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WATER RUNS DOWN A DRAIN | 0:00:08 | 0:00:09 | |
SOMBRE ORCHESTRAL MUSIC | 0:00:16 | 0:00:18 | |
This film contains some strong language and scenes which some viewers may find disturbing | 0:00:18 | 0:00:26 | |
THUNDER RUMBLES | 0:01:28 | 0:01:29 | |
SOMBRE ORCHESTRAL MUSIC | 0:01:43 | 0:01:45 | |
MARLI RENFRO: I was 21 years old, I was a pin-up model. | 0:02:11 | 0:02:15 | |
I was working with a photographer and he said that Universal - or UI, | 0:02:17 | 0:02:23 | |
as it was called then - are looking for somebody to pose in a film. | 0:02:23 | 0:02:28 | |
So I called and made an appointment. | 0:02:28 | 0:02:30 | |
I went and spoke with Mr Hitchcock and basically had to strip down, | 0:02:31 | 0:02:38 | |
got dressed again and then was interviewed by Janet Leigh, | 0:02:38 | 0:02:42 | |
and I had to strip down for her, too. | 0:02:42 | 0:02:44 | |
Oh, just in my underpants. | 0:02:44 | 0:02:45 | |
But anyway... My body was very similar to hers, so I got hired. | 0:02:45 | 0:02:51 | |
I had to report for make-up, I don't know, one or two days later. | 0:02:51 | 0:02:55 | |
And there's the red light flashing and "no admittance" and all of this, | 0:02:55 | 0:03:00 | |
and I thought, "Oh, God, here they're expecting a stripper." | 0:03:00 | 0:03:04 | |
I was not quite completely nude. | 0:03:05 | 0:03:08 | |
I had what we called a crotch patch. | 0:03:08 | 0:03:11 | |
During filming with the shower going and everything, it would come loose. | 0:03:12 | 0:03:16 | |
I told Hitchcock, I said "Why don't we take this thing off?" | 0:03:16 | 0:03:19 | |
He said, "No. No." | 0:03:19 | 0:03:20 | |
The whole time he wore a suit, black tie, white shirt. | 0:03:22 | 0:03:26 | |
I was hired for two or three days, and wound up working for seven. | 0:03:26 | 0:03:31 | |
It's extraordinary that it took | 0:03:33 | 0:03:35 | |
so long to do that one particular scene, | 0:03:35 | 0:03:37 | |
because that was about a third | 0:03:37 | 0:03:39 | |
of what Janet Leigh had to work for the movie. | 0:03:39 | 0:03:42 | |
There were 78 pieces of film and about 45 seconds. | 0:03:42 | 0:03:45 | |
Spending seven days on one small set, | 0:03:46 | 0:03:49 | |
shooting such a short scene, | 0:03:49 | 0:03:51 | |
was pretty much unheard of. | 0:03:51 | 0:03:52 | |
Generally these days you're lucky if you get one day to kill someone. | 0:03:52 | 0:03:55 | |
Oh, it has to be an obsession. | 0:03:55 | 0:03:56 | |
You're shooting that over the course of seven days, | 0:03:56 | 0:03:59 | |
that is absolutely an obsession. | 0:03:59 | 0:04:00 | |
Hitchcock fought to film this murder separately from the rest | 0:04:00 | 0:04:04 | |
of the movie, which meant in a way | 0:04:04 | 0:04:06 | |
that murder was now going to be | 0:04:06 | 0:04:08 | |
an acceptable part of entertainment. | 0:04:08 | 0:04:11 | |
There was violence in American films, but nothing like Psycho. | 0:04:11 | 0:04:15 | |
Nothing that intimate, nothing that designed, | 0:04:15 | 0:04:18 | |
nothing that kind of remorseless. | 0:04:18 | 0:04:21 | |
I think he knew what he had on his hands, | 0:04:21 | 0:04:23 | |
and he probably felt like | 0:04:23 | 0:04:25 | |
the whole film hinged on that moment. | 0:04:25 | 0:04:27 | |
This crucible moment. | 0:04:27 | 0:04:29 | |
You should have seen the blood. | 0:04:29 | 0:04:31 | |
The whole... The whole place was... | 0:04:31 | 0:04:34 | |
Well, it's too horrible to describe. | 0:04:34 | 0:04:37 | |
Dreadful. | 0:04:37 | 0:04:38 | |
It's... I think the first modern... | 0:04:38 | 0:04:41 | |
..expression of the female body under assault. | 0:04:42 | 0:04:47 | |
And in some ways it's its most pure expression, | 0:04:47 | 0:04:50 | |
because it IS devastating. | 0:04:50 | 0:04:52 | |
Women had top billing in the '30s and '20s, | 0:04:54 | 0:04:58 | |
and that sort of evaporated during the '40s. | 0:04:58 | 0:05:01 | |
And by the time we got to the end of the '50s, | 0:05:01 | 0:05:03 | |
women were secondary in movies and Hitch sort of... | 0:05:03 | 0:05:06 | |
That's what the movie does, in a way, say that. | 0:05:06 | 0:05:09 | |
It's killing off the woman. | 0:05:09 | 0:05:11 | |
And it was really the first A movie to deal with | 0:05:11 | 0:05:13 | |
this kind of horror, trashy, tabloid stuff. | 0:05:13 | 0:05:17 | |
Nobody wanted to make it, and they went, "Are you nuts? | 0:05:17 | 0:05:19 | |
"You just did North by Northwest, this incredible hit, | 0:05:19 | 0:05:22 | |
"and now you want to do this black and white... "What is this thing?" | 0:05:22 | 0:05:25 | |
I have just made a motion picture, | 0:05:25 | 0:05:28 | |
North by Northwest. | 0:05:28 | 0:05:30 | |
North by Northwest was, like, the ultimate achievement on every level. | 0:05:30 | 0:05:34 | |
It was grand entertainment, it was classy, it had movie stars. | 0:05:34 | 0:05:38 | |
It was beautiful, colourful. | 0:05:38 | 0:05:40 | |
So how are you going to follow that up? | 0:05:40 | 0:05:42 | |
With a prank. | 0:05:42 | 0:05:43 | |
I once made a movie, rather tongue-in-cheek, called Psycho. | 0:05:43 | 0:05:48 | |
-Yes? -And it was... It was a big joke, you know? | 0:05:48 | 0:05:51 | |
And I was horrified to find that some people took it seriously. | 0:05:51 | 0:05:55 | |
It was intended to cause people to scream and yell and so forth, | 0:05:55 | 0:06:00 | |
but no more than the screaming and yelling on a switchback railway. | 0:06:00 | 0:06:04 | |
Those of us who work in the horror genre rarely wear tuxedos. | 0:06:04 | 0:06:07 | |
This is not a movie that wears a tuxedo, either. | 0:06:07 | 0:06:10 | |
This is a movie that's very much jeans and a T-shirt. | 0:06:10 | 0:06:13 | |
But it's told by a guy who wears a tuxedo. | 0:06:13 | 0:06:16 | |
He wanted to stray beyond his comfort zone. | 0:06:16 | 0:06:19 | |
One of the things he was up to is, | 0:06:19 | 0:06:21 | |
"You don't know me at all." | 0:06:21 | 0:06:22 | |
And that's what Psycho is really about. | 0:06:22 | 0:06:25 | |
What attracted you to this one, then? | 0:06:25 | 0:06:27 | |
I think the murder in the bathtub coming out of the blue, you know? | 0:06:29 | 0:06:34 | |
That was about all. | 0:06:35 | 0:06:37 | |
Hitchcock was very, very aware of his competition. | 0:06:37 | 0:06:40 | |
He realised that Clouzot had done the kind of movie | 0:06:41 | 0:06:44 | |
that he felt that he should | 0:06:44 | 0:06:46 | |
and could be making and, of course, | 0:06:46 | 0:06:48 | |
when critics started calling Clouzot the French Hitchcock, well, | 0:06:48 | 0:06:53 | |
you were invading his territory then, and, believe me, he took notice. | 0:06:53 | 0:06:57 | |
Psycho is really the moment where the gloves come off. | 0:06:57 | 0:07:00 | |
It does feel like Hitch's revenge on Hollywood, to some extent. | 0:07:00 | 0:07:03 | |
On so many levels, it's his masterpiece. | 0:07:04 | 0:07:07 | |
I continue to feel like the movie is an act of aggression. | 0:07:07 | 0:07:10 | |
-Yeah. -Against his fans, his critics, actors. | 0:07:10 | 0:07:14 | |
-Yeah. -It just feels angry, like he was hurt and he had to hurt back. | 0:07:14 | 0:07:18 | |
The sudden violence of the shower scene in Psycho | 0:07:18 | 0:07:21 | |
was meaningful to him | 0:07:21 | 0:07:23 | |
for reasons that dated back, you know, 20 years | 0:07:23 | 0:07:27 | |
to the origins of World War II. | 0:07:27 | 0:07:29 | |
Hitchcock thought that the UK and the United States were insufficiently | 0:07:29 | 0:07:34 | |
prepared for the dangers and horrors of World War II. | 0:07:34 | 0:07:40 | |
There were several moments in his movies that spoke to that. | 0:07:40 | 0:07:44 | |
You can hear the bombs falling on the streets and the homes. | 0:07:44 | 0:07:46 | |
Don't tune me out, hang on a while, | 0:07:46 | 0:07:48 | |
this is a big story and you're part of it. | 0:07:48 | 0:07:50 | |
It's too late to do anything here now except stand in the dark | 0:07:50 | 0:07:53 | |
-and let them come. -What's the matter with us? | 0:07:53 | 0:07:55 | |
We not only let the Nazi do our rowing for us but our thinking. | 0:07:56 | 0:07:59 | |
Ye Gods and little fishes! | 0:08:00 | 0:08:02 | |
One of them was Shadow of a Doubt. | 0:08:02 | 0:08:04 | |
Only about a year and a half after Pearl Harbor, | 0:08:04 | 0:08:07 | |
set in Santa Rosa in California. | 0:08:07 | 0:08:10 | |
You can see how in that movie he's kind of chastising this town | 0:08:10 | 0:08:15 | |
for being naive. | 0:08:15 | 0:08:16 | |
You live in a dream, you're a sleepwalker, blind. | 0:08:16 | 0:08:20 | |
How do you know what the world is like? | 0:08:20 | 0:08:21 | |
Do you know the world is a foul sty? | 0:08:23 | 0:08:24 | |
Do you know if you rip the fronts of houses, you'd find swine? | 0:08:26 | 0:08:29 | |
He was basically saying, "America, you were way too naive. | 0:08:29 | 0:08:33 | |
"You think you're safe in your shower at home with your family and loved ones nearby? | 0:08:33 | 0:08:40 | |
"No. You're not. | 0:08:40 | 0:08:42 | |
"Sorry." | 0:08:42 | 0:08:43 | |
Hitchcock had many obsessions, | 0:08:43 | 0:08:44 | |
but one of them that he talked about with The Birds | 0:08:44 | 0:08:46 | |
was the randomness of life. | 0:08:46 | 0:08:48 | |
There is no explanation for the birds attacking. | 0:08:48 | 0:08:50 | |
To him, that was life. | 0:08:51 | 0:08:52 | |
There you are, everything's fine | 0:08:52 | 0:08:54 | |
and then someone gets cancer and they're dead two weeks later. | 0:08:54 | 0:08:57 | |
Or your life is good and you get hit by a bus. | 0:08:57 | 0:08:59 | |
Hitchcock was someone who, for several years now, | 0:08:59 | 0:09:02 | |
was showing up on people's TV sets on Sunday nights. | 0:09:02 | 0:09:07 | |
The victim tumbled and fell with a horrible crash. | 0:09:07 | 0:09:10 | |
I think their back broke immediately it hit the floor. | 0:09:10 | 0:09:13 | |
It was... It's difficult to describe the way that the... | 0:09:13 | 0:09:17 | |
He was an icon. | 0:09:17 | 0:09:18 | |
He was the sort of avuncular yet creepy guy who was presenting | 0:09:18 | 0:09:26 | |
sex and violence to Americans | 0:09:26 | 0:09:28 | |
leavened with black humour, every Sunday night. | 0:09:28 | 0:09:32 | |
And Americans are comfortable with him by 1960. | 0:09:32 | 0:09:36 | |
If someone else had made Psycho, | 0:09:36 | 0:09:38 | |
it's quite possible that the reaction would not | 0:09:38 | 0:09:41 | |
have been the same. | 0:09:41 | 0:09:42 | |
Psycho came at a very unique time in American pop culture. | 0:09:42 | 0:09:45 | |
It almost predates the turmoil and the shock and the trauma | 0:09:45 | 0:09:49 | |
that were to come in the 1960s | 0:09:49 | 0:09:51 | |
with racial violence, with political assassinations. | 0:09:51 | 0:09:54 | |
I'm not saying that Hitchcock anticipated it | 0:09:55 | 0:09:58 | |
and knew what he was up to, | 0:09:58 | 0:10:00 | |
but what he did know is that he was trapped by his past, | 0:10:00 | 0:10:05 | |
that it was not a time any more for Grace Kelly. | 0:10:05 | 0:10:08 | |
It was not a time any more for, what you do you call it, | 0:10:08 | 0:10:11 | |
beautiful Technicolor baubles. | 0:10:11 | 0:10:13 | |
When you look at Psycho | 0:10:14 | 0:10:16 | |
and you look at those magnificent, elegant, big, | 0:10:16 | 0:10:20 | |
rich, Technicolor films of the '50s, | 0:10:20 | 0:10:23 | |
you know that something changed. | 0:10:23 | 0:10:26 | |
I think that Psycho was his response to movies changing | 0:10:27 | 0:10:32 | |
and to upping the ante and not wanting to be forgotten. | 0:10:32 | 0:10:37 | |
1959, that was the year of Some Like it Hot, | 0:10:37 | 0:10:40 | |
Suddenly, Last Summer... | 0:10:40 | 0:10:42 | |
..and Anatomy of a Murder. | 0:10:44 | 0:10:45 | |
All three of those movies pushed boundaries. | 0:10:45 | 0:10:49 | |
So there was something in the air, culturally speaking, | 0:10:49 | 0:10:53 | |
that Hollywood was already tapping into. | 0:10:53 | 0:10:55 | |
Psycho comes out at this period | 0:11:00 | 0:11:02 | |
where we are post-atomic age but pre-civil rights. | 0:11:02 | 0:11:07 | |
You know, if you think about the horror movie violence, | 0:11:07 | 0:11:11 | |
they were science gone wrong, | 0:11:11 | 0:11:12 | |
but you didn't really feel like it was going to happen to you. | 0:11:12 | 0:11:16 | |
Psycho you felt could happen to you. | 0:11:17 | 0:11:19 | |
This was the first movie that showed, | 0:11:19 | 0:11:21 | |
yeah, you could be vulnerable, | 0:11:21 | 0:11:23 | |
naked, alone in a shower and someone who is wearing the clothes of their | 0:11:23 | 0:11:27 | |
dead mother is going to come in and just stab you, | 0:11:27 | 0:11:30 | |
because that's what they're going to do. | 0:11:30 | 0:11:32 | |
Americans were kind of obsessed with domesticity. | 0:11:34 | 0:11:38 | |
They wanted to tell themselves that in their private, | 0:11:38 | 0:11:41 | |
personal domestic spaces, | 0:11:41 | 0:11:43 | |
at least there they were safe. | 0:11:43 | 0:11:47 | |
The Soviets and whomever else, | 0:11:47 | 0:11:50 | |
they couldn't possibly get to you in your bathroom! | 0:11:50 | 0:11:52 | |
A few days after Psycho began shooting in November of 1959, | 0:11:54 | 0:12:00 | |
the Clutter family in Kansas is murdered. | 0:12:00 | 0:12:04 | |
Those are the In Cold Blood murders. | 0:12:04 | 0:12:06 | |
You're not living next door to the Norman Rockwell family any more, | 0:12:06 | 0:12:09 | |
you're living next door to the Manson family. | 0:12:09 | 0:12:11 | |
This is the new modern American family, which very much inspired | 0:12:11 | 0:12:14 | |
Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. | 0:12:14 | 0:12:16 | |
SHE SCREAMS | 0:12:16 | 0:12:18 | |
HE HOWLS IN RESPONSE | 0:12:18 | 0:12:19 | |
The first Playboy club opens in Chicago. | 0:12:21 | 0:12:26 | |
The most famous sitcom stars of the 1950s, | 0:12:26 | 0:12:30 | |
Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo, are divorced. | 0:12:30 | 0:12:35 | |
The birth control pill is approved by the FDA. | 0:12:35 | 0:12:39 | |
You could look at the shower scene as this build-up of tension, | 0:12:39 | 0:12:41 | |
all of these things, all of these American fears of the quiet '50s. | 0:12:41 | 0:12:46 | |
It's all going to explode, and it comes out in this scene. | 0:12:46 | 0:12:49 | |
Well, I was on the critics list in New York for review. | 0:13:01 | 0:13:04 | |
The press was all invited to the theatre | 0:13:04 | 0:13:08 | |
the day it opened at ten or 10:30 in the morning, | 0:13:08 | 0:13:11 | |
with the first performance. | 0:13:11 | 0:13:13 | |
As you went in, | 0:13:13 | 0:13:14 | |
Hitchcock's voice was blaring on loudspeakers saying... | 0:13:14 | 0:13:18 | |
MIMICS HITCHCOCK: "Nobody would be allowed in after the picture starts, | 0:13:18 | 0:13:21 | |
"and please don't reveal the ending." | 0:13:21 | 0:13:24 | |
Before Psycho, movies, as a form of entertainment, | 0:13:25 | 0:13:29 | |
were relatively disposable. | 0:13:29 | 0:13:30 | |
There was a tremendous... | 0:13:30 | 0:13:32 | |
Compared to today, a tremendous coming and going in movie theatres. | 0:13:32 | 0:13:36 | |
And Hitchcock brilliantly said | 0:13:36 | 0:13:38 | |
"We don't want anyone coming in | 0:13:38 | 0:13:41 | |
"after the beginning of this film." | 0:13:41 | 0:13:43 | |
It changed the way films are exhibited. | 0:13:43 | 0:13:46 | |
The reason was because the leading lady, Janet Leigh, | 0:13:46 | 0:13:49 | |
was killed off a third of the way through. | 0:13:49 | 0:13:52 | |
And I didn't want people whispering to each other, | 0:13:52 | 0:13:54 | |
"When is Janet Leigh coming on?" | 0:13:54 | 0:13:56 | |
He wanted to build anticipation. | 0:13:57 | 0:14:00 | |
The bathroom... | 0:14:00 | 0:14:01 | |
Something terrible happens in a bathroom. | 0:14:03 | 0:14:05 | |
We know this from the trailer. | 0:14:05 | 0:14:07 | |
We don't know it is Janet Leigh, | 0:14:07 | 0:14:08 | |
because it's Vera Miles in the trailer and not Janet Leigh. | 0:14:08 | 0:14:12 | |
SHE SCREAMS | 0:14:12 | 0:14:14 | |
The minute the curtain opens and started stabbing, | 0:14:14 | 0:14:19 | |
there was... There was a sustained shriek... | 0:14:19 | 0:14:23 | |
..from the audience. | 0:14:24 | 0:14:25 | |
AHHHH! | 0:14:25 | 0:14:26 | |
Like that. Constant. | 0:14:26 | 0:14:28 | |
You couldn't hear anything off the soundtrack. | 0:14:28 | 0:14:31 | |
Through the entire shower scene. | 0:14:31 | 0:14:33 | |
So you had the screams from Janet Leigh, | 0:14:34 | 0:14:36 | |
the screams from all the women surrounding you in the theatre, | 0:14:36 | 0:14:39 | |
and the high shrieking strings from Herrmann. | 0:14:39 | 0:14:41 | |
That must have been total mayhem. | 0:14:41 | 0:14:44 | |
It was actually the first time in the history of movies | 0:14:44 | 0:14:47 | |
where it wasn't safe to be in a movie theatre. | 0:14:47 | 0:14:50 | |
And when I walked out into Times Square at noon... | 0:14:51 | 0:14:54 | |
..I felt I had been raped. | 0:14:55 | 0:14:56 | |
In 1895, | 0:15:01 | 0:15:02 | |
when the Lumiere brothers really first showed film to an audience, | 0:15:02 | 0:15:08 | |
one of the fragments they showed was of a train pulling into a station. | 0:15:08 | 0:15:13 | |
And the legend has it that they thought the train | 0:15:14 | 0:15:16 | |
was going to hit them, and they were screaming | 0:15:16 | 0:15:18 | |
and it caused a stampede of people trying to | 0:15:18 | 0:15:21 | |
evacuate this room that it was screened in. | 0:15:21 | 0:15:23 | |
They didn't understand the concept. | 0:15:23 | 0:15:25 | |
You know, Psycho comes along and it has a similar kind of impact. | 0:15:25 | 0:15:29 | |
It's the only movie in my childhood | 0:15:29 | 0:15:31 | |
that my mom wouldn't let me go and see, | 0:15:31 | 0:15:33 | |
which was kind of ridiculous because I was seeing nothing | 0:15:33 | 0:15:36 | |
but horror films every single weekend, two of them, in fact. | 0:15:36 | 0:15:40 | |
But Psycho - no, I couldn't go! | 0:15:40 | 0:15:43 | |
As a kid, I thought the name was Cycle, | 0:15:43 | 0:15:45 | |
like it was about some killer on a motorcycle. | 0:15:45 | 0:15:47 | |
But I actually got this Super 8 version and just, like, | 0:15:47 | 0:15:51 | |
constantly ran the movie over and over again. | 0:15:51 | 0:15:54 | |
When audiences saw this really likeable character, | 0:15:56 | 0:16:00 | |
someone who was quite relatable in terms of | 0:16:00 | 0:16:03 | |
"I need more money, I'm growing older, | 0:16:03 | 0:16:05 | |
"the man that I love won't marry me," | 0:16:05 | 0:16:08 | |
they were really hooked. | 0:16:08 | 0:16:09 | |
Oh, Sam, let's get married. | 0:16:09 | 0:16:11 | |
Yeah. | 0:16:16 | 0:16:17 | |
And live with me in a store room behind a hardware store in Fairvale? | 0:16:17 | 0:16:21 | |
We'll have lots of laughs(!) | 0:16:21 | 0:16:22 | |
Of course she's going to survive the movie, it's Janet Leigh! | 0:16:22 | 0:16:27 | |
Instead, she takes a shower, out of nowhere she is murdered by... | 0:16:27 | 0:16:32 | |
..an old lady, who I can't even see? | 0:16:33 | 0:16:36 | |
What the fuck is going on here?! | 0:16:36 | 0:16:38 | |
He has broken the covenant of film-maker and audience, | 0:16:38 | 0:16:42 | |
and the audience cannot wait to see more. | 0:16:42 | 0:16:46 | |
He was a respected director... | 0:16:46 | 0:16:48 | |
..and, you know, she was a bona fide movie star, | 0:16:49 | 0:16:52 | |
and I think you kind of get into the thrill of that possible shock wave, | 0:16:52 | 0:16:58 | |
which obviously happened. | 0:16:58 | 0:17:00 | |
I think that moment signalled new American cinema, | 0:17:00 | 0:17:05 | |
maybe world cinema in certain ways. | 0:17:05 | 0:17:07 | |
I don't know that that had ever been done. | 0:17:07 | 0:17:08 | |
Right. | 0:17:08 | 0:17:10 | |
Maybe there's some obscure Czechoslovakian film that did it, | 0:17:10 | 0:17:13 | |
there's a guy going, like, "Grr!" | 0:17:13 | 0:17:14 | |
-LAUGHTER -"I did it first!" -Yeah. | 0:17:14 | 0:17:17 | |
I can think of things that, culturally, have got us thinking about that structure. | 0:17:17 | 0:17:21 | |
For instance, the first season of Game of Thrones, | 0:17:21 | 0:17:23 | |
in which our most appealing character of Ned Stark, | 0:17:23 | 0:17:26 | |
is just sort of cruelly killed in front of us. | 0:17:26 | 0:17:29 | |
Culturally, we had to be reminded of the power of that narrative trope. | 0:17:33 | 0:17:38 | |
The reality is he used the whole first half of the movie | 0:17:38 | 0:17:40 | |
as a ruse to get you to this house, | 0:17:40 | 0:17:42 | |
and the only way you're going to get to this house is | 0:17:42 | 0:17:45 | |
if you believe that she's someone who's stolen 40,000 and that she's | 0:17:45 | 0:17:49 | |
gotten off on the wrong freeway exit | 0:17:49 | 0:17:51 | |
and is on this little tiny road where nobody goes by. | 0:17:51 | 0:17:54 | |
There's a lot of things he is saying here about our society | 0:17:54 | 0:17:58 | |
that was changing at that point. | 0:17:58 | 0:18:00 | |
We were trying to get as fast as we could from Los Angeles to Chicago or | 0:18:00 | 0:18:03 | |
New York, and going in these little towns was not necessary any more. | 0:18:03 | 0:18:07 | |
And Norman doesn't even seem to mind. | 0:18:07 | 0:18:09 | |
He's ready to change the bed sheets every day with nobody there. | 0:18:09 | 0:18:12 | |
One by one, you drop the formalities. | 0:18:12 | 0:18:14 | |
I shouldn't even bother changing the sheets, but old habits die hard. | 0:18:14 | 0:18:18 | |
When she's driving off with the 40,000, | 0:18:20 | 0:18:23 | |
she's on the road and she's in the West. | 0:18:23 | 0:18:26 | |
There's something fundamentally American about that, | 0:18:27 | 0:18:30 | |
dating back all the way to manifest destiny. | 0:18:30 | 0:18:32 | |
"Go West, find your fate, find your freedom." | 0:18:32 | 0:18:37 | |
Marion tries to do just that, and that's where she meets her fate. | 0:18:37 | 0:18:41 | |
PSYCHO VIOLIN STRINGS PLAYED IN SLOWER TEMPO | 0:18:44 | 0:18:47 | |
It's interesting to compare the novel Psycho with the movie Psycho. | 0:18:47 | 0:18:51 | |
The shower scene is a lot different, it's really brief in the book. | 0:18:51 | 0:18:54 | |
So on page 28... | 0:18:54 | 0:18:57 | |
..um, here's the shower scene. | 0:18:57 | 0:18:59 | |
SHOWER RUNS | 0:18:59 | 0:19:00 | |
"The roar was deafening, the room was beginning to steam up. | 0:19:03 | 0:19:06 | |
"That's why she didn't hear the door open, | 0:19:08 | 0:19:10 | |
"or note the sound of footsteps. | 0:19:10 | 0:19:12 | |
"And at first when the shower curtains parted, the steam obscured the face. | 0:19:13 | 0:19:18 | |
"Then she did see it there, | 0:19:18 | 0:19:20 | |
"just a face, peering through the curtains, hanging in mid air like a mask. | 0:19:20 | 0:19:25 | |
"A half scarf concealed the hair and the glassy eyes stared inhumanly. | 0:19:25 | 0:19:30 | |
"But it wasn't a mask, it couldn't be. | 0:19:30 | 0:19:32 | |
"The skin had been powdered dead white and two hectic spots of rouge | 0:19:33 | 0:19:36 | |
"centred on the cheekbones. | 0:19:36 | 0:19:39 | |
"It wasn't a mask, it was the face of a crazy woman. | 0:19:39 | 0:19:42 | |
"Mary started to scream and then the curtain parted further | 0:19:42 | 0:19:45 | |
"and hand appeared, holding a butcher knife. | 0:19:45 | 0:19:47 | |
"It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream. | 0:19:48 | 0:19:51 | |
"And her head." | 0:19:52 | 0:19:53 | |
The fact the Hitchcock brought Saul Bass in to work on the shower scene | 0:20:00 | 0:20:03 | |
as its own kind of independent thing | 0:20:03 | 0:20:06 | |
says to me that he knew that he had to do something special with the shower scene. | 0:20:06 | 0:20:11 | |
"Interior, Mary in shower. | 0:20:13 | 0:20:15 | |
"We see the bathroom door being pushed slowly open. | 0:20:15 | 0:20:18 | |
"The noise of the shower drowns any sound. | 0:20:19 | 0:20:22 | |
"The door is then slowly and carefully closed | 0:20:22 | 0:20:25 | |
"and we see the shadow of a woman fall across the shower curtain. | 0:20:25 | 0:20:28 | |
"Mary's back is turned to the curtain. | 0:20:30 | 0:20:32 | |
"The white brightness of the bathroom is almost blinding. | 0:20:32 | 0:20:35 | |
"Suddenly we see the hand reach up, | 0:20:35 | 0:20:37 | |
"grasp the shower curtain, rip it aside. | 0:20:37 | 0:20:39 | |
"Cut to Mary, extreme close-up. | 0:20:39 | 0:20:43 | |
"As she turns in response to the feel and sound of the shower curtain being torn aside, | 0:20:43 | 0:20:48 | |
"a look of pure horror erupts in her face. | 0:20:48 | 0:20:51 | |
"A low, terrible groan begins to rise up out of her throat. | 0:20:51 | 0:20:55 | |
"A hand comes into shot. | 0:20:55 | 0:20:57 | |
"The hand holds an enormous bread knife. | 0:20:57 | 0:20:59 | |
"The flint of the blade shatters the screen | 0:20:59 | 0:21:02 | |
"to an almost total silver blankness. | 0:21:02 | 0:21:05 | |
"The slashing. | 0:21:05 | 0:21:06 | |
"An impression of a knife slashing as if tearing at the very scream, | 0:21:06 | 0:21:10 | |
"ripping the film. Over it, the brief gulps of screaming. | 0:21:10 | 0:21:13 | |
"And then silence. | 0:21:14 | 0:21:15 | |
"And then the dreadful thump as Mary's body falls in the tub. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:20 | |
"Reverse angle, the blank whiteness, the blur of the shower water. | 0:21:20 | 0:21:25 | |
"The hand pulling the shower curtain back. | 0:21:25 | 0:21:27 | |
"We catch one flicker of a glimpse of the murderer. | 0:21:27 | 0:21:30 | |
"A woman, her face contorted with madness, her head wild with hair, | 0:21:30 | 0:21:35 | |
"as if she were wearing a fright wig. | 0:21:35 | 0:21:38 | |
"And then we see only the curtain, closed across the tub, | 0:21:38 | 0:21:42 | |
"and hear the rush of the shower water. | 0:21:42 | 0:21:44 | |
"Above the shower bar we see the bathroom door open again, | 0:21:44 | 0:21:48 | |
"and after a moment, we hear the sound of the front door slamming. | 0:21:48 | 0:21:51 | |
"Cut to the dead body. | 0:21:51 | 0:21:53 | |
"Lying half-in, half-out of the tub, the head tumbled over, | 0:21:54 | 0:21:58 | |
"touching the floor. The hair wet, one eye wide open as if popped. | 0:21:58 | 0:22:04 | |
"One arm lying limp and wet along the tile floor. | 0:22:04 | 0:22:08 | |
"Coming down the side of the tub, | 0:22:08 | 0:22:10 | |
"running thick and dark along the porcelain, | 0:22:10 | 0:22:13 | |
"we see many small threads of blood. | 0:22:13 | 0:22:15 | |
"Camera moves away from the body, travels slowly across the bathroom, | 0:22:16 | 0:22:21 | |
"past the toilet... | 0:22:21 | 0:22:22 | |
"..out into the bedroom." | 0:22:23 | 0:22:25 | |
I think that the shower scene elevated film. | 0:22:33 | 0:22:35 | |
Not the horror genre specifically, but film-making in general. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:39 | |
Over and over again, it keeps showing you new things. | 0:22:39 | 0:22:41 | |
I think it's one of those spectacular pieces of work. | 0:22:41 | 0:22:45 | |
The film is moving inexorably to that scene. | 0:22:45 | 0:22:48 | |
You don't know it, as a viewer. | 0:22:48 | 0:22:50 | |
Sam, this is the last time. | 0:22:52 | 0:22:54 | |
I pay, too. | 0:22:55 | 0:22:56 | |
They also pay, who meet in hotel rooms. | 0:22:58 | 0:23:01 | |
There are plenty of motels in this area, you should have... | 0:23:01 | 0:23:05 | |
I mean, just to be safe. | 0:23:05 | 0:23:07 | |
Mother... My mother... | 0:23:07 | 0:23:09 | |
What is the phrase? | 0:23:10 | 0:23:11 | |
She isn't quite herself today. | 0:23:12 | 0:23:15 | |
Hitchcock was amazing at setting everything up. | 0:23:15 | 0:23:18 | |
When she's packing to go to see her boyfriend, | 0:23:18 | 0:23:22 | |
you see the shower head in the background. | 0:23:22 | 0:23:24 | |
It's very specific, the shower is right over her shoulder. | 0:23:24 | 0:23:28 | |
When it comes to Norman, when he talks about the bathroom, | 0:23:28 | 0:23:31 | |
he, like stutters and he can't really say toilet or bathroom. | 0:23:31 | 0:23:35 | |
And the, er... | 0:23:35 | 0:23:37 | |
..over there. | 0:23:38 | 0:23:39 | |
-The bathroom. -Yeah. | 0:23:40 | 0:23:42 | |
That's what's great about Hitchcock. | 0:23:42 | 0:23:44 | |
He always really tunes into those character moments. | 0:23:44 | 0:23:47 | |
That desperate drive at the beginning. | 0:23:47 | 0:23:49 | |
It's crazy good. | 0:23:49 | 0:23:50 | |
The notion of getting clean, that's her arc. | 0:23:50 | 0:23:52 | |
She can't see because of the density of the water, | 0:23:52 | 0:23:55 | |
which is really beautiful | 0:23:55 | 0:23:57 | |
because she's drowning in her worry and fear. | 0:23:57 | 0:24:00 | |
The slashing of the wipers presages the slashing of the knife. | 0:24:00 | 0:24:04 | |
It's sort of... It's a very violent and wet and sloshy, | 0:24:04 | 0:24:08 | |
sharp stabbing motion. | 0:24:08 | 0:24:10 | |
And it's a long build-up, | 0:24:10 | 0:24:11 | |
but we have no idea that the rain | 0:24:11 | 0:24:13 | |
that's going to come down upon her later | 0:24:13 | 0:24:15 | |
is going to include her own blood. | 0:24:15 | 0:24:17 | |
I certainly get the sensation that the shower scene was something that | 0:24:18 | 0:24:21 | |
Hitchcock had probably been working towards all of his life. | 0:24:21 | 0:24:23 | |
Is he cleaning house? | 0:24:29 | 0:24:31 | |
He's washing down the bathroom walls. | 0:24:31 | 0:24:34 | |
It must've splattered a lot. | 0:24:34 | 0:24:36 | |
Well, why not? That's what we're all thinking. | 0:24:38 | 0:24:40 | |
He killed her in there, and he has to clean up | 0:24:40 | 0:24:42 | |
those stains before he leaves. | 0:24:42 | 0:24:44 | |
You really can't talk about the shower scene without talking | 0:24:44 | 0:24:47 | |
about the rest of the film. | 0:24:47 | 0:24:48 | |
Without the parlour scene, obviously, the shower scene doesn't really work nearly as well, | 0:24:48 | 0:24:52 | |
because the parlour scene is a sort of really sad, | 0:24:52 | 0:24:54 | |
beautiful connection that comes before this savagery. | 0:24:54 | 0:24:58 | |
Is your time so empty? | 0:24:58 | 0:25:00 | |
No. Well, I run the office. | 0:25:00 | 0:25:05 | |
And, tend the cabins, and grounds, and do little errands for my mother. | 0:25:05 | 0:25:10 | |
The one she allows I might be capable of doing. | 0:25:10 | 0:25:13 | |
Do you go out with friends? | 0:25:14 | 0:25:17 | |
Well, a boy's best friend is his mother. | 0:25:19 | 0:25:21 | |
He has a very loaded preamble to the shower scene. | 0:25:21 | 0:25:25 | |
Wouldn't it be better if you put her... | 0:25:25 | 0:25:27 | |
..someplace? | 0:25:29 | 0:25:30 | |
You mean an institution? | 0:25:34 | 0:25:36 | |
A madhouse? | 0:25:36 | 0:25:38 | |
Look how still he is. | 0:25:38 | 0:25:39 | |
Whereas before, he was fidgety and moving around. | 0:25:39 | 0:25:43 | |
Suddenly, he became very still. | 0:25:43 | 0:25:46 | |
-Maybe that's the moment he decided to kill her. -Yeah. -Yeah. | 0:25:46 | 0:25:49 | |
Yeah, he's super confident now. | 0:25:49 | 0:25:51 | |
-Yeah. -Look at him. -He's barely moving his head. | 0:25:51 | 0:25:53 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:25:53 | 0:25:54 | |
-Just his eyes. -Wow! | 0:25:54 | 0:25:57 | |
He's so angry. | 0:25:57 | 0:25:58 | |
-And she just got terrified. -Yeah. | 0:25:59 | 0:26:01 | |
Oh, you're not, you're not going back to your room already? | 0:26:01 | 0:26:05 | |
Perhaps I'll go back to my room, now... | 0:26:05 | 0:26:07 | |
..Norman, it's been lovely to chat. | 0:26:07 | 0:26:10 | |
Terribly sorry about your loneliness. | 0:26:10 | 0:26:12 | |
This is the first moment that you're with him and not her. | 0:26:15 | 0:26:18 | |
Yeah, she literally walks away from camera. | 0:26:18 | 0:26:20 | |
-Yeah. -Right. -And then, well with him now. -My job here is done. -Yeah. | 0:26:20 | 0:26:23 | |
I'm no longer the protagonist of this story. | 0:26:23 | 0:26:25 | |
There was a private supper here... | 0:26:25 | 0:26:28 | |
..and, er... | 0:26:29 | 0:26:31 | |
Oh, by the way, this picture... | 0:26:31 | 0:26:33 | |
..has great significance. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:36 | |
Because... | 0:26:38 | 0:26:40 | |
Let's go along to cabin number one. | 0:26:43 | 0:26:45 | |
The painting that Mr Bates removed | 0:26:49 | 0:26:52 | |
to become the Peeping Tom was actually | 0:26:52 | 0:26:55 | |
a 16th or early 17th century painting. | 0:26:55 | 0:26:58 | |
Susanna and the Elders is actually a morality story | 0:27:00 | 0:27:03 | |
about a virtuous woman who bathed in her garden, | 0:27:03 | 0:27:07 | |
and was spied on by two elder man. | 0:27:07 | 0:27:10 | |
And the theme burgeoned, | 0:27:10 | 0:27:13 | |
possibly as a result of counter reformatory motives. | 0:27:13 | 0:27:17 | |
It was either that, or it was simply an excuse for painting female nudity. | 0:27:17 | 0:27:21 | |
Now, the interesting thing about it, is it's about adultery. | 0:27:23 | 0:27:26 | |
And it's fascinating because Mary, who's in the shower, | 0:27:26 | 0:27:31 | |
is kind of cleansing herself | 0:27:31 | 0:27:33 | |
of committing adultery with a married man. | 0:27:33 | 0:27:35 | |
In art history, there were about three or four different phases | 0:27:37 | 0:27:41 | |
of how artists depicted Susanna and the Elders. | 0:27:41 | 0:27:43 | |
Lucas van Leyden shows the two elders in prominence, | 0:27:45 | 0:27:49 | |
whereas the small Susanna is bathing in the far distance. | 0:27:49 | 0:27:54 | |
But by the time you get to Tintoretto, she's full frontal. | 0:27:54 | 0:27:58 | |
Rubens begins to take and probe the psychological intensity of the moment. | 0:27:59 | 0:28:04 | |
Rembrandt, using the power of lightness and darkness, | 0:28:04 | 0:28:08 | |
of highlights, to enhance the drama. | 0:28:08 | 0:28:11 | |
The interesting thing about the painting is that you've got full frontal nudity of Susanna, | 0:28:11 | 0:28:16 | |
and yet the two elders are not simply looking at her, | 0:28:16 | 0:28:19 | |
they're actually groping and violating her. | 0:28:19 | 0:28:21 | |
It's almost a rape scene... | 0:28:21 | 0:28:23 | |
..that's taking place before our eyes. | 0:28:24 | 0:28:26 | |
It's an amazing painting that he picked. | 0:28:26 | 0:28:29 | |
It's not any old Baroque painting. | 0:28:29 | 0:28:32 | |
It's voyeurism. | 0:28:32 | 0:28:33 | |
He removes the voyeuristic painting | 0:28:34 | 0:28:37 | |
to become the voyeur looking in on the shower. | 0:28:37 | 0:28:40 | |
He could've picked from 50 different examples, | 0:28:40 | 0:28:43 | |
but he chose this one because it had the most amount of information that | 0:28:43 | 0:28:46 | |
he could use for his film. | 0:28:46 | 0:28:48 | |
I love that there's a hole in the wall the size of his face. | 0:28:50 | 0:28:54 | |
Which tells you that he's been doing this more than once | 0:28:54 | 0:28:56 | |
and that he's made it comfortable for himself. | 0:28:56 | 0:28:59 | |
The notion that he is looking just as you are, it binds you with him, | 0:28:59 | 0:29:03 | |
and when you eliminate those walls and you're now watching him, | 0:29:03 | 0:29:08 | |
and you're watching, and you're watching together, | 0:29:08 | 0:29:11 | |
then you are in a new place where things can get a lot scarier. | 0:29:11 | 0:29:15 | |
Psycho is delineated from the other works of his oeuvre by those gazes. | 0:29:15 | 0:29:22 | |
The birds are looking at us, each individual bird, | 0:29:22 | 0:29:25 | |
dead bird, is looking at us. | 0:29:25 | 0:29:27 | |
Mother is looking at us from eyeless sockets. | 0:29:27 | 0:29:31 | |
Dead Marion, with her eye open. | 0:29:31 | 0:29:32 | |
The stare includes and indicts us at the same time. | 0:29:34 | 0:29:37 | |
It's a mirror image. | 0:29:38 | 0:29:40 | |
You know, it goes both ways. | 0:29:40 | 0:29:41 | |
We're looking into the eyes of death, | 0:29:41 | 0:29:43 | |
and the eyes of death are looking at us. | 0:29:43 | 0:29:45 | |
And it's inclusive and horrifying. | 0:29:45 | 0:29:48 | |
The laughing and the tears, | 0:29:48 | 0:29:51 | |
and the cruel eyes studying you. | 0:29:51 | 0:29:54 | |
My mother there? | 0:29:54 | 0:29:55 | |
God is studying you, | 0:29:57 | 0:29:58 | |
because there are a number of God point-of-view shots in Psycho, | 0:29:58 | 0:30:02 | |
just as there are in The Birds. | 0:30:02 | 0:30:05 | |
Hitchcock's God is cruel and arbitrary, | 0:30:05 | 0:30:07 | |
and like some kind of bird of prey or raptor which is gazing down | 0:30:07 | 0:30:12 | |
rather coldly and disinterestedly on its human subjects. | 0:30:12 | 0:30:15 | |
In the shower sequence, | 0:30:17 | 0:30:18 | |
the violence is directed and that knife is coming towards us. | 0:30:18 | 0:30:23 | |
So we're being punished for being the voyeurs. | 0:30:23 | 0:30:26 | |
There are consequences to watching and being watched. | 0:30:26 | 0:30:30 | |
In the character of James Stewart, | 0:30:30 | 0:30:32 | |
if we identify with him in Rear Window | 0:30:32 | 0:30:35 | |
has a very literal, great fall | 0:30:35 | 0:30:37 | |
at the end of it where he breaks the other leg. | 0:30:37 | 0:30:41 | |
Meaning another six, eight months of pain and itchiness | 0:30:41 | 0:30:44 | |
and not being able to screw Grace Kelly. | 0:30:44 | 0:30:47 | |
All those things are pertinent to Hitchcock. | 0:30:47 | 0:30:51 | |
I'll bet you nine people out of ten... | 0:30:51 | 0:30:53 | |
WOMAN TRANSLATES INTO FRENCH | 0:30:53 | 0:30:55 | |
..if they see something across, like a woman undressing and going | 0:30:55 | 0:31:01 | |
to bed, or even sometimes a man pottering around his room | 0:31:01 | 0:31:06 | |
doing nothing. | 0:31:06 | 0:31:07 | |
Nine people out of ten will stay and look. | 0:31:09 | 0:31:12 | |
They won't turn away and say, | 0:31:14 | 0:31:16 | |
it's none of my business and pull down their own curtain. | 0:31:16 | 0:31:20 | |
They won't do it. | 0:31:20 | 0:31:21 | |
In the beginning of the movie you're flying into a window with the blinds | 0:31:24 | 0:31:28 | |
closed, so you're starting out as a voyeur. | 0:31:28 | 0:31:30 | |
And if you think about it, if the movie's opening | 0:31:31 | 0:31:33 | |
from the point of view of a fly, it changes the whole context of what meaning of the movie is. | 0:31:33 | 0:31:38 | |
-WOMAN: -I'm not even going to swat that fly. | 0:31:38 | 0:31:40 | |
I hope they are watching. | 0:31:40 | 0:31:42 | |
They'll see, they'll see and they'll know, and they'll say... | 0:31:42 | 0:31:46 | |
..why, she wouldn't even harm a fly. | 0:31:47 | 0:31:50 | |
I think the voyeurism actually has a payoff in the shower scene. | 0:31:50 | 0:31:54 | |
It's Hitchcock's way of setting the bomb under the table, | 0:31:54 | 0:31:57 | |
which is something he liked to do to create dramatic irony. | 0:31:57 | 0:32:01 | |
Four people are sitting around the table, talking about baseball, | 0:32:01 | 0:32:07 | |
whatever you like. | 0:32:07 | 0:32:08 | |
Five minutes of it, | 0:32:09 | 0:32:11 | |
very dull. | 0:32:11 | 0:32:12 | |
Suddenly, a bomb goes off. | 0:32:13 | 0:32:17 | |
Blows the people to smithereens. | 0:32:17 | 0:32:20 | |
What do the audience have? | 0:32:20 | 0:32:21 | |
Ten seconds of shock. | 0:32:21 | 0:32:25 | |
Now take the same scene | 0:32:25 | 0:32:27 | |
and tell the audience there is a bomb under that table | 0:32:27 | 0:32:30 | |
and will go off in five minutes. | 0:32:30 | 0:32:32 | |
Well, the whole emotion of the audience is totally different, | 0:32:33 | 0:32:37 | |
because you've given them that information. | 0:32:37 | 0:32:39 | |
You've got the audience working. | 0:32:40 | 0:32:43 | |
-Hello? -I think at this point | 0:32:44 | 0:32:46 | |
we start to wonder what's going on in his head | 0:32:46 | 0:32:48 | |
and what's going to happen because of this look on his face. | 0:32:48 | 0:32:52 | |
That's so interesting as an actor, what is he playing? | 0:32:52 | 0:32:54 | |
He's playing, "Oh, God, don't let my mother kill this girl." | 0:32:54 | 0:32:57 | |
Norman Bates is presented in all these little, you know, | 0:32:57 | 0:33:01 | |
encapsulated moments throughout the film | 0:33:01 | 0:33:04 | |
and in much the same way that the murder is presented | 0:33:04 | 0:33:07 | |
in encapsulated moments of images and compositions, cut together. | 0:33:07 | 0:33:13 | |
So, I think that the movie is, it's about fragmentation, | 0:33:13 | 0:33:18 | |
it is fragmentation. | 0:33:18 | 0:33:20 | |
Norman goes up to the house. | 0:33:23 | 0:33:25 | |
It's very important that the audience sees him leave | 0:33:25 | 0:33:29 | |
because he is reacting to a third character that we think | 0:33:29 | 0:33:34 | |
is in the house, Mother. | 0:33:34 | 0:33:36 | |
But that is really in his mind. | 0:33:36 | 0:33:38 | |
He goes to the stairs and he looks up, and he looks like he's sad | 0:33:40 | 0:33:43 | |
because he realises that Mom's not at home upstairs. | 0:33:43 | 0:33:45 | |
Then he goes and flops into the kitchen, | 0:33:45 | 0:33:47 | |
like a dejected little schoolboy. | 0:33:47 | 0:33:49 | |
So he sits there, like, "Oh, rats, I can't have dinner with the lady I want to have dinner with." | 0:33:49 | 0:33:55 | |
I imagine he must've done that a lot when Mother was alive. | 0:33:55 | 0:33:58 | |
That she must've yelled at him and he would just go into kitchen when he couldn't get what he wanted, | 0:33:58 | 0:34:02 | |
when she was berating him for whatever he wasn't living up to her standards. | 0:34:02 | 0:34:06 | |
There's a lot one could say about Hitchcock mothers. | 0:34:06 | 0:34:09 | |
Are you quite sure she didn't come down here to see you, | 0:34:17 | 0:34:20 | |
to capture the rich Alex Sebastian for a husband? | 0:34:20 | 0:34:24 | |
Go get shaved before your father gets home. | 0:34:24 | 0:34:26 | |
You gentlemen aren't really trying to kill my son, are you? | 0:34:26 | 0:34:29 | |
When you talk about what is sacred in America, | 0:34:31 | 0:34:34 | |
people talk about mom and apple pie. | 0:34:34 | 0:34:37 | |
Mom is good, we love Mom, we are Mom, we are good. | 0:34:37 | 0:34:44 | |
On the other hand, there's something else going on in 1950s America | 0:34:44 | 0:34:49 | |
in culture and society, where Mom is also suspect. | 0:34:49 | 0:34:55 | |
There was a serious social panic in America about juvenile delinquency. | 0:34:57 | 0:35:02 | |
One thing that this social panic resulted in was this fear that moms | 0:35:02 | 0:35:07 | |
were going to shelter and spoil children, | 0:35:07 | 0:35:10 | |
possibly America itself, to death. | 0:35:10 | 0:35:13 | |
All of the sitcoms - Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet, | 0:35:14 | 0:35:19 | |
where Mother never did anything. | 0:35:19 | 0:35:21 | |
All she did was take care of the house and the kids. | 0:35:21 | 0:35:26 | |
I'm just practically ready and David has to get dressed. | 0:35:26 | 0:35:29 | |
Get dressed? You mean dressed up? | 0:35:29 | 0:35:31 | |
Well, yes, you want to look nice when Nancy gets here. | 0:35:31 | 0:35:33 | |
The director who exposes the horror of the American family in the '50s | 0:35:33 | 0:35:40 | |
without making a horror movie, is Douglas Sirk. | 0:35:40 | 0:35:43 | |
You see Kay, I love Ron. | 0:35:43 | 0:35:46 | |
You love him so much you're willing to ruin all our lives? | 0:35:46 | 0:35:49 | |
You can't really think that. | 0:35:49 | 0:35:50 | |
What else can I think? | 0:35:50 | 0:35:52 | |
In Sirk, it's the whole construction of the family. | 0:35:52 | 0:35:57 | |
It's not until Psycho, though, | 0:35:57 | 0:35:58 | |
where the mother is literally a monster when you see her at the end. | 0:35:58 | 0:36:03 | |
I think my mother scared me when I was three months old. | 0:36:03 | 0:36:08 | |
AUDIENCE LAUGHS You remember that? | 0:36:08 | 0:36:10 | |
You see, she said boo. | 0:36:10 | 0:36:11 | |
I don't know how many times in Psycho, do people talk about Mother. | 0:36:11 | 0:36:17 | |
Oh, we can see each other. | 0:36:17 | 0:36:19 | |
We can even have dinner. | 0:36:19 | 0:36:20 | |
But respectably. In my house, with my mother's picture on the mantel, | 0:36:21 | 0:36:25 | |
and my sister helping me broil a big steak for three. | 0:36:25 | 0:36:29 | |
And after the steak, will we send Sister to the movies, | 0:36:29 | 0:36:32 | |
turn Mama's picture to the wall? | 0:36:32 | 0:36:33 | |
Sam! | 0:36:33 | 0:36:34 | |
Patricia Hitchcock talks about, she offers her a tranquiliser. | 0:36:34 | 0:36:39 | |
Have you got some aspirin? | 0:36:39 | 0:36:40 | |
I've got something, not aspirin, | 0:36:40 | 0:36:42 | |
my mother's doctor gave them to me the day of my wedding. | 0:36:42 | 0:36:44 | |
Teddy was furious when he found out I had taken tranquilizers. | 0:36:44 | 0:36:47 | |
-Any calls? -Teddy called me, | 0:36:49 | 0:36:51 | |
my mother called to see if Teddy called... | 0:36:51 | 0:36:54 | |
Even in that office, the influence, | 0:36:54 | 0:36:57 | |
the negative influence of mothers, and here it's on women, not on men. | 0:36:57 | 0:37:03 | |
So, the fact that Norman Bates' mother, | 0:37:03 | 0:37:06 | |
we realise eventually it's Norman Bates himself, | 0:37:06 | 0:37:08 | |
might have on an unconscious level audiences saying, "Aha! | 0:37:08 | 0:37:12 | |
"I knew it! Mom IS gonna to kill us! | 0:37:12 | 0:37:15 | |
"Mom IS going to be the death of us all!" | 0:37:15 | 0:37:17 | |
SHOWER RUNS | 0:37:34 | 0:37:36 | |
OK. Once more into the bridge. | 0:37:36 | 0:37:38 | |
Back to the primal moment. | 0:37:39 | 0:37:41 | |
Marion is doing her accounting here, | 0:37:43 | 0:37:47 | |
figuring out how much she spent on the car. | 0:37:47 | 0:37:49 | |
She's making the decision to... | 0:37:51 | 0:37:52 | |
..return the money. | 0:37:54 | 0:37:55 | |
Nice little bit of handy exposition. | 0:37:55 | 0:37:57 | |
I always write down my math. | 0:37:58 | 0:38:00 | |
It's charming, you know. | 0:38:00 | 0:38:02 | |
It's still an old movie, let's face it. | 0:38:02 | 0:38:04 | |
She throws the paper in the toilet bowl | 0:38:06 | 0:38:09 | |
and then to cap it off she flushes it. | 0:38:09 | 0:38:13 | |
Right from the beginning, you know you're in new territory. | 0:38:14 | 0:38:17 | |
In 1960, nobody had shown a toilet before. | 0:38:17 | 0:38:19 | |
The flushing toilet is a clear indication that the scene to come | 0:38:19 | 0:38:23 | |
is going to break one or two taboos. | 0:38:23 | 0:38:25 | |
Details are important, you know. | 0:38:25 | 0:38:27 | |
In the building of suspense, | 0:38:27 | 0:38:29 | |
you know that those details are all going to add up to something | 0:38:29 | 0:38:31 | |
much more monumental than the simplicity of these shots. | 0:38:31 | 0:38:34 | |
Hitchcock was a Victorian. | 0:38:35 | 0:38:37 | |
Victorians thought that a bright, white tiled bathroom was sanitary. | 0:38:37 | 0:38:43 | |
That's the term they used. | 0:38:43 | 0:38:44 | |
His bathroom, in his home, was bright, white tiles. | 0:38:46 | 0:38:50 | |
He thought that invading the sanctity of the bathroom | 0:38:50 | 0:38:54 | |
was a cool and subversive thing to do. | 0:38:54 | 0:38:57 | |
He did it in silent films, he did in Spellbound. | 0:38:57 | 0:39:02 | |
By showing that brightness it was a way of saying, | 0:39:02 | 0:39:05 | |
look at how I am defiling the sanctity of the bathroom | 0:39:05 | 0:39:08 | |
and I am doing it almost bloodlessly. | 0:39:08 | 0:39:11 | |
Coincidentally, this scene was extremely influential on a scene | 0:39:11 | 0:39:15 | |
in The Conversation, which I edited back in 1973. | 0:39:15 | 0:39:19 | |
A murder has been committed and Gene Hackman comes into the bathroom | 0:39:19 | 0:39:24 | |
of a hotel room but the room is completely clean. | 0:39:24 | 0:39:28 | |
And he pulls the curtain apart, just as in Psycho | 0:39:28 | 0:39:32 | |
the mother pulls the curtain apart, but it's empty. | 0:39:32 | 0:39:35 | |
He goes to the drain of the tub and runs his fingers | 0:39:35 | 0:39:39 | |
around the drain to see if there was any telltale signs of blood | 0:39:39 | 0:39:42 | |
and there's nothing. | 0:39:42 | 0:39:44 | |
He goes over to the toilet to jiggle the handle | 0:39:44 | 0:39:47 | |
and the toilet suddenly backs up. | 0:39:47 | 0:39:50 | |
So it's a kind of an inverse version of the Psycho scene. | 0:39:50 | 0:39:55 | |
The toilet and the flushing of the toilet, | 0:39:56 | 0:39:59 | |
the shower curtain, the drain, | 0:39:59 | 0:40:01 | |
all of these things were definitely imprinted upon us by Psycho. | 0:40:01 | 0:40:06 | |
Now, one of the most beautiful, famous leading ladies in 1960 | 0:40:06 | 0:40:10 | |
just stripped in front of us and stepped into a shower. | 0:40:10 | 0:40:14 | |
It's like, holy shit, where are we going now? | 0:40:14 | 0:40:17 | |
Man, that must've been crazy racy for 1960. | 0:40:17 | 0:40:19 | |
I don't even understand. | 0:40:19 | 0:40:21 | |
Hitchcock knew that American men were curious | 0:40:21 | 0:40:23 | |
about Janet Leigh. | 0:40:23 | 0:40:25 | |
And so, the idea of having her in a shower | 0:40:25 | 0:40:29 | |
in a stance that seems very suggestive, was a huge deal. | 0:40:29 | 0:40:33 | |
Seeing her full body behind that curtain, | 0:40:33 | 0:40:37 | |
it's brilliant because it's translucent. | 0:40:37 | 0:40:39 | |
It's not transparent, it's not opaque but it's translucent. | 0:40:39 | 0:40:44 | |
Enough to see her and titillate us. | 0:40:44 | 0:40:47 | |
But not enough to really be graphic yet. | 0:40:47 | 0:40:50 | |
The whole theory is that you have to discover the sex in a woman | 0:40:50 | 0:40:54 | |
and not have it... | 0:40:54 | 0:40:56 | |
..stuck all over her like labels, you know. | 0:40:58 | 0:41:01 | |
And there's nothing else to look for, nothing to discover. | 0:41:02 | 0:41:05 | |
Do we know anybody who turns the shower on before getting in, I mean, | 0:41:08 | 0:41:11 | |
I don't act that way. | 0:41:11 | 0:41:12 | |
I don't turn a shower on like that. | 0:41:12 | 0:41:16 | |
I run it, and then get in when I know that it's safe. | 0:41:16 | 0:41:18 | |
And look at that almost sexual expression on her face. | 0:41:20 | 0:41:24 | |
She is being rained upon and it's cleansing, | 0:41:24 | 0:41:27 | |
it's warm and she's happy, | 0:41:27 | 0:41:29 | |
and she's, like, made up her mind. | 0:41:29 | 0:41:31 | |
The natural sounds kind of put you in the perspective of, | 0:41:31 | 0:41:34 | |
we all become Janet Leigh but not as attractive. | 0:41:34 | 0:41:37 | |
Through other movies like Rear Window and Birds, | 0:41:37 | 0:41:39 | |
he knows when the lack of music can be as effective as music. | 0:41:39 | 0:41:42 | |
APPROACHING FOOTSTEPS | 0:41:45 | 0:41:47 | |
FLUTTER OF WINGS | 0:41:54 | 0:41:55 | |
I think there's almost no moment | 0:42:00 | 0:42:03 | |
when we see Marion with a genuine smile. | 0:42:03 | 0:42:06 | |
There's almost no moment where... | 0:42:06 | 0:42:08 | |
Where she's allowed to feel good | 0:42:08 | 0:42:10 | |
about what her life is like. | 0:42:10 | 0:42:13 | |
She's happy for the first time. | 0:42:13 | 0:42:14 | |
We're going into a scene which, on the one hand, | 0:42:15 | 0:42:18 | |
is, um, quite liberatory for the character, | 0:42:18 | 0:42:20 | |
but at the same time it's clearly really what we're watching | 0:42:20 | 0:42:23 | |
is the liberation of Hitchcock. | 0:42:23 | 0:42:25 | |
Of his own repressed desires finally being writ large on the screen. | 0:42:25 | 0:42:29 | |
Hitchcock viewed the world as a very imperfect moral machine. | 0:42:29 | 0:42:34 | |
And he always had this... | 0:42:34 | 0:42:36 | |
..biblical almost sense of doom and punishment. | 0:42:38 | 0:42:40 | |
WOMAN SCREAMS You know, that befalls those | 0:42:40 | 0:42:44 | |
that tangle with sin in a casual way. | 0:42:44 | 0:42:47 | |
Even his most unHitchcockian movie, which is Mr & Mrs Smith, | 0:42:47 | 0:42:51 | |
which I love, punishes banality. | 0:42:51 | 0:42:53 | |
She makes a moral decision to take back that money and, you know, | 0:42:55 | 0:42:59 | |
and suffer what ever punishment will come her way. | 0:42:59 | 0:43:02 | |
I stepped into a private trap back there. | 0:43:02 | 0:43:04 | |
And I'd like to back and try to pull myself out of it. | 0:43:05 | 0:43:08 | |
Before it's too late for me, too. | 0:43:10 | 0:43:12 | |
This is very important. | 0:43:12 | 0:43:13 | |
It's very important narratively | 0:43:13 | 0:43:15 | |
because it doesn't come in the middle of a heist. | 0:43:15 | 0:43:18 | |
Or in the middle of the robbery. | 0:43:18 | 0:43:20 | |
Or as she is escaping with the money on the road. | 0:43:20 | 0:43:24 | |
And it turns out, bang! | 0:43:24 | 0:43:25 | |
It doesn't make a damn bit of difference because the universe | 0:43:25 | 0:43:28 | |
doesn't give a shit. | 0:43:28 | 0:43:29 | |
And I think, uh, | 0:43:29 | 0:43:31 | |
that is a true sign of his Catholicism | 0:43:31 | 0:43:34 | |
and his sense of doom about a sin that cannot be washed away. | 0:43:34 | 0:43:38 | |
Literally, with water. | 0:43:38 | 0:43:40 | |
You know, it cannot be purged. | 0:43:40 | 0:43:42 | |
Except by blood, and violence. | 0:43:42 | 0:43:44 | |
And paying the price. | 0:43:44 | 0:43:46 | |
She's punished for the worst crime, | 0:43:46 | 0:43:48 | |
which is sexually arousing Norman Bates. | 0:43:48 | 0:43:52 | |
You know, you get this strain again and again. | 0:43:52 | 0:43:55 | |
I mean, think of Strangers on a Train, where Robert Walker, you know, | 0:43:55 | 0:43:59 | |
strangles this poor girl. | 0:43:59 | 0:44:01 | |
Again, what does he strangle her for? | 0:44:01 | 0:44:03 | |
Because she's a loose woman who is in Farley Granger's way. | 0:44:03 | 0:44:07 | |
I mean, that's a foreshadowing of Psycho. | 0:44:07 | 0:44:10 | |
That's her point of view of the shower that puts us, the audience, | 0:44:12 | 0:44:16 | |
as if we're in the shower with her. | 0:44:16 | 0:44:17 | |
It makes us feel just a vulnerable as she is. | 0:44:17 | 0:44:21 | |
It's spraying at us and it's creating a sonic curtain. | 0:44:21 | 0:44:24 | |
She can't hear him coming. | 0:44:24 | 0:44:25 | |
Gee, I'm sorry, I didn't hear you in all this rain. | 0:44:27 | 0:44:29 | |
And that's why that shot is bad news. | 0:44:29 | 0:44:34 | |
You know, the shots change in their level of symmetry | 0:44:34 | 0:44:36 | |
during the course of the sequence. | 0:44:36 | 0:44:38 | |
That's order at the beginning, and then, oddly, | 0:44:38 | 0:44:40 | |
it'll be echoed by the eye, in the drain, | 0:44:40 | 0:44:42 | |
and Norman Bates' people through his office | 0:44:42 | 0:44:45 | |
and those things start to rhyme after a while in a great way. | 0:44:45 | 0:44:49 | |
How do you point a camera at a shower head without the lens getting sprayed? | 0:44:49 | 0:44:53 | |
Move the camera back enough, | 0:44:53 | 0:44:55 | |
plug some of the holes so that the spray shoots outward. | 0:44:55 | 0:44:57 | |
Very simple and elegant solution. | 0:44:57 | 0:44:59 | |
There's nothing unusual about the pacing here. | 0:45:01 | 0:45:04 | |
It's at a rather leisurely 4.5 seconds per cut, on average. | 0:45:04 | 0:45:10 | |
So, it's a calm before the storm, let's say. | 0:45:10 | 0:45:13 | |
Now here's what I would call a strange cut. | 0:45:14 | 0:45:17 | |
What I call the wet hair cut. | 0:45:17 | 0:45:18 | |
Which is her washing herself with her head tilted back, | 0:45:18 | 0:45:23 | |
and then it suddenly cuts to the same kind of an angle. | 0:45:23 | 0:45:28 | |
Really a jump cut. | 0:45:28 | 0:45:30 | |
Except now her hair is completely wet. | 0:45:30 | 0:45:32 | |
This would give the lie to somebody who said | 0:45:32 | 0:45:36 | |
"this scene was shot exactly as the storyboards were done," | 0:45:36 | 0:45:40 | |
because you never would storyboard a moment like that. | 0:45:40 | 0:45:44 | |
You think you're going to be watching her go through | 0:45:44 | 0:45:47 | |
the whole process in real time but that cut jumps you ahead. | 0:45:47 | 0:45:51 | |
It feels very... | 0:45:51 | 0:45:52 | |
..bold and confident. | 0:45:53 | 0:45:55 | |
Now we cut to the shower head, | 0:45:55 | 0:45:57 | |
but it's a side angle on the shower head. | 0:45:57 | 0:45:59 | |
Not this, sort of, subjective point of view. | 0:45:59 | 0:46:02 | |
When we were looking at her, she was facing left to right, | 0:46:03 | 0:46:06 | |
away from the shower. | 0:46:06 | 0:46:07 | |
And when we cut back to her, | 0:46:08 | 0:46:10 | |
we come around to the other side of the stageline. | 0:46:10 | 0:46:13 | |
What's behind her now is the shower curtain, not the wall. | 0:46:13 | 0:46:17 | |
And now there's another cut. | 0:46:17 | 0:46:20 | |
Again, it's a kind of awkward jump cut. | 0:46:20 | 0:46:22 | |
Objectively, there would be no reason to do that. | 0:46:22 | 0:46:26 | |
But it's unsettling because there's a big empty space, | 0:46:26 | 0:46:31 | |
which is itself unsettling. | 0:46:31 | 0:46:33 | |
What is going to fill that empty space? | 0:46:33 | 0:46:37 | |
The audience starts to look over to that negative space. | 0:46:37 | 0:46:40 | |
And feeling like, "Why am I looking over here?" | 0:46:40 | 0:46:43 | |
The door opens. You see the shadow. | 0:46:43 | 0:46:46 | |
And then Norman's figure. | 0:46:46 | 0:46:47 | |
And that's the mounting terror. | 0:46:47 | 0:46:49 | |
Where you say to yourself, "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" | 0:46:49 | 0:46:52 | |
And THAT is the difference between suspense and surprise. | 0:46:52 | 0:46:56 | |
The idea of menace in a shadowy figure, | 0:46:56 | 0:47:00 | |
I think, that Hitchcock's fear. | 0:47:00 | 0:47:03 | |
Who is the menacing figure in Alfred Hitchcock's own life? | 0:47:03 | 0:47:08 | |
By the time he gets to Pyscho, that person is unleashed. | 0:47:08 | 0:47:12 | |
Here you see Margo Epper, the stunt woman, coming toward. | 0:47:13 | 0:47:16 | |
How do you NOT reveal who that is? | 0:47:18 | 0:47:20 | |
I've been taking the wrap for that sequence for 20 years now | 0:47:20 | 0:47:24 | |
but that's not me behind the curtain. | 0:47:24 | 0:47:28 | |
I was in New York that day rehearsing a Broadway show. | 0:47:28 | 0:47:31 | |
Every time they kept shooting it, you kept seeing the stunt woman's face. | 0:47:31 | 0:47:35 | |
And one of the make-up men decided, "What if we blackened her face?" | 0:47:35 | 0:47:38 | |
And so they tried that a couple of times. | 0:47:38 | 0:47:39 | |
And went darker and darker, and darker. | 0:47:39 | 0:47:41 | |
Until they achieved that effect. | 0:47:41 | 0:47:44 | |
I've I talked with Janet Leigh about what she thought she saw | 0:47:44 | 0:47:47 | |
coming at her, and she clearly saw Norman coming at her. | 0:47:47 | 0:47:52 | |
And that's what she played. | 0:47:52 | 0:47:54 | |
So, the reality for her was, | 0:47:54 | 0:47:56 | |
"I'm going to die this way by this person who tried to befriend me, | 0:47:56 | 0:48:00 | |
"and I tried to be polite to." | 0:48:00 | 0:48:03 | |
You're very kind. | 0:48:03 | 0:48:04 | |
It's all for you. I'm not hungry, go ahead. | 0:48:05 | 0:48:08 | |
It really does lend an extra air of horror and pathos to that moment. | 0:48:09 | 0:48:13 | |
And that wallpaper in the background. | 0:48:14 | 0:48:16 | |
The Shining - so many horror movies try to have that, like, | 0:48:16 | 0:48:19 | |
perfect Hitchcock Bates' Motel wallpaper. | 0:48:19 | 0:48:21 | |
This floral pattern, that juxtapose with this black silhouette of the knife | 0:48:21 | 0:48:26 | |
and the hair of Mother, it's really, really terrifying. | 0:48:26 | 0:48:28 | |
The shape always kind of tortured me, | 0:48:28 | 0:48:30 | |
it was like a weird mushroom shaped head. | 0:48:30 | 0:48:33 | |
I don't know, kind of lame to me for some reason. | 0:48:33 | 0:48:35 | |
I'd always wished that the shot looked a little scarier. | 0:48:35 | 0:48:39 | |
When my grandfather first saw the first rough cut of Psycho | 0:48:39 | 0:48:42 | |
he didn't like it at all. | 0:48:42 | 0:48:44 | |
He was just going to cut it down to an hour | 0:48:44 | 0:48:46 | |
and make it part of the TV show. | 0:48:46 | 0:48:48 | |
Bernard Herrmann convinced him to create the most, | 0:48:48 | 0:48:50 | |
like, famous scared chord music in horror cinema history. | 0:48:50 | 0:48:54 | |
It's so ingrained in pop culture to where... | 0:48:54 | 0:48:56 | |
-HE MIMICS PSYCHO SHOWER SCENE MUSIC Yeah, yeah. -It is transcendent. | 0:48:56 | 0:48:59 | |
Yeah, yeah. My seven-year-old daughter knows that, | 0:48:59 | 0:49:02 | |
-but she doesn't know where comes from. But... -Yeah. | 0:49:02 | 0:49:05 | |
You know, she's made that joke. MIMICS PSYCHO SHOWER SCENE MUSIC | 0:49:05 | 0:49:07 | |
-Like, I don't know where she got it. -That's incredible. | 0:49:07 | 0:49:10 | |
She has no idea it's from Psycho. It's evolutionary. | 0:49:10 | 0:49:12 | |
Like, we're just born knowing the shower scene! | 0:49:12 | 0:49:14 | |
LAUGHTER | 0:49:14 | 0:49:15 | |
I wanted a tattoo, | 0:49:17 | 0:49:18 | |
and I thought it must be that one cue by Bernard Herrmann. | 0:49:18 | 0:49:22 | |
The most amazing cue ever made in cinematic history. | 0:49:22 | 0:49:27 | |
It has so little to do with harmony. | 0:49:27 | 0:49:29 | |
It is just sheer terror. | 0:49:29 | 0:49:33 | |
The way that music was used in movies to scare people | 0:49:33 | 0:49:36 | |
really changed after Psycho. | 0:49:36 | 0:49:38 | |
If you want to make something scary, you put in those strings. | 0:49:38 | 0:49:41 | |
And you're like "DE-DE-DE-DE!" | 0:49:41 | 0:49:42 | |
If you slow it down you get, "Da-ran, da-ran." | 0:49:42 | 0:49:46 | |
What I really adore about Herrmann | 0:49:46 | 0:49:48 | |
is the way that he realised that in the limitation | 0:49:48 | 0:49:53 | |
there is actually a much more powerful statement to be made. | 0:49:53 | 0:49:58 | |
He did the Day The Earth Stood Still, | 0:49:58 | 0:49:59 | |
and he wrote it for seven theremins and only a couple of horns. | 0:49:59 | 0:50:03 | |
EERIE TITLE MUSIC PLAYS | 0:50:03 | 0:50:04 | |
Herrmann wrote Living Doll, | 0:50:15 | 0:50:18 | |
which I think is one of the best scores that they had on Twilight Zone. | 0:50:18 | 0:50:22 | |
It's like a bass clarinet or it might have been a contrabassoon, | 0:50:22 | 0:50:27 | |
a glockenspiel, and a harp. | 0:50:27 | 0:50:30 | |
He was definitely an experimenter. | 0:50:30 | 0:50:31 | |
He's the one who taught me that you can kind of do anything, | 0:50:31 | 0:50:35 | |
anywhere, if it works. | 0:50:35 | 0:50:36 | |
What I think is also absolutely genius about the shower scene | 0:50:36 | 0:50:40 | |
is the way Herrmann spotted it. | 0:50:40 | 0:50:42 | |
The spotting is deciding, | 0:50:42 | 0:50:44 | |
when do start a cue, when do you end a cue. | 0:50:44 | 0:50:47 | |
It starts with the toilet flushing. | 0:50:47 | 0:50:51 | |
She steps into the shower. | 0:50:51 | 0:50:52 | |
There is no music at all, whatsoever. | 0:50:52 | 0:50:55 | |
This composer does not prepare us for the onslaught | 0:50:55 | 0:50:58 | |
that is about to happen. | 0:50:58 | 0:50:59 | |
When Janet Leigh walks into the shower | 0:50:59 | 0:51:02 | |
and she pulls the curtain closed | 0:51:02 | 0:51:04 | |
you can actually hear the sound of the rings on the bar | 0:51:04 | 0:51:07 | |
and it goes "qu-ii-ii-th". | 0:51:07 | 0:51:09 | |
You see the villain coming through. | 0:51:09 | 0:51:11 | |
No music. No music at all. | 0:51:11 | 0:51:12 | |
The curtain gets swept aside - | 0:51:12 | 0:51:14 | |
we get the first sting. | 0:51:14 | 0:51:15 | |
"Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da!" | 0:51:15 | 0:51:18 | |
This is... This is the rush of Janet Leigh's heartbeat. | 0:51:18 | 0:51:22 | |
From the moment that we as an audience completely realise, | 0:51:22 | 0:51:26 | |
"OK, this girl is being brutally butchered here." | 0:51:26 | 0:51:29 | |
And we see this and the music goes | 0:51:29 | 0:51:32 | |
"Ba-bom, ba-bo-oom ba-bo-oom!" | 0:51:32 | 0:51:36 | |
She falls to the floor. | 0:51:37 | 0:51:39 | |
The heartbeat slows because she's dying. | 0:51:39 | 0:51:42 | |
And then in her last gasp | 0:51:42 | 0:51:44 | |
that music basically leaves her | 0:51:44 | 0:51:47 | |
and all we have is the sound of the falling curtain | 0:51:47 | 0:51:50 | |
and her head smacking to the ground. | 0:51:50 | 0:51:52 | |
How genius is that? | 0:51:52 | 0:51:54 | |
That's Herrmann. That's not Hitch. | 0:51:54 | 0:51:56 | |
That's Bernie. | 0:51:57 | 0:51:59 | |
We used the original score, um... | 0:51:59 | 0:52:01 | |
Bernard Herrmann's original score | 0:52:01 | 0:52:03 | |
for our temp music, of course... | 0:52:03 | 0:52:05 | |
while we were editing the film. | 0:52:05 | 0:52:06 | |
And then Danny came and re-recorded it. | 0:52:06 | 0:52:08 | |
And it was so beautiful. | 0:52:08 | 0:52:09 | |
It's a perfect score. | 0:52:11 | 0:52:13 | |
When I was given the job, I mean, it really was a holy scripture for me. | 0:52:13 | 0:52:17 | |
And there was one beat in a meeting with some of the producers of like, | 0:52:17 | 0:52:22 | |
"Maybe because it's in colour we should do it with brass, | 0:52:22 | 0:52:25 | |
"and woodwinds, and percussion and do it for the full orchestra." | 0:52:25 | 0:52:28 | |
And I was like, "No, no, no, no! | 0:52:28 | 0:52:30 | |
"Please, please. | 0:52:30 | 0:52:31 | |
"I beg you. Don't make me do that." | 0:52:31 | 0:52:33 | |
I had visions of a very grumpy Bernard Herrmann. | 0:52:33 | 0:52:38 | |
His ghost coming into my room. | 0:52:38 | 0:52:40 | |
I'd wake up in the middle of the night and he'd be there going | 0:52:40 | 0:52:42 | |
"You little asshole. What've you done?" | 0:52:42 | 0:52:44 | |
A knife is raised up, and now the murder scene begins. | 0:52:46 | 0:52:52 | |
And the pace of the cutting, it's going to shrink dramatically. | 0:52:52 | 0:52:56 | |
And there it is. | 0:52:56 | 0:52:57 | |
Beautiful, cathartic, unbelievably savage. | 0:52:57 | 0:53:00 | |
Intimate... | 0:53:02 | 0:53:03 | |
And just wrong on so many levels. | 0:53:03 | 0:53:06 | |
That... That looks awful. | 0:53:06 | 0:53:07 | |
That is... | 0:53:07 | 0:53:08 | |
SHE SIGHS SLOWLY | 0:53:08 | 0:53:10 | |
Wow. Wow. | 0:53:11 | 0:53:13 | |
Man, oh, man! | 0:53:13 | 0:53:15 | |
He has a way of reaching out and grabbing you by the throat | 0:53:15 | 0:53:18 | |
and saying, "Look! Look! You WILL look at this!" | 0:53:18 | 0:53:21 | |
It was a perfect stainless steel trap. | 0:53:21 | 0:53:25 | |
You could not run away from it. | 0:53:25 | 0:53:26 | |
It was inflicting damage, | 0:53:26 | 0:53:29 | |
but at the same time, you knew you were in the hands of a master. | 0:53:29 | 0:53:33 | |
There was nothing to do but submit. | 0:53:33 | 0:53:35 | |
The Psycho shower scene is cut very much like an action scene. | 0:53:35 | 0:53:38 | |
George Tomasini was a master. | 0:53:38 | 0:53:39 | |
What he did with the shower scene changed the language of cinema. | 0:53:39 | 0:53:43 | |
The editor suddenly became a much more important piece of the puzzle. | 0:53:43 | 0:53:46 | |
You had to think about a cut. | 0:53:46 | 0:53:48 | |
Because a cut was going to take you four minutes to make, and splice, and check it. | 0:53:48 | 0:53:52 | |
And now you can make a cut every 12 seconds or something. | 0:53:52 | 0:53:55 | |
The planning, the consideration, the thinking, | 0:53:55 | 0:53:58 | |
that went into designing some of these films is astonishing. | 0:53:58 | 0:54:01 | |
Motion pictures were 14 years old | 0:54:01 | 0:54:03 | |
before somebody got the idea that you could make a cut. | 0:54:03 | 0:54:06 | |
Because it's violent what's happening. | 0:54:06 | 0:54:09 | |
You're looking at a image of a visual field | 0:54:09 | 0:54:12 | |
that is very detailed and full of motion | 0:54:12 | 0:54:15 | |
and then instantly it is removed and replaced with another image. | 0:54:15 | 0:54:20 | |
In a sense, the audience should, kind of, | 0:54:20 | 0:54:22 | |
crash through the windshield of this experience. | 0:54:22 | 0:54:25 | |
Hitchcock and Tomasini knew exactly where the audience was looking. | 0:54:25 | 0:54:29 | |
They ended up working the disorientation, | 0:54:29 | 0:54:32 | |
drawing you into Marion's sense of confusion and terror. | 0:54:32 | 0:54:34 | |
Every single cut that Tomasini does is you... | 0:54:36 | 0:54:38 | |
By the time you've caught up to what you're looking at in the new shot | 0:54:38 | 0:54:41 | |
he's already cut to another shot. | 0:54:41 | 0:54:43 | |
It's a kaleidoscope of these images crashing into your cranium. | 0:54:44 | 0:54:48 | |
But it's very planned. | 0:54:48 | 0:54:49 | |
And it feels that way - | 0:54:49 | 0:54:50 | |
it's order and chaos come crashing up against each other. | 0:54:50 | 0:54:53 | |
It's a magic act. | 0:54:53 | 0:54:55 | |
-Truly. -Yeah. | 0:54:55 | 0:54:57 | |
Because people walked out of the cinema feeling like they had seen... | 0:54:57 | 0:55:00 | |
Like, shocked, you know, beyond belief. | 0:55:00 | 0:55:02 | |
Because there was nothing like that in cinema prior to that. | 0:55:02 | 0:55:05 | |
And yet they hadn't actually seen the things that they thought they saw. | 0:55:05 | 0:55:08 | |
That's an incredible thing. | 0:55:08 | 0:55:10 | |
SHOWER RUNS | 0:55:10 | 0:55:11 | |
The use of the sound effects, um, are, I think, | 0:55:14 | 0:55:18 | |
a huge contributor to the violence of the scene. | 0:55:18 | 0:55:21 | |
The stabbing sounds in particular. | 0:55:21 | 0:55:23 | |
How do you come up with the sound of what happens | 0:55:23 | 0:55:27 | |
when a butcher knife strikes flesh? | 0:55:27 | 0:55:30 | |
The sound man came up with the idea of, | 0:55:30 | 0:55:32 | |
"What about a knife stabbing melons?" | 0:55:32 | 0:55:35 | |
So, knowing Hitchcock, | 0:55:40 | 0:55:41 | |
you would have to bring lots of melons and arrange them on a big table. | 0:55:41 | 0:55:47 | |
There would be Crenshaw melons, and, you know, | 0:55:47 | 0:55:49 | |
any kind of melon that you can imagine | 0:55:49 | 0:55:51 | |
of very, very different sizes. | 0:55:51 | 0:55:52 | |
So, I think they had about two dozen. | 0:55:52 | 0:55:55 | |
And some backups. | 0:55:55 | 0:55:57 | |
So, there's the prop man stabbing melon. | 0:55:59 | 0:56:02 | |
Melon, melon, melon. | 0:56:02 | 0:56:03 | |
Next. Melon, melon, melon. | 0:56:03 | 0:56:05 | |
And so by the end of it Hitchcock knew the one that sounded most like sinew | 0:56:05 | 0:56:09 | |
and sounded the way he thought it should sound. | 0:56:09 | 0:56:11 | |
So, when they were through demonstrating all of these different melons | 0:56:11 | 0:56:16 | |
all he said was... | 0:56:16 | 0:56:19 | |
"Casaba." | 0:56:19 | 0:56:20 | |
That's all they needed to know. | 0:56:20 | 0:56:23 | |
I think the whole key to the sound of the Casaba melon | 0:56:38 | 0:56:41 | |
is that the inner gooey part is very small | 0:56:41 | 0:56:44 | |
and there's a very thick layer of fruit that you have to stab through. | 0:56:44 | 0:56:48 | |
It's very dense. | 0:56:48 | 0:56:49 | |
-Dense. -Not hollow. | 0:56:49 | 0:56:50 | |
Like a lot of the other melons sounded a little bit hollow. | 0:56:50 | 0:56:53 | |
And I'm sure with his eyes closed, Hitchcock was probably hearing that. | 0:56:53 | 0:56:57 | |
To my ear, Casaba melon sounds more like dry, | 0:56:57 | 0:57:01 | |
bony stabbing as opposed to wet, gooey stabbing. | 0:57:01 | 0:57:04 | |
The starchiness and the thickness | 0:57:04 | 0:57:06 | |
probably gives you more of that viscera. | 0:57:06 | 0:57:07 | |
-The crunchiness, or... -Viscera? -Viscera. | 0:57:07 | 0:57:10 | |
Hitchcock also had them bring a sirloin. | 0:57:11 | 0:57:14 | |
A really big... | 0:57:14 | 0:57:16 | |
..thing of sirloin. | 0:57:16 | 0:57:18 | |
I don't eat me and so I nearly nauseous telling you this | 0:57:18 | 0:57:22 | |
but, in any case, Hitchcock thought that would be a really great idea. | 0:57:22 | 0:57:25 | |
And they did in fact stab a big, big, big slab of steak. | 0:57:25 | 0:57:31 | |
And so that sound is interspersed with melon. | 0:57:31 | 0:57:33 | |
RECORDINGS OF MELON AND STEAK BEING STABBED | 0:57:38 | 0:57:40 | |
And the sound man took it home and had it for dinner that night. | 0:57:43 | 0:57:46 | |
The stabbing sound in Psycho is not a Hollywood sound effect. | 0:57:46 | 0:57:51 | |
It is a natural sound effect. | 0:57:51 | 0:57:53 | |
Which makes it all the more horrible. | 0:57:53 | 0:57:55 | |
Like, you could take the combination of, like, an arrow... | 0:57:55 | 0:57:58 | |
A literal arrow or an axe hitting | 0:57:58 | 0:57:59 | |
and you add to that something like, pipe-in-the-mud kind of "goosh". | 0:57:59 | 0:58:03 | |
And you add to that some sort of a, like, a leather rip | 0:58:03 | 0:58:06 | |
and you could make the sound designed stab that would feel horrible. | 0:58:06 | 0:58:11 | |
Marion turns. | 0:58:11 | 0:58:13 | |
We have three close ups getting increasingly tighter | 0:58:13 | 0:58:16 | |
to the point that now we're looking at nothing but her open mouth. | 0:58:16 | 0:58:20 | |
The three quick cuts which makes me happy to be an editor. | 0:58:20 | 0:58:23 | |
I've seen some of Saul Bass's boards. | 0:58:23 | 0:58:26 | |
And you'll see cut one, and cut three. | 0:58:26 | 0:58:28 | |
But the idea of drawing the three together really feels like something | 0:58:28 | 0:58:32 | |
that's kind of a joyful discovery | 0:58:32 | 0:58:34 | |
in feeling your way through things in the cutting room. | 0:58:34 | 0:58:36 | |
Hitchcock does the thing here that he does and The Birds too, | 0:58:36 | 0:58:40 | |
to show something that's shocking - | 0:58:40 | 0:58:42 | |
an on axis cut. | 0:58:42 | 0:58:44 | |
Boom, boom, boom. | 0:58:44 | 0:58:46 | |
It's a psychological cut. | 0:58:46 | 0:58:47 | |
People always think it's something that Hitchcock came up with, | 0:58:47 | 0:58:50 | |
but I actually always traced it back to the original Frankenstein | 0:58:50 | 0:58:54 | |
directed by James Whale, in 1931. | 0:58:54 | 0:58:57 | |
In a way it was the same effect | 0:58:57 | 0:58:58 | |
because they were showing you something so grotesque, something that you had never seen before, | 0:58:58 | 0:59:02 | |
people wanted to go to the movie just to see how shocking it was. | 0:59:02 | 0:59:06 | |
There is something called an American cut when you're editing | 0:59:06 | 0:59:09 | |
which is just like jump-cutting into a close-up from a wide shot. | 0:59:09 | 0:59:12 | |
And I know whenever I do it in a movie | 0:59:12 | 0:59:13 | |
when I'm working with Sam Raimi, he is always, like, tortured. | 0:59:13 | 0:59:16 | |
He's like, "Why do you do those stupid cuts!" | 0:59:16 | 0:59:18 | |
I explain, "It's an American cut." | 0:59:18 | 0:59:19 | |
And he says, "That's more like a Canadian cut." | 0:59:19 | 0:59:21 | |
There is something really visceral about cutting from a wide shot, | 0:59:21 | 0:59:25 | |
jumping into a close-up. | 0:59:25 | 0:59:26 | |
Now we have a lower angle that is not a subjective angle. | 0:59:27 | 0:59:32 | |
This is not what Marion sees. | 0:59:32 | 0:59:34 | |
But it's maximised for threat. | 0:59:34 | 0:59:37 | |
There's a lot of defensive shots that make it look like | 0:59:37 | 0:59:40 | |
she's trying to fight him off. | 0:59:40 | 0:59:41 | |
That makes you feel that you're there. | 0:59:41 | 0:59:42 | |
We've jumped the stageline here, | 0:59:44 | 0:59:46 | |
which is another disorienting thing - in violence. | 0:59:46 | 0:59:50 | |
And in love, interestingly. | 0:59:50 | 0:59:52 | |
It's actually good to cross the stageline... | 0:59:52 | 0:59:54 | |
..because it gives you that subjective sense | 0:59:55 | 0:59:58 | |
of a kind of a dizzy, delirium. | 0:59:58 | 1:00:00 | |
You see Norman's hand with the knife, | 1:00:02 | 1:00:04 | |
come laterally across and break the lines. | 1:00:04 | 1:00:07 | |
It's so great because it's violating the purity. | 1:00:07 | 1:00:11 | |
The water is going in the opposite direction of the knife, | 1:00:11 | 1:00:13 | |
so there's all these great angles that are, again, | 1:00:13 | 1:00:15 | |
like German expressionist cinema | 1:00:15 | 1:00:17 | |
that Hitchcock had been exposed to in the early '20s | 1:00:17 | 1:00:20 | |
when he first started his career. | 1:00:20 | 1:00:22 | |
This overhead shot - it's like the whole shot is out of focus. | 1:00:23 | 1:00:25 | |
And they used it anyway. | 1:00:25 | 1:00:27 | |
I can imagine sitting in with studio executives now | 1:00:27 | 1:00:30 | |
and I'm saying, "Oh, you've got this one shot that's so out of focus. | 1:00:30 | 1:00:33 | |
"We really didn't need to take that shot out of the edit." | 1:00:33 | 1:00:35 | |
But thank goodness they left it in because it's such a great shot. | 1:00:35 | 1:00:38 | |
The knife is already through the frame before we, the audience, | 1:00:38 | 1:00:42 | |
are really able to lock on to what we are looking at. | 1:00:42 | 1:00:45 | |
Our face gravitates to Marion, | 1:00:45 | 1:00:47 | |
and then to the negative space to see where did the knife go. | 1:00:47 | 1:00:50 | |
They force the audience to fill in the blank. | 1:00:50 | 1:00:53 | |
Her right to right-to-left movement | 1:00:53 | 1:00:55 | |
carries us right to the cut | 1:00:55 | 1:00:56 | |
and right where her face is, there's the knife. | 1:00:56 | 1:01:00 | |
That knife never makes connection with her | 1:01:00 | 1:01:02 | |
but in my mind I see him stabbing her. It's crazy! | 1:01:02 | 1:01:06 | |
Hitchcock is going in 360 degrees. | 1:01:06 | 1:01:08 | |
All of these things that you're not supposed to do in narrative | 1:01:08 | 1:01:11 | |
storytelling, he's doing to give you this feeling | 1:01:11 | 1:01:14 | |
of complete disorientation. | 1:01:14 | 1:01:16 | |
Every time we cut back to Norman's form, we're grounded again. | 1:01:17 | 1:01:21 | |
Back to Norman, but now we're slightly tighter. | 1:01:21 | 1:01:24 | |
Cut to Marion, we are tighter. | 1:01:24 | 1:01:25 | |
Norman, tighter. | 1:01:25 | 1:01:27 | |
And then, ending - | 1:01:27 | 1:01:29 | |
intersecting water, over and over again - to the shot. | 1:01:29 | 1:01:32 | |
The one shot that convinces me, as a viewer, | 1:01:32 | 1:01:34 | |
that Marion has been stabbed. | 1:01:34 | 1:01:36 | |
The knife never connects with the skin? | 1:01:38 | 1:01:40 | |
But what about this shot here? | 1:01:40 | 1:01:42 | |
I'm telling you, folks, THAT is penetration. | 1:01:42 | 1:01:45 | |
Hitchcock got away with showing my belly button on film. | 1:01:45 | 1:01:50 | |
In all the beach towel movies, you know, with Annette Funicello | 1:01:50 | 1:01:54 | |
they had bikinis but they had to have them | 1:01:54 | 1:01:56 | |
up over their belly button. | 1:01:56 | 1:01:58 | |
He explained to me that... | 1:01:58 | 1:02:00 | |
He says, "the Paramount special-effects department made for me a torso of rubber. | 1:02:00 | 1:02:06 | |
"He plunged the knife and blood would spurt out. | 1:02:06 | 1:02:08 | |
"Oh, it was wonderful. I didn't use it at all." | 1:02:08 | 1:02:10 | |
"You didn't use it at all?" | 1:02:11 | 1:02:13 | |
"No, no. The knife never touches the body." | 1:02:13 | 1:02:16 | |
It goes back to Eisenstein | 1:02:16 | 1:02:18 | |
and the whole idea of editing, cutting, montage. | 1:02:18 | 1:02:22 | |
He didn't want a plastic knife or anything. | 1:02:22 | 1:02:24 | |
He used the knife. | 1:02:24 | 1:02:26 | |
He had marks on there like blood. | 1:02:26 | 1:02:28 | |
And he pressed it against my stomach and then pulled it out. | 1:02:28 | 1:02:32 | |
And then, in the film, they reversed it | 1:02:34 | 1:02:36 | |
showing it going in. | 1:02:36 | 1:02:38 | |
Hitchcock, I think, | 1:02:40 | 1:02:41 | |
it's safe to say spent an entire career | 1:02:41 | 1:02:43 | |
thumbing his nose at the censors. | 1:02:43 | 1:02:45 | |
The last shot of North by Northwest is a train entering a tunnel. | 1:02:47 | 1:02:52 | |
Like, a very unsubtle sexual metaphor. | 1:02:52 | 1:02:55 | |
And then we pick that up post coitus in Psycho. | 1:02:55 | 1:02:59 | |
Wow. That's interesting. | 1:02:59 | 1:03:01 | |
LAUGHTER | 1:03:02 | 1:03:04 | |
You know, the production code administration still mattered at that time. | 1:03:04 | 1:03:10 | |
And then in trying to get the movie approved by the Legion of Decency, | 1:03:10 | 1:03:16 | |
if either one of those had been a problem as far as | 1:03:16 | 1:03:19 | |
the production and distribution of Psycho, | 1:03:19 | 1:03:22 | |
it would not have been the phenomenon that it was. | 1:03:22 | 1:03:25 | |
There was a little negotiation going on. | 1:03:25 | 1:03:27 | |
He said, "I'll reshoot the beginning. | 1:03:27 | 1:03:29 | |
"You can come and watch me shoot it." | 1:03:29 | 1:03:32 | |
They never showed up. | 1:03:32 | 1:03:33 | |
All he did was tell the whole crew, | 1:03:33 | 1:03:36 | |
"We're just going to send the scene back. | 1:03:36 | 1:03:38 | |
"We're not going to cut one frame from it." | 1:03:38 | 1:03:41 | |
And he didn't. He just kept basically telling them | 1:03:41 | 1:03:43 | |
"You're prudes. And you're actually horn-dog prudes, | 1:03:43 | 1:03:47 | |
"because you're seeing something that isn't there." | 1:03:47 | 1:03:50 | |
So, everything stayed in the way he wanted it. | 1:03:50 | 1:03:52 | |
And he got away with it! | 1:03:52 | 1:03:53 | |
SHE CHUCKLES | 1:03:53 | 1:03:54 | |
You contrast Hitchcock making a disturbing, | 1:03:54 | 1:03:57 | |
shocking movie that revolves around sex and violence and a deeply | 1:03:57 | 1:04:02 | |
disturbed protagonist, with a movie | 1:04:02 | 1:04:04 | |
that came out the very same year, | 1:04:04 | 1:04:06 | |
within a few months of it, like Michael Powell's Peeping Tom. | 1:04:06 | 1:04:10 | |
That movie a lot of people see as having | 1:04:10 | 1:04:13 | |
ruined Michael Powell's career. | 1:04:13 | 1:04:15 | |
You know, Val Lewton, who these guys know I'm obsessed with, | 1:04:15 | 1:04:17 | |
but, you know, he was the master of "You saw nothing! Ever!" | 1:04:17 | 1:04:22 | |
There's no cat in Cat People. | 1:04:22 | 1:04:24 | |
-Right. -You know? -Right, right. | 1:04:24 | 1:04:26 | |
There's no cat people in Cat People. | 1:04:26 | 1:04:27 | |
There's shadows. There's some shadow. | 1:04:27 | 1:04:30 | |
Every one of his films was, | 1:04:30 | 1:04:31 | |
the title promised something that you never actually saw. | 1:04:31 | 1:04:34 | |
There's no leopard man in Leopard Man. | 1:04:34 | 1:04:37 | |
And the most chilling murder in all of Val Lewton's canon | 1:04:37 | 1:04:40 | |
takes place on the other side of a closed door | 1:04:40 | 1:04:43 | |
from the perspective of a mother who's hearing her daughter get slaughtered. | 1:04:43 | 1:04:47 | |
And you just see the blood seep in under the crack in the door. | 1:04:47 | 1:04:50 | |
You never see it. You never see it at all. | 1:04:50 | 1:04:53 | |
And that seems to me like the roots of the shower scene. | 1:04:53 | 1:04:56 | |
-Totally. -I would like to throw one in there... | 1:04:56 | 1:04:58 | |
-OK. -One film into the mix which has one particular mind-blowing scene, | 1:04:58 | 1:05:03 | |
which I would call horror, and that's Irreversible. | 1:05:03 | 1:05:06 | |
-Yeah. -And here's the thing about that rape scene. | 1:05:06 | 1:05:08 | |
It's like, it's... What is it, like 15 minutes long? | 1:05:08 | 1:05:11 | |
I think, 10 minutes. | 1:05:11 | 1:05:12 | |
And they don't really show anything, there's no nudity, | 1:05:12 | 1:05:16 | |
there's no nothing. It's just one shot that lingers. | 1:05:16 | 1:05:21 | |
Don't make it... | 1:05:21 | 1:05:23 | |
The rape scene in Irreversible and the shower scene in Psycho | 1:05:23 | 1:05:26 | |
are exact inverses. | 1:05:26 | 1:05:28 | |
-The shower scene is incredibly close and frenetic. -Yeah. | 1:05:28 | 1:05:33 | |
And the rape scene in Irreversible is incredibly distant and still. | 1:05:33 | 1:05:38 | |
The shots of the mother are out of focus, | 1:05:38 | 1:05:41 | |
the focus is on the water, not the mother. | 1:05:41 | 1:05:43 | |
You could argue that this is Marion's subjective point of view, | 1:05:43 | 1:05:47 | |
that she doesn't see who it is clearly because she's so confused. | 1:05:47 | 1:05:51 | |
Very quick cutting here. | 1:05:53 | 1:05:54 | |
On the average one shot every 3/4 of a second, 18 frames. | 1:05:54 | 1:06:00 | |
And the audience in 1960 would be having, | 1:06:00 | 1:06:05 | |
they would be seeing something | 1:06:05 | 1:06:06 | |
in a way that they were not used to seeing it. | 1:06:06 | 1:06:09 | |
I was always surprised that they got away with this. | 1:06:09 | 1:06:12 | |
Just the amount of, like, naked breast that they were able to show. | 1:06:12 | 1:06:15 | |
It had to be done impressionistically. | 1:06:15 | 1:06:17 | |
So, it was done with little pieces of film. | 1:06:18 | 1:06:21 | |
The head, the feet, the hand, parts of the torso. | 1:06:21 | 1:06:27 | |
The shot of her feet is the very first cut of blood | 1:06:27 | 1:06:29 | |
that we've had in this entire piece. | 1:06:29 | 1:06:32 | |
The blood starts to spatter into the water rather than flow. | 1:06:32 | 1:06:36 | |
You know, you see spots hitting like a dark rain. | 1:06:36 | 1:06:39 | |
And then it just is absorbed by the water and it spreads out in a very | 1:06:39 | 1:06:43 | |
kind of haunting, a haunting way. | 1:06:43 | 1:06:46 | |
My mom loves to tell me that, | 1:06:46 | 1:06:48 | |
"Oh, you know that the blood going down the drain in Psycho | 1:06:48 | 1:06:50 | |
-"is chocolate..." -Chocolate syrup. -Chocolate syrup, right? | 1:06:50 | 1:06:53 | |
So, is anyone in this room going to tell us that that's not actually chocolate syrup? | 1:06:53 | 1:06:57 | |
They had a can of Hershey's syrup, | 1:06:57 | 1:06:59 | |
which is watered-down and that's what they used for blood. | 1:06:59 | 1:07:02 | |
But they had to dribble it around me, and on me. | 1:07:02 | 1:07:05 | |
I deliberately made the film in black and white | 1:07:05 | 1:07:08 | |
because I knew that if it had been in colour, | 1:07:08 | 1:07:11 | |
the draining away of blood would've been too repulsive. | 1:07:11 | 1:07:14 | |
SHOWER RUNS | 1:07:14 | 1:07:15 | |
The knife comes through and even though it's just swinging through | 1:07:17 | 1:07:21 | |
frame, my brain is telling me | 1:07:21 | 1:07:22 | |
she's just gotten stabbed squarely in the back. | 1:07:22 | 1:07:25 | |
And then to the sneaky cut that Tomasini has put into the film, | 1:07:25 | 1:07:31 | |
starting here with her hand out of focus at the front, | 1:07:31 | 1:07:34 | |
it's going towards the wall, your eyes are super confused here | 1:07:34 | 1:07:38 | |
because you're looking at a negative space and just the wall tile. | 1:07:38 | 1:07:42 | |
Her hand starts to come in and instantly there's a jump cut. | 1:07:42 | 1:07:47 | |
If you watch that at full speed it just looks like...bam! | 1:07:47 | 1:07:52 | |
It ends up making it feel like she's slamming against the wall. | 1:07:52 | 1:07:55 | |
His exit is also tremendous, that quick move, without looking back. | 1:07:55 | 1:08:00 | |
He doesn't even stand there to make sure she's dead. He leaves. | 1:08:00 | 1:08:03 | |
It's almost like a time cut, where he's already out the door. | 1:08:03 | 1:08:06 | |
And I think part of it is they were really trying to hide, | 1:08:06 | 1:08:09 | |
you know, who it was and they were tired of showing that lame | 1:08:09 | 1:08:11 | |
shot where his head looked like a mushroom. | 1:08:11 | 1:08:13 | |
The shot of the hand, it looks like a starfish against the wall. | 1:08:13 | 1:08:17 | |
It's just a hand. | 1:08:17 | 1:08:18 | |
The least important part of her body right now after she's been | 1:08:18 | 1:08:21 | |
hacked to death. | 1:08:21 | 1:08:22 | |
And you see the life ebbing out of her body through her hand. | 1:08:22 | 1:08:26 | |
So the scene becomes all about her hands, if you watch it. | 1:08:26 | 1:08:29 | |
Hand. And then hand. And you watch it go. | 1:08:29 | 1:08:35 | |
Trying to grab onto something. Hand going down the wall. | 1:08:35 | 1:08:37 | |
She turns around, where is her hand? That's the big question. | 1:08:37 | 1:08:40 | |
And if you actually watch the opening scene of Jurassic Park | 1:08:40 | 1:08:43 | |
it's the same thing. It doesn't matter, that guy that got eaten | 1:08:43 | 1:08:46 | |
by the velociraptor, you barely see his face. | 1:08:46 | 1:08:48 | |
But what's important is he's grabbing on to his hand. | 1:08:48 | 1:08:53 | |
Hand reaches out. | 1:08:53 | 1:08:54 | |
Hand's touching the thing. | 1:08:54 | 1:08:56 | |
And I think that's part of the way that he kind of is able to | 1:08:56 | 1:08:59 | |
bring the audience into her death, rather than just watching her die. | 1:08:59 | 1:09:04 | |
Now she's begging for her life, trying to hold herself up. | 1:09:04 | 1:09:08 | |
The way that her hair leaves a trail behind her, it follows her down. | 1:09:08 | 1:09:13 | |
I mean, it's an incredibly haunting image. And it's a wall. | 1:09:13 | 1:09:17 | |
You know, you had depth before and she's just flat against nothingness. | 1:09:17 | 1:09:21 | |
Nobody did this before. | 1:09:21 | 1:09:23 | |
Deaths were quick in movies | 1:09:25 | 1:09:28 | |
and although actors loved to make the most of them... | 1:09:28 | 1:09:31 | |
This is so obviously directed in such a way. | 1:09:31 | 1:09:35 | |
You know, in Torn Curtain is this endless scene of trying to | 1:09:35 | 1:09:38 | |
kill someone. It's not bloody but it's graphic. | 1:09:38 | 1:09:41 | |
Even Frenzy is fairly graphic compared to Psycho. | 1:09:41 | 1:09:46 | |
But Psycho has the effect of being graphic, | 1:09:46 | 1:09:48 | |
much like Texas Chainsaw Massacre later was. | 1:09:48 | 1:09:50 | |
I love how slow it is, how much time it takes. | 1:09:52 | 1:09:56 | |
There's all this negative space on the left-hand side. | 1:09:56 | 1:09:58 | |
This is absolutely intentional. | 1:09:58 | 1:10:00 | |
Hitchcock is mirroring the shot at the beginning of the sequence | 1:10:00 | 1:10:04 | |
where Marion is showering in exactly the right-hand side of the frame. | 1:10:04 | 1:10:07 | |
It is the book end that makes the shower scene. | 1:10:07 | 1:10:11 | |
My favourite cut is the hand coming around onto the curtain | 1:10:11 | 1:10:14 | |
and it's all of a sudden from the staccato rhythms you end up | 1:10:14 | 1:10:17 | |
with this really fluid shot that has a sort of almost, | 1:10:17 | 1:10:21 | |
kind of poetic and sad quality to it. | 1:10:21 | 1:10:23 | |
She's dying and there's a softness to it | 1:10:23 | 1:10:25 | |
and it makes it just instantly emotional. | 1:10:25 | 1:10:29 | |
It's really, really a great cut. | 1:10:29 | 1:10:31 | |
It's one of the best cuts I've ever seen. | 1:10:31 | 1:10:34 | |
You can just barely see the outline of my breast in that shot. | 1:10:34 | 1:10:39 | |
That's my hand. And you can tell the difference on my knuckles, there. | 1:10:39 | 1:10:43 | |
The ring finger is disfigured a bit. | 1:10:43 | 1:10:46 | |
The nail is darker than a regular fingernail. | 1:10:46 | 1:10:51 | |
When I was three years old I reached down to | 1:10:51 | 1:10:54 | |
help my brother on a push lawnmower and - pssht! - cut it off. | 1:10:54 | 1:10:59 | |
This is the shot that Cecil B DeMille actually did first | 1:11:01 | 1:11:06 | |
in The Ten Commandments | 1:11:06 | 1:11:08 | |
where Sally Lung pulls down on the curtain. | 1:11:08 | 1:11:11 | |
This shot, the down shot, she just feels so vulnerable, | 1:11:14 | 1:11:17 | |
like a dying animal. | 1:11:17 | 1:11:20 | |
Again, such a bold shot because so much nudity is revealed. | 1:11:20 | 1:11:23 | |
There is a shot in the shower scene that was never used, | 1:11:23 | 1:11:28 | |
it was one of the most heartbreaking shots I've ever seen. | 1:11:28 | 1:11:32 | |
Anne Heche, she was definitely willing to do stuff. | 1:11:32 | 1:11:35 | |
That one shot at the end where she's slumped over, | 1:11:35 | 1:11:38 | |
that was the shot that Hitchcock could not use. | 1:11:38 | 1:11:41 | |
But it was storyboarded. | 1:11:41 | 1:11:43 | |
There was objections to using that | 1:11:43 | 1:11:46 | |
and perhaps Hitch felt it wasn't really necessary anyway. | 1:11:46 | 1:11:50 | |
Then we return to the motif of the shower head, | 1:11:50 | 1:11:53 | |
the impassive eye which has just watched this horrible thing happen. | 1:11:53 | 1:11:57 | |
This shot of the shower head at the beginning of the scene was | 1:11:57 | 1:12:00 | |
one of joy, she was going to get a new start and now that same | 1:12:00 | 1:12:04 | |
water is washing away the evidence of her existence and the murder. | 1:12:04 | 1:12:09 | |
The water keeps running and the blood flows | 1:12:09 | 1:12:13 | |
but the heart is stopping. | 1:12:13 | 1:12:14 | |
It's just such an amazing image to see her life flowing down the drain. | 1:12:14 | 1:12:19 | |
What a metaphor that is. | 1:12:19 | 1:12:21 | |
And it switches to the eye, right? | 1:12:23 | 1:12:26 | |
Oh, come on. | 1:12:28 | 1:12:30 | |
That's so good. | 1:12:31 | 1:12:33 | |
I wonder how long this shot is, how long she had to hold. | 1:12:33 | 1:12:36 | |
To get her eye to stay open? | 1:12:36 | 1:12:37 | |
Just to make sure her eye didn't twitch even a tiny bit. | 1:12:37 | 1:12:40 | |
Oh, my God, that's incredible. | 1:12:41 | 1:12:44 | |
The pointless spiralling of the universe | 1:12:44 | 1:12:46 | |
and the way that everything is ultimately | 1:12:46 | 1:12:48 | |
drawn down the plughole towards oblivion, towards meaningless death. | 1:12:48 | 1:12:53 | |
I think to some extent we are looking at Hitchcock's | 1:12:53 | 1:12:56 | |
fears as well as his obsessions. | 1:12:56 | 1:12:58 | |
You see it in Barton Fink, you see it in so many movies | 1:13:00 | 1:13:02 | |
and you're like, "Why is he going inside the drain? | 1:13:02 | 1:13:05 | |
"Are we going to go inside?" | 1:13:05 | 1:13:07 | |
That is the moment of Psycho where everything changes. | 1:13:08 | 1:13:13 | |
This was made by an auteur film-maker | 1:13:13 | 1:13:18 | |
and that is a very personal stamp. | 1:13:18 | 1:13:21 | |
It's a rupture in the movie | 1:13:22 | 1:13:25 | |
but the movie never achieves this kind of poetry again and you begin | 1:13:25 | 1:13:29 | |
to realise that, "Oh, this was what really mattered most to Hitchcock." | 1:13:29 | 1:13:34 | |
Tomasini has done a clockwise turn optically which then, | 1:13:34 | 1:13:38 | |
right about here, hooks back up to the 24-frame footage. | 1:13:38 | 1:13:43 | |
I'm just amazed they were able to get that clean. | 1:13:45 | 1:13:48 | |
Usually when you do an optical it's pretty grainy but it looks | 1:13:48 | 1:13:51 | |
so smooth and so beautiful. | 1:13:51 | 1:13:53 | |
It's surprising and seamless where they go from live action, | 1:13:53 | 1:13:56 | |
it's like one of the greatest opticals in the history of movies. | 1:13:56 | 1:13:59 | |
It's also kind of like what the title sequence is doing | 1:13:59 | 1:14:02 | |
in Vertigo, it's a theme that runs through this film | 1:14:02 | 1:14:05 | |
and then later on, of course. It's not style just for style's sake, | 1:14:05 | 1:14:08 | |
it's got content. | 1:14:08 | 1:14:10 | |
The cameras were huge and very difficult to manipulate. | 1:14:10 | 1:14:15 | |
You can actually see pictures of Hitchcock behind a Mitchell | 1:14:15 | 1:14:20 | |
and you get a sense of what it was like riding on that | 1:14:20 | 1:14:23 | |
carriage behind that huge locomotive of a camera. | 1:14:23 | 1:14:27 | |
Whereas today it's a snap, you just do it like Gus Van Sant. | 1:14:27 | 1:14:32 | |
In the remake he did it all live action. | 1:14:32 | 1:14:35 | |
The pull-back from her eye was a whole robotic camera move. | 1:14:41 | 1:14:46 | |
I seriously followed the original film shot by shot. | 1:14:46 | 1:14:51 | |
I was able to cut it exactly like the original, and we watched it | 1:14:51 | 1:14:56 | |
and it was weird and it didn't work. | 1:14:56 | 1:14:59 | |
I said, "Well, Gus, come over, watch the scene. I have a few reservations | 1:14:59 | 1:15:04 | |
"of how it's playing right now | 1:15:04 | 1:15:06 | |
"and it doesn't feel like the shower scene yet." | 1:15:06 | 1:15:09 | |
We went in and tried to make it a little more Gus Van Sant-y. | 1:15:09 | 1:15:15 | |
To duplicate something as iconic as the shower scene, | 1:15:15 | 1:15:18 | |
I really think it wasn't going to work. | 1:15:18 | 1:15:23 | |
And it just didn't. | 1:15:23 | 1:15:25 | |
I always loved the placement of those drops of water cos | 1:15:26 | 1:15:30 | |
they're like tears. | 1:15:30 | 1:15:32 | |
Right at the end it was a little flicker in her eye, | 1:15:32 | 1:15:35 | |
a little highlight in her eye. | 1:15:35 | 1:15:38 | |
And you can see her eye move. | 1:15:38 | 1:15:41 | |
There's a tight, slight flick of the eye, there. | 1:15:41 | 1:15:44 | |
Hitchcock almost fetishistically lingers in this postmortem moment. | 1:15:46 | 1:15:52 | |
This is what happens after you die and no-one turns off the water. | 1:15:52 | 1:15:56 | |
Hitch had a little snap of the finger to let Janet know | 1:15:56 | 1:15:59 | |
when the camera had past and was going to pan into the room. | 1:15:59 | 1:16:03 | |
It took a lot of takes. | 1:16:03 | 1:16:05 | |
I can feel the moleskin pulling away from my top part and so I could | 1:16:05 | 1:16:13 | |
-feel this, it was just of going... -SHE SQUEAKS | 1:16:13 | 1:16:17 | |
..and I thought, "You know what? | 1:16:17 | 1:16:20 | |
"I don't want to do this damn thing again. I really don't want to." | 1:16:20 | 1:16:24 | |
And there are all the guys on the scaffolding and I said, | 1:16:24 | 1:16:28 | |
"I'm not going to be modest. Let 'em look." | 1:16:28 | 1:16:32 | |
Why would you cut to the shower there? | 1:16:33 | 1:16:35 | |
I don't think the reason has anything to do with artistic | 1:16:35 | 1:16:39 | |
decision. It's the solution to some problem that he had. | 1:16:39 | 1:16:42 | |
After my grandfather filmed Psycho | 1:16:42 | 1:16:44 | |
and it had been shown to all the executives, | 1:16:44 | 1:16:46 | |
the last person he showed it to was my grandmother | 1:16:46 | 1:16:49 | |
and they were sitting in the screening screen, | 1:16:49 | 1:16:51 | |
and he's panning out and she looks at my grandfather and says, | 1:16:51 | 1:16:53 | |
"Hitch, you can't release this." | 1:16:53 | 1:16:55 | |
And he said, "Why not?" She goes, "Janet Leigh took a breath." | 1:16:55 | 1:16:58 | |
They couldn't reshoot it. | 1:16:58 | 1:16:59 | |
Janet was gone, they didn't have the budget, | 1:16:59 | 1:17:02 | |
so they simply cut back to the shower head...spewing water. | 1:17:02 | 1:17:07 | |
And then that cynical camera move. | 1:17:09 | 1:17:13 | |
She made her moral decision and this is what it got her. | 1:17:13 | 1:17:16 | |
There's an image of the uncaring universe, if you want one. | 1:17:18 | 1:17:21 | |
You see the headline there - "OKAY" - it is not OK. | 1:17:21 | 1:17:24 | |
Nothing is OK. | 1:17:24 | 1:17:25 | |
He always comes back to his MacGuffin which is the 40,000. | 1:17:25 | 1:17:30 | |
He throws the newspaper into the quagmire, it goes down with the car. | 1:17:30 | 1:17:35 | |
And the audience says, "That's the money | 1:17:35 | 1:17:39 | |
"that we thought was important in this story, | 1:17:39 | 1:17:41 | |
"it's totally unimportant." | 1:17:41 | 1:17:43 | |
This is the thing in the movie that always tortured me. | 1:17:43 | 1:17:46 | |
The greatest scene in movie history ends on a sour note with | 1:17:46 | 1:17:49 | |
a bad ADR line. That has been the doom of so many movies. | 1:17:49 | 1:17:53 | |
Here comes Norman. | 1:17:59 | 1:18:00 | |
Just wondering what happened and oh, my, he can't believe it. | 1:18:00 | 1:18:04 | |
Another murder at the motel. How did that happen? | 1:18:04 | 1:18:07 | |
It's an extraordinary aftermath, it's a crucial piece | 1:18:08 | 1:18:12 | |
of the film-making to sort of let the consequence of it actually land. | 1:18:12 | 1:18:16 | |
It's not about getting the blood stains out of the tub | 1:18:16 | 1:18:20 | |
it's about this incredibly laborious process | 1:18:20 | 1:18:25 | |
that this unbearably damaged soul needs to work through. | 1:18:25 | 1:18:33 | |
It demands not just that we watch as we've watched the murder | 1:18:33 | 1:18:38 | |
of Marion Crane, we're also voyeurs to the horror of Norman's world. | 1:18:38 | 1:18:44 | |
For me, the clean up represents Alfred Hitchcock's sense | 1:18:44 | 1:18:49 | |
of orderliness, sense of "I wasn't sexually aroused by this woman, | 1:18:49 | 1:18:55 | |
"and I'm just going to pretend that this unhappy episode just | 1:18:55 | 1:19:00 | |
"didn't even occur." | 1:19:00 | 1:19:02 | |
I think that cleaning always represents sexual guilt. | 1:19:02 | 1:19:08 | |
You care about this guy. And I know it sounds crazy but you do. | 1:19:08 | 1:19:11 | |
You want to know what's going to happen to him, you want to know | 1:19:11 | 1:19:15 | |
is he going to be free of this or is it going to consume him? | 1:19:15 | 1:19:18 | |
The fact that he is able to get you to care is | 1:19:18 | 1:19:22 | |
one of the miracles of the movie. | 1:19:22 | 1:19:24 | |
Psycho obviously has influence on a whole host of movies. | 1:19:26 | 1:19:31 | |
Psycho is the mother of the slasher genre. | 1:19:31 | 1:19:34 | |
The shower scene is really the first fully sexualised on-screen | 1:19:34 | 1:19:38 | |
knife attack. | 1:19:38 | 1:19:40 | |
You have Mario Bava in Italy and he's taking | 1:19:40 | 1:19:43 | |
the visuals of the Psycho scene and in Italy in the '60s | 1:19:43 | 1:19:46 | |
they didn't have the same censorship laws that we had in America. | 1:19:46 | 1:19:50 | |
Bava takes the Hitchcock style and really creates | 1:19:50 | 1:19:53 | |
the Italian giallo film. | 1:19:53 | 1:19:56 | |
Dario Argento burst onto the scene with Bird Of The Crystal Plumage, | 1:19:56 | 1:19:59 | |
determined to present murder as a form of fine art, | 1:19:59 | 1:20:03 | |
consistently sexualising | 1:20:03 | 1:20:04 | |
and fetishises the killings and tries to present them | 1:20:04 | 1:20:08 | |
as something beautiful, cathartic and almost orgasmic, | 1:20:08 | 1:20:11 | |
which happens again and again in his work. | 1:20:11 | 1:20:14 | |
Then, of course, | 1:20:14 | 1:20:16 | |
the American films started imitating the Italian films | 1:20:16 | 1:20:18 | |
and you get the wave of slasher films in the '80s, | 1:20:18 | 1:20:21 | |
kicking off with John Carpenter's Halloween. | 1:20:21 | 1:20:23 | |
Psycho might have also really started the rather negative | 1:20:23 | 1:20:27 | |
trend of victims undressing before they're butchered, which is | 1:20:27 | 1:20:30 | |
something that haunted slasher cinema throughout the '70s. | 1:20:30 | 1:20:33 | |
Martin Scorsese talks about the construction of the fight | 1:20:33 | 1:20:38 | |
in Raging Bull with Sugar Ray Robinson. | 1:20:38 | 1:20:42 | |
I literally got a shot-by-shot breakdown of the shower | 1:20:42 | 1:20:44 | |
scene in Psycho and laid out my original storyboards for this one | 1:20:44 | 1:20:48 | |
sequence, shot-by-shot, and shot it in that order. | 1:20:48 | 1:20:51 | |
I don't believe film influences the culture in this way any more. | 1:20:53 | 1:20:57 | |
When a moment of violence is so suggestive, so new, | 1:20:57 | 1:21:01 | |
so unlike anything we've seen that it just becomes | 1:21:01 | 1:21:04 | |
part of the cultural conversation, | 1:21:04 | 1:21:06 | |
I think that's what happened with the shower scene. | 1:21:06 | 1:21:09 | |
I'm on this TV show called Scream Queens. | 1:22:07 | 1:22:11 | |
I've been asked to get in the shower and take pictures before, | 1:22:11 | 1:22:15 | |
I've been asked to recreate it and I've said no every time | 1:22:15 | 1:22:21 | |
because of course this is my mother's legacy | 1:22:21 | 1:22:23 | |
and it is not mine to play in, it's her sandbox. | 1:22:23 | 1:22:28 | |
But my mother's been gone now over ten years | 1:22:28 | 1:22:32 | |
and this is a great show and it was | 1:22:32 | 1:22:36 | |
a really respectful, funny homage. | 1:22:36 | 1:22:40 | |
And so the red devil comes along, he rips open the curtain - | 1:22:42 | 1:22:46 | |
but I'm not there. | 1:22:46 | 1:22:48 | |
And that second I come from behind the bathroom door, attack him, | 1:22:48 | 1:22:54 | |
and right before, I do I look at him and go, | 1:22:54 | 1:22:56 | |
"I saw that movie, like, 50 times." | 1:22:56 | 1:22:59 | |
I went back to Chicago, shot the September 1960 cover. | 1:23:07 | 1:23:12 | |
I worked at the Playboy Club until probably October that year. | 1:23:14 | 1:23:18 | |
I was one of the original Bunnies there. I never mentioned Psycho. | 1:23:18 | 1:23:24 | |
The shot I didn't like was when Tony Perkins pulls me | 1:23:24 | 1:23:30 | |
out of the tub and wraps me in the shower curtain. | 1:23:30 | 1:23:34 | |
He picks me up to carry me out to the trunk, he gets me, | 1:23:34 | 1:23:37 | |
I don't know, about six, nine inches off the floor and drops me | 1:23:37 | 1:23:41 | |
back down because he wasn't in a position to pick up a dead weight. | 1:23:41 | 1:23:45 | |
He picks me up, puts me on his knees and then... | 1:23:45 | 1:23:48 | |
And that's me. | 1:23:49 | 1:23:51 | |
And that's out to the car and that's the end of me. | 1:23:51 | 1:23:55 | |
CHAIR CREAKS | 1:24:16 | 1:24:20 |