The next time I saw Hitch, I asked about these differences. The first one was merely practical: he did not want to make a film in Britain this time, and so had transferred the action right away to San Francisco and round about. Though, he added, he was now wondering about San Francisco, because it was so hackneyed a location—‘I think if I see one more car chase bouncing over those hills I shall scream.’ Maybe somewhere on the East Coast instead, but anyway in America. The second he readily agreed to. He did not want this film to be too heavy and serious, so he was reworking the characters in an altogether lighter vein. Anyway, he thought the supernatural was always difficult to accommodate in a story that was not centred on it, since it tended to remove the characters concerned from normal human sympathies and make them too special.
As for the homicidal maniac: ‘People always think villains are extraordinary, but in my experience they are usually rather ordinary and boring—certainly less interesting and peculiar than most of the ordinary, law-abiding people you meet. In this story, the way I see it, the villains are actually rather dull characters, they are the straight men, if you like, their motives are very simple and mundane. Whereas the more ordinary couple are actually very peculiar. And you see, each is moved some way in the direction of the other: the criminals are made to have much more of the ordinary in them, while the good guys have more of the criminal in them. It makes it less melodramatic, lighter and more believable—almost a comedy thriller. I think I’ll keep a bit of ambiguity about the kidnapper’s background in infant mayhem and the possible genuineness of the psychic’s powers, just for fun, but that’s all.’
And the kidnapping of the Bishop? The book had given him the idea for it, because he had always been fascinated by the special attitudes of people under some kind of social constraint, such as being part of a church congregation, and had wanted to stage a crime in the middle of a church service just to work out the possibilities of the situation. The kidnapping of a bishop seemed like the perfect opportunity, but what would be the point of doing it as it was done in the book? ‘Kidnap him in ordinary clothes alone in a wood and he might as well be a stockbroker. If you are going to kidnap a bishop, you want to do it at the moment when he is most evidently being a bishop—in the middle of mass, in front of a crowded congregation.’ Though in the script the denomination of the Bishop is carefully unspecified, one can hardly doubt from the way he describes it that the idea of snatching a bishop in the midst of High Mass, before the eyes of a crowded congregation, has for Hitch the special appeal of breaking a taboo.
At this time Hitch was already working every day with Ernest Lehman on the script, and he showed me the actual physical script they were working on. It was a large loose-leaf book of double foolscap size, each left-hand page containing Lehman’s first full draft and on the facing page, typed up and then further annotated by hand, Hitch’s comments and glosses—often far more copious than the script itself. The comments varied from a brief query on the wording of a line of dialogue to very elaborately thought-out arguments about the dramatic logic of a particular turn of events: all of them a basis for discussion rather than an instruction to change. And discussion was what was going on: each morning, regular as clockwork, Lehman came to the studio and they would talk over as much as they could get through before lunch, maybe only a line or two sometimes, sitting comfortably side by side on a large sofa with the script between them. Then Lehman would go off to make the modifications they had agreed on and come back the next day for more. (When I asked excitedly if he had scripts like this for his other films, Hitch said no, he had only just thought of this layout.)
Why Ernest Lehman? Because, obviously, they had got along very well on North by Northwest, and also because Lehman was between assignments at this time. I wondered whether the routine of working with Hitch had changed at all in the fifteen years since North by Northwest. I remembered Hitch had said afterwards that originally he thought of North by Northwest as much more abrupt and disjointed, like an early Nevinson painting, all jagged, angular shapes; then had felt he had to fill in the gaps to make it smoother-flowing, so as not to distress a modern public used to having everything spoon-fed them. Perhaps changing times, changing assumptions about plotting based on television conventions, would have loosened things up a bit? But Lehman found that if anything Hitch had become even more tight and meticulous in his script preparation—before, he had wanted things worked out sufficiently to give him a reliable working basis, but on the new film he wanted all the cracks to be neatly and convincingly papered over and everything set in script terms and dramatic logic (or the appearance of it) before he set foot on a sound stage.
All the same, the collaboration with Lehman was not entirely without problems, any more than it had been on North by Northwest. Again Lehman toyed from time to time with the idea of resigning, and was persuaded back, grumbling but still fascinated. He ended incredulous at all the agony which had gone into the creation of such a slight picture, and amazed that so little of it showed. Finally, his main difference of opinion with Hitch was over the ending, which Hitch eventually wrote himself and submitted to Lehman, listened to his objections (mainly that the medium is shown throughout as a complete fake, so to suggest at the last that maybe she has a touch of psychic power is disturbingly inconsistent), discussed his alternative solutions, and then went right ahead and used his own version.
So the preparation went on, and already by late spring of 1974 they had begun to hire the crew, though starting dates were vague—this autumn, the New Year, next spring …—and no casting definite, though Hitch went through an intensive series of screenings of films currently around the studio (Universal, of course) to look over the work of possible actors or technicians. I once encountered him quite mystified about Goldie Hawn after seeing Sugarland Express and wondered for a wild moment if someone had suggested she might be a possible successor to Grace Kelly, you know, cool with a sizzle of sexuality underneath. To be fair, though, she would have been conceivable casting, as in a very different way would Angela Lansbury, whom Hitchcock went to see in Gypsy at this time, for the role eventually played by Barbara Harris. The studio’s most enthusiastic suggestion, Liza Minnelli, he just could not see in the part.
The script completed, more or less, Hitch started work with his sketch artist, Tom Wright, who had worked on one or two other Hitchcock films in this capacity, and who was this time to be second-unit director as well. I was out of the country at the start of this stage of the preparation, and by the time I got back Hitch himself had had a succession of health problems which put him in and out of hospital for most of the autumn—first, he had a heart pacer fitted, which he delights to show with gruesome details of the surgical processes involved. Then, as a result of a bad reaction to the antibiotics he was given, he got colitis, and once over that he had a kidney stone removed (‘Of course, they don’t cut you any more, they go in through the front, if you see what I mean,’ he added with relish). He noted with fascination the instant banking of heart data in Chicago, and insisted that all the surgery be done with local anaesthetics so he could watch how it was done. I had the feeling that what turned most listeners green even in description might well sometime become more grist to his mill.
By December 1974, when I saw him again, the production was moving towards its final stages of preparedness. The script was pretty well fixed, for the moment (the final pre-production script bears evidence of some intensive final polishing around the end of March and the beginning of April 1975, but nearly all in matters of detail), and instead Hitch was concentrating on laying out the action sequences with Tom Wright. This applied particularly to the car chase sequence in the picture, which presumably the second unit would do anyway, but which was clearly going to be done exactly as Hitch designed it. The whole film, as usual, was set out shot by shot in a sort of story-board form, keyed into the final shooting script, so that by the time Hitch went on to the floor he, and everyone else relevant in the unit, knew exactly what he wa
nted to shoot and how he wanted to shoot it, and could refer to this story board in case of doubt. Hitch still maintains, perversely, that once he has prepared a film in this way and cast it, anyone could shoot it. He says this, but it seems very doubtful, seeing how much extra moment-to-moment explanation and decision-making is necessary with even the most detailed script of this kind, which in the last analysis can only be an aide-mémoire for the director, the one man who knows completely what this shorthand means.
The car chase is not exactly a car chase, not for most of its length, but a prolonged cat-and-mouse game in which the psychic and her boy-friend, lured on a wild-goose chase to a rendezvous on top of a mountain, find the brake fluid has been drained from their car as it careers wildly down out of control. Then, escaping with their lives, they are pursued by the would-be killer in his car until he gets killed himself in a car wreck. One day when I saw him, Hitch had spent the morning laying this out, and was talking with great enthusiasm about the necessity of re-examining conventional situations to make quite sure if the conventional way of shooting them is in fact the best. Sometimes of course it is the only sensible way. But sometimes, as in this case, if you start to ask questions you do not get very sensible answers.
Why, for instance, must you always see the edge of the windscreen and the top of the bonnet in a driver’s-eye-view shot of the road, especially in a car speeding towards or away from something or out of control? No reason at all, says Hitch. In fact, it is flouting an important psychological truth, that though of course they are physically there in the driver’s field of vision, he will see only—and therefore we, for full identification, should also see only—what is important to him: the road rushing vertiginously to meet him, the landscape flying past on either side. So Hitch had been designing the sequence accordingly, shot by shot, with the illustrator sketching under his direction, taking visual notes, then going away and drawing up the individual shot compositions and coming back to discuss further and where necessary modify—exactly as, at an earlier stage, the scriptwriter had worked.
How far is the film thus arrived at in words and drawn images transferred exactly to the screen? The answer, as one might suppose, is closely but not slavishly. Though the ‘story board’ is kept on set, I never saw Hitch himself refer to it during the shooting—obviously he does not need to, it is primarily a stage in his thinking about a film, or thinking it out, and once that is done it is hardly needed. Even the locations are selected at an early stage in the script preparation and their characteristics embodied in the script, rather than leaving anything to last-minute inspiration.
For example, there is a sequence in the middle of the film in which the taxi-driver makes contact with the widow of the man who tried to kill him, at the latter’s funeral. Recognizing him (in a shot in which everything is right out of focus except the man himself, glimpsed in the distance beyond the funeral party at the graveside), she tries to escape, and he pursues her. As Hitch says, there is an obvious conventional way of doing this: shot of back of retreating woman; shot of front of advancing man, gaining on her; close-up of her breaking into a run, panicked; close-up of him looking determined, gaining on her, and so on. The scene is necessary, but if you shoot it the same old way it is boring. Audiences can imagine for themselves the reactions of the two involved, they don’t have to be shown. And as usual, because that is the way it is conventionally done, Hitch wanted, if it was reasonably possible, to do it differently. Looking at the cemetery they had chosen as a location (in Glendale, quite close to the studio), he was struck by its curious irregular, rather overgrown grid pattern, and at once had the idea of shooting the pursuit from above—a high platform built for the purpose—in one shot, with the two characters moving to and fro across the grid in rough parallel, like ‘an animated Mondrian’. But all this was worked out in detail months before shooting started, whereas another director might well select the location which would give him the idea at the last moment.
Clearly, the idea of situating the story very specifically in and around San Francisco had been abandoned quite early on, and the decision taken to make the film mostly in and near the studio. But the image of Grace Cathedral remained for the Bishop’s kidnapping, and with it some other unobtrusively San Francisco locations for the houses of various characters. At one time Hitch even contemplated doing the cathedral sequence in the studio, on the principle that all he really needed was one column and the rest could be matted in. But he discovered that in the studio the sequence would cost $200,000, so decided he might as well go on location, and while he was there himself shoot the other San Francisco exteriors, which had formerly been assigned to the second unit.
By this time, then, the main things left imponderable were the casting and the title. On 22 April the title was settled as Deceit, and most of the casting was done, with Bruce Dern as Lumley, the taxi-driver, Barbara Harris as Blanche, the psychic, Roy Thinnes as Adamson, the kidnapper, Karen Black as Fran, his girl-friend, and, just before production started, Cathleen Nesbitt as Julia Rainbird, the old lady who sets the whole thing off.
It is, I think, a fair indication of the small importance Hitch attaches to performers among the various elements in a film that casting was left so late, until everything else had been settled; no consideration was given to making the characters conform to the known personalities and capabilities of the actors envisaged; rather, the roles were left as strictly circumscribed slots into which the actors would eventually be fitted. The only really known quantity among them, in that he had worked with Hitch before on Marnie (very briefly) and some television, was Bruce Dern, though Cathleen Nesbitt would of course be very familiar to him from his days of constant attendance at the London theatre. Roy Thinnes was working just next door on Robert Wise’s Hindenburg. Barbara Harris he got, I discovered, from once having seen her in the film of A Thousand Clowns and remembering her as suitable over the studio’s objections that she was ‘unreliable’; he had never seen her in the theatre and was amused to discover that in one of her biggest stage successes, On a Clear Day …, she had also played a psychic. Karen Black he got from I don’t know where, certainly not Day of the Locust, which he had not seen (though following its box-office career with interest), but anyway on the enthusiastic recommendation of the studio, who felt she was going somewhere, and certainly with no rooted objection on his part, since Fran was the least developed principal in the script and any reasonably attractive, reasonably competent actress would do.
In any case, he clearly regarded the two kidnappers as the less interesting roles, and spoke with more enthusiasm about Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris, finding in them both just the characteristic of built-in personal oddity which would give density and individuality to their characters as written in broad outline. In other words, he was still following his old adage that the most important part of directing actors is casting them right, so that you can rely on them to take on naturally the required shape without constant instruction, Barbara Harris especially delighted him with her constant creativity in the apparently unconscious invention of business and telling detail to bring the outlines to life: when the shooting was concluded he said that of all the actors he had ever worked with he thought she had made the most important personal contribution to the film of elements he had never even thought of, without any need for urging or obvious ‘direction’ from him. Indeed, the only actor I saw him do much apparent direction of was Karen Black, and then evidently not because he felt it was necessary but because she seemed to want reassurance that the master was satisfied. I was amazed at the transformation she seemed to have undergone since the previous year, when I had observed her quite a lot during the shooting of Day of the Locust. There, in tune with the atmosphere of the production as a whole, she was playful, extrovert, kooky and, from time to time, temperamental; shooting this film she was staid, deferential, eagerly concentrating on the purely technical problems of fitting into a staged action, referring to Hitch rather like a good little girl who hopes fo
r an approving pat on the head from her teacher.
Shooting was due to start on 5 May 1975, but at the last moment it was delayed till 12 May to accommodate further costume and make-up tests. Even this time was not lost, though. One of the few patches in the script which was not laid out in full detail was the opening scene, a long dialogue between Blanche and Miss Rainbird in which the plot foundations are laid during a seance. The indications as to how precisely this would be shot remained sketchy. Since the tests required were for Cathleen Nesbitt and Barbara Harris, Hitch directed them himself, using the chance to rehearse the first scene in various ways so that by the time shooting started he was just as detailed in his conception of it as he was for the rest of the film.
Watching Hitch at work is an education in precision and in economy. The atmosphere on a Hitchcock set is different from that of any other I have ever been on. Even at Universal Studios, before the shooting moved to location in Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, it was rather like making a film in church. There are some very gifted directors who choose to work in an atmosphere of apparent chaos. Billy Wilder, the veteran who had most recently been working at the same studio, on The Front Page, kept the cast and crew in stitches with a constant stream of jokes and tricks, and seemingly welcomed any and every distraction, even to the extent of every now and then throwing the Universal Studios guided tour an unscheduled attraction by letting them troop in their hundreds through the sound stage while he was actually shooting, to the consternation of the studio authorities. Not so Alfred Hitchcock. The studio set was strictly closed to visitors of any kind, and within an atmosphere of the utmost courtesy and formality prevailed.
It was, of course, all part of a deliberate pattern. Ever since he arrived in Hollywood, he has directed in the same unvarying uniform. He explains the aberration from his own point of view largely in terms of comfort—undertaking any job as arduous as directing a feature film, he wants to be as comfortable as possible and since a dark suit is what he has always worn, this is what he feels most comfortable in. But there is more to it than that. Clothing in southern California is especially susceptible to structuralist analysis in terms of signs and meaning, and by the code in operation a jacket means fairly formal, a tie means formal (whatever kind of tie, and whatever worn with), and a suit, even the flashiest, most sporty tweed, means very formal indeed. So Hitch’s working clothes mean to everyone else the height of formality, and when they dress likewise, as sooner or later most of the senior members of the unit do (the first assistant director told me he was advised that a jacket and tie would be a good idea when he was first signed months before shooting started), they are put automatically into a particularly restrained, formal, purposeful frame of mind.
Hitch: The Life and Times and Alfred Hitchcock Page 35