: total confidence. So in our meetings, we rarely talked about anything specifically relating to the film. I still have my steno notebook from those meetings with maybe three pages of little odds and ends: notions that I had, or something Hitch might mention about something he didn’t like, so I’d make a note of it. But most of the time, we talked about other things. He was extremely interesting, and he was a wonderful person to work with. I was in analysis at the time, and I would go to his office directly from the couch and tell him all about it. He was very interested, and he seemed delighted that I was, I guess, a different kind of animal than he’d worked with before. I was very informal and very expressive, and he seemed to enjoy that.

If, in any of those meetings, Hitchcock ever seemed distracted or disinterested, I would ask him to show me a movie, and when it was over, I’d ask him two-hours worth of questions, and he’d explain everything – even draw diagrams of things. It was quite unbelievable. I remember once asking him why he told the audience the truth about Madeleine halfway through Vertigo, and he explained that there was nowhere else for the audience to go because they would have gotten bored if he didn’t reveal the truth. And that was Hitchcock’s greatest bugaboo: boredom. It was about the only thing that he was really afraid of, and I made a note of it. The whole experience was incredible. There was no place else in the world I could have gotten a better education about filmmaking. Yet, despite all that he taught me, Hitch never interfered with me as a writer. He was perfectly willing to tell me everything I wanted to know, but he clearly felt that the writing was my job. A lot of directors don’t do that, but he had every confidence that I’d come in with a good script.

Was it the opening that gave him such confidence in your abilities? After all, you were a young writer at the time, a former songwriter, with only one feature film, ‘The Black Orchid’ – a family drama about Italian Americans to your credit.

I think so. Fortunately, at our first meeting, he discovered that I had a sense of humor. I know he was a bit concerned about meeting me because he thought The Black Orchid was ‘kitchen sink’ drama, and the only other thing I’d done was a Playhouse 90 – Made in Japan – which had to do with the racial intolerance surrounding a young soldier who gets involved with a Japanese girl in occupied Japan. I guess Hitch thought it was kind of ‘heavy’, and he actually resisted meeting me at first. This was because Hitchcock hated to say ‘no’ to anybody. I later made the mistake of asking him to do something that he didn’t want to do, and I was sorry afterwards. I asked him to look at a film that a friend of mine had made, and it was very awkward. His feeling was, ‘What if I don’t like it?’ He’d rather leave town than tell someone, even an absolute stranger, that he didn’t like his movie. When I realized this, I resolved things and pressed on with the script.

When you began on the full script, were you writing it with Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh in mind?

Tony Perkins, yes, but Janet Leigh wasn’t locked in yet. Hitch had Perkins in mind mainly because Tony owed Paramount a picture and his price for the picture was much less than his normal rate. In one of our earliest discussions, when I was complaining about the Norman Bates character in the novel, Hitch let me go on for a while, and then finally he said, ‘We can get Tony Perkins.’ And I was delighted. I’d just seen Tony in New York during the final run-through of Look Homeward Angel, and when Hitchcock told me that Tony was Bates, I had this powerful image of Perkins on stage, and said to myself, ‘That’s Norman Bates! That’s exactly who I want it to be!’

Did you ever read the earlier screen adaptation done by James Cavanagh, which Hitchcock didn’t like?

No. I never read that screenplay. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t even aware that it existed. The general Hollywood policy at the time was that the studio was supposed to inform the writer’s agent that there’d been an earlier script. But very often, back then, the agent wouldn’t tell the writer, and that’s what happened in this case. Only much later, when somebody at Universal told me about it, did I learn there was an earlier version.

Did you know of William Pinkard’s Paramount memo that described the novel as ‘impossible’ for film adaptation?

Not at the time, but he was right. The novel opens with Norman having a dialogue with his ‘mother’, and there’s no way to shoot that unless you want to show that he’s talking to a corpse. So the novel couldn’t have been adapted as it was, not without major changes.

Did you ever look into the real life case of Edward Gein which, in outline, was far more shocking than either the novel or the eventual movie?

At the time I wrote Psycho, I didn’t know there was such a person. I didn’t find out until a couple of years later when William Friedkin told me about it. He had collected all kinds of information about the real case, and he took me into his office at Universal and showed me. I had no idea that Bloch had loosely based his novel on a real person.

What did you think of the odd structural challenges of the story, particularly the peculiarity you mentioned earlier: the murder of the main character before the film’s half over, and the subsequent shift from Marion’s situation to Norman’s problems?

When I first read the book, I didn’t have any definite thoughts about how to deal with this. All I knew is that by page three or so, it was clear to me that I couldn’t start the movie like the novel. Then on my way over to meet Hitchcock, the idea of making it into a movie about Marion Crane came to me, so I pitched it that way to Hitchcock, and I think that he instantly appreciated that I was solving the big problem with the book. I believe that every audience wants to grab onto somebody almost from the first frame; they want to care about someone. In this film, it was going to be this young woman who steals the $60,000 and then is killed unexpectedly. That was the shocker. My hope was that in the scene between Marion and Norman in the back parlor at the motel everything would be set up right for the audience to deal with the loss. During the parlor scene, when Marion learns about Norman’s life, she gets a renewed perspective on herself. She sees this pathetic guy who’s stuck in something he can’t get out of, and she realizes that she’s also in a similar situation. But she remains sympathetic to Norman, and the audience needs to feel the same way. The scene has to properly prepare the audience to like this pathetic guy because they’re going to lose Marion very soon and unexpectedly.

In the real world, murders happen all the time, and nobody seems to give much of a damn about the victim, and that’s why I felt it was important for the audience to like Marion and sympathize with her before she dies. Then, in the middle of the shock of her death, the audience needs to shift its sympathies to Norman who, we believe, knows that his mother committed the murder. What a horrendous situation for a young man to be in! So the audience, which already kind of likes him from the scene in the parlor – for his shyness and so on – is hopefully prepared to shift its loyalties to Norman. And it worked. If the audience could have gotten on screen and helped Norman get rid of the body, they would have done so. When the car stops sinking in the bog, there was often an audible gasp in the audience because they didn’t want him to get caught. I think that’s the most magical moment in the movie for Tony Perkins as an actor because of the way he stood there and chewed on that candy corn waiting for the car to go down. It was terrific. You just knew there were a lot of other cars down there!

You developed a great deal of personal sympathy for Marion as a woman motivated by love who finally realizes that she can’t buy happiness, especially with stolen money. Did you feel, as Janet Leigh did, that Marion loved Sam more than he loved her?

Janet Leigh thought that?

Yes.

Well, that’s right. I wanted it clear that Sam loves to come down to Phoenix and see Marion and have sex with her. But he doesn’t seem to think that anything more than that is absolutely necessary. This was not such a strange thought for a man, even in 1959: ‘Shouldn’t we both be happy? We’re having sex after all’. But I don’t feel that Marion stole the money just for Sam; I think she felt she was in a desperate situation, and her sense of morality was giving her ulcers. She didn’t think she could go on shacking up anymore – having sex on her lunch hour in sleazy hotels where the people didn’t care about her when she checked in, but they wanted her to check out on time. Marion felt disposable and demeaned, and when the chance came, she tried to do something about it.

In the Truffaut interview, Hitchcock described the first part of the movie as a ‘red herring’ as a way of distracting the audience’s ‘attention in order to heighten the murder’. He found the film a ‘very interesting construction’ and felt that the ‘game with the audience was fascinating’. Did he really approach the film in that way?

Well, that’s certainly true in the sense that Hitchcock felt that everything one does is a game. And he also loved theatricality. He always wanted to stimulate his audiences, and he clearly liked cinematic tricks as so many of his films have shown. He especially liked Vertigo because there was a great trick in it, yet, at the same time, I don’t think that he was unaware of the psychological or emotional aspects of whatever he was filming. But with a number of his films before Psycho, like To Catch a Thief, for example, there’s not much characterization involved, with the astounding exception of Vertigo. He’d gotten into what I call his ‘marshmallow Technicolor’ period in which the characters acted just like the movie stars portraying them. They were big, lush movies – a pleasure to watch – and you could sense the good time they all had making them, but there wasn’t much depth. Then just before Psycho, with North by Northwest, Hitchcock got back to his strengths again. He put a man in such a harrowing situation that it would make you scream if you were in it, and then made the man work through it somehow. In a way, this is what Marion was also trying to do. She was trying to work through this awful situation she was in, but she just happened to end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. So Psycho had both the Hitchcock tricks as well as the depth of some of his earlier films.

One of the many themes in ‘Psycho’ is voyeurism, most clearly portrayed by Norman’s looking through his peephole as Marion undresses for the shower. Many critics feel that the film is not only an indictment of voyeurism in general, but a specific indictment of the voyeurism of movie viewers what Hitchcock called ‘Peeping Tom audiences’. The film seems to manipulate the viewer into rooting for a thief hoping she’ll escape from the policeman, for example and then shifts the viewer’s allegiance to the seemingly pathetic soul who covers up her murder going so far, as you’ve mentioned, to hope that the car with Marion’s corpse will sink completely into the swamp. The film’s clever manipulation of audience identification seems to make the viewer unusually involved and even complicit in the main characters’ guilt. How do you feel about all this?

That’s true right up until the murder, but then the audience, amazingly, forgets completely about Marion. One reason that we’re so quick to nullify the victim is because we can’t stand the thought of the death and loss, so the best thing to do is turn our attention elsewhere. I became even more aware of this after the film was made, and I watched it with a general audience. Despite our previous concern for Marion, we don’t want to worry about her dead body, and we’re ready to move on. In a more general sense, I think a fundamental essence of watching films is voyeuristic because we intrude so deeply into the characters’ lives – while sitting in the dark. It’s not necessarily sexual, although it can be, but its power to involve us with the characters is incredible. The very first movie that I can recall seeing was Greta Garbo’s version of Anna Karenina where she dies at the end. As a child, I was horribly upset because I thought that Garbo had actually died, so my mother had to explain that she was just pretending to die. That helped a lot, but I was still greatly affected. The intimate situations that we watch movie characters deal with are utterly personal, and the more personal, the more successful the film. Hitchcock clearly understood this basis aspect of film, and he knew how to exploit it.

In adapting the novel, you made quite a few significant changes beginning the film in Phoenix, eliminating Norman’s interest in the occult, showing the shower murder in detail, substituting the telling piece of ripped paper for an earring, having ‘Mother’ confront the insurance detective at the top of the stairs rather than at the front door, and so on. I’d like to ask you about a few others. One was using the voice overs to let the audience know what Marion was thinking as she was driving away from Phoenix.

One day, when we were talking about the film, I said to Hitch, ‘It’s a shame that we don’t have time to show what’s happened back in Phoenix’, and he said, ‘Yes, it would really be something to show how they’re all reacting back in the city’. So I thought, what if we did it – what if I wrote those scenes as Marion might have imagined them. This was especially enjoyable because Marion could give her own characterizations of the people she left behind – like the wealthy guy who made a pass at her who she now imagines is saying that he’ll get his revenge on ‘her fine soft flesh’, and so on. Of course, it’s something we all do. We leave a party, and we wonder what they’re saying about us now that we’re gone – a kind of fantasizing. So I wrote up those scenes, then cut down the dialogue, and then we used them as voice-overs. For Psycho, as I always do, I wrote many scenes which didn’t appear in the final screenplay, and, in this case, they turned out to be especially useful.

In the later parts of the novel, there’s clearly a romance blossoming between Marion’s lover, Sam, and her sister, Lila, but it’s not really there in the movie?

Yes, I felt that would be distracting, but I also didn’t want to do that to Marion. I didn’t want to show Sam meeting with her, loving her on whatever level he loved her, having sex with her, and then, as soon as she’s killed, just turning around and saying, ‘I wonder if there are any more like her at home?’ I felt it was too cheap and crappy, and I always appreciated the fact that neither Vera Miles nor John Gavin ever gave any indication of a romantic attraction in their performances. Even though it wasn’t actually in the script, actors could still project it anyway – with a look or gesture. But Vera and John didn’t, and I was very grateful. Ironically, the only scene that Hitch cut from the screenplay was a three-minute scene in one of the motel rooms between the sister and the lover where they finally realize that Marion’s really dead. They’ve both lost somebody very important in their lives, and it’s a moving scene, but Hitch felt that it slowed the narrative down too much for the audience. I don’t think he would cut that scene today.

At the very end of the movie, the psychiatrist attempts to explain Norman’s condition, whereas in the novel, Sam and Lila speculate on Norman’s problems.

Yes, I didn’t feel that they would know enough to explain things properly. Not only weren’t they aware of many things, but where would they get all the technical information? On the other hand, I felt it was absolutely necessary to have things explained to the audience. I never believed the film should end with Norman weeping in the cellar, and the audience going, ‘Oh, it’s Norman!’ Then blackout, ‘The End’. The audience, I believe, would feel cheated and unresolved, so I had the film shift quickly to the authorities. I also didn’t want Sam and Lila driving off in his truck and talking things over because I wanted to keep the audience within the world of the crimes, and the subsequent legalities as well, in order to help them resolve their feelings.

But that scene, as you know, is probably the most criticized aspect of a movie that’s generally considered an overall masterpiece. How do you feel about that now?

My own opinion is that the problem with the scene is the way it was performed by the very actor that I recommended for the part! Simon Oakland orated the scene which wasn’t at all how I’d envisioned the psychiatrist explaining things. My feeling was that the police had already given this doctor all the facts, and that he’d talked to Norman, and that he’d put it all together. But Simon did stuff that was a little too broad for the role, and Hitch was always afraid that the scene was what he called a ‘hat grabber’. But I disagreed. No one was going to grab his hat. Everyone wanted to know what happened. It just needed to be performed a bit more naturally.

I read somewhere that Hitchcock required only one sequence rewritten from your original screenplay and that was making the highway cop less flirtatious and more threatening?

Yes, I originally had him as a sort of charming guy who was coming on to Marion. Hitch originally liked the idea, but then he felt it wasn’t right for this particular movie because he needed the cop to be more threatening. And he was right because we needed the audience to feel frightened that the cop would pull Marion in and catch her with the stolen money. The irony, of course, is that later you realize that you were frightened about something that would have saved her life.

One of the great peculiarities of the script is that Marion goes through with the car transfer even though she knows the policeman is watching her. The English critic Robin Wood suggests the reason is that Marion, in her theft of the $60,000, has lost control of herself that she’s gone a ‘little mad’ as Norman puts it later. Is that correct?

Absolutely. I also used it as a way to show that, at this point at least, absolutely nothing can stop Marion from proceeding with things. If she can’t stop the transaction of the car when a cop is watching her, then she clearly doesn’t have the sense to get into her car and drive back to Phoenix. At that point in her flight, Marion should have turned around, gone home, and deposited the money where it was supposed to be. But she can’t. She’s lost control. She can only dig herself in deeper and deeper.

After her talk with Norman about the ‘traps’ that human beings get caught in, Marion finally decides to undo what she’s done, drive back to Phoenix, and return the stolen money. Then she goes to her motel room and symbolically washes away her guilt in the purifying, baptismal waters of the shower. In the Truffaut interview, the French director asked Hitchcock, ‘What was it that attracted you to the novel?’ and Hitchcock replied, ‘I think that the thing that appealed to me and made me decide to do the picture was the suddenness of the murder in the shower, coming, as it were, out of the blue. That was about all’. But there’s very little detail about the shower murder in the novel.

That’s right, there’s just a few lines at the end of the third chapter. Mary, the Marion character, is in the shower, the door opens, a butcher knife appears, and it cuts off her head. That last part was especially appalling and unbelievable – the murderer cutting off her head. If Bloch had said, ‘stabbed her and stabbed her and stabbed her’, I would have been sickened enough by it, but to cut off her head was way too much, not to mention unlikely, since I’m sure it isn’t very easy to cut off someone’s head with a single blow.

The shower scene is one of the most famous scenes in motion picture history, and it’s probably been analyzed more times than the famous ‘Odessa Steps’ sequence from Battleship Potemkin. On the set, Hitchcock broke from his fast paced, low budget schedule, and spent seven full days shooting this single scene, using over seventy camera setups for forty five seconds on the screen. Were you aware, while you were writing the script, of the attention that would be paid to this one scene by the director?

Naturally, I knew that it was a crucial scene in the movie, but I also knew that there was no way that I could actually write out in the screenplay everything that we wanted to show on the screen. So Hitchcock and I, despite his usual reticence about discussing the picture, talked about the shower scene at great length, especially the absolute terror of being naked and wet when you’re suddenly attacked, completely helpless, and unable to defend yourself. Nevertheless, despite all our discussions, when I actually watched the scene being shot I was amazed that Hitch was doing so many setups. The original shooting schedule gave no indication of a seven-day shoot, and everything had been carefully arranged by Hitchcock to make it look like a single afternoon of filming. Naturally, there was a great deal of secrecy surrounding the scene, and Hitch didn’t want anybody to know a damn thing about it – or the rest of the movie for that matter. Very early on, he’d told me point blank that he didn’t want me to discuss the picture with anyone. Not exactly in those words, but his meaning was clear. So when people would say, ‘I hear you’re writing a movie for Hitchcock?’ I’d have to say, ‘Well, it’s not really settled yet’, or something evasive like that.

Since you were on the set almost every day of shooting, I wonder if you could resolve a few long standing questions about that famous scene? For example, did Saul Bass, who did the storyboards for the scene, actually direct any of it?

I truly don’t understand that bizarre story. In all honestly, Saul Bass’s claim that he directed the shower scene is the most shocking thing I’ve ever heard about the making of Psycho. We all knew, of course, that he’d been assigned to design the storyboards, which he did and did well. So maybe in some peculiar way, he came to believe that by doing the storyboards, he’d somehow ‘directed’ the scene, which is, of course, nonsense. I was there every day for seven days, and Hitchcock directed every shot. Ironically, one of my favorite memories of the making of the film is Hitch standing next to the shower calmly directing the naked model that he’d brought in so Janet Leigh wouldn’t have to perform in the nude.

Were any shots of the body double, Marli Renfro, used in the final cut?

I’m not sure. I don’t think that there’s anything shown in the scene that couldn’t have been Janet Leigh. It seems to me that we were on Janet’s face and shoulders most of the time in the scene, so I’m not quite sure where the model is – if she’s there at all.

Does the knife actually touch the flesh? Hitchcock told Truffaut and many others that ‘the knife never touched the body’, but Donald Spoto, in ‘The Darker Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock’, claims that one of Hitchcock’s two important additions to the Bass layout was ‘the quick shot of the knife entering the woman’s abdomen’. The film itself seems to bear out Spoto’s contention.

I don’t know, but I never saw that kind of special effect shot being done on the set. I know there’s definitely a shot in the film where it looks like the knife touches and penetrates, but I’m not sure. I don’t think Hitch would have been satisfied with a retractable knife or a fake torso. He certainly wasn’t shy about artificial things, but I don’t think he would have done it for this particular scene.

Despite the unforgettable horror of Marion’s murder and some critics’ musings about its abject meaninglessness, the scene seems to have two important meanings for someone with Hitchcock’s Jesuit training. One is that Marion has been punished for her crime in the very way that she imagined earlier in the car with her ‘fine soft flesh’. Second, and more important, is that Marion dies repentant of her crime and seemingly purified which makes her even more sympathetic to the audience and heightens her terrible tragedy. How do you feel about that?

Yes, that’s true. During her talk with Norman in the parlor, Marion realizes how trapped the young man is, and she decides to escape her own predicament, and I think that’s why the audience cares so much about her. At the time I wrote the screenplay, I was very upset by all the supposedly ‘meaningless’ murders that were happening in our society, and I couldn’t bring myself to see how any murder of a human being could be meaningless. As for Hitchcock’s attitudes, I must admit that I’ve never really thought about it before, but Hitchcock and I definitely came from similar religious backgrounds. I was raised a Catholic, and although I’d left the faith, so to speak, we both had a similar moral sense, and, for both of us, it seemed much more terrible – and affecting – for someone to be killed after she’s finally gotten back on the right track and washed herself clean.

I wonder if we could also talk about the other classic scene of terror in the movie: the death of the detective?

Hitch and I had quite a few long talks about that scene too, since it’s so crucial that the audience continues to believe that ‘mother’ is mother. In the novel, ‘mother’ comes down the stairs and kills the detective at the front door. So I suggested that we reverse things and follow Marty Balsam up the stairs and then keep the camera rising up to a high crane shot before ‘mother’ comes out at the top of the stairs. Then things would happen so fast that the audience would think that they’d actually seen the old woman as she stabs the detective and knock him down the stairs. And Hitch liked the idea very much, and he felt that it would work, but he was worried because it would cost him about $25,000 to build the crane into the set. In the end, he finally decided to do it, and the scene was very successful. Many people who saw the finished picture were absolutely convinced that they’d seen Norman’s mother in the scene, but, of course, they only saw the top of her head.

Along with these powerful moments of terror, the film is full of many themes and key images that delineate the characters for example, the notion of secrets (everyone has one), voyeurism, the stuffed birds, and the countless mirrors. Late in the film, when Lila is exploring Norman’s room, a number of specific details help define Norman’s character. One is a book with a blank cover which Lila opens up and stares at just before the film cuts away from her face. One critic has wondered if it’s a ‘family album’, but in the novel, it’s a book with ‘almost pathologically pornographic’ illustrations. Was this dropped in deference to the more sympathetic portrayal of Norman in the film, or was it just too hard to relay to the audience?

Well, I wanted the audience to see Norman as a suffocated young man who constantly seeks sexual stimulation, but I didn’t want it to come from pathological pornography – maybe just pictures of women in corsets or something like that. So it was definitely muted from the novel. Another detail in that same scene is the record of Beethoven’s Eroica, which Hitchcock got very excited about. He felt it was a very telling detail. There was, I can remember, a lot of tightrope walking in constructing that scene in screenplay format. I needed to quickly convey a few things about Norman that were further indications that something was quite wrong, but it couldn’t be spelled out or overdone.

After the film was edited by George Tomasini and scored with the masterful music of Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock was apparently worried about ‘Psycho’s commercial possibilities and even considered cutting it down to an hour for his television show. Were you aware of this at the time?

No, I never heard him say anything like that. As a matter of fact, when he showed me the first rough cut, I was quite disturbed, and he patted my knee and said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a rough cut’. It looked terrible – like all rough cuts look – but this was only the second one I’d ever seen, and the editor had put in absolutely everything. There were tremendously long pauses, and all kinds of crap that was gone by the next time I saw it. When I did see the second cut, I knew it was a good movie, but a ‘good movie’ in the sense that Laura was a good movie: just one of those dark movies that it’s nice to have in your credits.

Despite some initial panning by a number of film reviewers, ‘Psycho’ proved to be an enormous success with audiences eventually turning an investment of $800,000 into over $20 million in profits. But in the wake of the film, many people felt that the career of the film’s star, Anthony Perkins, was greatly damaged by the inevitable stereotyping. Did this happen to you as well?

Absolutely, throughout the sixties and seventies, I was always being offered the ‘new’ Psycho, and I seldom had a chance to write other kinds of pictures. I guess the size of the reaction to that kind of movie is just too huge. It blocks out everything else. Then I also made my own mistake, if any of this can be called a mistake, by becoming a producer and writer for The Outer Limits not long after Psycho. That put the final nail in the coffin. I remember a few years later, I was able to write a movie for CBS called A Death of Innocence with Shelley Winters about a woman who discovers that her daughter, who’s been charged with murder, really is guilty. It was a deep, heartfelt kind of movie, and about two days after it was aired, I went to a meeting at CBS on some other matter, and everyone there was talking about the fact that the ratings for the movie were fantastic and that everybody thought it was wonderful picture. Then someone said something nice about the script, and I said, ‘Thank you’. But the man looked at me strangely, so I said that I’d written the screenplay, and he said, almost reflexively, ‘No, you didn’t’. It was quite a blow to realize that even when I’d done something completely different from Psycho – and very successfully – people still couldn’t accept it. I really didn’t know that people in the industry still had such narrow mind-sets. It was like the casting of the studio movies in the thirties and the forties – where the character actors always did the same thing in every picture. Well, that was how Hollywood continually stereotyped certain established screenwriters.

Aside from ‘Psycho’, you also wrote the original treatment for ‘Marnie’ when Grace Kelly was still involved in the project. But then Hitchcock did ‘The Birds’, and you began producing and writing the very popular television show ‘The Outer Limits’. Is that why you were unable to do the script for ‘Marnie’?

Yes, Hitch put it on the shelf when Kelly dropped out, and when he decided to use Tippi Hedren, he called me up, but I was in production on The Outer Limits, and there was no way I could get out of it. So Hitchcock went ahead with Jay Presson Allen, and I was very disappointed that she made some key changes from the book which I’m surprised Hitchcock went along with. His original fascination with that book was the triangle among the young woman who steals, her husband, and her psychiatrist. But Allen unfortunately decided to combine the two male characters into one. Nevertheless, I still like the film quite a bit.

In discussing Alfred Hitchcock for Janet Leigh’s 1995 book about the making of ‘Psycho’, you said of the director, ‘I don’t think he ever recovered from ‘Psycho’’. Why do you feel this way?

I think he felt that, in a strange way, he’d made a movie that trapped him inside his TV persona. I don’t know this to be a fact, but it’s just how I see it. Audiences loved him on the TV show, and they wanted more Psycho. So he decided to make The Birds, but I felt that the birds themselves were not a good enough killer. Since I still had a two-picture deal with Hitchcock, I turned down the assignment for The Birds, and he picked a novelist to do it. Marnie was the picture I wanted to write, but he had to postpone it after Grace Kelly backed out of it. He was very angry about that at the time. I never saw him so pissed off at anyone. He was very hurt, and that’s the worst kind of pissed off to be when you hurt, too.

What do you make of Hitchcock’s numerous remarks that ‘Psycho’ was made in ‘fun’. He said that ‘You have to remember that “Psycho” was made with quite a sense of amusement on my part. To me, it’s a fun picture. The process through which we take the audience, you see, [is] rather like taking them through the haunted house at the fairground’. What do you make of that? The humorous ‘Psycho’ trailer seems to reinforce the idea.

That trailer was written by the same guy who wrote all Hitchcock’s intros for the TV show. Hitch liked this persona so much because the public liked it, and it made him a star. The truth is, Hitch was not very well treated by the Hollywood establishment, even though he’d clearly found a niche for himself, so he greatly enjoyed the public’s adulation – and he wasn’t about to give it up. So he did the tongue-in-cheek trailer for Psycho, just liked he did with the TV productions. It was all part of Hitchcock trapping himself within his television persona, but the movie itself is another matter. He might have had fun making it, but he took it seriously.

Speaking of humor, is it true that Hitchcock received a letter from a man complaining that his daughter wouldn’t take a bath after seeing ‘Les Diaboliques’ and wouldn’t take a shower after seeing ‘Psycho’, so Hitchcock suggested that the man have his daughter ‘dry cleaned’?

I’ve heard the story! But I’m not sure if it’s true.

Does it sound like Hitchcock?

It definitely sounds like him, but I can’t picture him actually responding to the letter. But who knows?

Despite Hitchcock’s well known sense of humor, ‘Psycho’ clearly represents a significant shift in the vision of his films. It’s definitely a much darker vision where violence is shown in all its horror and where sexuality is implied in an unprecedented manner. There have been many theories as to why this happened when it did some critics have even suggested that it was the result of his difficulties with some of his leading ladies but you once suggested that it was really the result of the famous director’s struggle to deal with his own mortality. Could you discuss this?

Yes. The year before he made Psycho, both Hitch and his wife had been quite ill, and he’d had a very serious surgery and lost a lot of weight. At the time we were working on Psycho, he hardly looked like the Hitchcock that we’re all familiar with. It’s very possible that this affected his overall vision, but, at the same time, I’ve always felt that his primary motive for making Psycho was the desire to make a successful, low-budget movie in which he could share heavily in the profits. Despite all his success, Hitchcock had money problems, and he wanted to feel more financially secure.

Whatever Hitchcock’s motives, critics have compared ‘Psycho’ with the ‘Oresteia’, ‘Macbeth’, ‘Crime and Punishment’, and Conrad’s ‘The Heart of Darkness’. Richard Schickel has described the film as ‘one of the crucial cultural artifacts of this era,’ and Donald Spoto has called it ‘one of the great works of modern American art’. Why do you think that this low budget, unpretentious masterpiece of cinematic horror continually inspires such serious commentary?

I really don’t know. I think it might have been a case of timing. It might have appealed to the public so much because they felt that it was saying something no one else had articulated yet. Important pieces often become so because they say something that no one else has managed to express. With Psycho, it might have been a heightened sense of mortality, societal violence, and moral responsibility. It was very unsettling to an audience to see a film where the star – one they’d come to care for – suddenly is killed halfway through the picture. Just a few years after the film came out, Americans were astonished and horrified by the much-publicized death of Kitty Genovese in New York City where she was attacked, yelled out for help, and nobody did anything – even though many people heard her chilling, desperate cries. It was very upsetting, and it made everyone reconsider violence in our society and our responses to it. Maybe Psycho did something similar to audiences. Maybe it touched a nerve – and still does. I think the film aroused in the audience some of the guilt we would all later face when we heard about Kitty Genovese and wondered what we would have done if we’d heard her calls for help. Maybe Psycho makes us think about similar things, even subconsciously, ‘I heard the girl screaming for help, and I didn’t do anything. Then I saw him bury the car, and I didn’t do anything. And then I didn’t think about her very much anymore – even though she was a human being and one I cared for’. Maybe the public was ready for that in 1960. All I know is that people still feel compelled to talk to me about that film, especially Marion’s death in the shower. And not only do they talk about it, but they seem to need to talk about it. It’s necessary somehow, and maybe that’s what we’re all responding to.

– ‘Creative Screenwriting – Interview with Joseph Stefano’. (www.creativescreenwriting.com)

   

Alfred Hitchcock on Cinematic Style

The Lodger (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

The audience's emotions are central to Hitchcock's narrative universe; these feelings are evoked through "gripping situations" which are derived from the film's basic framework, in which language plays a limited role. Hitchcock's use of language is often confined to serving the plot, and he writes the script in partnership with his selected screenwriters. The scriptwriter can use a variety of visual tactics to develop a character:

[...] 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. [...] Things, then, are as important as actors to the writer. They can richly illustrate character”

This narrative style was a feature of the silent film, going back to the films of D.W. Griffith, and is the era in which Hitchcock learned his craft, but was unfortunately passed over in favour of the theatrical and dialogue with the advent of the sound film. From then on, relying on dialogue became the standard practice. But according to Hitchcock, the experienced screenwriter knows how to make effective use of non-verbal elements: things and objects, in the film, instead of falling "into the uncinematic habit of relying too much on dialogue".

Of course, Hitchcock understood that the modern film cannot simply eliminate the need for dialogue. You cannot shoot a modern motion picture only in pictures. So Hitchcock settles on a compromise: "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". 

‘The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema’ - Alfred Hitchcock

It is important to remember that Hitchcock began his career in the era of silent movies. His first nine films as director - between 1925 and 1929 - were all silent, and even his first sound film, ‘Blackmail’ (1929), was begun as a silent, and was released in silent and sound versions.

The limitations of the silent form led filmmakers to develop a visual language to enable them to say with images what they could not using dialogue or sound. By the time of the arrival of sound in 1927 (later in Europe) this filmmaking language had become so sophisticated that sound was felt by some to be almost unnecessary. Others - including Hitchcock - felt that the arrival of sound meant that something was lost to cinema. Directors were no longer forced to tell a story using images alone, and cinema's distinctively visual storytelling suffered as a result.

Throughout his career, Hitchcock continued to believe in cinema as a visual medium. For him, dialogue and sound should remain secondary to the image in telling the story. This is not to say that he was completely uninterested in dialogue - he worked with many fine writers, and many of his films have excellent dialogue sequences. But it's true that when we think of Hitchcock we tend to remember images - the shower scene in ‘Psycho’ (1960) or the handcuffed Robert Donat and Madelaine Carroll in ‘The 39 Steps’ (1935) - rather than lines of dialogue.

“When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try first to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between" 

The limitations of silent cinema meant that directors were forced to be imaginative in using images to convey dialogue and effects. The use of 'intertitles' allowed some dialogue and exposition (setting the scene), but it was generally felt that too many intertitles interfered with the action. After the release of the German director F.W. Murnau's ‘Der Letzte Mann’ (‘The Last Laugh’, Germany, 1924), which used no intertitles at all, many felt that a 'pure' cinema should be able to do away with dialogue altogether, and convey everything with images alone.

Let’s look at one example of how the early Hitchcock uses visuals for emotional effect. Hitchcock’s ‘The Lodger’ (1926) concerns a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer at loose in a fog-bound London. The presence of a mysterious stranger in a lodging home creates suspicions among the occupants. Hitchcock wanted to highlight how the lodger's pacing up and down in his room affects the other inhabitants in the room below in one scene. In a sound film we could just hear the lodger's footsteps while watching the reactions of the other occupants.

Hitchcock came up with an innovative solution. He set up a glass floor and filmed the lodger (Ivor Novello) walking back and forth from below. Hitchcock achieves a more interesting and powerful effect than he could have achieved with sound by superimposing this shot over one of the ceilings - with the swaying chandelier further emphasising the force of the lodger's steps - and intercutting between this image and the reaction of the family below. 

The director's efforts are directed at the impression created on the movie audience. Each shot is a statement made with the intention of eliciting an emotional response, of effecting the audience's state of mind, of feeling. That is, the visual has a direct effect on the emotions. Occasionally, the director wants to just please the eye with his visual presentation; other times, he wants to produce a powerful impression on the audience. Thus, the filmmaker exposes his style via his management of all these narrative options. And style is important. Perhaps the most crucial and unique characteristic of a filmmaker is his or her style. This style is evident in both the topic he/she chooses and the method in which he/she directs it. Significant directors are well-known for their aesthetics. 

And Hitchcock is unmistakably known for his intensely personal style, as François Truffaut put it in the introduction to his famous interview with Hitchcock: “Because he exercises such complete control over all the elements of his films and imprints his personal concepts at each step of the way, Hitchcock has a distinctive style of his own. He is undoubtedly one of the few filmmakers on the horizon today whose screen signature can be identified as soon as the picture begins.”

According to Hitchcock, some filmmakers are more concerned with honing their style and handling of the material than with discovering new subjects. They are primarily concerned with the way in which they deliver their stories – a phrase that accurately describes Hitchcock's cinematic technique. He is a filmmaker of narratives who is interested in conveying stories in his own unique way.

For more on this aspect of Hitchcock see the full article from the BFI Screenonline: ‘Hitchcock’s Style’.

North By Northwest (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

In the following extract from an interview with Hitchcock in 1963, the great director discusses his prioritisation of cinematic style over content.

H: Let me say this to you. I put first and foremost cinematic style before content. Most people, reviewers, you know, they review pictures purely in terms of content. I don’t care what the film is about. I don’t even know who was in that airplane attacking Cary Grant. I don’t care. So long as that audience goes through that emotion! Content is quite secondary to me.

I: Now is this a philosophical viewpoint? ... Or is this something that just happened, like the man who makes cartoons likes to make people laugh?

H: Well, I believe this. I believe we still have in our hands the most powerful instrument, cinema, that’s been known. I know of no other medium where on a given night in Japan, in Germany, in Paris, and in London and in New York, the different audiences of different nationalities can be shocked at the same moment at the same thing on that screen. I don’t know of any other medium. The theater? How far does that get? It never gets to Japan. Well, by God, you go outside of a movie on The Ginza, and you will see a great big head of Hitchcock up there. Because they think so much of the director with oriental eyes! Really! Yes! But this is my point when you say what do I enjoy? I enjoy the fact that we can cause, internationally, audiences to emote. And I think this is our job.

I: As an entertainer? As a creator?

H: As an entertainer. As a creator. What is art? Art is an experience, isn’t it? You know? Now the art of the talking picture, I think, belongs to the theater. You see, the only thing wrong with silent pictures was that sound never came out of the mouths. But unfortunately, the moment sound arrived, all these horrible commercial people rushed to the theater, and borrowed from the theater. And they are still doing it today. I’ve done it myself! They say “Will you make a film of Dial M For Murder?” I say O.K., all right. But I refuse to open it up like they do in the movies. I said it’s nonsense. What do you do? When you take a stage play, I said? What do you call opening it up? The taxi arrives, we have a long shot of the street. The taxi stops at the front door of the apartment house. The characters get out, cross the sidewalk, go into the lobby, get into an elevator, go upstairs, walk along the corridor, open the door, and they go into a room. And there they are, on the stage again. So, you might just as well dispense with all that, and be honest and say it’s a photographed stage play and all we can do is to take the audience out of the orchestra and put them on the stage with players.

Dial M for Murder (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

I: You didn’t do this completely though. In Dial M?

H: Yes, and I’ll tell you why. Because I’ve seen so many stage plays go wrong through opening up, loosening it, when the very essence is the fact that the writer conceived it within a small compass.

I: But you would still treat it cinematically?

H: Within its area. If I can. As much as I can.

I: Do you design each production? Design each film in advance completely? With drawings, and ...

H: Yes, Psycho, yes, to some extent with drawings, but you see Psycho was designed, first of all to lead an audience completely up the garden path. They thought the story was about a girl who stole $40,000. That was deliberate. And suddenly out of the blue, she is stabbed to death. Now, a lot of people complained about the excessive violence. This was purposely done, because as the film then proceeded, I reduced the violence while I was transferring it to the mind of the audience. By that first impact, so the design of the film was very clearly laid out. So that that audience, by the time we got toward the end when the girl was going over the house, wandering, they didn't particularly care who she was ... They will yell LOOK OUT! when a burglar is going around the house. They will still have the same fear of being caught or being attacked or what have you. So, I was transferring by establishing the violence strong in the beginning and then got less and less violent as the film went on, thus letting their minds carry. That’s what the pattern of the film was. The pattern of The Birds was deliberately to go slow. And with an unimportant kind of relationship.

I: This has been highly criticized by some critics.

H: I deliberately made it slow.

I: You deliberately made it slow?

H: Oh, no question about it.

I: But it was still — to me, interesting.

H: But the point is, that’s where the critics were wrong, you see, because the effect on an audience isn’t there unless I’ve made them wait deliberately and gone slow.

I: This is timing?

H: This is truer timing. Well, it's just like designing composition in a painting. Or balance of colors. There is nothing accidental, there should never be anything accidental about these things. You’ve got to be very clear in what you are doing and why you're doing it. You know, for example, I think it was the New Yorker once — they don’t review pictures. They don’t review them, they make jokes about pictures anyway. They always have a man who’s supposed not to like the movies — But they had the ridiculous effrontery to say a picture like North by Northwest was unconsciously funny. You know. They really did. Or, Hitchcock is doing a parody of himself Of course, I’m doing it with the tongue in cheek. Psycho was the biggest joke to me. I couldn’t make Psycho without my tongue in my cheek. If I’d been doing Psycho seriously, then it would have been a case history told in a documentary manner. It certainly wouldn’t have been told in terms of mystery and oooooh, look out audience, here comes the bogey man! This is like telling a story to a little boy. It’s like telling a fairy story. You tell it in hushed tones: ‘Ssh! and then the woman went up the stairs!’ That’s all I’m doing. And you’ve got to have a sense of humor to do this.

The Birds (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

I: In The Birds then, there is really no — what you would call theme or message ?

H: All you can say about The Birds is nature can be awful rough on you. If you play around with it. Look what uranium has done. Man dug that out of the ground. The Birds expresses nature and what it can do, and the dangers of nature, because there is no doubt if the birds did decide, you know, with the millions that there are, to go for everybody's eyes, then we'd have H. G. Wells’ Kingdom of the Blind on our hands.

I: I think you took advantage of a natural human trait though, that when, say uranium, or the Bund movement in the ‘30s, or the plague in the medieval times starts to descend upon a given group of people, they don’t want to believe it. They fight against it.

H: Well, or they're helpless with it. You see, the idea of the people in the house, when the birds are attacking and not knowing what to do ... I only had the shutter blow open and the young man try to close the shutter, to tell the audience what it was really like outside. Otherwise, I was asking too much of their imagination. So, I gave them a little sample: White shadows go for his hand ... bloody it up. I'm saying ‘Audience, that's what it's really like outside.’ Only by the millions, not just two, as I’ve just shown. Now the helplessness of the people is no different in that sequence than people in an air raid with nowhere to go. Now, that's where the idea came from. I've been in raids ... in London and the bombs are falling, and the guns are going like hell all over the place. You don't know where to go. Where can you go? Can't go down to the basement. That's kind of sissy, you know.

I: I see ... So you’re just caught.

H: You’re caught! You’re trapped!

– Extract from “Cinema (1963) - Hitchcock on Style: An Interview with Alfred Hitchcock”. Reprinted in Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Volume 1 (1995) edited by Sidney Gottlieb.

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

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

This is the second part of an interview with Alfred Hitchcock from 1963 prior to the release of The Birds in which the acclaimed director discusses his recent films, his use of special effects, working with writers, and tension in narrative. 

In ‘Psycho’ you presumably intended the audience to identify with Janet Leigh.

I wouldn’t say Psycho was necessarily the best example. Because I felt there that the characters in the second part were merely figures. I was concentrating much more on the effect of the murder and the menace and the background of the boy/mother situation, rather than the other people. But in the case of The Birds, I think three of the four characters do go through a process which ties them directly in to the bird attacks.

In ‘The Birds’ you have worked without stars—or without big stars. Why?

I felt that one should have anonymous people, not too familiar, because the subject matter itself is not quite so facetious as that of other films: although the Birds do attack, it is treated quite realistically. One of the most—to me—satisfying scenes in The Birds is where there are no birds seen at all. You have a room which is boarded up—it comes toward the end of the picture—there are four people in the room: a child, young man and woman, and a mother, mother of the young man, sitting there in silence just waiting for them. I just keep that silence going for quite a bit until the first sounds come, then you begin to hear the attack outside and you don’t see the mass of birds at all. And it’s that kind of thing which permitted one to have comparatively unknown people because the thing belonged as a whole. It wouldn’t have looked good to have had a familiar film star sitting there waiting, you know; it’s hard to describe why; but this is quite an interesting sequence; to me it’s really satisfying because there I threw everything to the audience to use their imagination; to help them along a little bit, I had one shutter blow open. The young man has to pull the shutter to and then you see just the close-up attack on his hand and the seagulls biting and drawing blood.

North by Northwest (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

The atmosphere sounds similar to that of the sequence in ‘North by Northwest’ where Cary Grant waits at the road-side for Kaplan.

That was, I would say, an amusing approach. This thing in The Birds is not. We’ve shown the audience sufficient samples—I had one sequence where 300 crows wait outside the schoolhouse for the children, and when the kids come out they are chased down the road: montage sequence of individual crows attacking each child on the back, pecking at them and so forth.

Little menacing bits of dialogue—do you write these yourself: ‘Crop-dusting where there ain’t no crops’ in ‘North by Northwest’?

Oh that’s my line, yes.

How much of your scripts do you in fact write yourself?

Oh, quite a bit. You see I used to be a writer myself years ago. The difficulty is that one is working in the visual so much—that’s why I so rarely use film writers—I always use novelists or playwrights, definitely, not people working in the mystery field. They’re no use to me at all. In The Birds, I opened the film with the shot of birds in their nicest—what we think are their nicest—surroundings: in their cages. They’re chirruping away, and they’re all beautifully set—all very happy, ostensibly, and there’s a little light-hearted sequence. I treat the film in the beginning as a light comedy and there’s some byplay with the girl and the young man where a canary gets out of a cage, and the girl is a rather rich society girl, and she is not aware that the young man knows her identity—when he gets the bird from under his hat he says, ‘Let’s put Melanie Daniels back into her gilded cage, shall we,’ and that’s his way of telling the girl he knows who she is. The pay-off on that one line comes much later in the story when the centre of the town is attacked by seagulls and the girl seeks refuge in a phone booth—it’s glass-walled and she can’t get out. I take high shots and you see birds beating all around: The gulls are the people now you see and she’s the bird. So I have to write these lines in myself because I know it’s going to help appreciably later on. There’s no comment made about it, but it’s very clear that she’s in a cage but it’s no longer gilded.

The Birds (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

You expect quite a lot of your audience.

For those who want it. I don’t think films should be looked at once. I think they go by too fast. But the critics sit in there at their 10:30 a.m. sitting, and they see a film through once and that seems to be sufficient. But I don’t really think it is. Most films should be seen through more than once.

Why is ‘The Trouble with Harry’ a comedy rather than a thriller?

I think it was a nice little pastorale, you know. A typically English piece of humour, though it was set in America. It was an English novel and we followed it pretty closely. I laid it in the autumnal setting to counterpoint the macabre of the body, but I even tried to photograph that in an amusing way.

How do you choose your subjects?

I don’t probe particularly deeply. If something appeals to me... I think instinctively one would go for a subject very often that would lend itself to one’s treatment. I’m not terribly keen on just taking a stage play. As far back as when I made Juno and the Paycock I felt very frustrated about it and kind of rather ashamed when it got terrific notices. It wasn’t anything to do with me. It belonged to Sean O’Casey. My job was just to put it on the screen. I think that’s the job of any craftsman, setting the camera up and photographing people acting. That’s what I call most films today: photographs of people talking. It’s no effort to me to make a film like Dial M for Murder because there’s nothing there to do. On the other hand, you say to me: why do you make a film like Dial M for Murder? Because I run for cover when the batteries are running dry: You know, I might be engaged in a subject which is abortive—I’ve done that many times, I’ve been half way through a subject and found it didn’t work out after all—so immediately, instead of waiting, to keep one’s hand in you go for something which is fairly routine while the batteries are recharging.

In ‘North by Northwest’, Grant seems to want Eva Marie Saint dead: he’s happier when she’s an enemy or in danger than when she seems to be an available wife or lover.

What’s that old Oscar Wilde thing? ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’. That I think is a very natural phenomenon, really.

You don’t find it somewhat perverted?

Well, everything’s perverted in a different way, isn’t it?

North by Northwest (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Was the falling body at the end of ‘North by Northwest’ a superimposition?

Yes, that’s a double printing job. You photograph your background first and then you get a white backing and a large arm sticking out of the backing and you strap the middle of the torso to the arm and then with a side worm gear men can take that body and do that (twisting gesture) with it—Jimmy Stewart’s done it as well. Now you take the camera close and whip it back on rails and then also by making the movement slow you can undercrank it too, so that your whip back can be taken care of that way. Then it’s superimposed on the background. We’re working in The Birds on the sodium light system. We’re having to double-print a lot of birds over existing birds, where we have a small quantity of birds, trained ones, moving in and out, or whatever they’re doing, then you print over that scene a lot of other birds. And we’re using a sodium light process, which is a background which is lit by sodium—those yellow fog lights, you know—so that the camera picks up just the images, the background goes back, you get your colour image. And in the camera is a prism and that prism also makes the silhouette matte at the same time on a regular b/w film so that it doesn’t register colour. The filter in the prism turns the image black and the sodium background plain. So you make your travelling matte at the same time as you’re photographing: we use an old technicolour camera for that.

You must have been very thrilled with your ‘Vertigo’ effect.

I’ve been trying for fifteen, twenty years to get that effect. I first tried it in Rebecca. I wanted to get, in an inquest scene, Joan Fontaine to start to faint and see everything receding from her. I tried everything—I even thought of printing a photograph on rubber and stretching the middle.

Vertigo (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

You obtained the stretching of the perspective by simultaneously tracking in and zooming out, didn’t you?

Yes.

We have an argument about ‘Rear Window’. One of us says that a good deal of the suspense comes from one’s not being sure whether James Stewart is right, whether he’s making a fool of himself. The other says that you’re meant to be certain that he’s right and the suspense comes from whether he will prove it in time.

I would say that it’s the latter, because it’s frustration you see. The audience are with Stewart, the identification is direct and therefore they must feel superior to the other characters with him, but the frustration is there all the same. The interesting thing I think about Rear Window is that there’s more pure film there, even though it’s static, than in many films I’ve made. After all you get the famous examples that Pudovkin experimented with—where you get Stewart looking, what he sees, and his reaction to it. And there, after all, is the most powerful thing of film. You’ve got three pieces of film. Let’s assume, for example, Stewart looks, you see a mother and child; then you go back to Stewart and he smiles. Now you see he’s rather benevolent or benign, call it what you like. Take the middle piece away and put a nude girl in there and he’s a dirty old man.

Would you say that your films now are rather more thought out than instinctive, and were more instinctive in the thirties?

I would say so, yes. Well, I think you can have a bit of both really. But I think I got that (i.e. more intellectual) when I was aware of the global implications of audiences. That’s one thing that you do learn in America, because America is a polyglot country. I often tell people, there are no Americans, it’s full of foreigners. You become very audience-conscious because there are so many different types of people. Axiomatically you’re appealing to your Japanese audience and your Latin-American audience as well.

Rear Window (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

The idea of ‘Stage Fright’ intrigues us a great deal. Do you like it?

No. It wasn’t well done. You remember I said I liked to work with playwrights and novelists preferably. I went a bit overboard—I had James Bridie and he was too careless for me, structurally. He used to say, ‘Well, what does it matter?’

Whose was the basic idea of the flash-back that wasn’t true?

That was mine, but that was probably an error. That was going a bit too far because I suppose people are so accustomed to flash-backs being true that it was just confusing when it was untrue. It’s like the boy with the bomb in Sabotage. I should never have let that bomb go off. It was a cardinal error to let that bomb go off. If you work an audience up, it’s obligatory to relieve them, to release them from that.

Having built them up, the explosion didn’t release them?

No, of course not. It got them mad.

What next?

I’m going to do the Marnie picture next. The story of the compulsive thief that I was going to do with Grace Kelly.

Who’s taking the Grace Kelly part?

I’ve got a girl in mind, but we’re not letting on yet.

You’re going back to big stars?

Not necessarily. Sometimes I think big stars are useful but today they don’t help a picture any more. They help it if it’s good, but if it’s not good the public won’t go.

And ‘Psycho’ showed you could get along without them...

Yes.

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