F.T. It’s a lovely subject. Also a sad one.
A.H. Yes, very sad. Because the real theme is: If the dead were to come back, what would you do with them?
F.T. Your third project is an original screenplay, which you assigned to the writing team of Age and Scarpelli, the writers of Big Deal on Madonna Street.
A.H. That one I’ve just now abandoned. Definitely. It was the story of an Italian who immigrates to America. He starts out as an elevator boy in a big hotel and eventually becomes the general manager. He brings his family over from Sicily. It turns out they are a gang of thieves, and he has to try to prevent them from stealing a collection of precious coins that are on display in the hotel.
I dropped the project because it seemed to be shapeless. Aside from that, you know that Italians are very slipshod in matters of story construction. They just ramble on.
F.T. So you just dropped these three projects and you went to work on Torn Curtain. Where did you get the idea for this picture?II
A.H. I got the idea from the disappearance of the two British diplomats. Burgess and MacLean, who deserted their country and went to Russia. I said to myself, “What did Mrs. MacLean think of the whole thing?”
So, you see, the first third of the film is more or less from a woman’s point of view, until we have the dramatic showdown between the young couple in the hotel room in Berlin.
From here on I take Paul Newman’s point of view. And I show the unpremeditated murder in which he is forced to take a hand and then his efforts to get to Professor Lindt to learn his secret formula before the crime catches up with him. Then, the last part of the film is the couple’s escape. As you see, the picture is clearly divided into three sections. The story worked out very naturally in that way, and its movement follows the logical geographical course. To make sure it was exact, before starting the scenario, I made the same trip as the characters. I went to Copenhagen, then, via a Rumanian airline, over to East Berlin, to Leipzig, then to East Berlin again, and finally to Sweden.
F.T. True, the three-part division is clear, and I must admit I like the picture best from the second third on. The first part didn’t move me. It’s my feeling that the public guesses the developments well ahead of Julie Andrews and even before the key information is given out.
A.H. I agree with you on that. From the moment when Newman tells Julie Andrews, “You go back to New York; I’ll go back to Sweden,” the public cannot fully believe him because we’ve allowed them to see other cues to his strange behavior. Nevertheless, all that had to be accurately worked out because you’ve got to be fair to the audience who will be seeing the film more than once. The picture’s got to be able to stand up to a double check. Of course, when the girl learns that her fiancé has booked a reservation for East Berlin and she says, “But that’s behind the Iron Curtain,” the audience is already ahead of us. But I don’t think it matters because what they’re really concerned with at this point is to see the effect on the girl—how she is going to react.
F.T. So far, so good, but I can’t go along with what comes next. The girl believes her fiancé to be a traitor long after everyone in the audience has already figured out the truth.
A.H. No doubt, but I preferred to start the story on a note of “misterioso” so as to avoid the beginning I’ve used in the past and which has now become a cliché; the man who has been given a mission. I just didn’t want to repeat that scene again. You have it in every one of the Bond pictures. A man says, “007, you go there. Bring back the gun, or do this or that.” So I did that scene anyway, but instead of playing it at the beginning, I brought it in as a surprise in the middle of the film. It’s the discussion with the farmer on the tractor, just before the murder.
Julie Andrews as Sarah Sherman.
Paul Newman and Ludwig Donath.
F.T. The strongest scene, of course, is Gromek’s killing on the farm; it’s the one that grips the audience the most. Since it is played without music, it is very realistic and also very savage.
A.H. In doing that long killing scene, my first thought again was to avoid the cliché. In every picture somebody gets killed and it goes very quickly. They are stabbed or shot, and the killer never even stops to look and see whether the victim is really dead or not. And I thought it was time to show that it was very difficult, very painful, and it takes a very long time to kill a man. The public is aware that this must be a silent killing because of the presence of the taxi driver on the farm. Firing a shot is out of the question. In line with our old principle, the killing has to be carried out by means suggested by the locale and the characters. We are in a farmhouse and the farmer’s wife is doing the killing. So we use household objects: the kettle full of soup, a carving knife, a shovel, and, finally, the gas oven.
F.T. The height of realism was when the blade of the knife broke against Gromek’s throat! There are several remarkable things in that murder sequence: the series of quick shots of Gromek’s hand poking at Newman’s jacket in a threatening way, the woman hitting out at Gromek’s legs with the shovel, and then Gromek’s fingers waving around before he finally subsides, with his head in the gas oven.
Going back to the script, I noticed two important changes in the film. One was the elimination of a scene in the factory between Berlin and Leipzig, and the other was the simplification of the sequence in the bus. In the script that was a very elaborate sequence, full of vivid detail.
Julie Andrews and Rick Traeger in Torn Curtain.
A.H. I had to compress the episode of the bus because if I had allowed it to drag out, I could not have sustained the tension. Remember, it’s a scene in which time is compressed to create the illusion of a long journey. I directed that whole scene by imagining the bus to be a character of the film. We have a good bus, which is going to help our couple to escape. And a few hundred yards behind them is the bad bus, which is threatening the good one. But I’m not happy with the technical quality of the transparencies for that scene. For economy reasons I had the background plates shot by German cameramen, but we should have sent an American crew over.
F.T. Couldn’t those transparency plates have been filmed on American highways?
A.H. No, because at the end of that sequence we show them coming into the city. We needed the real trolleys and all those genuine details. Aside from that, what did you think of the photography?
F.T. It’s very good.
A.H. You know, it represented a drastic change for me. The lighting projected against big white surfaces. We shot the whole film through a gray gauze. The actors kept on asking, “Where are the lights?” We almost attained the ideal, you know, shooting with natural lights.
F.T. What about the factory scene?III Did you drop it before or after the shooting?
A.H. Afterward. I shot it. It’s quite effective; in fact, very good. I dropped it from the final version because the film was too long. Aside from that, I wasn’t too happy with the way Paul Newman played it. As you know, he’s a “method” actor, and he found it hard to just give me one of those neutral looks I needed to cut from his point of view. Instead of simply looking toward Gromek’s brother, toward the knife or the sausage, he played the scene in the “method” style, with emotion, and he was always turning away. Well, I fixed it somehow in the cutting, but finally I dropped the scene. Aside from the length of the picture, the reason I cut that scene out was also because I remembered the trouble I’d had with The Secret Agent. I made that picture in England thirty years ago and it was a flop. Do you remember the reason why? Because the central figure had to commit a killing he didn’t want to do, and the public couldn’t identify with a hero who was so reluctant to carry out his mission. So I felt that with Torn Curtain I would be falling into this trap again through that factory scene.
Anyway, the actor who played Gromek was very good. I had him completely transformed for the brother’s role. His hair was white; he had a mustache
and wore glasses. The people on the set objected: “But he doesn’t look like the other one anymore.” They all felt that the public should be under the impression that he was the twin of the dead man. I told them, “That’s idiotic. If you turn Gromek Two into the spitting image of Gromek One, the public will just think they’re seeing the same man!” You see how people think in stereotype terms? Anyway, it was a good scene. I’ll have that piece sent to Paris.
F.T. Really?
A.H. Yes, I’ll give you that piece of film, if you like.
F.T. Thank you very much! I’ll look at it and then turn it over to Henri Langlois for the Cinémathèque Française.
* * *
F.T. Mr. Hitchcock, there’s a systematic pattern that runs throughout all of your work. From the very beginning you have consistently chosen to limit yourself to those film elements that are visually inspiring or that have a dramatic potential. As a matter of fact, during our talks you’ve referred again and again to the need to “charge the screen with emotion” or to “fill the whole tapestry.”
By systematically eliminating what you call “flaws” or “gaps” from your scenarios and by continually improving on the original texture, you have built up a stock of dramatic material that is clearly your own. Whether you’re aware of it or not, this filtering process generally serves to express personal concepts that are supplementary to the action; it’s as if you were instinctively imposing your own ideas on all your themes. Do you see what I mean?
A.H. Well, experience tells you a lot. I’m aware that you and many other critics feel that all of my films resemble one another. But to me, strangely enough, every film is a brand-new thing.
F.T. In your work there’s a consistent effort to tackle new experiences. It seems to me that once you get a cinematic idea, you never let go of it until you’re entirely satisfied—even if it takes several pictures to work it out successfully.
A.H. I see what you mean. It’s po’ssible that I sometimes go back subconsciously, if only to run for cover. But I’ve never sunk low enough to say to myself, “I think I’ll copy what I did in such and such a film.”
F.T. No, you’ve surely never done that. And on those rare occasions when you made such pictures as Waltzes from Vienna or Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which are not in your genre, you dismissed them as an out-and-out waste of time.
A.H. I agree.
F.T. Well then, your evolution does follow a systematic pattern of constant amelioration from film to film. If you’re not sure an idea has been properly carried out in one picture, you’ll work it out in the next one. Only when you’re completely satisfied with the result do you go on to tackle something else.
Hitchcock’s least favorite motion picture—Waltzes from Vienna (1933).
A.H. Naturally, I expect to go forward, to advance with each picture, but to what degree I will succeed, I don’t know. I might add that I always feel comfortable about a project when I can tell the story in a very simple way, from beginning fo end, in a fairly abbreviated version. I like to imagine a young woman who has been to see the movie and goes home very satisfied with what she’s seen.
Her mother asks her, “How was the movie?”
And she answers, “It was very good.”
The mother says, “What was it about?”
And the girl replies, “Well, it was about a young woman who so and so and so . . .”
Well, I feel that before undertaking to shoot a movie, one should be able to do just that, to satisfy oneself that it can be narrated just as clearly, the whole cycle.
F.T. That’s the main thing—to complete the cycle. This is the biggest problem, particularly for beginners. It’s so easy to go astray that one often feels the completed picture has no relation to what was originally intended. So that it’s only after friends and critics who see the first screenings talk about it in the same terms we used before it was shot—only then do we know—that despite the mistakes and waste the essential is still there. In other words, it’s when somebody else uses your own words about the basic concept that you see you’ve succeeded in conveying to the screen the ideas that prompted you to undertake this picture instead of something else.
A.H. That’s exactly what I mean. I’m often troubled by the dilemma of whether I should cling to what I call the rising curve of the story, or whether I shouldn’t experiment more through a looser form of narrative.
F.T. I believe you’re right to hang on to that rising curve. For you, it works very successfully.
A.H. For instance, I personally would have been a little bothered by the shape of your film Jules and Jim because it doesn’t automatically rise in that way. At one point, when one of the characters jumps out of a window, the story stops. Then a title reading “Some time later” flashes across the screen, and the action is picked up again in a movie house showing a newsreel on the burning of books. Then, one of the characters says, “Look, our friend’s down there in the front row.” The three of them get together outside the movie house and the story starts again. Now, that may be good and correct in its way, but in the genre of the suspense story, it would be absolutely inadmissible.
F.T. I absolutely agree with you and not only in the context of suspense. One should not systematically subordinate everything to the characters. In any film there comes a moment when the story must have the priority. You’re quite right; one should not compromise the dramatic curve.
A.H. I note the distinction you make between situation films and character films. I’ve often wondered whether I could do a suspense storv within a looser film, in a form that’s not so tight.
F.T. It’s risky, but it might be interesting to try it. It seems to me you have already experimented along these lines.
A.H. Well, the story of Marnie is looser because it is carried by the characters, but we still had the rising curve of interest because of the basic question: When will the girl be found out? That’s one question, and the other one is: What’s the matter with this girl; why won’t she go to bed with her husband? In a sense it’s a psychological mystery.
F.T. While you deal with out-of-the-way subjects, most of the things you film are very personal to you, somewhat like obsessions. I’m not suggesting that you live in murder and sex, but I imagine that when you open up a newspaper you start out with the crime stories.
A.H. As a matter of fact, I don’t read about crime in newspapers. The only newspaper I read is the London Times, which is rather dry but has lots of humorous items. A few years ago the Times carried an item under the heading: “Fish Sent to Prison.” I read the story and it turned out that someone had donated a small tropical aquarium to the women’s prison in London. But the heading amused me. I read the paper for that sort of thing.
F.T. Do you also read magazines and novels?
A.H. I don’t read novels, or any fiction. I would say that most of my reading consists of contemporary biographies and books on travel. I can’t read fiction because if I did I would instinctively be asking myself, “Will this make a movie or not?” I’m not interested in literary style, except perhaps when I read Somerset Maugham, whom I admire for the simplicity of his style. I don’t like literature that is flowery and where the main attraction is the turn of a phrase. My mind is strictly visual, and when I read an elaborate description of a city street or of the countryside, I’m impatient with it. I’d rather show it myself with a camera.
F.T. I wonder whether you know Night of the Hunter, the only picture Charles Laughton ever directed?
A.H. No, I never saw it.
F.T. Well, in that picture there was a very good idea that reminded me of your films. Robert Mitchum plays the preacher of one of those secret, strange religious sects. The word “love” was tattooed on one of his hands and the word “hate” on the other. His sermon consisted in a sort of pathetic struggle between the two hands. It was quite effective. When I saw that, it occurred
to me that your pictures also describe the conflict between good and evil. It’s shown in a great variety of ways—some of them quite powerful—and yet it’s always simplified, just like that fight between the two hands. Do you agree?
A.H. I would say so. The other day we mentioned a slogan: The better the villain, the better the picture. We might turn that around and say “The stronger the evil, the stronger the film.”
F.T. How do you feel about being labeled a Catholic artist?
A.H. That’s a rather difficult question, and I’m not sure I can give you a precise answer. I come from a Catholic family and I had a strict, religious upbringing. My wife converted to Catholicism before our marriage. I don’t think I can be labeled a Catholic artist, but it may be that one’s early upbringing influences a man’s life and guides his instinct.
For instance, in several films—and though this seemed, at the time, to be accidental—there were Catholic churches and not Baptist or Lutheran churches. For Vertigo I needed a church with a tower, so naturally I looked around for an old church. The only churches of that kind in California are the Catholic missions. On the face of it, it might seem that I deliberately chose to show a Catholic church, but, in reality, the idea originated with the Boileau-Narcejac novel. I simply couldn’t see anyone jumping from the tower of a modern Protestant church. I am definitely not anti-religious; perhaps I’m sometimes neglectful.