Hitch (46 page)

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 wanted 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 for 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.

Which, for Hitch's purposes, is perfect. There are no people running around, no raised voices or temperaments on a Hitchcock set. He himself sits quietly observing, expressing the absolute minimum, which, for a nervous or insecure actor, could be alarming. He communicates mainly with the director of photography (Leonard South, a senior man who has photographed few features on his own, but was for years operator for the late Robert Burks and is used to Hitchcock's technique), his first assistant and his script girl. Round about, everyone walks almost on tiptoe, and one hears constantly the formulas of extreme courtesy—'I beg your pardon', ‘I'm so sorry', ‘Might I suggest …' Even at a glance this is an operation entirely under control, knowing exactly where it is heading. Hitch intervenes directly only when something does not go according to plan, and practically everything does. And it should therefore not have been surprising, I suppose, to discover that of all the films I have ever seen in production, this was the one which was being the most shot in one or at most two takes. When I commented on the oddity of this in current Hollywood practice, he said briskly, ‘If you know what you want, and you know when you've got it, why do more?'

One afternoon, for instance, right after a press lunch he had staged in a mock-up graveyard—a nonsense occasion with Bloody Marys to drink, waitresses in mourning, and the names and birth-dates of the journalists present inscribed on gravestones, no doubt devised to compensate the Hollywood press for the fact that the set itself was closed, as well as to support Hitch's public image as a macabre joker—I watched him polish off a whole sequence on two adjacent sets in about two and a half hours.

The situation is that the master-criminal (Roy Thinnes, at this time) and his girl-friend-accomplice (Karen Black) are just collecting on their latest caper—a giant diamond as ransom for a kidnapped businessman. The girl, heavily disguised (as Marnie, more or less) in a blond wig, dark glasses, and black from her rakish hat to her rather kinky, very high-heeled boots, has just picked up the diamond from the police and is now landing in a police helicopter which has flown at her unspoken direction to a golf course miles from anywhere
where so that the exchange can be completed. First, in a partial mock-up of a helicopter we see Karen Black gesture the pilot to stay where he is, look for a sign, get out carrying a gun and vanish into the darkness. Then the pilot gets out and looks after her, registering reactions to a flashing light and then to the sound of a car driving away. In the next scene, in the wood, we see Adamson, the criminal, standing with a body slumped at his feet; Fran comes up to him, hands over a little bag; he opens it and drops the ransom diamond into the palm of his hand, then examines it with a jeweller's glass while we zoom into close-up: diamond, glass, eye. Then, satisfied, they turn and head off through the dark wood, all without a word of dialogue, leaving the recumbent body to be picked up and taken back to civilization.