Werner Herzog: Writing and Dreams

Werner Herzog is celebrated as one of the most influential and innovative filmmakers of our time, but his ascent to acclaim was far from a straight trajectory from privilege to power. Abandoned by his father at an early age, Herzog survived a WWII bombing that demolished the house next door to his childhood home and was raised by a single mother in near-poverty. He found his calling in filmmaking after reading an encyclopedia entry on the subject as a teenager and took a job as a welder in a steel factory in his late teens to fund his first films. These building blocks of his character — tenacity, self-reliance, imaginative curiosity — shine with blinding brilliance in the richest and most revealing of Herzog’s interviews.

Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed presents the director’s extensive, wide-ranging conversation with writer and filmmaker Paul Cronin.

Herzog’s insights coalesce into a kind of manifesto for following one’s particular calling, a form of intelligent, irreverent self-help for the modern creative spirit — indeed, even though Herzog is a humanist fully detached from religion, there is a strong spiritual undertone to his wisdom, rooted in what Cronin calls “unadulterated intuition” and spanning everything from what it really means to find your purpose and do what you love to the psychology and practicalities of worrying less about money to the art of living with presence in an age of productivity. As Cronin points out in the introduction, Herzog’s thoughts collected in the book are “a decades-long outpouring, a response to the clarion call, to the fervent requests for guidance.”

And yet in many ways, A Guide for the Perplexed could well have been titled A Guide to the Perplexed, for Herzog is as much a product of his “cumulative humiliations and defeats,” as he himself phrases it, as of his own “chronic perplexity,” to borrow E.B. White’s unforgettable term — Herzog possesses that rare, paradoxical combination of absolute clarity of conviction and wholehearted willingness to inhabit his own inner contradictions, to pursue life’s open-endedness with equal parts focus of vision and nimbleness of navigation.

– Maria Popova.

In the following excerpt Werner Herzog elaborates on his approach to writing screenplays and the role of dreams in that process.

Do you have an ideology, something that drives you beyond mere storytelling?

“Mere storytelling,” as you put it, is enough for a film. Steven Spielberg’s films might be full of special effects, but audiences appreciate them because at the centre of each is a well-crafted story. Spielberg deserves the position he is in because he understands something that those who are concerned only with the fireworks of flashy visuals don’t. If a story in a narrative film doesn’t function, that film won’t function.

My films come to me very much alive, like dreams, without explanation. I never think about what it all means. I think only about telling a story, and however illogical the images, I let them invade me. An idea comes to me, and then, over a period of time – perhaps while driving or walking – this blurred vision becomes clearer in my mind, pulling itself into focus. I see the film before me, as if it were playing on a screen, and it soon becomes so transparent that I can sit and write it all down, describing the images passing through my mind. I don’t write a script if I can’t see and hear the entire film - “characters, dialogue, music, locations – in my head. I have never written a screenplay for anyone else because I see my stories in a certain way and don’t want anyone else to touch them. When I write, I sit in front of the computer and pound the keys. I start at the beginning and write fast, leaving out anything that isn’t necessary, aiming at all times for the hard core of the narrative. I can’t write without that urgency. Something is wrong if it takes more than five days to finish a screenplay.

A story created this way will always be full of life. I saw the whole of Even Dwarfs Started Small as a continuous nightmare in front of my eyes and was extremely disciplined while typing so I wouldn’t make any mistakes. I just let it all pour out and didn’t make more than five typos in the entire screenplay.

People sense I am well orientated, that I know where I have come from and where I’m headed, so it’s understandable that they search for some guiding ideology behind my work. But no such thing exists as far as I’m concerned. There is never some philosophical idea that guides a film through the veil of a story. All I can say is that I understand the world in my own way and am capable of articulating this understanding through stories and images that are coherent to others. I don’t like to drop names, but what sort of an ideology would you push under the shirt of Conrad or Hemingway or Kafka? Goya or Caspar David Friedrich? Even after watching my films, it bothers some audiences that they are unable to put their finger on what my credo might be. Grasp this with a pair of pliers, but the credo is the films themselves and my ability to make them. This is what troubles those people who have forever viewed my work with tunnel vision, as if they were looking through a straw they picked up at McDonald’s. They keep searching. No wonder they get desperate.

Some of these milkshake-drinkers have located themes running throughout your work.

Apparently so, but don’t ask me to do the same. A film is a projection of light that becomes something else only when it crosses the gaze of the audience, with the viewer able to connect what he is looking at with something deeper within himself. Everyone completes images and stories in a different way because everyone’s perspective is unique, so it’s never been a good idea for me to explain what my films might mean. The opinion of the public, however different from my own, is sacred. Whenever anyone asks me if Stroszek kills himself at the end of Stroszek, I tell them they’re free to choose the ending that best works for them. If anyone is expecting a statement from me on such matters, it would be best if they put this book down right now and poured themselves a glass of wine. Consider this line from Walt Whitman: “Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity. When I give I give myself.” None of my films were made following deep philosophical contemplation. My way of expressing certain ideas – our deep-rooted hopes and gnawing fears – is by rendering them visible on screen.

Those hordes who write about cinema have often been trained to think in certain ways, to analyse a body of work and investigate apparent connections, to bring certain rigid, fashionable theories to bear and show off everything they know while doing so. They read their own intellectual make-up and approach to life into my films, apparently deciphering things that for me don’t need to be deciphered, and by churning out page after page of unappealing prose actually obscure and confuse. It doesn’t mean they’re right, it doesn’t mean they’re wrong. They function in their world, and I in mine. “I want to appeal to people’s instincts before anything else. When I present an audience with a new film I hope they bring only their hearts and minds, plus a little sympathy. I ask for no more than that. Film isn’t the art of scholars but of illiterates. It should be looked at straight on, without any prefabricated ideas, which is something Henri Langlois knew all too well. At the Cinémathèque Française he would screen films from around the world – in Bengali, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese – without subtitles. It means audiences had to cultivate a kind of intelligence and intensity of vision that has little to do with rational thought. They almost developed their own sense of illiteracy, tapping into an innate but usually long-dormant facility.

You must be able to see some connections between your films.

People say I’m an outsider, but even if everyone finds me eccentric, I know I’m standing at the centre. There is nothing eccentric about my films; it’s everything else that’s eccentric. I never felt that Kaspar Hauser, for example, was an outsider. He might have been continually forced to the sidelines, he might have stood apart from everyone, but he’s at the true heart of things. Everyone around him, with their deformed souls, transformed into domesticated pigs and members of bourgeois society, they are the bizarre ones. Aguirre, Fini Straubinger and Stroszek all fit into this pattern. So do Walter Steiner, Hias in Heart of Glass, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, the Aborigines of Where the Green Ants Dream and the desert people of Fata Morgana. Look at Reinhold Messner, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, Nosferatu and even Kinski himself, or Vladimir Kokol, the young deaf and blind man in Land of Silence and Darkness who connects with the world only by bouncing a ball off his head and clutching a radio to his chest, much like Kaspar, who plays with his wooden horse. None of these people are pathologically mad. “It’s the society they find themselves in that’s demented. Whether dwarfs, hallucinating soldiers or indigenous peoples, these individuals are not freaks.

I have always felt that my characters – fictional or non-fictional – all belong to the same family. It isn’t easy to put my finger on exactly what binds them together, but if a member of the clan were walking about town, you would intuitively and instantly recognise them. If you were to sit and watch all my films in one go, you would see the cross-references, the relationships and similarities between characters. They have no shadows, they emerge from the darkness without a past, they are misunderstood and humiliated. If you turned on the television and saw ten seconds of something, you would immediately know it must be one of mine. I look at my films as one big story, a vast, interconnected work I have been concentrating on for fifty years. Like the separate bricks that make up a building, taken together they constitute something bigger than their individual parts.

Does investigation of these individuals tell us anything about their surroundings?

We learn more about the buildings, streets and structures of an unknown city by climbing to the top of an overlooking hill than by standing in its central square. Looking in from the outskirts, we come to understand the environments in which these characters live.

How close do you feel to the characters in your films?

I have a great deal of sympathy for these people, to the point where Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein joked that I should play everyone in my films myself. I function pretty well as an actor and in several of my films could have played the leading character if necessary. I could never make a film – fiction or non-fiction – about someone for whom I have no empathy, who fails to arouse some level of appreciation and curiosity. In fact, when it comes to Fini Straubinger in Land of Silence and Darkness, Bruno S. in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser or Dieter Dengler, these people are points of reference not just for my work, but also my life. I learnt so much from my time with them. The radical dignity they radiate is clearly visible in the films. There is something of what constitutes them inside me.

– Excerpt from Werner Herzog - A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin.

John Cassavetes: Chasing Shadows

Shadows (Directed by John Cassavetes)

John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) is one of the pioneering works of American independent cinema. Made for $40,000 with a non-professional cast and crew, using rented and borrowed equipment, the film portrays several days in the lives of three African-American siblings – Hugh, Ben, and Lelia. Though most critics consider Shadows as being about the issue of race, Cassavetes always thought of the film as more personal. Almost all of the scenes were based on his own experiences and feelings at the time: from the humiliation of his early auditioning days, to Ben’s aimless detachment and cruising for girls, to the lonely, night-time wandering that lasted throughout Cassavetes’ life. Aspects of Cassavetes’ feelings and beliefs are also present in the portrayal of Lelia’s romantic impulsiveness, Rupert and Hugh’s belief in friendship and Tom’s angry speech about academic life. Most significantly of all, the relationship between self-centred drifter Ben and his dutiful brother Hugh mirrored the relationship of John Cassavetes with his older brother Nick. 

As the critic Raymond Carney claims: ‘Beyond these specific references, the general subject of Shadows was close to Cassavetes’ view of his own situation at this point in his life. He thought of himself as doing the same thing in his world as Lelia and Ben did in theirs. In their different ways, he and they were attempting to ‘pass’ for something that was not necessarily a reflection of their true identities. As would be the case with all of his subsequent works, the issues in the film were close to Cassavetes’ heart. He could not satirize or mock characters who were so similar to him.’

The following excerpts express Cassavetes’ thoughts on the making of Shadows:

We tried to do Shadows realistically. I just was as tough and as mixed up and screwed up as anyone else and made a picture about the aimlessness and the wandering of young people and the emotional qualities that they possessed.

The story is of a Negro family that lives just beyond the bright lights of Broadway; but we did not mean it to be a film about race. It got its name because one of the actors, in the early days, was fooling around making a charcoal sketch of some of the other actors and suddenly called his drawing Shadows. It seemed to fit the film. The NAACP came to us to finance it, but we turned it down. We’re not politicians. One of the things that has to be established when you’re making a movie is freedom. Everyone will get the wrong idea and say we’ve got a cause. I couldn’t care less about causes of any kind. Shadows is not offensive to anybody – Southerners included – because it has no message. The thing people don’t like is having a philosophy shoved down their throats. We’re not pushing anything. I don’t believe the purpose of art is propagandizing.

At the time I made Shadows I wished that I was a black man, because it would be something so definite and the challenge would be greater than being a white man. But now, American black men are white men so there’s no challenge and I don’t really wish to be that anymore. I don’t know about other men’s desires but it is my desire to be an underdog, to win on a long shot, to gamble, to take chances.

There is a great need in the cinema for truthfulness, but truth is not necessarily sordid and not necessarily downbeat. Unfortunately, the art films have dealt mainly with the evils of society. But society is more interesting than rape or murder. I think you can do more through positive action than in pointing out the foibles and stupidities of man. Yes, any man is capable of killing any other man, we know that, we don’t have to stress that. To say that it’s right and normal, to continue to say it, to have society and the Establishment confirm that view, is wrong.

Art films reach for the most obvious fallacies of society, such as racial prejudice. That’s been a fault of the art film – devoting itself to human ills, human weaknesses. An artist has a responsibility not to dwell on this and point it up, but to find hope for this age and see that it wins occasionally. Pictures are supposed to clarify people’s emotions, to explain the feelings of people on an emotional plane. An art film should not preclude laughter, enjoyment and hope. Is life about horror? Or is it about those few moments we have? I would like to say that my life has some meaning.

I think that there are certainly many, many wonderful things to be written about in this day and age of disillusionment and horror and impending doom. We must take a more positive stand in making motion pictures, and have a few more laughs, and treat life with a little more hope than we have in the past. Shadows is a realistic drama with hope – a hopeful picture about a lower echelon of society in the United States – how they live, how they react. The people are hopeful. They have some belief. I believe in people.

I’m not an Angry Young Man. I’m just an industrious young man. And I believe in people. I don’t believe in ‘exposés’, as exposés have just torn America apart, and the rest of the world. I don’t believe in saying that the presidential campaign is all phony, going inside it and looking at it. It’s been going on for years this way, but for the first time in history we’re going in and saying, ‘Yeah, see what they do? See how they get votes? See how this is done? See?’ Human frailties are with us. People aren’t perfect. But we have good instincts that counterbalance our bad acts. The main battle is you don’t make ugliness for the sake of ugliness. By attacking, constantly attacking everything in sight, no matter what anyone does, it’s not good enough because it can’t be trusted. And nobody, starting with the top of our government, can be believed. Everybody is a phony. So if everybody’s a phony, what’s the sense of going on, because there isn’t anybody worth making a picture about, talking about, writing about. There’s no hope in living and you might as well pack it all in and forget about it. Why should young people’s minds constantly be filled with the corruption of life? Soon they can’t do anything but believe there’s total corruption.

I adore the neo-realists for their humaneness of vision. Zavattini is surely the greatest screenwriter that ever lived. Particularly inspirational to me when I made Shadows were La Terra Trema, I Vitelloni, Umberto D and Bellissima. The neo-realist filmmakers were not afraid of reality; they looked it straight in the face. I have always admired their courage and their willingness to show us how we really are. It’s the same with Godard, early Bergman, Kurosawa and the second greatest director next to Capra, Carl Dreyer. Shadows contains much of that neo-realistic influence.

I’d like to feel that people have influenced me, but then when you get on the floor you realize you’re really alone and no one can influence your work. They can just open you up and give you confidence that the aim for quality is really the greatest power a director can have – if you’re in quest of power. In a way, you must be out for power. We wouldn’t make films if we didn’t think that in some way we could speak for everyone.

I’m not part of anything. I never joined anything. I could work anywhere. Some of the greatest pictures I’ve ever seen came from the studio system. I have nothing against it at all. I’m an individual. Intellectual bullshit doesn’t interest me. I’m only interested in working with people who like to work and find out about something that they don’t already know. If people want to work on a project, they’ve got to work on a project that’s theirs. It’s not mine and it’s not theirs. It’s only yours if you make it yours. With actors, as well as technicians, the biggest problem is to get people who really want to do the job and let them do it their own way. The labels come afterwards. If your films have no chance of being shown anywhere, if you don’t have enough money, you show them in basements; then they’re called underground films. It doesn’t really matter what you call them. When you make a film you aren’t part of a movement. You want to make a film, this film, a personal and individual one, and you do, with the help of your friends.

Shadows from beginning to end was a creative accident. I was going on Jean Shepherd’s Night People radio show, because he had plugged Edge of the City, and I wanted to thank him for it. I told Jean about the piece we had done, and how it could be a good film. I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be terrific if [ordinary] people could make movies, instead of all these Hollywood big-wigs who are only interested in business and how much the picture was going to gross and everything?’ And he asked if I thought I’d be able to raise the money for it. ‘If people really want to see a movie about people,’ I answered, ‘they should just contribute money.’ For a week afterwards, money came in. At the end it totaled $2,500. And we were committed to start a film. One soldier showed up with five dollars after hitchhiking 300 miles to give it to us. And some really weird girl came in off the street; she had a mustache and hair on her legs and the hair on her head was matted with dirt and she wore a filthy polka-dot dress; she was really bad. After walking into the workshop, this girl got down on her knees, grabbed my pants and said, ‘I listened to your program last night. You are the Messiah.’ Anyway, she became our sound editor and straightened out her life. In fact, a lot of people who worked on the film were people who were screwed up – and got straightened out working with the rest of us. We wouldn’t take anything bigger than a five dollar bill – though once, when things looked real rough, we did cash a $100 check from Josh Logan.

When I started, I thought it would only take me a few months; it took three years. I made every mistake known to man; I can’t even remember all the mistakes we made. I was so dumb! Having acted in movies, I kinda knew how they were made, so after doing some shooting, I’d shout out something like ‘Print take three!’ I’d neglected to hire a script girl, however, so no one wrote down which take I wanted – with the astounding result that all the film was printed. It was really the height of ignorance. We did everything wrong, technically. We began shooting without having the slightest idea of what had to be done or what the film would be like. We had no idea at all. We didn’t know a thing about technique: all we did was begin shooting. The technical problems of the production were endless and trying. The ‘Sound Department’ often looked at the recorder, only to see no signal whatsoever! The only thing we did right was to get a group of people together who were young, full of life and wanting to do something of meaning.

There was [also] a struggle because the actors had to find the confidence to have quiet at times, and not just constantly talk. This took about the first three weeks of the schedule. Eventually all this material was thrown away, and then everyone became cool and easy and relaxed and they had their own things to say, which was the point. Though I had to scrap most of what we shot in the first eight weeks’ shooting, later on, once they relaxed and gained confidence, many of the things they did shocked even me, they were so completely unpredictably true.

The things we got praised for were the things we tried to cure. All those things were accidents, not strokes of genius. We didn’t have any equipment, we didn’t have a dolly. And we had all this movement, so we used long lenses. And [we were] photographing in the street because we couldn’t afford a studio or couldn’t afford even to go inside some place, you know. And our sound – when we opened Shadows in England, they said, ‘The truest sound that we’ve ever seen.’ Well, at that time, almost all the pictures, certainly all the pictures at Twentieth Century Fox, were looped. You know, all the sync that the actors actually spoke on the stage was cleaned up and made to be absolutely sterile, so that there was no sound behind anything. If you saw traffic, you wouldn’t hear it. You’d just hear voices so that the dialogue would be clean. But we recorded most of Shadows in a dance studio with Bob Fosse and his group dancing above our heads, and we were shooting this movie. So I never considered the sound. We didn’t even have enough money to print it, to hear how bad it was. So when we came out, we had Sinatra singing upstairs, and all kinds of boom, dancing feet above us. And that was the sound of the picture. So we spent hours, days, weeks, months, years trying to straighten out this sound. Finally, it was impossible and we just went with it. Well, when the picture opened in London they said, ‘This is an innovation!’ You know? Innovation! We killed ourselves to try to ruin that innovation!

When it was finished, we didn’t have enough money to print [all] the sound. There was no dialogue [written down] so every take was different. So we looked at it and said, ‘What the hell are we going to print here? I don’t know what they’re saying. It looks terrific, everything’s all right, it’s beautiful – we’ll lay in the lines.’ So we had a couple of secretaries who used to come up all the time and do transcripts for us. They volunteered their services, they had nothing to do, we had all silent film. So we went to the deaf-mute place and we got lip-readers. They read everything and it took us about a year.

We used a 16mm camera, partly because it was cheaper and partly because we could do more hand-held stuff with it, and it was easier to handle in the streets. We used a [Nagra] tape-recorder and a hand-held boom. We rarely had rehearsals for the camera, even though Erich Kollmar, the cameraman, likes rehearsals. I encouraged him to get it the first time, as it happened. Erich found that the lighting and photographing of these actors, who moved according to impulse instead of direction, prevented him from using a camera in a conventional way. He was forced to photograph the film with simplicity. He was driven to lighting a general area and then hoping for the best. So we not only improvised in terms of the words, but we improvised in terms of motions. The cameraman also improvised, he had to follow the artists and light generally, so that the actor could move when and wherever he pleased. The first week of shooting was just about useless. We were all getting used to each other and to the equipment, but it was not because of the camera movement that we had to throw footage out. In fact, when you try it, you find that natural movement is easier to follow than rehearsed movement, since it has a natural rhythm. A strange and interesting thing happened in that the camera, in following the people, followed them smoothly and beautifully, simply because people have a natural rhythm. Whereas when they rehearse something according to a technical mark, they begin to be jerky and unnatural, and no matter how talented they are, the camera has a difficult time following them.

I think the important contribution that Shadows can make to the film is that audiences go to the cinema to see people: they only empathize with people, and not with technical virtuosity. Most people don’t know what a ‘cut,’ or a ‘dissolve’ or a ‘fade-out’ is, and I’m sure they are not concerned with them. And what we in the business might consider a brilliant shot doesn’t really interest them, because they are watching the people, and I think it becomes important for the artist to realize that the only important thing is a good actor.

Normally to shoot somewhere like Broadway there would be ten or a dozen gaffers [lighting men], then another five or six grips [technicians] to move the cameras and cables, and then all the producers and directors on top of that. They wouldn’t want anything [out of focus]; everything would have to be clear cut. In a [Hollywood] picture you have marks to hit, and the lighting cameraman always lights for you at a certain mark. The actor is expected to go through a dramatic scene, staying within a certain region where the lights are. If he gets out of light just half an inch, then they’ll cut the take and do it over again. So then the actor begins to think about the light rather than about the person he is supposed to be making love to, or arguing with.

In my own case I had worked in a lot of [commercial] films and I couldn’t adjust to the medium. I found that I wasn’t as free as I could be on the stage or in a live television show. So for me [making Shadows] was mainly to find out why I was not free – because I didn’t particularly like to work in films, and yet I like the medium. The actor is the only person in a film who works from emotion, in whom the emotional truth of a situation resides. If we had made Shadows in Hollywood, none of the people could have emerged as the fine actors they are. It’s probably easier technically to make a film in Hollywood, but it would have been difficult to be adventurous simply because there are certain rules and regulations that are set specifically to destroy the actor and make him feel uncomfortable – make the production so important that he feels that if he messes up just one line, that he is doing something terribly wrong and may never work again. And this is especially true, not for the stars, but with the feature players who might be stars later on, or with the small players, the one-line players who might become feature players. There’s a certain cruelty in our business that is unbelievably bad. I don’t see how people can make pictures about people and then have absolutely no regard for the people they are working with.

In the course of [the filming] the tide of outside enthusiasm dwindled and finally turned into rejection. The Shadows people continued, no longer with the hope of injecting the industry with vitality, but only for the sake of their pride in themselves and in the film that they were all devoted to. [On] the last day of shooting, I couldn’t turn on the camera. I was so fed up with doing it because there was no love of the craft or the idea or anything. We’re doing this experiment, and now it’s the last day, nobody’s here except McEndree and me. He couldn’t turn on the camera and I couldn’t turn on the camera and Ben was standing there asking, ‘Are you going to roll this thing or not?’ We’re just standing there looking at each other. We couldn’t turn on this camera because it had been such a hassle.

I went to a theater-owner friend of mine and I said, ‘Look, we want to show our film and we can fill this theater.’ It was the Paris Theater in New York and 600 people filled that theater and we turned away another 400 people at the door. About 15 minutes into the film the people started to leave. And they left. And they left! And I began perspiring and the cast was getting angry. We all sat closer and closer together and pretty soon there wasn’t anyone in the theater! I think there was one critic in the theater, one critic who was a friend of ours, who walked over to us and said, ‘This is the most marvelous film I’ve ever seen in my life!’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to hit you right now. I’m a little uptight, not feeling too hot and none of us are, so’ And he said, ‘No. This is really a very good film.’ So, like all failures, you get a sense of humor about it and you go out and spend the night – when it’s bad enough, and this was so bad that it couldn’t be repaired.

I could see the flaws in Shadows myself: It was a totally intellectual film – and therefore less than human. I had fallen in love with the camera, with technique, with beautiful shots, with experimentation for its own sake. All I did was exploiting film technique, shooting rhythms, using large lenses – shooting through trees, and windows. It had a nice rhythm to it, but it had absolutely nothing to do with people. Whereas you have to create interest in your characters because this is what audiences go to see. The film was filled with what you might call ‘cinematic virtuosity’ – for its own sake; with angles and fancy cutting and a lot of jazz going on in the background. But the one thing that came at all alive to me after I had laid it aside a few weeks was that just now and again the actors had survived all my tricks. But this did not often happen! They barely came to life.

– Excerpts from ‘Raymond Carney: Cassavetes on Cassavetes’.

 

George Axelrod: Breaking the Rules: The Manchurian Candidate

The Manchurian Candidate (Directed by John Frankenheimer)

George Axelrod was born in New York City, the son of silent screen actress Betty Carpenter. He often frequented Broadway theatre as a child and finally obtained a job working there backstage. Following service in the Army Signal Corps during World War II, he found work writing for various television and radio shows throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s. In 1952, he had his first major breakthrough with the performance of his play The Seven Year Itch. Tom Ewell played a Manhattan businessman who takes advantage of his family's absence to have an affair with his attractive neighbour. Ewell would receive a Tony Award for his performance in the stage version. In 1955, Axelrod released the comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Axelrod's debut Hollywood screenplay was 1954's "Phffft!" starring Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday about a divorced couple. In 1955, Ewell reprised his stage role alongside Marilyn Monroe in the film adaptation of The Seven Year Itch directed by Billy Wilder. Adultery, particularly in a comedy, was prohibited by the production code in 1955. Studio bosses were opposed to the male lead consummating the romance, and therefore confined Ewell's role to merely fantasising about it. Axelrod eventually distanced himself from the film, expressing his disappointment. Although the play was sanitised for the movie, the film included one of Hollywood's most famous images - Monroe astride a subway air vent, fighting to keep her dress down as the draught blows it up over her legs. 

Axelrod was not involved with the film version of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1955) a witty morality story about a fan magazine writer who sells his soul to a Hollywood agent with demonic abilities. Jayne Mansfield reprised her stage role for the 1957 film, directed by Frank Tashlin. Axelrod had relocated from New York to Los Angeles in part to oversee the handling of his screenplays more carefully. Though he chose not to adapt his own play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? for the screen, he did adapt William Inge's Bus Stop, Truman Capote's novel Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate. His penultimate screenplay was for The Fourth Protocol, a 1987 British Cold War spy thriller starring Michael Caine based on a novel by Frederick Forsyth. 

In the following extract George Axelrod is interviewed by Pat McGilligan about adapting The Manchurian Candidate for director John Frankenheimer.

Tell me more about how you put ‘Manchurian’ together. 

Johnny [Frankenheimer] and I had become friends and were looking around for something else to do. I read a review of The Manchurian Candidate in the New Yorker and bought the book [by Richard Condon (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959)] the next day. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, what a fucking movie!’ There was a lot of resistance. It was everything the studios didn’t want —political satire, worse than regular satire. It was not easy, but [Frank] Sinatra made it all possible. Sinatra agreed to play [Bennett] Marco, and that’s the only way United Artists would let us do it.

Was Condon or Frankenheimer involved in the script? 

I worked with Frankenheimer on it from the beginning.

Was he helpful? 

Very much so. Condon was not involved, although Dick became a very good friend. I wrote the first draft of The Manchurian Candidate in New York, in a house in Bedford Village, in the summer. Then I came out here in August or September of ’61 to work with Frankenheimer, who produced Manchurian with me, and to prepare the film... For film, I do two very specifically different things. I’m a pretty good adapter, and I can do the odd original. They’re two very different techniques. The very best adaptation I ever did was The Manchurian Candidate. It is a brilliant, wildly chaotic novel. Wonderful voice. To take the essence of that and try to make it so that it worked for a film was a challenge.

A very good example of breaking the rules of the craft is The Manchurian Candidate screenplay: it breaks every single known rule. It’s got dream sequences, flashbacks, narration out of nowhere. When we got in trouble, it had just a voice explaining stuff. Everything in the world that you’re told not to do. But that was part of its genetic code, the secret of the crossword puzzle. It worked for this script.

For example, one scene: When the book describes the reading matter of the hero, it says his library consists of books which have been picked out for him at random by a guy in a bookstore in San Francisco from a list of titles he happens to have on hand at the moment. What I did was transpose that, so when the colonel [played by Douglas Henderson] comes in to fire Marco, he notices that Marco has a lot of books. I had Frank read off the titles of all his books: ‘The Ethnic Choices of Arabs, The Jurisdictional Practices of the Mafia...’

With Frank saying the titles, it makes an excellent scene. But it was not a scene in the book—I had to make a scene out of a piece of description by Condon. That’s what I mean by transposing the gene.
The main trick of Manchurian was to make the brainwashing believable. What I did was dramatize the way the prisoners were brainwashed into believing they were attending a meeting of a lady’s garden society. I had the further idea of making Corporal Melvin [played by James Edwards] black and doing the whole second half of the dream with black ladies. I remember we shot for days, getting all the different angles—front and back, black and white. At the time, we weren’t entirely sure how it was going to fit together. We had miles of film. It was bewildering.

Meanwhile, we had to screw the [production] board all up and schedule all Frank’s scenes up front. We had to shoot all his stuff in fifteen days—because he has the attention span of a gnat— to keep his interest. Then he was set to leave. He was going off to Europe or some place.
 
Before he left, he announced, ‘I want to see every foot of film that I’m in before I leave.’ Johnny Frankenheimer said, ‘You can see everything except the brainwashing sequence.’ Frank said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. I want to see everything,’ in a voice where you felt kneecaps were going to be broken. Now, this is totally self-serving but absolutely true: I said, ‘Let me take a crack at it because I really understand what I am trying to do . . . ’ The editor, Ferris Webster, and I went back to my office, and we got the script out. I just penciled the script where the shots were—cut, cut, cut—then he went back and put it together, and we never changed the sequence. That’s how it was cut, that magical sequence.

Was Frank a good actor, acting out of continuity? 

Frank is one of the best screen actors in the world. He’s magic. Like Marilyn. But you have to understand how he works. When he won’t do many takes, it’s because he can’t. He has no technical vocabulary as an actor. Something magical happens the first time, and sometimes, he can do it a second time. After that, it’s gone.

But can he work out of continuity? 

He understands how to do each scene—what it’s about. He’s a musical genius, and he’s lyrically sensitive. He knows that each scene tells a little story. He never tries to change a line. He has enormous respect for the dialogue. He was just a dream to work with.

Ernest Lehman: Writing ‘North by Northwest’

North by Northwest (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Ernest Lehman (1915–2005), one of the most acclaimed screenwriters in Hollywood history, was born in New York City. After graduating from City College of New York, he worked for a publicity agency that specialized in a Broadway/Hollywood clientele. His early short stories, often related to theater and film, began to appear in prestigious journals like Collier’s and Esquire, and his short novel Sweet Smell of Success was first serialized in Cosmopolitan. After moving to Hollywood in 1953, his first screenplay was Executive Suite (1954), directed by Robert Wise. His subsequent films include: Sabrina (1954),  The King and I (1956), Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), From the Terrace (1960), Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music (1965), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and Hitchcock’s final film, Family Plot (1976). His various screenplays received five Writers Guild Awards and were nominated four times for Academy Awards. In 2001, he became the first writer in film history to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The following extract is from a conversation with William Behr on Lehman’s writing of Hitchcock’s classic thriller North by Northwest.

In 1957, you were one of the most sought after screenwriters in Hollywood, and Alfred Hitchcock decided that he’d like you to write his next picture.

LEHMAN: That’s right. MGM had bought a novel called The Wreck of the Mary Deare, and they told me that Hitch wanted me to write it.

Had you met him before?

LEHMAN: Just once. We were introduced by Bernard Herrmann, and we had lunch together. Benny thought we’d get along well, and we did.

So why did you turn down ‘The Wreck of the Mary Deare’?


LEHMAN: When I read the novel, I just didn’t see the movie in it. It was mostly a naval inquiry into something that had happened in the past, and I felt it would be too static.

But the book began with a very intriguing scene.

LEHMAN: Yes, the ship was found in a channel with nobody on board. But that was the only good scene in the whole novel. All the rest of it was the inquiry.

But Hitchcock still wanted you for the picture.

LEHMAN: My agent, who was also Hitchcock’s agent, let me know that Hitch was very upset that I’d turned him down. I guess he wasn’t used to that. So a couple of weeks later, my agent asked me if I’d be willing to have lunch with Hitchcock at the Polo Lounge. So I said, ‘Why not? I’m sure we’ll have a good time together.’ And we did have a good time, and I came away thinking, ‘Maybe Hitch knows how to do the picture.’ So even though I still had my doubts, I decided to do it.

Did you talk much about the picture at that meeting?

LEHMAN: Not at all.

Then how did things go when you started working on the script?

LEHMAN: Well, I went to his house every day for about three weeks, and I realized that every time I brought up the subject of Mary Deare, he would change the subject. So, I began to suspect that he didn’t know any more about how to do the picture than I did. Finally, I went to his house one morning and said, ‘I’ve got bad news for you, Hitch. You’ll have to get another writer. I don’t know how to write this picture.’ And he said, ‘Don’t be silly, Ernie. We’ll do something else.’ And I said, ‘But what’ll we tell MGM?’ And he said, ‘We won’t tell them a thing.’ And that’s how it evolved.

How did you break the news to MGM?

LEHMAN: That was later on, when we were working on North by Northwest, and Hitch said, ‘Don’t you think it’s time we told MGM that we’re not doing Mary Deare?’ Everybody at the studio thought we were moving along just fine with the picture. People used to salute me in the hallways and say, ‘Hello, Skipper, how’s it going?’ But Hitch wanted me to tell them, and I said, ‘I’m not going to tell them. You’re going to have to do it.’ So, he did it. He went to a meeting and told them that it was taking too long to write Mary Deare, and that we were planning to do another script instead. The studio people, who apparently assumed that Hitch was now planning to do two pictures for the studio, were delighted. Then he glanced down at his wristwatch, said he had to go – because we didn’t really have a story at that point – and left. And that was that.

After you’d decided to do an original script, I believe Hitchcock suggested a film on the life of Jack Sheperd, an eighteenth century English escape artist?

LEHMAN: Yes. After the decision to drop Mary Deare was made, we spent a couple of months just talking about ideas and possibilities. And Hitch brought up a lot of subjects that I wasn’t interested in, and, I guess, I brought up a few that he wasn’t interested in. And one of his suggestions was a picture about an escape artist, which didn’t interest me at all.

You once discussed the fact that, in those days, doing an original script was looked down on in Hollywood circles.


LEHMAN: That’s right. It wasn’t as highly regarded as it is now. If you were at a party back then, and somebody said, ‘What are you doing these days?’ and if you answered, ‘I’m doing an original script,’ it suggested that you really weren’t doing anything at all – since almost all of the pictures back then were adaptations of plays or novels.

And those scripts would have the prestige of the book or the play behind them.

LEHMAN: Exactly.

Was it different with this project, given that you were working with Hitchcock?

LEHMAN: Well, for me personally, none of this mattered anyway. I never went to a party where anyone said, ‘Oh, you’re doing an original? Too bad.’ That never happened.

Once you were finally under way on the script, you decided to do ‘the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.’ What did you mean by that?

LEHMAN: I meant something that was witty and entertaining, with lots of suspense, and all kinds of colorful locales – things like that. Everything that I’d enjoyed in Hitchcock pictures from the past.

The one I think of the most is ‘The 39 Steps’, where you have someone who from out of nowhere falls into a complicated spy web, and the action of the film moves around quite a bit, up to Scotland and then back to London.

LEHMAN: Was there humor in it?

Yes, especially between the leads. Remember when they were handcuffed together?

LEHMAN: Yes, I do. I think that was Robert Donat and Madeline Carroll.

It was. Now, in the process of writing the film, it seems that you began with a list of disparate ideas that Hitchcock mentioned as possible scenes for the movie. Could you discuss them?

LEHMAN: Yes. They were all wonderful, and I took them all down, and I never used most of them. For some reason, Hitch wanted to do the longest dolly shot in cinema history. The idea was that the shot would begin with an assembly line, and then you’d gradually see the parts of the car added and assembled, and, all the while, the camera’s dollying for miles along with the assembly line, and then eventually there’s a completed car, all built, and it’s driven off the assembly line, and there’s a dead body in the backseat.

Did you try to work that one into the script?

LEHMAN: Not really. It was intriguing, but it had no place in the picture. Then Hitch told me another one: there’s a speech being made at the General Assembly of the United Nations, and the speaker suddenly stops. He’s irritated, and he says he’s not going to continue until the delegate from Brazil wakes up. So a UN page goes over to the man, taps him on the shoulder, and the delegate falls over dead. But he’d been doodling – and that’s the only clue to the murder – and his doodling is a sketch of the antlers of moose.

So I said, ‘Well, that’s intriguing – now we’ve got the United Nations, and Detroit, and what might seem like a reference to northern Canada.’ And Hitch said that he’d always wanted to do a scene at Lake Louise where a family is having a reunion – a get-together – and a twelve-year-old girl takes a gun out of a baby carriage and shoots someone. I realize that all these ideas sound very peculiar and unrelated, but I took them all down and thought about them.

Wasn’t there something in Alaska?

LEHMAN: Yes. There’s a hole in the ice, and an Eskimo is fishing, and a hand suddenly comes up out of the water. As you can see, all these ideas seemed to be moving in a northwesterly direction, starting in New York. Hitch also mentioned something about wanting to do a shot where people take off in a little plane that has skis on the ice instead of wheels, and that reinforced the idea of heading northwest. So, I started calling the project In a Northwesterly Direction.

Where did Mount Rushmore come in?

LEHMAN: That also came up in those discussions. Just like he’d said, ‘I always wanted to do a dolly shot in an auto factory,’ he said, ‘I always wanted to do a chase across the faces of Mount Rushmore.’ And I thought, ‘Hey, I really like that idea.’ And that was the seed of the flower that took eleven months to grow. But I had to ask myself, ‘Who’s chasing whom over the faces of Mount Rushmore?’ and ‘How do they get there?’ and ‘Why?’ And that took quite a bit of doing on my part. I remember that I used to squeeze out a tiny bit of the screenplay every day, fully convinced that it would never actually become a movie.

There were many nights when I would be driving home from the studio thinking that we were just kidding ourselves – and wondering how long the charade would go on. The truth is, even with all my experience, I really didn’t know how to write the script. I’d never written a movie like that before, but gradually I eked it out – or, at least, the first sixty-five pages – and then Hitch went off to make Vertigo. So I’d sit there in my lonely office, and many times I’d go home at night having written less than half a page, completely discouraged. And several times I tried to quit while he was away, but my agent wouldn’t let me, saying, ‘You’ve already quit The Wreck of the Mary Deare, you can’t quit this one too.’ So I was kind of trapped into doing it.

Like Roger Thornhill.

LEHMAN: Yes, like my own character, always wondering, ‘How can I get out of this?’ And the only way I could get out of it was to ‘write’ my way out of it. And I think that, despite the unpleasantness of having to work under those conditions, I wound up at the top of my form as a writer, and, later, Hitch was at the top of his form when he directed the picture. In a sense, it’s unlike any picture he ever made. And it seems to have legs. They’ve just re-released the film in Australia as a feature – all over again.

It’s still extremely popular.

LEHMAN: Yes, it’s just incredible what endurance it has. It’s kind of timeless.

It is. And one of its great pleasures is the ingeniousness of the plot. You can’t watch the film without being amazed at how it keeps working itself out, how it keeps progressing. Given all its complications, it’s amazing that you were actually writing the script without an overall plan without knowing where you were going, except to Mount Rushmore.

LEHMAN: And I think that difficulty turned out to be very positive and beneficial. Since I never knew where I was going next, I was constantly painting myself into corners, and then trying to figure a way out of them. As a result, the picture has about ten acts instead of three, and if I’d tried to sit down at the beginning and conceive the whole plot, I could have never done it. Everything was written in increments: moving it a little bit forward, then a little bit more, one page at a time. Saying to myself, ‘Okay, you’ve got him out of Grand Central Station. Now he’s on the train, now what? Well, there’s no female character in it yet, I better put Eve on the train. But what should I do with her? And where should they meet? Well, let’s see, I’ve ridden on the 20th Century, how about the dining car?’ That’s the way it went, very slowly. Always asking, ‘What do I do next?’ So, in the end, the audience never knows what’s coming next, because I didn’t either.

It pays off consistently, and most thrillers don’t.


LEHMAN: And it’s not just suspense. It’s not like Shadow of a Doubt or Vertigo. It’s not really a ‘dark’ picture at all.

But it does have definite affinities with other Hitchcock films, and I wonder if you thought about any of them while your were writing ‘North by Northwest’? Like ‘The 39 Steps’ or ‘Saboteur’ or ‘Notorious’?

LEHMAN: Not at all. As a matter of fact, I’d forgotten all about The 39 Steps, and I was a little chagrined when somebody reminded me about it. I was a kid when that picture came out, and I’d mostly forgotten it. Then somebody reminded me that there was a helicopter chase in the film.

Well, it’s not really a chase. Robert Donat is being pursued over the Scottish moors by the police, and there’s a single, cut away shot of a surveillance hover craft. On the other hand, there is an extended train scene in the film as well as the other similarities I mentioned earlier.

LEHMAN: Well, I guess if you write long enough, all kinds of parallelisms will pop up. And if you’ve gone to the movies all your life, you’re bound to absorb certain things, and then reuse them without realizing that you’re doing it. I’m sure that it happens, but when I was writing North by Northwest, I had no other films in my mind. I was struggling too much with the one I was working on.

Is it true that the idea of the nonexistent spy, Kaplan, was suggested to Hitchcock by a New York newspaperman?

LEHMAN: Yes. That was back when Hitch and I were bouncing around ideas, and he said, ‘You know, I was at a cocktail party in New York, and Otis Gurnsey told me that the CIA had once used a nonexistent decoy.’ Gurnsey, who was a drama writer for the New York Sun, was wondering if Hitch could use it in one of his films sometime – and we did.

I didn’t know that the CIA actually did it?

LEHMAN: As far as I know, they did.

This may be a bit of a stretch, but I wonder if you were influenced by the 1956 British film ‘The Man Who Never Was’, which told the true story of the extraordinary World War II deception in which the British Secret Service took a corpse, dressed it up, gave it phony papers, and dropped it in the ocean off the coast of Spain? The deception was so effective that Hitler significantly altered his defenses for the Allied invasion of Italy.

LEHMAN: I’m sure I didn’t have it in mind, but, now that you mention it, I do remember that film. I guess you can never be sure where the hell your ideas come from. It’s very hard to describe how one ‘writes,’ the actual process – unless you’re writing an essay or an article, then you’ve got something specific to focus on. But when you’re writing an original screenplay, you can’t help but wonder where some of your ideas come from. Often, they just pop into your head in response to the questions you ask yourself. ‘How do I get out of this?’ or ‘How do I get them to say that?’ I decided to make Thornhill an advertising executive so he could talk in a kind of clever repartee, rather than speaking in a straightforward manner. I felt that would be more amusing, and that it sounded like something Cary Grant could do very well. That’s one thing about that script that I’m very proud of – the dialogue, the repartee. Nobody ever says anything straight. Yet even though it’s rather oblique, it’s still perfectly understandable.

It’s one of the cleverest scripts ever written, both for its plot and its dialogue. Now, I also wanted to ask you about your on site research trip for the film.

LEHMAN: Well, I pretty much followed Thornhill’s movements, beginning in New York where I spent five days at the United Nations. I was looking for a place where a murder could take place, and when they found out what I was up to, they banned Hitchcock from shooting there. So, he had to build his own sets in Culver City.

They’re very convincing.

LEHMAN: Yes, they are. I think Hitch managed to steal one shot at the UN – Cary walking up the steps and into the building – but that was it. Then, I went to a judge in Glen Cove, Long Island, and had him put me through the business of being arrested for drunk driving. I had no idea how to write that scene, and going through the process was a lot of fun.

Didn’t you also check out the home of the Soviet ambassador while you were out on Long Island?

LEHMAN: Yes, in Glen Cove. That’s where the Russian delegation lived during the Cold War. They rented a mansion out there for the United Nations sessions.

Then, you headed ‘northwest.’

LEHMAN: Well, even though I’d traveled on the 20th Century when I was a New Yorker – and I certainly knew Grand Central Station and all that – I decided to take a trip on the 20th Century Limited just in case something useful stuck in my mind. So, I got off at the LaSalle Street Station in Chicago, went to the Ambassador East Hotel, and checked things out. Then, I took the bullet train to Rapid City, South Dakota, hired a forest ranger on his day off, and started climbing Mount Rushmore. I wanted to climb to the top and see what was up there. But it was an absolutely idiotic thing to do. Halfway up, I looked down and thought, ‘God, I’m just a screenwriter. What the hell am I doing up here? One slip and I’m dead!’ So, I gave the Polaroid camera to the forest ranger, and I told him to go up to the top and take photos of everything.

Did you wait where you were until he came back, or did you climb down by yourself?

LEHMAN: I came back down by myself. Very, very carefully. It might be more accurate to say that I crawled back down. It was an absolutely idiotic idea.

Were the Polaroids any good?

LEHMAN: Yes, but I was surprised that there’s nothing much up there. Then the Department of Parks found out that we were planning to have people fall off the face of their famous monument, and they banned Hitchcock from shooting up there. He was furious. So the whole thing had to be constructed in Culver City. It was a marvelous job of set design. There was only one long shot that Hitch got at Rushmore. It was taken from the cafeteria, and they couldn’t stop him from doing that. Looking back on it all, it was a very memorable project. But there was a lot of drama behind the drama – especially trying to get the script finished. There were constant, endless, seemingly insurmountable crises of script, but, somehow, I finished the first sixty-five pages, and I sent them off to Hitch. He was on vacation in the Bahamas at the time, and he sent me back a very enthusiastic, four-page, handwritten letter. He loved the first sixty-five pages – which was high praise from Hitch – and it was very encouraging.

So I kept pressing forward, and Hitch, confident that I now knew what the hell I was doing, moved over to MGM from his home base at Universal, and started story-boarding the script with his art director, and casting the roles. And all the time, I’m sitting there in my office sweating the fact that I have no idea whatsoever why the hell they’re all going to Mount Rushmore! Why were these people heading to South Dakota? I had no idea! So, the last act of the script was blank. Actual blank pages! Then Cary Grant came on the picture with some astronomical salary, and I was still sitting there in my office with nothing but a partially-completed script. So I called up Hitch, and I told him we were in big trouble. He came rushing over to my office, sat across from me, and the two of us stared at each other.

Finally, he suggested that we call in some mystery novelist to help us kick around ideas, but I didn’t like the idea. After all, I was getting paid by MGM to write the thing, and I felt that it would make me look pretty foolish. I kept saying, ‘God, what’ll they say about me upstairs?’ and Hitch would say, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell them it’s all my fault. I’ll tell them I should’ve been able to help you, but I couldn’t – or something like that.’

Then we went to his office – it was about six o’clock in the evening – and we kept talking about his idea, even discussing which mystery writer we should get, and, all the time, the right side of my brain was working, and suddenly, as I was listening to him – not really ignoring him – I said, ‘She takes a gun out of her purse and shoots him.’ So where the hell did that come from? It just popped into my head. That’s the way it works sometimes: you’ve got a problem and, no matter what else is going on around you, the right side of your brain keeps working on it and then, suddenly, it pops out of nowhere. And Hitch took it right in stride. Even though I’d completely changed the subject and suddenly blurted out, ‘She takes a gun out of her purse and shoots him,’ he didn’t miss a beat and responded, ‘Yes, the Polish Underground sometimes killed their own members, just to prove they weren’t in the Underground.’ And I said, ‘Yes, but these are fake bullets. That’ll convince Van Damm that he has to take her away with him. Now that she’s a fugitive, he’ll decide to take her on the plane.’ And, instantly, I had the whole last act.

It must’ve been quite a relief.

LEHMAN: It sure was. For both of us.

And it’s still a very effective scene when she pulls out that gun in the Rushmore cafeteria.

LEHMAN: It’s crazy, but it worked...

Okay, now that the script’s finally done, you have this long history of warring with directors and actors who try to alter your dialogue. So it must have been quite a relief to work with Hitchcock, who didn’t allow that kind of thing.

LEHMAN: That’s definitely true. He never allowed a word to be changed. Just like Billy Wilder. Absolutely. I could be pretty awful about people messing with my lines; I guess I’m a very passive-aggressive person. I remember one time on From The Terrace, when they were rehearsing downstairs in New York, and I was up in my apartment at the Plaza Hotel, and the director called me and said, ‘Paul Newman’s struggling. He says he can’t read one of his speeches. He doesn’t know how to do it.’ So, I said, ‘I’ll be right down there.’ I immediately went downstairs, walked over to Paul, took the script, read the speech, handed him back the script, and said, ‘There, I read it. Now, you do it.’ It was very rude. But I was always very protective of my scripts, and Hitch respected that…

Could you discuss the metamorphosis of the title?

LEHMAN: As I mentioned earlier, all of Hitch’s original ideas – even the ones I didn’t use – seemed to be unconsciously moving in a northwesterly direction. So, that’s what I called the project for quite a few months, In a Northwesterly Direction. Finally, after Hitchcock told them that I was writing an original screenplay instead of The Wreck of the Mary Deare, the head of the story department, Kenneth McKenna, heard the title, and he said, ‘Why don’t you use North By Northwest as a working title?’ So we did.

And Hitchcock and I were always certain that it was only a working title and that we’d change it later when we came up with something better, but we never did… It wasn’t until after the picture was done, that somebody wrote in and pointed out the quotation from Shakespeare where Hamlet says, ‘I am but mad north-northwest.’ And the same thing’s true with the direction. When we were making the picture, we had no idea that ‘north by northwest’ wasn’t an actual direction. For some reason, it sounded right to us.

One of the most famous and most discussed sequences in American film is the crop duster attack on Thornhill. How did it transform from a cyclone to a crop duster?

LEHMAN: One day, Hitch said to me, ‘I’ve always wanted to do a scene in the middle of nowhere – where there’s absolutely nothing. You’re out in the open, and there’s nothing all around you. The camera can turn around 360 degrees, and there’s nothing there but this one man standing all alone – because the villains, who are out to kill him, have lured him out to this lonely spot.’ Then Hitch continued, ‘Suddenly, a tornado comes along and....’ ‘But Hitch,’ I interrupted, ‘how do the villains create a tornado?’ and he had no idea.

So I wondered, ‘What if a plane comes out of the sky?’ And he liked it immediately, and he said, ‘Yes, it’s a crop duster. We can plant some crops nearby.’ So we planted a fake cornfield in Bakersfield and did the scene that way. And, like you said, it became a very famous sequence. As a matter of fact, that’s how I knew that Cary Grant had died. Every channel on TV was showing that shot of Cary running away from the plane. It’s strange, isn’t it, that such a distinguished career should be remembered mostly for that one shot?

But it’s an unforgettable image.

LEHMAN: Yes, it is.

I wonder if you were surprised at all by the way Hitchcock did the crop duster sequence. I know that you and Hitchcock discussed every shot in the film, but still, not many directors would’ve had the nerve or the confidence to shoot a seven minute sequence with only a few lines of dialogue.

LEHMAN: Well, that’s the way I wrote it, almost shot by shot. I pictured it that way, and I even acted it out for Hitch. But you’re right, only Hitchcock would’ve had the guts to let all those cars go by with nothing else happening. But taking risks was one of Hitch’s trademarks, and, since the audience knew it was a Hitchcock picture, they were willing to be patient.

And the scene grows more and more ominous. You know that ‘something’ is coming.

LEHMAN: Yes, like when the truck is approaching, and you start to wonder if it’ll run him down, but, instead, there’s just lots of dust. It’s very surprising, and very effective. Hitch felt that the longer you can keep the audience waiting, the better.

Over the course of your career, you had a habit of suggesting camera shots to the directors you worked with. How did Hitchcock react to that?

LEHMAN: The only time he ever really got angry at me – though I’m sure he got mad at me at other times – was about that very thing. Fed up, he suddenly burst out, ‘Why do you insist on telling me how to direct this picture?’ And I said, ‘Why do you insist on telling me how to write it?’ But that’s the way I was. I’d get a picture in my head, and if I had a good idea about how it should be shot, I’d put it on paper. Why not?

Some directors, like Robert Wise, who did four of my pictures, appreciated my suggestions. I remember that sometimes I’d go down to the set, and I’d be astounded. I’d see Bob building this huge set, and I think to myself, ‘God, just because I put those words on the paper, look at what’s happening here! Be careful! Be sure it’s a good idea!’ But Bob always listened, unless it was something really terrible. So on North by Northwest, I tried to develop a Hitchcock frame of mind. I became like Hitchcock, and I tried to think like him. And whenever Hitch didn’t like something I suggested, he’d simply say, ‘Oh, Ernie, that’s the way they do it in the movies.’ And then I’d know better, and I’d try to write the scene over again.

When the picture was finished, it was Hitchcock’s longest film at 136 minutes, and an anxious MGM wanted to cut out the forest scene at Mount Rushmore when Thornhill and Eve are finally able to talk to each other without the previous lies and deceptions. It’s clearly one of the best and most important scenes in the movie. Did you get involved in the arguments over this?

LEHMAN: Actually, they just wanted to cut the scene down, not to cut it out entirely. Because you have to have that scene in the film – which, by the way, was very difficult to write. All the deception is gone, and they’re very serious, but they’re still being clever – because that’s the way they are. Anyway, we kept the whole scene. Sol Siegel asked us down to the screening room, and we watched the scene, and he pleaded with Hitch to cut it down. But Hitch said no. He said that ‘it would spoil the picture,’ and he was adamant. He knew that he had the final word – given his contract. Besides, the studio people were pretty much in awe of Hitchcock, and they were very afraid of offending him.

The scene actually is a bit long, but I didn’t know how to write it any shorter. And the transition is absolutely necessary. Another scene that was extremely difficult to write was the one in Eve’s hotel room after she’s just tried to have him killed by the plane. How do you play it? You can’t have him get too angry, because then you won’t have a relationship. So, I tried having him be angry with her in a slightly affectionate way: ‘How does a girl like you get to be a girl like you?’

What also helps is his deception in the bathroom. When we realize what Thornhill is up to, we can accept what came before, thinking, ‘So that’s why he contained his anger’ because he’s planning to follow her.

LEHMAN: Yes, I’m glad that works.

‘North by Northwest’ is a classic in the thriller genre, but it also has serious underlying themes, and I’d like to ask you about two. The first is Thornhill’s ‘remaking’ himself from a smug, slick, self absorbed Madison Avenue liar into a man who becomes extremely heroic and compassionate at the end. First, his identity is stripped away, and then all the comforts and protections of his easy, shallow life are similarly removed before he can remake himself.

LEHMAN: Well, this may sound strange, but I wasn’t consciously trying to remake him or redeem him. It happened unconsciously.

But he’s so glib in the beginning . . .

LEHMAN: I know. He even steals a cab.

That’s what I mean. Would he do that at the end?

LEHMAN: I don’t think he would.

So he’s matured. He’s changed himself.

LEHMAN: Yes, as a result of his wild escapade.


But you’re the one who wrote it the one who made him mature.

LEHMAN: I know, but it wasn’t conscious. I think I have little computers in my head that work unconsciously. And I’m glad they do. Who knows where this stuff comes from?

Well, maybe you’ll say the same thing about the next question which relates to the ‘marriage’ theme in the movie. British critic Robin Wood and others have written quite perceptively about this aspect of the film which portrays two shallow people, afraid of commitment, who eventually find love and, at the very end of the picture, marriage.

LEHMAN: Well, you know, we were forced to put in that very last line on the train, ‘Come along, Mrs. Thornhill.’ It’s actually dubbed over. If you watch it carefully, you won’t see Cary’s lips moving. That was the old production code. What a difference from today!

Yes, but it’s still a logical progression from the previous scene when Thornhill proposes to Eve on Mount Rushmore. And that scene follows naturally from their discussion in the woods when Eve explains how sad and pathetic her life has been, and Thornhill asks, ‘How come?’ and she responds, ‘Men like you.’ But Thornhill, confused, asks, ‘What’s wrong with men like me?’ and Eve replies, ‘They don’t believe in marriage.’ Then the always clever, twice divorced Thornhill says, ‘I’ve been married twice,’ and Eve responds, ‘See what I mean?’

LEHMAN: Yes, you’re right. And that scene in the forest definitely makes it better – it leads naturally to the ending. But I still can’t honestly say that I would’ve put that final line in the picture. But who knows? That was forty years ago. All I can say is that the marriage theme rose naturally out of my struggles with the plot, and I didn’t dwell on it very much when I was writing the script…

– From ‘A Conversation with Ernest Lehman’. In Classic American Films: Conversations with the Screenwriters. By William Baer.