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.

 

Writing for Hitchcock: Interview with Ed McBain

The Birds (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

When Alfred Hitchcock started work on his film, The Birds (1963), he asked critically-acclaimed New York novelist Evan Hunter (also known as crime writer Ed McBain) to write the script. Hitchcock knew Hunter could work in the Hollywood milieu from his contributions to Alfred Hitchcock Presents (the director’s long-running television show) as well as Hunter’s other screenplay adaptations of his best-selling novels. He later confided in Hunter that he chose a famous novelist to write the screenplay for The Birds to garner the critical respect and recognition that had eluded his other films.

The following interview with Ed McBain (Evan Hunter) was conducted by Charles L.P. Silet courtesy of MysteryNet.

MysteryNet: When did you first meet Hitchcock?

Hunter: I met him after he had done First Offense, which was a serious story of mine, on Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I didn’t write the screenplay for that but it was based on my story. When I did write one it was based on a story by Robert Turner. It was a difficult thing to do because the story was just an internal monologue, the kid thinking about the electrocution of his father at 11:00 o’clock. I transferred it to a bar where the kid’s drunk and trying to get drunker and is obnoxious and I put in all the bystanders in the bar to open it up.

This may have been in Hitch’s mind when he called upon me to do The Birds, because the Daphne du Maurier story, The Birds involves just two people in a cottage. They hardly say anything, there’s no dialog in the entire story. Hitch also told me later, and I learned later from other sources, that he was looking for some ‘artistic respectability’ with The Birds. This was something that had always eluded him, and he deliberately chose to work with a successful New York novelist, rather than a Hollywood screenwriter, many of whom are much better screenwriters than I am.

MysteryNet: Tell us a little bit about your experience of working with Hitchcock.

Hunter: Hitch told me on the phone that he had called my agent and asked if I would want to do The Birds. I’d had some stuff done on his television show, so I vaguely knew him. But I wasn’t familiar with du Maurier’s story, so I said ‘Let me read it.’ I read it and it sounded interesting and I accepted the job. But when I spoke with him he said ‘Forget the story now that you’ve read it, because all we’re using is the title and the notion of birds attacking people.’ He said, ‘That’s it. So when you come out to the coast, come out with some ideas we can pursue and I’ll have some and we’ll talk further.’ In the first two days we shot down my ideas and his ideas, and started from scratch.

MysteryNet: And as you worked you worked in tandem?

Hunter: We spent a lot of time trying to figure out who the girl was going to be – that’s Hollywood talk: ‘the girl;’ it ain’t my talk – and ‘the boy’ and figured out how we were going to get the story going. I would come in every day having thought the night before and he would always say ‘Tell me the story so far,’ and I would tell him and then he would start shooting holes in it. He was always thinking in terms of the shot he could get, and I was always thinking in terms of the logic of the actions of the characters. He wanted a scene where Melanie Daniels rents a boat and goes across the inlet and gets hit by a bird. That’s the first bird attack.

I would think why is she going to all this trouble renting a boat when she could easily drive around? But it was a good working relationship. He was meticulous about the circumstances in the script. There are holes you could drive Mack trucks through in some thrillers. He said ‘In my films I’d like to think that if you’d reel it back you’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, there it is.’ Nowadays of course we can do that through video replay.

MysteryNet: You said that you worked with other directors and often times the script gets so changed it’s hardly recognizable. How much of The Birds is really yours?

Hunter: Most of it is. The most noticeable deletion was not shooting the end of the script as I had written it. I had another ten pages of script that he did not shoot, or if he shot I never saw them. And the most noticeable addition was the scene where in an attempt to give the girl some depth at the birthday party for the children Rod Taylor takes her up on a hilltop and removes from one pocket of his jacket a martini shaker, and then from the other pocket two martini glasses and pours martinis for them. On this hilltop they start talking about her empty life.

It’s a stupid scene and I don’t know who wrote it. Rod Taylor said to me, the day they were shooting it and I was on the set, he said ‘Evan, did you write this scene?’ I read it and I said, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘We’re shooting it this morning.’ I said ‘Well, let me talk to Hitch about it.’ I went to Hitch and said ‘This is a dumb scene, it’s going to slow down the movie enormously, slow down the point where the birds attack the children at the birthday party, and it serves no purpose and I don’t think it should be in the movie.’ And he looked me dead in the eye and he said ‘Are you going to trust me or a two-bit actor?’

MysteryNet: What was in the ending that you wrote?

Hunter: Mitch leaves with his family driving a convertible with a cloth top and there was a reason for that. And the reason was that I wanted to make the final assault the birds attacking the car’s top. Also in my version, as we leave the farmhouse we see the devastation that was wreaked on the town itself. We see overturned school buses and signs of people having defended their homes against the bird attacks. So it becomes not just an isolated attack on Mitch and his family but a town-wide attack with implications that it may have gone even beyond the town.

Mitch and his family finally get to another road block and it’s covered with birds and Mitch gets out and moves some stuff and he gets back into the car. As they start driving through it the birds all come up off the roadblock and start attacking the car as they’re driving out of town. In that area in Northern California the coast roads have these horseshoe curves but the birds fly in a straight line after the car, and as they attack the canvas top we see from inside the car looking up all these beaks tearing at the canvas and finally the whole top goes back and the birds are hovering over the car.

Just then the road straightens out and Mitch hits the gas pedal and the car moves off and the birds just keep falling back, falling back, falling back. In the car they all catch their breath and Mitch’s sister says, ‘Mitch do you think they’ll be in San Francisco when we get there?’ and he says, ‘I don’t know, honey,’ and that’s the last line of the movie.

MysteryNet: Why didn’t Hitchcock shoot it that way?

Hunter: I think he was very tired by then, and this would have required a lot of work with the scene in the car where four characters are in a tight space and the camera is in with them watching the beaks and then the scene of the birds hovering and the birds following and the helicopter shots, animation, everything. It was just too much to do.

MysteryNet: What about the restaurant scene which you wrote in Connecticut and you shipped back to Hitchcock in Hollywood?

Hunter: I love that scene, that was like a one act play. Hitch called and he said I need something more. I don’t know how we discovered where we would take them, the central characters, Melanie and Mitch, but once I knew it was a restaurant, ‘The Tides’, then I had the whole scene in place and it just wrote itself.

MysteryNet: It’s a scene which sort of explains, or provides, a kind of logic, to explain the birds’ behavior.

Hunter: That’s right. It’s really a scene of great confusion because nobody knows what the hell is happening. We made, if you’ll forgive the expression, an ‘artistic’ decision early on that we were never going to explain the bird attacks, never. Otherwise the film would become science fiction and we didn’t want to do that.

MysteryNet: Was Hitchcock easy to work with?

Hunter: Oh yeah, I loved working with him. He was like the father anyone wished he would have. He was intelligent, he was world-traveled. He knew everybody, he was famous, he was a star in his own right. I don’t know how many people would recognize Steven Spielberg if he walked into a restaurant, maybe in Hollywood, but I don’t think they would in Iowa. But if Hitch walked in they’d damn well know him. He was a big, big star. One of the few directors I think who has ever had such a high profile.

– Charles L.P. Silet: ‘Writing For Hitchcock: An Interview with Ed McBain’. Original article here

John Michael Hayes: On Writing Rear Window

Rear Window (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

John Michael Hayes wrote the screenplays for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Trouble with Harry (1955), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). Based on a Cornell Woolrich short story, the screenplay for Rear Window was Hayes’ first project with a major director. A keen writer of dialogue, Hayes quickly understood that because Hitchcock grew up in silent films, he had a tendency to rely on the camera as much as possible. He later recalled: ‘I caught some of that spirit. Hitchcock taught me about how to tell a story with the camera and tell it silently.’

Rear Window (1954) is an enthralling Hitchcockian filmic study of human obsession and voyeurism. This cinematic masterpiece was shot entirely on a single set constructed at Paramount Studios - a realistic courtyard comprised of 32 apartments at a fictitious Manhattan address. Each of the other tenants provides an astute commentary on marriage and a comprehensive survey of male/female relations, while the protagonist observes them via his'rear window.' The camera angles are mostly from the protagonist's apartment, which means that the film spectator (in a dark theatre) sees the tenants of the other flats almost exclusively via his eyes - sharing in his voyeuristic surveillance. 

Parallel to the crime-thriller theme of mysterious apartment neighbours is the struggle of the passively observant and immobile protagonist (James Stewart), a magazine photographer who is impotently confined to a wheelchair while recuperating in his Greenwich Village apartment and fearful of marriage's imprisoning effects. Confined by his plaster cast, he fights to overcome his ambivalence and unwillingness to marry his high-fashion model fiancee-girlfriend (Grace Kelly).

Rear Window grows into an immersive universe, and Alfred Hitchcock brilliantly places us in it to the point that we are compelled to participate in the film’s narrative. We are, in a sense, accomplices in the protagonist’s voyeurism. 

Working with his long-time collaborator, cinematographer Robert Burks, Hitchcock moves the camera gracefully and purposefully through the play area he has created. The camera catches items with intent and a clarity that goes beyond merely creating the sense of being in the area; it creates the sensation of being right there with Stewart, staring out into the courtyard. 

You also get a sense of the genuine core of visual filmmaking, as his ability to suggest and even persuade the audience is imprinted on us by what he thinks vital. Hitchcock establishes practically all of Stewart's biography in a wordless tour of his room as our protagonist sleeps.

Hitchcock builds suspense incrementally via various changes in perspective, time of day, and persons entering and exiting the building. Our one point of contact is Stewart, who is confined to a wheelchair.

The primary focus of Rear Window is a horrific mystery thriller that unfolds in a methodical manner that is unsettling in part because Hitchcock has condensed everything into a limited area. Additionally, he has disabled his protagonist, and the outsiders continuously urge us to second guess or reconsider our preconceptions, whether it's Stella (Thelma Ritter), Jefferies' police officer pal (Wendell Corey), or his best friend Lisa. Each character stands in opposition to Jefferies at various points while also serving as a sounding board for his implausible notions that begin to show some resemblance to reality. We have the opportunity to be a part of it all. 

As with Vertigo four years later, there is an unsettling sensation that Hitchcock is tapping into some of humanity's fundamental urges to watch and spy on others for pleasure without consequence or vulnerability.

The critic Chris Wehner takes up this idea in a 2002 interview with John Michael Hayes in which he discusses the writing of Rear Window. It provides a fascinating insight into Hayes’ working methods and his relationship with the great director:

Rear Window is considered to be Hitchcock’s most ‘cinematic‘ picture. At times it had to communicate a lot to the audience without a word ever being spoken. This isn’t surprising as Hitchcock started directing in 1922, during the silent era, making several silent films. By 1954, the year Rear Window was released he had clearly mastered the art of directing. However, before he could unleash his visual brilliance there had to be a great script from which to allow such a great movie to be made.

Think of the drawbacks to the story. First, the protagonist is bound to a wheelchair and is most of the time a reactive participant who is essentially isolated. Second, the antagonist doesn’t say more than a dozen words (at least that we hear), and isn’t confrontational with the protagonist until the very end. Hitchcock often said, ‘the better the villain, the better the picture.’ The obstacles placed in the protagonist’s way were rooted in circumstance and happenstance – nothing placed by the antagonist. Thirdly, the entire movie takes place in an apartment and what is seen from the window. What might at first be seen as limitations were most likely viewed as cinematic possibilities and challenges that Hitchcock could not refuse.

John Michael Hayes’ screenplay was based on Cornell Woolrich’s original 1942 short story ‘It Had to Be Murder’. He was assigned to write the script after one meeting with Hitchcock.

Hitchcock didn’t sign on to direct the picture until after reading a thirteen page treatment by playwright Joshua Logan. Logan’s work laid the foundation from which Hayes wrote his treatment.

The short story lacked several important details which were added to the screenplay. It did not have a strong female character, or love interest, and Logan keenly injected that into the narrative. But, for the most part, it stuck closely to the source material. Logan’s treatment opens with New York City and Jefferies (the name is spelled ‘Jeffries‘ in Woolrich’s story and Logan’s treatment), who’s isolated in his apartment due to a broken leg in a cast. Logan created Trink, a love interest for Jeff, who is later renamed Lisa by Hayes. Also, in Logan’s treatment, Jeff is a sports writer, which is later changed to a photographer by Hayes. As in the final movie, Logan’s treatment has Jeff’s love interest go into the killer’s (Thorwald) apartment where she is discovered. The killer later comes after Jefferies when he is alone. But before he can kill Jefferies he is himself killed. Which, of course, was changed by Hayes.

Logan’s treatment clearly laid the foundation for Hayes to build on, but it had several problems and lacked numerous elements that Hitchcock and Hayes would add to strengthen the story: story elements, richer characters, more conflict, and better visuals.

Hayes constructed a convincing narrative with richly drawn characters and keenly raised the emotion and drama by injecting well placed conflict. Hayes knew that everything hinged on Jefferies’ character. He had to build a sympathetic protagonist the audience would absolutely love spending time with in order for the movie to work. He fleshed out Jefferies’ background, his relationship with Lisa, and his own internal conflict and emotional resolve. The result is a classic Thriller.

Tell me about your first meeting with Hitchcock.
I was given a copy of the Woolrich story by my agent, and was told to meet with Hitchcock later that week for dinner at the Beverly Hills Hotel. My job was simple: Read the Woolrich piece, and be prepared to discuss it in great detail and length. It was not unlike preparing for the most important book report of one’s life.

The meeting itself was a near fiasco. It felt much more like a personal test of endurance than anything resembling a story conference. Hitchcock arrived late and, with time to sit and worry over his arrival, I had a couple of drinks, which I wasn’t entirely used to. Upon his arrival, we had a feast for the ages, along with copious amounts of alcohol.

Plied by the liquor, I rambled on for much too long about Hitchcock’s prior films. And I wasn’t entirely complimentary. Hitchcock appeared to listen, but once the meal itself was finished he abruptly left. And we had never even spoken about Rear Window at all. Later, after returning home, my wife asked how the meeting went. I told her we’d better start packing our bags, as I felt quite strongly that my opportunity with Hitchcock had vanished along with any future career I had envisioned in the industry.

Amazingly, upon reporting for work on Monday, I was told that Hitchcock immensely enjoyed our dinner and that I was to be hired immediately.

When you started working on a story in outline or treatment form, did you start with characterizations, plot, situations, structure, or what?
In crafting any story, you need to go into it holding dearly a clear understanding of where it is you want to end up. If you delve into a script with no clear concept of how you want it to end, you’ll flounder while looking for ways out of the problems you’ve brought upon your own script. In other words, any lack of direction in regards to your ending directly affects the entire script itself. You’ll spend days trying to re-vamp problems you’ve created by not having a clear direction from the get-go.

In Rear Window there isn’t your typical strong villain and the protagonist is bound to a wheelchair, so how difficult was it to maintain a level of tension and suspense? 
Having non-typical characters was of no real hindrance to the establishment of tension and suspense. In reality, there was a lot to work with. With a non-typical villain, you had the built-in opportunity to engage the characters in a ‘It couldn’t be him. Could it? He’s just a regular fellow’ form of banter, just as much as having the protagonist limited in his physical actions helped the suspense of, ‘How in the world is he going to defend himself, if need be?’ Writers sometimes habitually overdo it in how their characters move, act, and depict themselves. Grand flourish in a villain works for Bond movies, I suppose, but, in the world you and I live in, true villains don’t act as such. At least not on any level you or I may have experienced. There’s a form of everyday villainy that is largely forgotten now in cinema. And that’s what audiences can align best with –what it is they see and know in everyday life.

You really fleshed out Cornell Woolrich’s short story by adding the love story and fully developing Jefferies’ character, among other things, which were not in the book. Was this your idea or Hitchcock’s? 
The idea of adding the Fremont character was mine, and it was based upon my wife, Mel, who was in fact a high fashion model herself. The love interest is a requirement, or at least it was at the time and place in which the story was crafted. My opinion was, and still is, that we all fall very hard in love sooner or later, and can clearly relate to the concept of peril brought upon those that we strongly care about. As well as the simple fact that having a headstrong, yet imperiled, female character could add a great bounty to the story. As for Jefferies, it was necessary simply due to the relative brevity of the original work. That much was clearly visible by all from the beginning of the project.

While you were writing the treatment and script for Rear Window, how involved was Hitchcock? 
Early on he was still working on Dial M for Murder. One of the greatest assets of working with Hitchcock was that he essentially left you, the writer, alone to do your work. Once I completed the work expected of me, Hitchcock and I would then literally pore over the material almost shot by shot. That was primarily his biggest involvement at that stage of development – after I had completed the first expectations of my task. Unlike a lot of other directors and producers, he didn’t bother you constantly for pages in order to summarily reject them.

What were the best and worst things about working with Hitchcock? 
The best part of working with Hitchcock was the autonomy to do the job you were hired to do without interference, as I’ve mentioned above. The worst part was his distinct stinginess in being able to offer credit where credit was due. It was of paramount importance for him to be seen as a one-man show, but that just simply wasn’t the truth, at least not in my experience.

Looking back on how the two of you parted ways, what do you suppose it was? 
What it was is exceptionally simple: He wasn’t for a moment willing to allow anyone to believe he couldn’t do it all on his own. I believe in application of credit where credit is due – if you’ve earned it, you need to be respected, regarded, and properly credited for it. At times in our work together, Hitchcock wasn’t willing to allow that...

– From ‘Chris Wehner: Interview with Rear Window scribe John Michael Hayes’ (Screenwriter’s Monthly, Dec. 2002)

 

Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’: An American Nightmare

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

When Alfred Hitchcock was interviewed by Francois Truffaut in the fall of 1962, he had this to say on Psycho: ‘It wasn’t a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance... they were aroused by pure film.’ Adding that it ‘belongs to filmmakers, to you and me.’

Made in the spirit of a low-budget movie (Psycho cost $800,000), Hitchcock utilised his television crew from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, shot in what was then an unfashionable black and white, deployed long sequences without dialogue and eschewed the traditional narrative path by having the female lead killed early on. Moreover, Hitchcock forced the audience to be attentive while breaking convention, guiding the audience to switch allegiance from Marion Crane’s (Janet Leigh’s) theft and escape, to an audacious sympathy with Anthony Perkins’ mother-fixated serial-killer, Norman Bates. The death of Marion Crane in the infamous shower sequence is followed by Norman’s painstaking clean-up of the crime scene and disposal of her body, car and stolen cash, into a nearby lake. A complex chain that plays with the audience’s identification with Norman’s feelings of fear and guilt.

The film’s melodramatic second half provides two potent set-piece shocks. The private detective Arbogast (Martin Balsam) is killed in a scene that uses back-projection to follow his death-tumble down the stairs. And the secret of Norman’s relationship with his mother is disclosed.

Hitchcock’s relish in how film affects his audience is most apparent in Psycho. ‘I was directing the viewers,’ the director told Truffaut in their book-length interview. ‘You might say I was playing them, like an organ.’

What makes Psycho timeless, however, is that it connects directly with its audience’s primal fears and concerns. Marion Crane takes a detour into a world of randomness, guilt and death. And yet on several occasions Hitchcock remarked that Psycho is a film made with a sense of amusement. ‘It's a fun picture,’ he once quipped. In his book The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures, Donald Spoto writes that the sharp wit of the film is a refusal to submit to the horror and oppression of those fears and impulses which the film so relentlessly explores:

“For most, a first viewing of Psycho is marked by suspense, even mounting terror, and by a sense of decay and death permeating the whole. Yet for all its overt Gothicism – forbidding gingerbread houses, the abundance of mirrors, terrible dark nights of madness and death – repeated viewings leave a sense, above all, of profound sadness. For Psycho describes, as perhaps no other American film, the inordinate expense of wasted lives in a world so comfortably familiar as to appear, initially, unthreatening: the world of office girls and lunchtime liaisons, of half-eaten cheese sandwiches, of motels just off the main road, of shy young men and maternal devotion. But these may just be flimsy veils for spiritual, moral and psychic disarray of terrifying ramifications. 

“Psycho postulates that the American dream has become a nightmare, and that all its components play us false. Hitchcock reveals the emptiness of the dream that a woman can flee to her lover and begin an Edenic new life, forgetting the past. He shows that love stolen at mid-day, like cash stolen in later afternoon, amounts to nothing. He shatters the notion that intense filial devotion can conquer death and cancel the past. Finally, the film treats with satiric, Swiftian vengeance the two great American psychological obsessions: the role of Mother, and the embarrassed secretiveness which surrounds both love-making and the bathroom…. 

“These concerns, these vulnerabilities, raise Marion Crane and Normal Bates almost to the level of prototypes; thus Hitchcock’s insistence on audience manipulation and the resulting identification of viewer with character…. Broader in scope than the bizarre elements of its plot indicate, Psycho has the dimensions of great tragedy, very like Oresteia, Macbeth and Crime and Punishment. In method and content, in the sheer economy of its style and in its oddly appealing wit, it is one of the great works of modern art.”

– Donald Spoto. The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures. New 
York: Hopkins and Blake, 1976.

Alfred Hitchcock: On Creating Suspense

Vertigo (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Vertigo follows John "Scottie" Ferguson, a police officer who realises he has a fear of heights that presents as vertigo and is forced to resign after an unpleasant occurrence occurs as a result of his condition. He spends his time with his friend and ex-fiancée Marjorie "Midge" Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), a brilliant and self-sufficient woman who clearly has affection for him. However, Scottie's daily routine becomes more interesting when an old college acquaintance Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) visits him and requests an unusual favour. Elster wishes to have his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) watched, but not out of suspicion of infidelity, but out of concern for her mental health. Madeleine is apparently reenacting the latter days of her late great-grandmother's existence, and Scottie is interested by the strange blond young woman who appears to have no idea where she is or what she is doing. Our protagonist quickly becomes enamoured and unable to leave, urgently attempting to unravel the mystery around Madeleine while revelling in it, for it is precisely the unknown about this woman that fuels his infatuation turned obsession. 

Scottie's downward spiral begins with a plot twist that concludes with his obsession taking control of both his acts and his life. For it is here that we see the heartbreaking reality of a man in love with an impenetrable vision, a phantasm in his imagination that no woman—not even the one he claims to love—could ever live up to. For Madeleine is the epitome of the mysterious woman, so mysterious, evasive, and alluring that a person can project all of their deepest desires onto her, worshipping and feeling a miraculous pull towards the constructed image in their mind's eye, as long as real facts about her remain obscured and she herself remains just slightly out of reach. Scottie's inability to comprehend Madeleine drives him literally insane with desire and fuels a fruitless urge within him, since each attempt offers him only another difficult puzzle to solve. The more the truth eludes him, the more obsessed he becomes with unravelling Madeleine's mystery; however, this is a puzzle he subconsciously desires to remain unsolved, as it would imply the end of his attraction and, with it, his vertigo, which could be interpreted as a metaphor for the loss of control and sense of disorientation experienced when hopelessly in love.

Vertigo is a deft story about the factuality of the persistent male gaze that dominates and determines both our shared collective reality and the bulk of the narratives we as a species make and willingly consume, but it is also a deft deconstruction of it. By portraying a man who, at one point in the film, exerts control over what a woman should look like, how she should speak, walk, and behave in order to conform to his fantasy and satisfy his gaze, Hitchcock subtly reveals his own obsession with controlling his actresses and his attempt to transform them into the perfect "Hitchcock blond." As Kim Novak noted in a 1996 interview with Roger Ebert, "I could completely relate to (...) being pushed and pulled in many directions, being instructed what clothing to wear, how to walk, and how to behave. I believe there was a slight edge to my performance, as if I were implying that I would not allow myself to be pushed past a certain point—that I was present, that I was myself, and that I insisted on myself.” In other words, possessing a woman becomes an obsession unto itself—and when a man obsesses, he acts as if possessed. However, on another level, Vertigo's male voyeur is the one who finds himself on the receiving end of this patriarchal powerplay—for he does not control the narrative, she does. Scottie is made impotent by the idealised and romanticised fantasy in his head, unconscious of the true identity of the unknown woman and unaware of what is truly occurring. On the other side, she is perpetually one step ahead of him, relying on his attention, attraction, and impulses to bring both of them where they need to be in order for the plan they are a part of to play out as planned. Ultimately, the decision to stay or leave was hers alone—she willed it that way, intentionally and willfully, whatever the consequences. 

In 1963 Peter Bogdanovich prepared the first complete Alfred Hitchcock retrospective in America, ‘The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock’ at The Museum of Modern Art. As part of the exhibition Bogdanovich conducted an extensive interview with Hitchcock about his career. In the following excerpt Hitchcock discusses the role of suspense in ‘Vertigo’ and ‘Psycho’:

Isn’t ‘Vertigo’ about the conflict between illusion and reality?

Oh, yes. I was interested by the basic situation, because it contained so much analogy to sex. Stewart’s efforts to recreate the woman were, cinematically, exactly the same as though he were trying to undress the woman, instead of dressing her. He couldn’t get the other woman out of his mind. Now, in the book, they didn’t reveal that she was one and the same woman until the end of the story. I shocked Sam Taylor, who worked on it, when I said, ‘When Stewart comes upon this brunette girl, Sam, this is the time for us to blow the whole truth.’ He said, ‘Good God, why?’ I told him, if we don’t what is the rest of our story until we do reveal the truth. A man has picked up a brunette and sees in her the possibilities of resemblance to the other woman. Let’s put ourselves in the minds of our audience here: “So you’ve got a brunette and you’re going to change her.” What story are we telling now? A man wants to make a girl over and then, at the very end, finds out it is the same woman. Maybe he kills her, or whatever. Here we are, back in our old situation: surprise or suspense.

Vertigo (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

And we come to our old analogy of the bomb: you and I sit talking and there’s a bomb in the room. We’re having a very innocuous conversation about nothing. Boring. Doesn’t mean a thing. Suddenly, boom! The bomb goes off and they’re shocked – for fifteen seconds. Now you change it. Play the same scene, insert the bomb, show that the bomb is placed there, establish that it’s going to go off at one o’clock – it’s now a quarter of one, ten of one – show a clock on the wall, back to the same scene. Now our conversation becomes very vital, by its sheer nonsense. ‘Look under the table! You fool!’ Now they’re working for ten minutes, instead of being surprised for fifteen seconds. Now let’s go back to Vertigo. If we don’t let them know, they will speculate. They will get a very blurred impression as to what is going on. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘one of the fatal things, Sam, in all suspense is to have a mind that is confused. Otherwise the audience won’t emote. Clarify, clarify, clarify. Don’t let them say, “I don’t know which woman that is, who’s that?” ‘So,’ I said, ‘we are going to take the bull by the horns and put it all in a flashback, bang! Right then and there – show it’s one and the same woman.’ Then, when Stewart comes to the hotel for her, the audience says, “Little does he know.”

Vertigo (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Second, the girl’s resistance in the earlier part of the film had no reason. Now you have the reason – she doesn’t want to be uncovered. That’s why she doesn’t want the grey suit, doesn’t want to go blond – because the moment she does, she’s in for it. So now you’ve got extra values working for you. We play on his fetish in creating this dead woman, and he is so obsessed with the pride he has in making her over. Even when she comes back from the hairdresser, the blond hair is still down. And he says, ‘Put your hair up.’ She says, ‘No.’ He says, ‘Please.’ Now what is he saying to her? ‘You’ve taken everything off except your bra and your panties, please take those off.’ She says, ‘All right.’ She goes into the bathroom. He’s only waiting to see a nude woman come out, ready to get in bed with. That’s what the scene is. Now, as soon as she comes out, he sees a ghost – he sees the other woman. That’s why I played her in a green light.

You see, in the earlier part – which is purely in the mind of Stewart – when he is watching this girl go from place to place, when she is really faking, behaving like a woman of the past – in order to get this slightly subtle quality of a dreamlike nature although it was bright sunshine, I shot the film through a fog filter and I got a green effect – fog over bright sunshine. That’s why, when she comes out of the bathroom, I played her in the green light. That’s why I chose the Empire Hotel in Post Street – because it had a green neon sign outside the window. I wanted to establish that green light flashing all the time. So that when we need it, we’ve got it. I slid the soft, fog lens over, and as she came forward, for a moment he got the image of the past. Then as her face came up to him, I slipped the soft effect away, and he came back to reality. She had come back from the dead, and he felt it, and knew it, and probably was even bewildered – until he saw the locket – and then he knew he had been tricked.

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Do you really consider ‘Psycho’ an essentially humorous film?

Well, when I say humorous, I mean it’s my humor that enabled me to tackle the outrageousness of it. If I were telling the same story seriously, I’d tell a case history and never treat it in terms of mystery or suspense. It would simply be what the psychiatrist relates at the end.

In ‘Psycho’, aren’t you really directing the audience more than the actors?

Yes. It’s using pure cinema to cause the audience to emote. It was done by visual means designed in every possible way for an audience. That’s why the murder in the bathroom is so violent, because as the film proceeds, there is less violence. But that scene was in the minds of the audience so strongly that one didn’t have to do much more. I think that in Psycho there is no identification with the characters. There wasn’t time to develop them and there was no need to. The audience goes through the paroxysms in the film without consciousness of Vera Miles or John Gavin. They’re just characters that lead the audience through the final part of the picture. I wasn’t interested in them. And you know, nobody ever mentions that they were ever in the film. It’s rather sad for them.

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Can you imagine how the people in the front office would have cast the picture? They’d say, ‘Well, she gets killed off in the first reel, let’s put anybody in there, and give Janet Leigh the second part with the love interest.’ Of course, this is idiot thinking. The whole point is to kill off the star, that is what makes it so unexpected. This was the basic reason for making the audience see it from the beginning. If they came in half-way through the picture, they would say, ‘When’s Janet Leigh coming on?’ You can’t have blurred thinking in suspense.

Didn’t you experiment with TV techniques in ‘Psycho’?

It was made by a TV unit, but that was only a matter of economics really, speed and economy of shooting, achieved by minimizing the number of set-ups. We slowed up whenever it became really cinematic. The bathroom scene took seven days, whereas the psychiatrist’s scene at the end was all done in one day.

How much did Saul Bass contribute to the picture?

Only the main title, the credits. He asked me if he could do one sequence in Psycho and I said yes. So he did a sequence on paper, little drawings of the detective going up the stairs before he is killed. One day on the picture, I was sick, and I called up and told the assistant to make those shots as Bass had planned them. There were about twenty of them and when I saw them, I said, ‘You can’t use any of them.’ The sequence told his way would indicate that the detective is a menace. He’s not. He is an innocent man, therefore the shot should be innocent. We don’t have to work the audience up. We’ve done that. The mere fact that he’s going up the stairs is enough. Keep it simple. No complications. One shot.

Did you intend any moral implications in the picture?

I don’t think you can take any moral stand because you’re dealing with distorted people. You can’t apply morality to insane persons.

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