F.T. Those scenes in which James Stewart takes Judy to the dress shop to buy a suit just like the one Madeleine wore, and the way in which he makes her try on shoes, are among the best. He’s like a maniac.
A.H. That’s the basic situation in this picture. Cinematically, all of Stewart’s efforts to recreate the dead woman are shown in such a way that he seems to be trying to undress her, instead of the other way around. What I liked best is when the girl came back after having had her hair dyed blond. James Stewart is disappointed because she hasn’t put her hair up in a bun. What this really means is that the girl has almost stripped, but she still won’t take her knickers off. When he insists, she says, “All right!” and goes into the bathroom while he waits outside. What Stewart is really waiting for is for the woman to emerge totally naked this time, and ready for love.
F.T. That didn’t occur to me, but the close-up on Stewart’s face as he’s waiting for her to come out of the bathroom is wonderful; he’s almost got tears in his eyes.
A.H. At the beginning of the picture, when James Stewart follows Madeleine to the cemetery, we gave her a dreamlike, mysterious quality by shooting through a fog filter. That gave us a green effect, like fog over the bright sunshine. Then, later on, when Stewart first meets Judy, I decided to make her live at the Empire Hotel in Post Street because it has a green neon sign flashing continually outside the window. So when the girl emerges from the bathroom, that green light gives her the same subtle, ghostlike quality. After focusing on Stewart, who’s staring at her, we go back to the girl, but now we slip that soft effect away to indicate that Stewart’s come back to reality. Temporarily dazed by the vision of his beloved Madeleine come back from the dead, Stewart comes to his senses when he spots the locket. In a flash he realizes that Judy’s been tricking him right along.
F.T. The whole erotic aspect of the picture is fascinating. I remember another scene, at the beginning, when Stewart hauled Kim Novak out of the water. He takes her to his place, where we find her asleep in his bed. As she gradually comes to, there’s an implication, though it’s not specifically stated, that he’s probably taken the girl’s clothes off and has seen her in the nude. The rest of that scene is superb, as Kim Novak walks around with her toes sticking out of his bathrobe and then settles down by the fire, with Stewart pacing back and forth behind her.
Vertigo unfolds at a deliberate pace, with a contemplative rhythm that contrasts sharply with your other pictures, which are mostly based on swift motion and sudden transitions.
A.H. That’s perfectly natural since we’re telling the story from the viewpoint of a man who’s in an emotional crisis. Did you notice the distortion when Stewart looks down the tower stairway? Do you know how we did that?
F.T. Wasn’t that a track-out combined with a forward zoom?
A.H. That’s it. When Joan Fontaine fainted at the inquest in Rebecca. I wanted to show how she felt that everything was moving far away from her before she toppled over. I always remember one night at the Chelsea Arts Ball at Albert Hall in London when I got terribly drunk and I had the sensation that everything was going far away from me. I tried to get that into Rebecca, but they couldn’t do it. The viewpoint must be fixed, you see, while the perspective is changed as it stretches lengthwise. I thought about the problem for fifteen years. By the time we got to Vertigo, we solved it by using the dolly and zoom simultaneously. I asked how much it would cost, and they told me it would cost fifty thousand dollars. When I asked why, they said, “Because to put the camera at the top of the stairs we have to have a big apparatus to lift it, counterweight it, and hold it up in space.
“I said, “There are no characters in this scene; it’s simply a viewpoint. Why can’t we make a miniature of the stairway and lay it on its side, then take our shot by pulling away from it? We can use a tracking shot and a zoom flat on the ground.” So that’s the way we did it, and it only cost us nineteen thousand dollars.
F.T. As much as that? I feel that you really like Vertigo.
A.H. One of the things that bothers me is a flaw in the story. The husband was planning to throw his wife down from the top of the tower. But how could he know that James Stewart wouldn’t make it up those stairs? Because he became dizzy? How could he be sure of that!
F.T. That’s true, but I saw it as one of those assumptions you felt people would accept. I understand that the picture was neither a hit nor a failure.
A.H. It has made money by now.
F.T. In your terms, wouldn’t that be considered a flop?
A.H. I suppose so. One of our whimsies when a picture isn’t doing too well is to blame it on the faulty exploitation. So let’s live up to the tradition and say they just didn’t handle the sales properly! Do you know that I had Vera Miles in mind for Vertigo, and we had done the whole wardrobe and the final tests with her?
F.T. Didn’t Paramount want her?
A.H. Paramount was perfectly willing to have her, but she became pregnant just before the part that was going to turn her into a star. After that I lost interest; I couldn’t get the rhythm going with her again.
F.T. I take it, from some of your interviews, that you weren’t too happy with Kim Novak, but I thought she was perfect for the picture. There was a passive, animal quality about her that was exactly right for the part.
A.H. Miss Novak arrived on the set with all sorts of preconceived notions that I couldn’t possibly go along with. You know, I don’t like to argue with a performer on the set; there’s no reason to bring the electricians in on our troubles. I went to Kim Novak’s dressing room and told her about the dresses and hairdos that I had been planning for several months. I also explained that the story was of less importance to me than the over-all visual impact on the screen, once the picture is completed.
F.T. It seems to me these unpleasant formalities make you unfair in assessing the whole picture. I can assure you that those who admire Vertigo like Kim Novak in it. Very few American actresses are quite as carnal on the screen. When you see Judy walking on the street, the tawny hair and make-up convey an animal-like sensuality. That quality is accentuated, I suppose, by the fact that she wears no brassiere.
A.H. That’s right, she doesn’t wear a brassière. As a matter of fact, she’s particularly proud of that!
F.T. Before shooting North by Northwest I believe you worked on a project about a shipwreck and then dropped it. Is that right?
A.H. That was The Wreck of the Mary Deare. I went to work on that with Ernest Lehman and we found it wasn’t going to be any good. It belongs to the type of story that’s very hard to lick. There’s a very famous legend called “the Mystery of the Marie Celeste.” Do you know it? It’s supposed to have happened in the middle of the nineteenth century, when a ship was discovered, in full sail, in the Atlantic. People who boarded the ship found the lifeboats, the galley stove was still hot, and there were the remnants of a meal, but no sign of life.
Why is it that we can’t lick this type of story? Because it’s too strong to begin with. There’s so much mystery from the very outset that the attempt to explain it is bound to be terribly laborious. The rest of the story never quite lives up to the beginning.
F.T. I see what you mean.
A.H. Anyway, a writer called Hammond Innes had written a novel, The Wreck of the Mary Deare, about a cargo boat that is sailing along the English Channel with only one man aboard who’s stoking coal into the furnace. Two sailors from a salvage vessel that’s passing by manage to board the ship. Anyway, you have a beautiful setup in that mystery ship with a single man on board. But as soon as you go into the explanations, the whole thing becomes very trite, and the public is apt to wonder why you didn’t show the events that led up to this point. It’s really like picking out the climax of a story and putting it at the beginning. Since I was committed to Metro to do that picture, I told them that the story wouldn’t work out and sugges
ted we do something else. So that’s how, starting at zero, we went on to do North by Northwest.
When you’re involved in a project and you see it isn’t going to work out, the wisest thing is to simply throw the whole thing away.
F.T. To my knowledge, you’ve done just that several times. Wasn’t there supposed to be a picture on Africa?
A.H. I’d bought a story called Flamingo Feather, written by a South African author who was also a diplomat. His name is Laurens van der Post. It was the story of mysterious happenings in South Africa today. A lot of people were involved; it was hinged around a secret compound in which large numbers of natives were being trained under Russian command. I went to South Africa to do some advance research on the shooting, and I found out that there was no chance of getting the fifty thousand Africans we needed. I said, “Well, how did they make King Solomon’s Mines?” They told me they’d only used a few hundred natives on that, and the costumes had been sent over from Hollywood. Apparently they don’t make those costumes in Africa. Then I asked again why we couldn’t get fifty thousand Africans, and I was told that the natives work on the pineapple plantations and at many other jobs and the work couldn’t be stopped for a movie. When I wanted to look over the terrain, they showed me the Valley of a Thousand Hills in Natal. I said, “We can get the same scenery sixty miles north of Los Angeles.” It was all so confusing that I dropped the whole idea.
F.T. Were the political aspects of such a film a factor in your decision to give it up?
A.H. I suppose so.
F.T. You generally avoid any politics in your films.
A.H. It’s just that the public doesn’t care for films on politics. How else would you account for the fact that most of the pictures dealing with the politics of the Iron Curtain are failures? The same applies to films about domestic politics.
F.T. Isn’t it because they’re mostly propaganda films, and rather naïve ones at that?
A.H. Yet there’ve been quite a few pictures on East and West Berlin. Carol Reed made one called The Man Between; Kazan made Man on a Tightrope, and Fox produced a picture with Gregory Peck, which involved a businessman’s son captured by the East Germans. I can’t remember the name. Then there was The Big Lift, with Montgomery Clift. None of them has been really successful.
F.T. It’s possible that people don’t like the mélange of reality and fiction. The best might be a straightforward documentary.
A.H. You know, I have an idea for a really good Cold War suspense movie. An American, speaking Russian fluently, is parachuted into Russia, and the little man who looks after him on the plane accidentally falls through the opening, so that the two men come down together on the one parachute. The first one not only speaks fluent Russian; he also has the necessary papers and could be taken for a Russian citizen, while the little man with him has no papers and doesn’t speak a word of Russian. This is the point of departure from the story. Every second would be suspenseful.
F.T. One solution might be for the Russian-speaking man to pass the other one off as his deaf-mute kid brother.
A.H. Yes, that could be done at times, but the real value of this situation is that it enables you to do the whole dialogue in Russian all the way through, with the other man constantly asking, “What did they say? What did they do?” His real purpose, you see, would be to serve as the means of narration.
F.T. It would be fun to work that out.
A.H. But they’ll never allow us to do it!
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F.T. We’ve already mentioned North by Northwest several times in the course of these talks, and you seem to-agree with me that just as The Thirty-nine Steps may be regarded as the compendium of your work in Britain, North by Northwest is the picture that epitomizes the whole of your work in America. It’s always difficult to sum up all the ups and downs in stories in a few words, but this one is almost impossible.II
A.H. That brings up an amusing sidelight of the shooting. You may remember that during the first part all sorts of things happen to the hero with such bewildering rapidity that he doesn’t know what it’s all about. Anyway, Cary Grant came up to me and said, “It’s a terrible script. We’ve already done a third of the picture and I still can’t make head or tail of it.”
F.T. He felt the story was too confusing?
A.H. Yes, but without realizing it he was using a line of his own dialogue.
F.T. By the way, I meant to ask you whether you ever introduce useless dialogue in a scene, knowing in advance that people won’t pay any attention to it?
A.H. Why should we do that, for heaven’s sake?
F.T. Well, either to allow the audience a breather between two moments of tension or else to sum up the situation for the benefit of those viewers who may have missed the beginning of the picture.
A.H. That practice goes back to the Griffith era. At some midway point of the picture he’d insert a few lines of narrative titles summing up everything that preceded, for the benefit of the late-comers.
F.T. You have the equivalent of that in the second third of North by Northwest. There’s a dialogue scene at the airport in which Cary Grant tells Leo G. Carroll, the counterintelligence man, everything that’s happened to him since the beginning of the picture.
A.H. That scene has a dual function. Firstly, it clarifies and sums up the sequence of events for the audience, and, secondly, Cary Grant’s account is the cue for the counterintelligence agent to fill him in on some of the missing elements of these mystifying events.
F.T. Yes, but we don’t know what he’s saying because his voice is drowned out by the roar of the plane propellers.
A.H. It wasn’t necessary for that to be heard because the public already had the information. The facts had been brought out in a previous scene, when the counterespionage men decide that to help Cary Grant might arouse the suspicion of the spies.
F.T. Of course, I remember now. The deafening sound of the planes also serves another purpose: it makes us lose all notion of time. The counterintelligence man spends thirty seconds in telling Cary Grant a story that, in reality, would take him, at the very least, three minutes to tell.
A.H. Exactly, this is part of the play with time. In this picture nothing was left to chance, and that’s why, when it was over, I took a very firm stand. I’d never worked for M-G-M before, and when it was edited, they put on a lot of pressure to have me eliminate a whole sequence at the end of the picture. I refused.
F.T. Which sequence was that?
A.H. Right after the scene in that cafeteria where people look at Mount Rushmore through a telescope. You remember that Eva Marie Saint takes a shot at Cary Grant. Actually, she only pretends to kill him in order to save his life. Well, in the next sequence he’s taken to the woods to meet the girl.
F.T. When the two cars come together? But isn’t that a key scene?
A.H. It’s indispensable because it’s truly their first meeting since Cary Grant has learned that she is James Mason’s mistress, and this is the scene in which he finds out she is working for Central Intelligence. My contract had been drawn up by MCA, my agents, and when I read it over, I found that, although I hadn’t asked for it, they’d put in a clause giving me complete artistic control of the picture, regardless of production time, cost or anything. So I was able to say politely, “I’m very sorry, but this sequence must remain in the picture.”
* * *
F.T. It seems to me that there were many trick shots in that picture, lots of them almost invisible, and also many special effects, like miniatures and fake sets.
A.H. We had an exact copy made up of the United Nations lobby. You see, someone had used that setting for a film called The Glass Wall, and after that Dag Hammarskjöld prohibited any shooting of fiction films on the premises.
Just the same, while the guards were looking for our equipment, we shot one
scene of Cary Grant coming into the building by using a concealed camera. We’d been told we couldn’t even do any photography, so we concealed the camera in the back of a truck and in that way we got enough footage for the background. Then we got a still photographer to get permission to take some colored stills inside, and I walked around with him, as if I was a visitor, whispering, “Take that shot from there. And now, another one from the roof down.” We used those color photographs to reconstitute the settings in our studios.
The place where the man is stabbed in the back is in the delegates’ lounge, but to maintain the prestige of the United Nations, we called it the “public lounge” in the picture, and this also explains how the man with the knife could get in there. Anyway, the locale was very accurately reconstructed. I’m very concerned about the authenticity of settings and furnishings. When we can’t shoot in the actual settings, I’m for taking research photographs of everything.
When we were preparing to shoot Vertigo, in which James Stewart plays an educated detective who’s retired from the police force, I sent a photographer to San Francisco. His assignment was to dig up some retired detectives, preferably college graduates, and to take pictures of their apartments.
The same for The Birds. In order to get the characters right, I had every inhabitant of Bodega Bay—man, woman, and child—photographed for the costume department. The restaurant is an exact copy of the one up there. The home of the schoolteacher is a combination of a schoolteacher’s house in San Francisco and the home of a schoolteacher in Bodega Bay. I covered it both ways because, as you may remember, the schoolteacher in that picture works in Bodega Bay but she comes from San Francisco.