Alfred Hitchcock Talking Pictures

Known to millions across the world as the master of suspense,

Alfred Hitchcock wasn't just one of Britain's greatest film directors,

he was one of the most influential

moviemakers in cinema history.

Hitchcock's career spanned 50 years from the 1920s to the 1970s

and in every decade of that period, he created classic after classic.

He manipulated audiences with movies that were popular,

pioneering, menacing and macabre,

and all stamped with his own distinctly,

visual style and gallows humour.

Hitchcock was also a master self-publicist.

The cameo appearances he made in most of his films

and his popular television series,

Alfred Hitchcock Presents, helped to turn him

into a figure as recognisable as many of the stars of his pictures.

By the 1960s, at the time of these interviews,

his image as a manipulator who controlled

audiences like a puppeteer was well established.

But as well as playing up to that reputation,

the conversations also reveal some of his storytelling techniques

and his passion about cinema as an art form.

Let's start, Mr Hitchcock,

by discussing this whole business of frightening audiences.

Do you find that audiences

are frightened by different things now

from the things that frightened them

when you started, what 30 years ago, 35 years ago making films?

No, I wouldn't say so because after

all they were frightened as children.

You have to remember it's all based on Red Riding Hood, you see.

Nothing has changed since Red Riding Hood.

What they're frightened of today are exactly the same things

they were frightened of yesterday.

Because this, shall we call it,

this fright complex is rooted in every individual.

Do you think when making films, that women are frightened

by different things from the things that frighten men?

Erm, oh, I would say so, yes.

I would definitely say that, after all, women are frightened by a mouse.

You don't see men jumping on chairs and screaming.

-There are definitely different things.

-So when you make a film,

are you setting out to frighten men, or women?

Women, because 80% of the audience in the cinema are women.

Erm, because you see, even if the house is 50/50,

half men, half women,

a good percentage of the men has said to his girl,

being on the make, of course, "What do you want to see, dear?"

So that's where her influence comes, as well.

Men have very little to do with the choice of the film.

When it comes to audiences in different

parts of the world, take American audiences against British audiences,

instead of men and women for a moment.

Erm, bearing in mind your Red Riding Hood point

where we're all frightened by the great, simple things.

Are American audiences frightened by different things from European audiences?

Er, I would say, no.

You've got to remember the American audience is the global audience.

As I once reminded an Englishman, I said you don't understand America,

because you think they are Americans but they're not.

America is full of foreigners.

They're all foreigners since 1776.

Therefore, whatever frightens the Americans, frightens the Italians,

the Romanians, the Danes and everyone else, you know, from Europe.

Do you think that it does an injustice to you,

simply to think of you as a man who, above all else,

has frightened the wits out of audiences?

Yes, but you have to remember that this process of frightening

is done by means of a given medium.

The medium of pure cinema, is what I believe in.

Erm, the assembly of pieces of film to create fright,

is the essential part of my job.

Just as much as a painter would,

by putting certain colours together,

create evil on canvas.

Now you would go as far as that, would you, to say that to create

fright is an essential, or THE essential part of my job?

-Of my job?

-Yes.

Only in terms of the audience expect it from me.

Let me put it in another way,

you're a master, aren't you, of the unexpected?

That's only because one's challenged by the audience.

They're saying to me, "Show us" and I know what's coming next.

I say, "Do you?"

Therefore, that's the avoidance of the cliche, automatically.

They are expecting the cliche and I have to say,

"We cannot have a cliche here."

When you talk about putting bits of film together,

and then creating in terms of what you call pure cinema,

the sequence that you're going for,

I can imagine that it must've been a bit of a shock to you,

personally, when talkies came?

Because, in a sense, you're talking almost about

a classical technique, aren't you?

Well, the only thing wrong with the silent picture

was that mouths opened and no sound came out.

Unfortunately, when talk came in,

the vulgarians, the money changers of the industry,

immediately commenced a cash-in by photographing stage plays.

That took the whole thing away from cinema completely.

It's like a lot of film one sees today, not that I see very many,

but to me they're what I call photographs of people

talking and bears no relation to the art of the cinema.

The point is, that the power of cinema, in its purest form,

is so vast because it can go over the whole world.

On a given night, a film can play in Tokyo, West Berlin,

London, New York,

and the same audience is responding emotionally to the same things.

No other medium can do this.

The theatre, doesn't do it because you have got different

sets of people but remember, in a film, they are the same actors.

A book is translated. How well do we know? I don't know.

The risk is in translating even a film, what they call dubbing,

you know, there's liable to be a loss and therefore

when one's thinking of a film, globally,

the talk is reduced to a minimum and, if possible,

tell the story visually and let the talk be part of the atmosphere.

Is it true that you are yourself, erm...?

I've seen it in newspaper cuttings and this kind of thing,

that you are yourself a great expert on crime?

Well, do you mean in committing it?

I wasn't suggesting - no, no.

HE LAUGHS

As a detective, you mean, on that side?

No, no, I'm interested and, I suppose one has at one's fingertips

all the details of the famous cases of the past

and I've often used examples, pieces of them in film.

-For example, in the film Rear Window.

-Yes, I remember well.

There are two passages in it

which come from famous English crime.

A Crippen case, I used a bit of that

and the Patrick Mahon case, you know.

Mahon was a man who killed a girl

and then cut her up into pieces

and threw the flesh out of the window from a train

between Eastbourne and London,

but his great problem was what to do with the head.

That's what I put in the Rear Window with the dog sniffing the flower bed.

And erm...

I remember I was making a movie years ago

and I employed, as a technical advisor,

a man who was one of the big four at Scotland Yard.

He was on this case.

This man, Mahon, didn't know what to do with the head

so put it into a fire grate and put a fire under it.

There was a big storm going on outside,

it was The Crumbles at Eastbourne on the beach.

The heat, while this thunder and lightning was going on,

it was awfully terribly melodramatic,

the heat under the head caused the eyes to open.

This poor man ran out into the storm

and came back in the morning when the fire had done its job.

This particular superintendent,

ex-superintendent rather of Scotland Yard,

told me that he went to the butchers and got a sheep's head

and put it in the grate to test the time it would take to burn.

So the head business went into this picture.

What frightens you, personally, Mr Hitchcock, if anything?

Any trouble frightens me.

I was once asked, "What is your idea of happiness?"

And I said, "A clear horizon."

Two years after that interview,

Hitchcock was being questioned again,

this time by Philip Jenkinson, for the programme Profile.

Do you dream vividly?

Er... Reasonably so.

Yes, I think that's almost the basis of one's work

is the making of nightmares with as much realism as you can.

-Just as in a dream, it is extremely vivid.

-Mm.

After all, when you're on your way to the gallows in the dream, it is

so vivid that you're glad when you wake up.

Have you ever studied, seriously that is, psychological textbooks?

No.

I was present a year or

so ago at a group therapy meeting at a mental hospital where doctors

and patients alike, I'm afraid, tore Psycho to shreds

and said that in their opinion,

it had set back the cause of mental health several years.

How do you answer critics who say things like this?

Well, I don't know, um...

..who they were because people, you know,

often complain about the effect of films on certain minds,

but they generalise about this.

I have to ask them - what minds does it affect?

When Psycho was made, a man was arrested for murder

in Los Angeles and he had confessed to killing three women.

The last murder he committed, he said,

was influenced by the fact that he had just seen Psycho.

So naturally, the newspapers got on to me and asked for my comment.

And I said, "What film did he see when he murdered the second woman?

"And am I to assume that when he murdered the first woman,

"he had just finished drinking a glass of milk?"

Very good answer!

So, when they say it set it back, what minds were set back?

Yes, I see the point.

You see, people always generalise and of course,

it's the sick mind that is affected by these things.

-The mind that is already sick long before it sees it, you mean?

-Well...

You know, people, to me, when they complain, say, about Psycho,

-they lack the sense of humour that I had to have when I made it.

-Yes.

Because you couldn't make a picture like Psycho

without your tongue in your cheek.

In 1970,

Hitchcock was a special guest of the National Film Theatre where

he faced questions from an audience of admirers

and from another British director, the late Bryan Forbes.

APPLAUSE

These steps were terribly awkward coming down.

One had to step them one by one and it reminded me

of the old lady who was walking with one foot on the kerb and one foot in

the road and they said to her,

"Why are you walking like that?"

She said, "Oh, I thought I was lame!"

LAUGHTER

This is obviously going to be my absolute downfall, this interview.

So I approach you really as the depressed areas'

David Frost, Mr Hitchcock.

I don't want to ask you any of the questions I'm sure have bored

you over the years, I'll try and avoid them anyway.

What interests me, to start the ball rolling, I'm fascinated by writers'

diaries, by writers' notebooks, and therefore, as a fellow director,

I'm fascinated at the point where you feel yourself committed.

Is it in the script, is it in the first day,

is it long before the script?

Where do you think it all starts for you?

Well, for me, it all starts with the basic material first.

Now, the question when you have your basic material,

you may have a novel, you may have a play, you can have an original

idea, you can have just a couple of sentences,

and from that, the film begins.

Now, I work very closely with the writer

and begin to construct the film on paper.

From the very beginning, we say, we roughly sketch in the whole

shape of the film and then begin from the beginning.

And you end up with say 100 pages, or maybe even more, of narrative,

which is very bad reading for a litterateur.

I mean, there are no descriptions of any kind, no, for example,

"He wondered..."

Cos you can't photograph "He wondered..."

-No "camera pans right" or any of that.

-Not at that stage.

Not at that stage, no.

It is though you were looking at the film on the screen

and the sound was turned off.

And therefore, to me, this is the first stage.

Now, the reason for it is this, it is to urge one, to drive one,

to make one, work purely in the visual.

And not rely upon words at all.

Because I'm still a purist and I do believe that film,

being the newest art of the 20th century,

is a series of images projected on a screen

and this succession of images create ideas, which in their turn

create emotion, just as much as in literature,

words put together create sentences and so on and so forth.

Do you think, at that stage, in black and white

or is your preference for colour?

Do you find yourself thinking in terms of black and white images?

Not at all.

No, the colour is part of the structure.

In other words, you restrain colour,

bring it in when it's necessary,

but don't orchestrate it so loudly that later on you may use

it in a word, a mixed metaphor, you've exploded your gunpowder.

Yes, I mean, there was something behind that question because,

if I may be so bold, I thought there was only one of your films

which leaps to mind, which I thought

would have been better in black and white and that was The Birds.

I don't know why. This is only a personal preference.

I would have preferred to have seen that film in black and white.

I wondered why you opted for colour.

Well, strangely enough you should ask me that,

I opted for colour because the birds were black and white. LAUGHTER

-APPLAUSE

-Yes.

So that the faces of the people involved would be

separated from the birds.

SCREAMS

BIRDS SCREECH AND CHILDREN CRY

SHE SOBS

CAR HORN

Yes, my question was really more technical because I felt the

technique of the birds, the phoney birds, would have been

perhaps less obvious to me if they'd have been in black and white.

That was the only thing that I...

Well, we actually used real birds.

There were no mechanical birds used at all.

There were one or two wooden ones or stationary ones, weren't there?

Er... We hope that it deceived the eye.

LAUGHTER

That was purely a matter of quantity rather than quality.

LAUGHTER

When you say you start with a script, how many...

I know my own case, the amount of, as it were,

stillborn children one has.

How many times do you think, in your career,

have you started off with what hopefully you thought was

something that was going to excite you and alas have had to abandon it?

Oh, many times.

In the last two years, I've abandoned two projects

and the point is you get so far and you realise it's not going to

work out, so it's better to lose

150,000 or 200,000 than two million.

-Yes.

-Just dump it and let it go.

MURMURS OF LAUGHTER

I've often found myself, and perhaps you have had the same

experience, that although we dump things, certain things...

Part of the egg remains and continues to gestate

and we pull them out of a drawer, out of our subconscious,

years later and use them in a different context.

-Does that happen to you?

-No, it doesn't happen to me.

The only thing that I pigeonhole are certain ideas that belong to

a certain genre picture, the adventure, for example.

You store up an idea and you put it away and one day it will come out.

For example, in a picture like North By Northwest, I'd

waited about 15 years to put Mount Rushmore on the screen.

Yes.

So you keep it back in your mind.

Unfortunately, it doesn't always work out

because storing this scene up

and having the pleasure of anticipating the use of it,

the Department of Interiors step in and say,

"You mustn't have any character climbing over

"the faces of the presidents." You say, "Why not?"

They say, "Oh, because this is the shrine of democracy."

LAUGHTER

"You must only have your characters sliding or

"chasing between their heads."

And I was completely defeated because I had a lovely idea,

which I thought, of Cary Grant sliding down Lincoln's nose.

LAUGHTER

And then, hiding in the nostril.

LAUGHTER

A Kleenex ad.

And the man in search of him is in the vicinity, but unfortunately,

Cary Grant hiding in the nostril begins to have a sneezing fit.

-LAUGHTER

-Marvellous.

And I was never allowed to do it.

Well, shall we invite some questions from the audience?

-Yes, let's do that.

-On what we've discussed so far.

Um... That one.

I wondered had you ever been tempted to step outside

the sort of thriller limitation and do something completely different,

or is it the attraction...

Is the limitation the attraction to do something new?

It's not for me. It's the public, you see.

If I made, for example, a musical...

LAUGHTER

..the public would wonder - when will the moment come when one of the...

LAUGHTER

..when one of the chorus girls will drop dead?

LAUGHTER And what from?

LAUGHTER

The gentleman at the back, next to the lady in green. Yes, you, sir.

Apart from self-satisfaction, Mr Hitchcock,

what is your basic motive for making the films that you do make?

Basic motive?

Money.

LAUGHTER

There's an old expression which says,

"All work and no play, makes Jack."

LAUGHTER

Mr Hitchcock, you said that you have in your mental back drawer, mental

bottom drawer, if you like, a series of bizarre locations or backdrops.

Which one would you most like to use in your films

and haven't had yet the opportunity to do so?

Well, I once had an idea that I would like to open a film,

say at the Covent Garden Opera or the Metropolitan

or at the Scala in Milan, and Maria Callas is on the stage,

singing an aria and her head is tilted upwards and she sees

in a box way up a man approach the back of another man and stab him.

She is just reaching a high note.

LAUGHTER

And the high note turns to a scream

and it's the highest note she's ever sung in her life.

LAUGHTER

The result of which, she gets a huge round of applause.

LAUGHTER

I don't know the rest. LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

Make that one for me. I'll buy that.

Um... Just up here, yes.

No, the lady, please. Sorry.

Mr Hitchcock, I wanted to know, as I was scared stiff by Psycho,

what frightens you?

Policemen frighten me.

LAUGHTER

Er... No, the...

-Not English policemen, surely?

-Oh, the worst!

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

Because they're so polite.

LAUGHTER

Mr Hitchcock, you seem to have a very nice sense of humour,

which you obviously had before you established

yourself as a thriller, directing thrillers.

How come you've never had any comedies?

But every film I make IS a comedy.

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

Mr Hitchcock, could you tell us

when you first had the idea of appearing in all your films?

I think it started with The Lodger. And could you tell us why?

I don't know of any other filmmaker that does it.

No, in those early days, we ran out of actors.

LAUGHTER

That's really true.

Have you ever bothered to join Equity?

No, I think they pay a stand-in for me.

-Are they after you?

-Oh, yes!

LAUGHTER

Gentlemen in the centre here, or the lady. Were there two hands went up?

Was it yours, madam? Yes, please.

Which of your films gave you the most personal satisfaction and why?

Probably two films.

The first one is a picture called Shadow Of A Doubt,

which I wrote with Thornton Wilder and this was one of those rare

occasions when suspense and melodrama combined well with character.

And it was shot in the original town

and at that time they were shooting an awful lot on the back lot.

So it had a freshness.

The other film was Rear Window because, to me,

that's probably the most cinematic film one has made.

And most people don't really recognise this

because the man is in one room and in one position,

but nevertheless, it's the montage and the cutting of what he sees

and its effect on him that creates the whole atmosphere

and drama of the film.

In other words, the visual is transferred to emotional ideas

and that film lends itself to that.

Would you say, Mr Hitchcock, it would be fair

comment to say that your films have never really been concerned

with social consciousness, as we now bandy around the term?

You haven't really taken note of your own times.

-You've ploughed your own furrow, as it were.

-That's true.

Samuel Goldwyn once said, "Messages are for Western Union."

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

Yes, I don't think the applause is actually well placed

because not all films that fall into that category are necessarily

bad films and Goldwyn was getting a cheap laugh really,

which has echoed down the years, and may bury him.

What I meant was, a subject came my way, which is an American subject,

and would seem to me, on the face of it, to be ideally suited for you.

It's a true life thing, it's called Witness To A Killing,

and it's based on that New York murder where 56 people saw

a girl stabbed to death in the street and did nothing about it.

Would that sort of subject attract you at all?

Yes, except that it is an objective approach

and it would be very hard to get an audience involved in it.

-That's interesting.

-It would be hard to...

It would be objective, from an audience point of view.

They would be examining the behaviour

patterns of the people who witnessed it.

And therefore, the comment would be - can you imagine how

irresponsible people are when it comes to being involved?

-They'd rather not be involved.

-Yes.

But the comment would come from the onlooker,

rather than providing them with any particular emotion.

Do you get any of your ideas or stories from headlines?

Sometimes, yes. I made a picture, Wrong Man, once,

which was a recount of an actual case of wrongful arrest.

I shot it in the actual places where everything occurred.

Even, I was allowed to photograph the trial in the same courtroom,

with the judge sitting beside me as technical adviser.

And people kept coming up and whispering to me, saying,

"The judge is wrong. The judge is wrong."

LAUGHTER

We had to wait until the judge went out of the court to put things right.

LAUGHTER

Take another question from there.

Mr Hitchcock, what do you think of the current

trend in the cinema towards nudity and frank love scenes,

and how will it affect you in the future in your filmmaking?

Your own appearances?

LAUGHTER

-You mean, in the nude?

-Yes.

-LAUGHTER

-When can we expect your first nude appearance?

-Never!

I think that's a passing phase. After all, how far can you go with nudity?

Or sexual relations?

You know, it would seem that we're all waiting for that

zoom in to a close up of the sexual act.

And how close can we get to it?

Once you've reached that point, then where do you go?

After all, it makes no difference to me

because that scene I've already done.

I did it in the end of a picture called North By Northwest.

Where I showed Cary Grant pull a girl into an upper berth

and I cut to the phallic train entering the tunnel.

LAUGHTER

APPLAUSE

Well, Mr Hitchcock, on behalf of this collective audience,

I'm sure they'd wish me to thank you for your usual inspired

and urbane performance.

For myself, I can't say I've actually sat at the feet

of the master, but in years to come I can say I shared a sofa with you.

I'm very privileged. Thank you very much.

APPLAUSE

Two years later, Hitchcock was interviewed again,

talking about a film now considered one of his last great pictures -

Frenzy.

A certain amount of the press reviews,

while commenting on the comedy of those scenes, have also commented

on the violence of the first killing in particular, the overt violence

and suggested that perhaps you needn't have been

-quite as explicit as you were.

-Why not?

What is worth doing is worth doing well.

There wasn't a feeling that you had to live up to Straw Dogs or

to a new feeling of violence in the cinema?

I've never seen Straw Dogs.

So I wouldn't know anything about that.

I never copy other films ever

because I usually spend most of the time avoiding the cliche.

For example, in North By Northwest, I had to put the hero,

Cary Grant, on the spot, so the cliche would have been

putting him under a lamp, wet roads, a pool of light,

a black cat slithering along the wall, a face peering from a window,

and a black limousine coming along.

I decided against all that as being the worst kind of cliche for this

scene, so I decided to do it in the open, bright sunshine, without a tree

or a house in sight, and then out of nowhere comes a crop-duster

and chases him around.

Immediately, that has now become a cliche because the next time

you saw it was in a Bond picture when Bond was chased by a helicopter.

You saw a French picture called That Man From Rio,

where a man is chased by a motorboat.

Then, in a later film, you saw a man chased by a car.

So, what was once the avoidance of a cliche has become a cliche.

I don't think anyone would doubt the tremendous influence you've

had on other films and other filmmakers, but this in fact

is the first film you've made in England for something like 20 years.

-That's right.

-What made you come back now?

The story lends itself to that occasion. No other reason.

You've cast this film with a great many distinguished character

-actors, but no stars.

-It wasn't necessary.

I thought that the story would benefit by being a little more

realistic, especially in America.

They won't know the people at all.

Is there a feeling that the film will be your film

-and that you will be the star?

-Entirely, yes. Sure.

-And that's the way you'd like it?

-I think so, yes.

Looking back on the film now,

are you completely happy with the way it's turned out?

Pretty well, yes. It was laid out very meticulously to start with.

And it followed the desired pattern.

How much do you mind what critics do talk about in the context

-of your films?

-Well, they tend to talk about content,

rather than the treatment and they worry about the content.

I don't.

Any more than if I were a painter, painting say a plate of apples,

worrying whether the apples are sweet or sour.

The reason I ask is that very often your films open to a rather

mild reception and then after about five years,

they're suddenly rediscovered.

Always. It takes a year for them to become a classic.

Psycho is a typical example.

When that film was reviewed,

it was said of it, "This film is

"a blot on an honourable career," and yet, within a year, it's a classic.

Do you think the same thing will happen to Frenzy?

Not quite so much.

No, there have been...rather responsible

reviews on the picture,

I don't know whether you've read them all.

Yes, I have.

But where do you rate it in your own hierarchy of films?

I rate it alongside Rear Window and pictures like that.

But what got you into thrillers in the first place?

The same that got other litterateurs

and other English creators into the field.

After all, in England, the thriller or the suspense story,

you've got John Buchan, or Conan Doyle, it's first class literature.

Whereas in America, it's not.

And yet, once you'd made your name in this country,

-as a maker of thrillers, you did in fact go to America.

-That's right.

-Was that by choice?

-Oh, yes, because it was a challenge to go there.

My problem with America was to make them recognise that the thriller

was an important genre of film to make and need not be a cheap thing.

When you're not making thrillers in California,

what kind of life do you lead away from the studios?

I stay at home. And go to bed at nine.

And read.

-Not thrillers.

-Not thrillers?

-No.

-Alfred Hitchcock, thank you.

-Delighted.

After Frenzy, Hitchcock made only one more film -

1976's Family Plot.

In 1979, he received

the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award.

He joked that it must mean he'd be dead soon.

And he did die the following year, of kidney failure, aged 80.

Just a few months earlier, he'd been knighted by the Queen

and became Sir Alfred Hitchcock.

His many admirers called it a long overdue

but fitting title for the man who was, after all,

Britain's greatest single contribution to world cinema.