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

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

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

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

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

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

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

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

North by Northwest (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

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

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

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

Oh that’s my line, yes.

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

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

The Birds (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

You expect quite a lot of your audience.

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

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

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

How do you choose your subjects?

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

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

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

You don’t find it somewhat perverted?

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

North by Northwest (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

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

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

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

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

Vertigo (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

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

Yes.

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

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

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

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

Rear Window (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

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

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

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

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

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

No, of course not. It got them mad.

What next?

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

Who’s taking the Grace Kelly part?

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

You’re going back to big stars?

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

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

Yes.

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

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

The Birds (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you tell us something about ‘The Birds’?

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

What would you say was the theme of the film?

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

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

That’s true, yes.

What particularly attracted you to science fiction?

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

The Birds (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

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

Oh yes.

Is this any particular fondness for birds?

Not particularly, no.

Do you find them threatening in some way?

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

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

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

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

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

The Birds (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

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

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

You’re not using music?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes.

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

I hear ‘Psycho’ made a lot of money.

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

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

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

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

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

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

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

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

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

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

You got rid of it very early in the film.

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

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

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

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

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

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

Was this shot meant deliberately as a clue?

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

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alfred Hitchcock: On Making ‘The Birds’

The Birds (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you feel the picture is really about?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marnie (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

What will Marnie be like?

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

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

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

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

Life of a City

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

We, the Accused

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

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