Hitchcock
Bear in mind that we had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare the audience for this scene: we had established a mystery woman in the house; we had established the fact that this mystery woman had come down and slashed a woman to pieces under her shower. All the elements that would convey suspense to the detective’s journey upstairs had gone before and we therefore needed a simple statement. We needed to show a staircase and a man going up that staircase in a very simple way.
F.T. I suppose that the original rushes of that scene helped you to determine just the right expression. In French we would say that “he arrived like a flower,” which implies, of course, that he was ready to be plucked.
A.H. It wasn’t exactly impassivity; it was more like complacency. Anyway, I used a single shot of Arbogast coming up the stairs, and when he got to the top step, I deliberately placed the camera very high for two reasons. The first was so that I could shoot down on top of the mother, because if I’d shown her back, it might have looked as if I was deliberately concealing her face and the audience would have been leery. I used that high angle in order not to give the impression that I was trying to avoid showing her.
But the main reason for raising the camera so high was to get the contrast between the long shot and the close-up of the big head as the knife came down at him. It was like music, you see, the high shot with the violins, and suddenly the big head with the brass instruments clashing. In the high shot the mother dashes out and I cut into the movement of the knife sweeping down. Then I went over to the close-up on Arbogast. We put a plastic tube on his face with hemoglobin, and as the knife came up to it, we pulled a string releasing the blood on his face down the line we had traced in advance. Then he fell back on the stairway.
F.T. I was rather intrigued by that fall backward. He doesn’t actually fall. His feet aren’t shown, but the feeling one gets is that he’s going down the stairs backward, brushing each step with the tip of his foot, like a dancer.
A.H. That’s the impression we were after. Do you know how we got that?
F.T. I realize you wanted to stretch out the action, but I don’t know how you did it.
A.H. We did it by process. First I did a separate dolly shot down the stairway, without the man. Then we sat him in a special chair in which he was in a fixed position in front of the transparency screen showing the stairs. ‘Then we shot the chair, and Arbogast simply threw his arms up, waving them as if he’d lost his balance.
F.T. It’s extremely effective. Later on in the picture you use another very high shot to show Perkins taking his mother to the cellar.
A.H. I raised the camera when Perkins was going upstairs. He goes into the room and we don’t see him, but we hear him say, “Mother, I’ve got to take you down to the cellar. They’re snooping around.” And then you see him take her down to the cellar. I didn’t want to cut, when he carries her down, to a high shot because the audience would have been suspicious as to why the camera has suddenly jumped away. So I had a hanging camera follow Perkins up the stairs, and when he went into the room I continued going up without a cut. As the camera got up on top of the door, the camera turned and looked back down the stairs again. Meanwhile, I had an argument take place between the son and his mother to distract the audience and take their minds off what the camera was doing. In this way the camera was above Perkins again as he carried his mother down and the public hadn’t noticed a thing. It was rather exciting to use the camera to deceive the audience.
F.T. The stabbing of Janet Leigh was very well done also.
A.H. It took us seven days to shoot that scene, and there were seventy camera setups for forty-five seconds of footage. We had a torso specially made up for that scene, with the blood that was supposed to spurt away from the knife, but I didn’t use it. I used a live girl instead, a naked model who stood in for Janet Leigh. We only showed Miss Leigh’s hands, shoulders, and head. All the rest was the stand-in. Naturally, the knife never touched the body; it was all done in the montage. I shot some of it in slow motion so as to cover the breasts. The slow shots were not accelerated later on because they were inserted in the montage so as to give an impression of normal speed.
F.T. It’s an exceptionally violent scene.
A.H. This is the most violent scene of the picture. As the film unfolds, there is less violence because the harrowing memory of this initial killing carries over to the suspenseful passages that come later.
F.T. Yet, even better than the killing, in the sense of its harmony, is the scene in which Perkins handles the mop and broom to clean away any traces of the crime. The whole construction of the picture suggests a sort of scale of the abnormal. First there is a scene of adultery, then a theft, then one crime followed by another, and, finally, psychopathy. Each passage puts us on a higher note of the scale. Isn’t that so?
A.H. I suppose so, but you know that to me Janet Leigh is playing the role of a perfectly ordinary bourgeoise.
F.T. But she does lead us in the direction of the abnormal, toward Perkins and his stuffed birds.
A.H. I was quite intrigued with them: they were like symbols. Obviously Perkins is interested in taxidermy since he’d filled his own mother with sawdust. But the owl, for instance, has another connotation. Owls belong to the night world; they are watchers, and this appeals to Perkins’ masochism. He knows the birds and he knows that they’re watching him all the time. He can see his own guilt reflected in their knowing eyes.
F.T. Would you say that Psycho is an experimental film?
A.H. Possibly. My main satisfaction is that the film had an effect on the audiences, and I consider that very important. I don’t care about the subject matter; I don’t care about the acting: but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the sound track and all of the technical ingredients that made the audience scream. I feel it’s tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion. And with Psycho we most definitely achieved this. It wasn’t a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film.
F.T. Yes, that’s true.
A.H. That’s why I take pride in the fact that Psycho, more than any of my other pictures, is a film that belongs to film-makers, to you and me. I can’t get a real appreciation of the picture in the terms we’re using now. People will say, “It was a terrible film to make. The subject was horrible, the people were small, there were no characters in it.” I know all of this, but I also know that the construction of the story and the way in which it was told caused audiences all over the world to react and become emotional.
F.T. Yes, emotional and even physical.
A.H. Emotional. I don’t care whether it looked like a small or a large picture. I didn’t start off to make an important movie. I thought I could have fun with this subject and this situation. The picture cost eight hundred thousand dollars. It was an experiment in this sense: Could I make a feature film under the same conditions as a television show? I used a complete television unit to shoot it very quickly. The only place where I digressed was when I slowed down the murder scene, the cleaning-up scene, and the other scenes that indicated anything that required time. All of the rest was handled in the same way that they do it in television.
F.T. I know that you produced Psycho yourself. How did you make out with it?
A.H. Psycho cost us no more than eight hundred thousand dollars to make. It has grossed some fifteen million dollars to date.
F.T. That’s fantastic! Would you say this was your greatest hit to date?
A.H. Yes. And that’s what I’d like you to do—a picture that would gross millions of dollars throughout the world! It’s an area of film-making in which it’s more important for you to be pleased with the technique than with the content. It’s the kind of picture in which the camera takes over. Of course, since criti
cs are more concerned with the scenario, it won’t necessarily get you the best notices, but you have to design your film just as Shakespeare did his plays—for an audience.
F.T. That reminds me that Psycho is particularly universal because it’s a half-silent movie; there are at least two reels with no dialogue at all. And that also simplified all the problems of subtitling and dubbing.
A.H. Do you know that in Thailand they use no subtitles or dubbing? They shut off the sound and a man stands somewhere near the screen and interprets all the roles, using different voices.
* * *
I. Marion (Janet Leigh) and her lover, Sain (John Gavin), lack the necessary funds to settle down to married life. When her employer gives her forty thousand dollars to he deposited to his account in the bank, she steals the money and leaves Phoenix. That night she stops at a run down motel. The young owner, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), becomes friendly and tells her that he lives in the brooding Victorian mansion nearby with his mother, a sick and apparently difficult woman.
As Marion is taking a shower before retiring for the night, the old lady suddenly appears in the bathroom and stabs her to death. Minutes later Norman appears, and though apparently grief-stricken, he proceeds to wipe away the bloodstains from the bathroom and to haul Marion’s body and her possessions to her car trunk. He then drives the car to a nearby pond and stands by as the muddy waters swallow up all the evidence of the crime.
Three people undertake to trace the missing young woman: her sister, Lila (Vera Miles), Sam, and Arbogast (Martin Balsam), an insurance detective who has been assigned to find the money. Arbogast’s investigation leads him to the motel, where Norman speaks to him but arouses his suspicions when he refuses to allow him to meet his mother. The detective calls Sam and Lila to tell them of his suspicions, then steals back into the house to speak to the old lady. He makes his way to the first floor, and as he reaches the landing, he is stabbed to death, his inert body toppling down the stairs
Lila and Sam now learn from the local sheriff that Norman Bates’s mother has been dead and buried for the past eight years. They go to the motel, and when Lila attempts to search the house, she has a narrow escape from death. In the ensuing struggle Norman is revealed as a schizophrenic, leading a dual existence, and who, when impersonating his dead mother, is also a homicidal maniac.
* * *
“THE BIRDS” ■ THE ELDERLY ORNITHOLOGIST ■ THE GOUGED-OUT EYES ■ THE GIRL IN A GILDED GAGE ■ IMPROVISATIONS ■ THE SIZE OF THE IMAGE ■ THE SCENE THAT WAS DROPPED ■ AN EMOTIONAL TRUCK ■ ELECTRONIC SOUNDS ■ PRACTICAL JOKES
* * *
14
FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT. I’m curious to find out whether you discovered Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds before or after publication.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK. Afterward. Actually, it was in one of those “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” books. I found out that there had been attempts to do The Birds on radio and television, but they weren’t successful.
F.T. Did you investigate before taking on the project to make sure that the technical problems with the birds could be handled?
A.H. Absolutely not! I didn’t even give it a thought. I said, “This is the job. Let’s get on with it.” But I think that if the story had involved vultures, or birds of prey, I might not have wanted it. The basic appeal to me is that it had to do with ordinary, everyday birds. Do you see what I mean?
F.T. Well, it was a chance to apply your old rule of going from the smallest to the biggest, in the intellectual as well as in the plastic sense. What will you do for an encore to the gentle little sparrows that gouge men’s eyes out? How about a picture about flowers with a deadly scent?
A.H. We might do better than that with man-eating flowers.
F.T. Since 1945, it’s the atom bomb that has represented the ultimate threat to mankind, so it’s rather disconcerting to suggest that the end of the world might be brought about by thousands of birds . . . .
A.H. That’s reflected in the skeptical attitude of the ornithologist. The old lady is a reactionary, or at any rate she’s too conservative to admit that the birds might be responsible for such a catastrophe.
F.T. I’m glad you didn’t give a specific reason for the attacks. It is clearly a speculation, a fantasy.I
A.H. That’s the way I saw it.
F.T. I understand that Daphne du Manner’s inspiration for a massive attack by the birds was inspired by a real-life incident.
A.H. Yes, these things do happen from time to time and they’re generally due to a bird disease, a form of rabies. But it would have been too horrible to put that in a picture, don’t you think?
F.T. I don’t know about that, but I’m sure it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as fascinating to look at.
A.H. While I was shooting in Bodega Bay, there was an item in a San Francisco paper about crows attacking some young lambs, and, of all places, right in the same locality where we were working. I met a farmer who told me how the crows swooped down to kill his young lambs. That’s where I got the idea for the gouged-out eyes of the dead man.
The picture opens with our two principal characters in San Francisco, and then I take them to Bodega Bay. The house and farm we built ourselves. We made an exact copy of the existing houses. There was an old Russian farm built around 1849. There were many Russians living on the coast at the time, and there’s even a town called Sebastopol some twelve miles northeast of Bodega Bay. When the Russians owned Alaska, they used to come down the coast to hunt seals.
F.T. One distinct disadvantage in your kind of films is that however much people enjoy them, they hate to admit that they’ve been taken in. Their admiration is often mitigated by a tinge of resentment. It’s as if they begrudged you the pleasure you give them.
A.H. Of course. They come to the theater and they sit down and say, “All right. Now, show me!” And they want to be one jump ahead of the action: “I know what’s going to happen.” So, I have to take up the challenge: “Oh, you know what’s going to happen. Well, we’ll just see about that!” With The Birds I made sure that the public would not be able to anticipate from one scene to another.
F.T. This happens to be one picture, I think, in which the public doesn’t try to anticipate. They merely suspect that the attacks by the birds are going to become increasingly serious. The first part is an entirely normal picture with psychological overtones, and it is only at the end of each scene that some clue hints at the potential menace of the birds.
A.H. I had to do it that way because the public’s curiosity was bound to be aroused by the articles in the press and the reviews, as well as by the word-of-mouth talk about the picture. I didn’t want the public to become too impatient about the birds, because that would distract them from the personal story of the two central characters. Those references at the end of each scene were my way of saying, “Just be patient. They’re coming soon.”
You know, there’s a lot of detail in this movie; it’s absolutely essential because these little nuances enrich the over-all impact and strengthen the picture.
At the beginning of the film we show Rod Taylor in the bird shop. He catches the canary that has escaped from its cage, and after putting it back, he says to Tippi Hedren, “I’m putting you back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels.” I added that sentence during the shooting because I felt it added to her characterization as a wealthy, shallow playgirl. And later on, when the gulls attack the village, Melanie Daniels takes refuge in a glass telephone booth and I show her as a bird in a cage. This time it isn’t a gilded cage, but a cage of misery, and it’s also the beginning of her ordeal by fire, so to speak. It’s a reversal of the age-old conflict between men and birds. Here the human beings are in cages and the birds are on the outside. When I shoot something like that, I hardly think the public is likely to notice it.
F.T. Even though that metaphor wasn’t obvious—to me, at any rate—this i
s truly a remarkably powerful scene. It was very ingenious to have that dialogue in the opening scene in the bird shop about the lovebirds because later on the whole film revolves around hate-filled birds. Throughout the picture the lovebirds were used in various ways to punctuate the irony of the content.
A.H. Aside from the touches of irony, that was necessary because love is going to survive the whole ordeal. At the end of the picture the little girl asks, “Can I take my lovebirds along?” That little couple of lovebirds lends an optimistic note to the theme.
F.T. They convey a double meaning to several scenes, including one with the mother and another with the schoolteacher.
A.H. It all goes to show that with a little effort even the word “love” can be made to sound ominous.
* * *
F.T. The story construction follows the three basic rules of classic tragedy: unity of place, of time, and of action. All of the action takes place within two days’time in Bodega Bay. The birds are seen in ever growing numbers and they become increasingly dangerous as the action progresses. It must have been a difficult script, but the story really works.
A.H. I can tell you the emotions I went through. I’ve always boasted that I never look at a script while I’m shooting. I know the whole film by heart. I’ve always been afraid of improvising on the set because, although one might have the time to get a new idea, there isn’t sufficient time in the studio to examine the value of such an idea. There are too many crew people around. That’s overhead, and I’m very conscientious about not wasting production money. I could never work like those directors who have the whole crew stand by while they sit down to think things out. I could never do that. But I was quite tense and this is unusual for me because as a rule I have a lot of fun during the shooting. When I went home to my wife at night, I was still tense and upset. Something happened that was altogether new in my experience: I began to study the scenario as we went along, and I saw that there were weaknesses in it. This emotional siege I went through served to bring out an additional creative sense in me.