Alfred Hitchcock - Masters of Cinema (Complete Interview in 1972)

you once said that you like to make an audience scream through technical means what is it about an audience screaming that you like how many times have you heard a woman say oh i went to see the movie and had a good cry that's true they do you see now what is a good cry she never says i went there and had a bad cry otherwise she wouldn't have paid the money to go in the first place so these people have paid money to be uh scared just as much as they go to disneyland and go on the big dip or whatever they call that railway you know the roller coaster although he has a rental because all the haunted house they pay to be scared do you like to be scared yourself no i'm not keen about it i have been on other occasions like when oh i think i was driving with my wife to dubrovnik in the middle of the night and we were on a ledge on a mountain ledge eight thousand feet up and we came head to head on with a bus so it was a question who was going to go by first i remember having to get out and beckon her on and the wheel was within 18 inches of the drop i said this may be good enough for the movies but it's not good enough for me now i know that you plot out very carefully your scenario and and work out very carefully of films does it ever happen then that the actors get in the way of this that you have trouble with them method actors do you do well method actors are like children they're all right for the theater but they're little problem with films especially where cutting is involved if you remember a film i made years ago called rear window which was all from the point of view of one man james stewart sitting in a window well he had to look then i had to cut to what he saw then cut back to his reaction now what i was really doing was showing a mental process of the man by means of pictures by what he saw and supposing he said well i don't feel i would look that way well how can the film be constructed on those lines if he i had it with that actor um who's now dead called montgomery clift he was a method actor and you had difficulty with him well yes i was shooting the scene in quebec and he was playing the part of a priest who'd just been acquitted of a murder but was being sort of booed and stoned outside the courthouse and then the action of the film was to go across the street into the chateau frontenac hotel which you've seen pictures on so far probably in there well i wanted him to look up to the crowd and up to the people leaning out of the window but i also had put on the facade of the building the big gold letters of the word hotel so the audience would know where they were going into a hotel and he said i don't think i would look up i said well you better look up or else what about somebody like orson welles or charles lawton well charlie daughton was a problem you know when i made that film jamaica in it took a whole morning to get one close-up he was a nice man a charming man he really was but all he suffered so much because you know he felt he couldn't get it out and we were a whole morning on the one close-up until he got up and he was crying in the corner and i went over sort of patted him on the shoulder he looked up at me and said aren't you and i a couple of babies and i don't think me i mean i i wanted to use a gold witness and they include me out you know the funny came back and did it you see he said all right i said yes charles fine it wasn't all that different from the other close-ups you see then he took me aside and put his arm around my shoulder and said you know how i got it don't you i said no charles how he said i thought of myself as a small boy of ten wetting my knickers absolutely true really you'll be astonished do you think there's something like a hitchcockian actor if that's a word a type that is perfect for your films uh i don't really think so there are many many types in the film friends either or all kinds of leading people from the london theater i used to say years ago i don't today because he's gone charles has come but i used to say the hardest things to photograph are dogs babies motorboats and charlie law because they never come back for tape too everybody's just decorating and so forth and they're never calmly going on out to sea somewhere you've used though a series of i guess what could be described as cool blondes uh gray scaly tissues that wasn't really by design it was really to avoid the obvious voluptuous uh sexy blonde speaking of sexiness you deal a lot with uh sexual aberrations and fetishes as subject matter you feel this is a good subject matter for suspense well suspense is it doesn't relate really to that then why would you suspend relates entirely to causing an audience to go through emotions and can only be arrived at by giving them knowledge most people get confused between the mystery story and the thriller and the suspense story and the who done it have been different who done it you see is a intellectual exercise like a crossword puzzle when you buy who done it you're terribly tempted to look at that last page and you don't because you feel you've wasted your money or be disappointed but the suspense story is giving the audience full information before you start in other words there is a bomb under these seats tell the audience that and they will scream out and say get out of there get out of there how about in notorious could you uh describe the buildup of suspense there well it's just no no that wasn't really the suspense there was how soon will claude reigns find out that the woman who was the daughter of an old friend it's an american agent we all know it we were told at the beginning that she was working with cary grant then you had the added fact that clary grant was in love with her and yet in the course of his job he literally had to put this woman into the arms of another man so that was your emotional story but your suspense story which built up to its climax when they just then in the process of which you come to the moment when says mother i'm married to an american agent now they know they've got to get rid of her but they've got to get rid of her surreptitiously can't just bump her off because all the rest of the his colleagues will know so you get a case of our cynical poisoning you see who is your idea of an ideal villain i've heard you read someone that you thought the claude reigns kind of personified a nice man in his way you know i think any any man uh as you know as you've seen the film frenzy you've got a cheerful lively man who is a is a psychotic you see unless they're pleasant and unacceptable their victims will never go near them most people misunderstand what a villain is he's a charming man who kills women but if he didn't have the charm they'd run a mile from him well that brings us back maybe to sexual aberrations again there seemed to be a lot of jack the ripper types in various of your in various films well they're only they are aberrations uh for the by the fact that um apparently they're uh acceptable members of society and the picture friends they are agreed to go to some extent in the scene between a doctor and a lawyer to explain that faculty outwardly their normal apparently decent human beings and then quote it comes over them unquote you do use humor uh do you think that that plays a kind of relief from the building up is always needed you know you can't understand situation if you have the bomb you must never let it go off because if you created suspense with the audience then you must relieve it for instance i think in the 39 steps when madeleine carroll is in the train compartment and she uh gives the hero away after you feel she's not going to oh well that's true wouldn't and it wouldn't sure if a man burst into the apartment in the movies of course she'd uh return the embrace you see but then i don't believe what they do in movements is always correct i'm a believer in you humor i mean who wants to uh fill a film always with the you know heavy going it's like the poor housewife you know and uh those pictures that i that they're heavy-handed i call them sink to sink pictures because here's a poor housewife washing dishes of the sink the husband returns from work looks at this slightly forlorn figure and says look dear why don't you dry your hands go up and put on a nice clean dress yeah we'll get a sitter and we'll go out and have dinner and take in the movie and she said that'll be wonderful takes april or goes upstairs they get the babysitter they go out they have dinner he parks the car they go in the movie and she sits and looks at the screen and what does she see a woman washing dishes at the sink yeah they make those movies you know i mean the scent symbolizes the kind of heavy-handed movie that's made sometimes i made them myself under certain circumstances but who wants to what about in north by northwest that also that's a fantasy you know and what about the humor that's in north by northwest can you describe a little bit the various things that you use well i mean there's a humor of gary grant being made drunk and goes on a wild ride in a car you know and there's a certain amount of wit on the part of he and the girl let's get back to suspense again can you describe a little bit the build up of suspense in spellbound well in spellbound you start of course with a mysterious figure a spellbound was based on a novel which we didn't use it was called the house of dr edwards and it was the story of a doctor taking a patient to a mental institution although i never used it in the film i wanted one of the men in the dining car of the train and he saw a fly crawling across to take the fly and put the wings off and the other man said i wouldn't do that if i were you you know the point was i didn't know which was the crazy man who pulled the wings off the doctor or the the patient and we abandoned that idea and i worked with ben hecht on it and we started the story of the new doctor who came into the institution and fell in love with a female doctor and gradually uh he began to have sort of weird reactions to lines where they were made by a fork on a tablecloth or the lines on the road of the woman he'd fallen in love with but gradually of course it in a way was a mystery but it was a mystery with certain overturns of psychiatry in it you see and it was almost like examining a patient under psychiatric in psychiatric terms that the mystery was sold it was really a mystery story but of course a fresh approach to it what about strangers in the train the cutting back and forth between the the lighter that's lost when he threatens he threatens eventually because the nice man won't carry out his part of the so-called bargain because the bargain was never made uh he was a tech the hero was a tennis player so that the um the villain uh the weird guy was on the way to the scene of the crime and was going to plant a piece of evidence which would make the hero definitely the murderer of his wife and the but unfortunately the hero was occupied with a tennis match and i always remember when we shot the long shots at forest hills and uh they were davis cup matches and i said would you mind having nothing removed please it's in the way the davis cup so they took it away for me and then we did this whole tennis match and of course the moment the match was over he dashed after the other man through the years you've achieved a great deal of fame and success do you like your fame does it give you a certain amount of pride what enables me to sleep at night you're making a joke of the question but no nothing i mean hard questions i mean does it ever make you feel happy or proud to arrive at an airport and have cameramen and reporters and people there to greet you some little things like the other nice i remember once arriving at tel aviv and coming down the steps and having the whole airport applaud well that was very nice and once i was standing in the middle of the square at copenhagen and there's a it's a very large square and the roadway there's an intersection and suddenly i heard the sound of an ambulance siren screaming it came from the far corner of the square i was just standing there no camera or anything with an assistant and suddenly this ambulance stops at the intersection a man jumped out came rushing toward me said autograph please i gave him the autograph he rushed back to the ambulance they started the siren and he went on his way who was it that's what i don't know i don't even know whether the autograph was for the patient or the driver mr hitchcock before we get down to serious business i'd like first of all to very personally thank you for 40 years for me a marvelous movie going it's been a great pleasure seeing them and meeting you today uh most of the interviews i've seen and read with you have tended i think perhaps understandably to concentrate on the bigger film the later films the spellbound the rear windows and so on and today your permission i'd like to um initially at least go back to the beginning and discuss some of the earlier films which may not be quite so familiar today uh particularly since you worked in the german silent film to ask you how much your um uh early english films particularly films like number 17 really really drew on the pictorial style you may have picked up in the german cinemas and the german studios well in those days this would be about 1924 when the ufa studios were their zenith almost they they emerged from a company called decla bioscope and in those days i was i used to write the script and then become the art director and i wasn't directing then but i went to work at uh noy babelsbeard and of course they were making some of the most famous films the german films the knee belonging and yanning's the last laugh yannings was a tremendously important figure as well as mourinho the director lang lupic in those days and [Music] i remember when i was working there our picture was called the blackguard but they were making the last laugh and in those days it's just the opposite to what happens today everything was done on the lot and it didn't matter what the set was they'd build it and i remember in the last slap yannings it was a story about the reverence that the germans have for the uniform and it's the only film ever made that told the story purely pictorially without titles without a word of course it was silent films in those days anyway and they even built a hotel with the lobby and all the streets outside with all the traffic and everything and they even built a railroad station with the great big glass roof and the locomotive and the passengers moving backwards and forwards and they were to me prodigious jobs of production of course the late british silence and the early british talks were pretty much dominated by borrowed german talent cameraman directors and so on and um i think a film like your own number 17 is very very uh german in its pictorial style remember that film yes but more than that i think the lodger which was the third film the first two films i made as a director were made in munich and i had to direct them in german but of course there were english stories played with german actors character people but it made no difference because there was no sound just titles when i got back to england to do number three film it was mrs bellockland's famous book the lodger and this is the story of a rooming house in london where one she wondered and the rest of the family wondered whether the man upstairs is jack the ripper or not that uh one of your other early buddy songs lately the 1934 man who knew too much which i i love because the way it gets into the into the basic plot and the initial murders are very quickly and so very simply you seem a little unhappy with the film you refer to it as the work of a talented amateur whereas your later film you consider that of a professional i'm just wondering where you put the distinction where you feel you stopped being an amateur and became that professional i think i think actually the the difference would be that in the original man who knew too much i wasn't audience conscious whereas in the second one i was but i must have many of us still still feel those um early british films by no means the work of an amateur but we represented something the best thing and i can't remember to this day i think it was to involve the father more you see having had stewart in the role you had to change your story because in the original leslie banksy english actor was in the lead and he was caught and spent the end of the film locked up in a room where you couldn't do that with a man of the statue of james stewart so your story had to be manipulated to give him more activity in the latter part yes and in such a way i lost the original uh stories climax which was the famous sydney street siege which was a time about 1910 when three anarchists held up the whole of the british police force the soldiers from the tower of london and just three of them that's when churchill went down and you there are photographs of him directing operations from a doorway and these men held everyone up and there they were about to send to the nearest arsenal of woolwich for the artillery to come out it was when i went to um scotland yard researching for the second version a rather officious public relations man answered me with an in an extremely peremptory way i said well how would you handle the sydney street seeds today oh he said we just sent two men in with a dog well they wouldn't have anarchists today in england well they have a different kind of anarchist one other point i wanted to get into was the technique you've um developed from the facts i've exploited through the years sort of reaching past your actors and literally directing the audience so that you get the emotions you want not by the players on screen but by the uh you know by the people sitting in the audience which of course is what what any good director should do but of course you've made rather a specialty that's what it's all about when did you sort of become conscious of the fact that this is the way you would uh really in directions during my american period i was became very conscious of audience and uh well there are hints in the beginning because the the the closer example of the glass of drugged wine in the lady vanishes a very good example of directing the audience to that and not to the players that is true well you see that comes under the heading of avoiding the cliche you see the poisoned wine situation or the drugged wine the character usually picks it up and goes like that oh by the way and you said this and he does this about half a dozen times which is such a cliche so i decided to avoid that cliche and really leave the wine there untouched until the last minute but in order to keep the audience reminded of it i photographed the scene part of the scene through the two glasses so that will keep the audience saying well when are they going to pick up the drugs why um i've heard you say in the past that which is surprising for director who makes so many thrillers and suspense films that you don't basically like the device of the chase as part of part of your films is that because you are sort of um limited to being on location that you can't pre-plan that on the storyboard no i i think the chase is very good um but um i've never gone in for a purely physical chase i know it's very effective and you see you've had it in many many films i think what i where i've changed is the chase to rescue someone that i've never cross cut you see in the early griffith days you know they he used to cross cut with the man either going to the gallows or the guillotine with the rescuer on the way well i tended to avoid that kind of cross cutting in a chase sequence and stayed either with one or the other which makes the audience sweat the more because you don't show the progress of the rescuer now in the birds i did that once or twice i had a girl seated in front of the schoolhouse smoking and when she sits down there's a there's a child's play thing i forget jungle team they call it and there was one bird on it you see and i just put the camera on her and never showed what was going on behind until eventually she follows one bird through the sky when she turns around there's a mass of them now you see in the old technique you would have cross cut with the girl say little does she know it but the birds are gathering outside but when she saw them she tipped her into the school took the teacher to the window and indicated them never showed them then the teacher turned to the children saying now you all go home go down the street quietly when i tell you to run you run from that moment the children are herded toward the door of the school house and i went straight to the birds and stayed with them and never move them until suddenly you hear the pattern of the feet and all the birds went humble and somebody said to me afterwards what happened to that shot of the children when they went down the steps out of the school i said there was none as well there must have been there must have been so so it was making the audience carry the thing in their mind you see in terms of the traditional sort of old-time griffith cross-cutting i think the chase you did in the number 17 it still holds up superbly um perhaps because it's it mainly miniature and i guess you had the chance to it was all medium those fantastic traveling shots of the car going under the bridge and the train moving forward at the same time just incredible yes that was done by you you saw on the screen the rails and the roadway and both train and um greyhound bus are coming towards you remind us please read my last years i was thinking about american audience you know and they both come towards you and suddenly you see the bus go across the front of the train or what you think the camera whips back and the train goes under a bridge and the bus goes over the bridge what made you finally make the move to hollywood because you always wanted to be the big hollywood director or because you've done as much as you could in british film in that well i was the number one british director but on the other hand i noticed that hollywood was uh there was directors from all over europe going there so in a way it was a challenge actually because there were no other british directors says except james whale i think was the only one but then he came from the theater isn't he did you sort of have the uh outsized size of films like rebecca and foreign imposed on you or did you intend to make them that that big and pretentious well the first picture intended was to be the titanic and i researched that considerably in fact the the producer intended at the time to buy the leviathan which was awaiting the ship breakers offer and he was going to have it towed around through the canal and sink it off santa monica which was a prodigious job i often think you know he would say well gone there it is make the most of it what do you do you know do a close-up of a riveting dolly bag or uh put eight cameras on it and then the ship is sunk and a white-faced electrician says electricity wasn't on no camera got it and just kind of a derivation perhaps from that wonderful climactic dolly shot in young and innocent oh yeah the most elaborate shot you've ever done it is yes that was well there again you see uh it was it arose from the dialogue statement of an old man says to a young girl he said isn't it ridiculous sitting here among all these people looking for a man whose eyes blink have you often felt that individual films of yours would be would be improved by you're going back to them and working on them uh i don't think i would care to do that in fact i'll go further i wished i didn't have to meet them you see having worked with the writer on the design of the film really the whole creative work is finished all you have now is to wait and see it diminish and find you only arrive with sixty percent of the original conception on the screen have you ever thought of working as lubricated occasionally by preparing the film yourself from like desire or royal royal scandal literally making the film yourself on paper on the storyboard and then handing it over to another uh director like arnold premiere just to carry out orders for you no so there is something there is some fun for you in physical making well there's some fun and then the need to get it right i mean you know there's tempo involved the size of image of course storyboard will take care of that providing that the other director adhered to the storyboard this may not be of much concern to you commercially since your films always show you know theaters and tv and make a lot of money still for you i'm sure but it's uh i don't think there's any one director whose films are used more in film schools to teach film technique you can literally build a whole course around hitchcock films whereas with the obvious people like eisenstein and griffith i think with one or two films you've done it but i do know of um the whole course that had been built just around your films and the students learned a tremendous amount from them and they're entertained at the same time yes but the most important thing is that i am a puritan and i am a believer individual and that's what i think that schools should teach and uh you know so often you hear of schools who send a pupil out with an eight millimeter camera and see what he comes back with you know how he observes well that's only a part of the whole process that's like being in an art school and when you're sent out to sketch people sitting in a railroad terminal that's the whole course which it isn't at all it's only a little tiny segment of the course and i think that film school should teach the history as much as anything from the beginning well it's interesting most of the first-year students come back with films that look like ingmar bergman films but by the second year when they've really absorbed technique and style and history they come back with hitchcock films which is rather nice i think yes it is

Channel: Dejan Jankovic

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Keywords: Alfred, Hitchcock, masters, of, cinema, interview, tv, film, best, directors, ever, dejan, jankovic, reditelj, dean, yankovitz, director, deki43, serbia, srbija, belgrade, beograd, Mr, Mrs, Smith, 1941, The, Man, Who, Knew, Too, Much, 1939, Strangers, on, train, 1951, 1960, Psycho, Rear, Window, North, by, northwest, all, the, time, birds, 1963, vertigo, 1957, trailers, hitchcocked, 2010, 2011, Sabotage, (1936), Lady, Vanishes, 1938

Id: umfiwI-7I0M

Length: 33min 40sec (2020 seconds)

Published: Mon May 02 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/mi-16evil]

When I have to time what?! Tell me /u/j4mm3d!

But seriously though, Hitch is such a cool interview subject. If you can get your hands on the book Truffaut/Hitchcock you should. Great interviews between two of the best directors of all time.

[u/KelMHill]

It's sad that 33 minutes should be considered "LONG-ish" these days.

[u/HenrikHP]

http://www.amazon.com/Hitchcock-Revised-Edition-Francois-Truffaut/dp/0671604295 <-- This is also amazing :)

[u/persepolisp]

I sometimes find disappointment in interviews with directors, as they sometimes provide definitive answers that crush the beautiful ambiguity of certain films.

[u/MamuMogambo]

She is beautiful.