Alfred Hitchcock Talks to Francois Truffaut

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Once a week for ten years, beginning in 1955, Hitchcock introduced his popular television show with a formal “good evening, ladies and gentlemen” spoken in an exaggerated British accent, sounding something like a movie version of an English butler. He was sarcastic and ironic; he mocked his sponsors and himself. He had, in short, a good time at everyone’s expense, his own included. The publicity and public exposure his appearances provided was invaluable. Despite the fact that Hitchcock coveted a quiet, creative life, he wanted everyone to know who was responsible for the films he created, as evidenced by the fact that he quite literally wrote himself into his films by means of brief, silent cameos in almost all of them. These, and the television series, guaranteed an almost personal engagement with his audience.

Hitchcock wanted another kind of engagement, however. As Robert Kapsis has pointed out, he wanted critical, even scholarly, recognition of his work. This began in the late fifties in France, a country that always took filmmaking seriously. The first book-length study of his work was written in 1957 by two French critics who would soon become important directors in their own right: Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. In 1962, one of the most famous of the “new wave” of French directors working in the late fifties and throughout the sixties, Francois Truffaut (who made, among many other films, The Four Hundred Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, and Fahrenheit 451), began a career-long interview with Hitchcock. The result was many days of conversation, conducted with the assistance of a translator, that finally appeared in a book called, simply enough, Hitchcock/Truffaut. In it, Hitchcock continued what he did in most other interviews. He talked about the structure of his films, his love of the form of film itself, and all the things that could be accomplished with it. He talked about his profound awareness of the audience and how they could be manipulated to respond the way he wanted them to. He never talked about the narrative depth of his work, about its emotional and psychological complexities (the closest he gets is the reference in the interview to his own desire for orderliness in his life). Otherwise, he always left interpretation to others.

In the following extract Francois Truffaut talks to Alfred Hitchcock about “Pure Cinema,” Playing His Audience Like an Organ, and Psycho.

F.T Before talking about Psycho I would like to ask whether you have any theory in respect to the opening scene of your pictures. Some of them start out with an act of violence; others simply indicate the locale.

A.H. It all depends on what the purpose is. The opening of The Birds is an attempt to suggest the normal, complacent, everyday life in San Francisco. Sometimes I simply use a title to indicate that we’re in Phoenix or in San Francisco. It’s too easy, I know, but it’s economical. I’m torn between the need for economy and the wish to present a locale, even when it’s a familiar one, with more subtlety. After all, it’s no problem at all to present Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the back- ground, or London with Big Ben on the horizon.

F.T. In pictures that don’t open up with violence, you almost invariably apply the same rule of exposition: From the farthest to the nearest. You show the city, then a building in the city, a room in that building. That’s the way Psycho begins.

A.H. In the opening of Psycho I wanted to say that we were in Phoenix, and we even spelled out the day and the time, but I only did that to lead up to a very important fact: that it was two-forty-three in the afternoon and this is the only time the poor girl has to go to bed with her lover. It suggests that she’s spent her whole lunch hour with him.

F.T. It’s a nice touch because it establishes at once that this is an illicit affair.

A.H. It also allows the viewer to become a Peeping Tom.

F.T. Jean Douchet, a French film critic, made a witty comment on that scene. He wrote that since John Gavin is stripped to his waist, but Janet Leigh wears a brassiere, the scene is only satisfying to one half of the audience.

A.H. In truth, Janet Leigh should not have been wearing a brassiere. I can see nothing immoral about that scene, and I get no special kick out of it. But the scene would have been more interesting if the girl’s bare breasts had been rubbing against the man’s chest.

F.T. I noticed that throughout the whole picture you tried to throw out red herrings to the viewers, and it occurred to me that the reason for that erotic opening was to mislead them again. The sex angle was raised so that later on the audience would think that Anthony Perkins is merely a voyeur. If I’m not mistaken, out of your fifty works, this is the only film showing a woman in a brassiere.

A.H. Well, one of the reasons for which I wanted to do the scene in that way was that the audiences are changing. It seems to me that the straightforward kissing scene would be looked down at by the younger viewers; they’d feel it was silly. I know that they themselves behave as John Gavin and Janet Leigh did. I think that nowadays you have to show them the way they themselves behave most of the time. Besides, I also wanted to give a visual impression of despair and solitude in that scene.

F.T. Yes, it occurred to me that Psycho was oriented toward a new generation of filmgoers. There were many things in that picture that you’d never done in your earlier films.

A.H. Absolutely. In fact, that’s also true in a technical sense for The Birds.

F.T. I’ve read the novel from which Psycho was taken, and one of the things that bothered me is that it cheats. For instance, there are passages like this: “Norman sat down beside his mother and they began a conversation.” Now, since she doesn’t exist, that’s obviously misleading, whereas the film narration is rigorously worked out to eliminate these discrepancies. What was it that attracted you to the novel?

A.H. 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.

F.T. The killing is pretty much like a rape. I believe the novel was based on a newspaper story.

A.H. It was the story of a man who kept his mother’s body in his house, somewhere in Wisconsin.

F.T. In Psycho there’s a whole arsenal of terror, which you generally avoid: the ghostly house . . .

A.H. The mysterious atmosphere is, to some extent, quite accidental. For instance, the actual locale of the events is in northern California, where that type of house is very com- mon. They’re either called “California Gothic,” or, when they’re particularly awful, they’re called “California ginger-bread.” I did not set out to reconstruct an old-fashioned Universal horror-picture atmosphere. I simply wanted to be accurate, and there is no question but that both the house and the motel are authentic reproductions of the real thing. I chose that house and motel because I realized that if I had taken an ordinary low bungalow the effect wouldn’t have been the same. I felt that type of architecture would help the atmosphere of the yarn.

F.T. I must say that the architectural contrast between the vertical house and the horizontal motel is quite pleasing to the eye.

A.H. Definitely, that’s our composition: a vertical block and a horizontal block.

F.T. In that whole picture there isn’t a single character with whom a viewer might identify.

A.H. It wasn’t necessary. Even so, the audience was probably sorry for the poor girl at the time of her death. In fact, the first part of the story was a red herring. That was deliberate, you see, to detract the viewer’s attention in order to heighten the murder. We purposely made that beginning on the long side, with the bit about the theft and her escape, in order to get the audience absorbed with the question of whether she would or would not be caught. Even that business about the forty thousand dollars was milked to the very end so that the public might wonder what’s going to happen to the money.

You know that the public always likes to be one jump ahead of the story; they like to feel they know what’s coming next. So you deliberately play upon this fact to control their thoughts. The more we go into the details of the girl’s journey, the more the audience becomes absorbed in her flight. That’s why so much is made of the motorcycle cop and the change of cars. When Anthony Perkins tells the girl of his life in the motel, and they exchange views, you still play upon the girl’s problem. It seems as if she’s decided to go back to Phoenix and give the money back, and it’s possible that the public anticipates by thinking, “Ah, this young man is influencing her to change her mind.” You turn the viewer in one direction and then in another; you keep him as far as possible from what’s actually going to happen.

In the average production, Janet Leigh would have been given the other role. She would have played the sister who’s investigating. It’s rather unusual to kill the star in the first third of the film. I purposely killed the star so as to make the killing even more unexpected. As a matter of fact, that’s
why I insisted that the audiences be kept out of the theaters once the picture had started, because the late-comers would have been waiting to see Janet Leigh after she has disappeared from the screen action.

Psycho has a very interesting construction and that game with the audience was fascinating. I was directing the viewers. You might say I was playing them, like an organ.

F.T. I admired that picture enormously, but I felt a letdown during the two scenes with the sheriff.

A.H. The sheriff ’s intervention comes under the heading of what we have discussed many times before: “Why don’t they go to the police?” I’ve always replied, “They don’t go to the police because it’s dull.” Here is a perfect example of what happens when they go to the police.

F.T. Still, the action picks up again almost immediately after that. One intriguing aspect is the way the picture makes the viewer constantly switch loyalties. At the beginning he hopes that Janet Leigh won’t be caught. The murder is very shocking, but as soon as Perkins wipes away the traces of the killing, we begin to side with him, to hope that he won’t be found out. Later on, when we learn from the sheriff that Perkins’ mother has been dead for eight years, we again change sides and are against Perkins, but this time, it’s sheer curiosity. The viewer’ emotions are not exactly wholesome...

F.T. Would you say that Psycho is an experimental film?

A.H. Possibly. My main satisfaction is that the film had an effect on the audiences, and I consider that very important. I don’t care about the subject matter; I don’t care about the acting; but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the sound track and all of the technical ingredients that made the audience scream. I feel it’s tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve some- thing of a mass emotion. And with Psycho we most definitely achieved this. It wasn’t a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film.

F.T. Yes, that’s true.

A.H. That’s why I take pride in the fact that Psycho, more than any of my other pictures, is a film that belongs to film-makers, to you and me. I can’t get a real appreciation of the picture in the terms we’re using now. People will say, “It was a terrible film to make. The subject was horrible, the people were small, there were no characters in it.” I know all of this, but I also know that the construction of the story and the way in which it was told caused audiences all over the world to react and become emotional.

F.T. Yes, emotional and even physical.

A.H. Emotional. I don’t care whether it looked like a small or a large picture. I didn’t start off to make an important movie. I thought I could have fun with this subject and this situation. The picture cost eight hundred thousand dollars. It was an experiment in this sense: Could I make a feature film under the same conditions as a television show? I used a complete television unit to shoot it very quickly. The only place where I digressed was when I slowed down the murder scene, the cleaning-up scene, and the other scenes that indicated anything that required time. All of the rest was handled in the same way that they do it in television.

F.T. I know that you produced Psycho yourself. How did you make out with it?

A.H. Psycho cost us no more than eight hundred thousand dollars to make. It has grossed some fifteen million dollars to date.

F.T. That’s fantastic! Would you say this was your greatest hit to date?

A.H. Yes. And that’s what I’d like you to do—a picture that would gross millions of dollars throughout the world! It’s an area of film-making in which it’s more important for you to be pleased with the technique than with the content. It’s the kind of picture in which the camera takes over. Of course, since critics are more concerned with the scenario, it won’t necessarily get you the best notices, but you have to design your film just as Shakespeare did his plays—for an audience.

F.T. That reminds me that Psycho is particularly universal because it’s a half-silent movie; there are at least two reels with no dialogue at all. And that also simplified all the problems of subtitling and dubbing.

A.H. Do you know that in Thailand they use no subtitles or dubbing? They shut off the sound and a man stands somewhere near the screen and interprets all the roles, using different voices.

– Good Evening. Alfred Hitchcock Talks to Francois Truffaut about “Pure Cinema,” Playing His Audience Like an Organ, and Psycho.