Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  Hitchcock’s camera expertise often heightened his expectations of the cinematographer. He and cameraman John Russell had grown accustomed to working together on the Hitchcock TV series. Hitchcock perhaps took it for granted that communication between them would be virtually second-nature. Assistant director Hilton Green observed: “[Hitchcock] never expounded with John or told any cameraman he was wrong. He would tell them what he wanted, ask what lens they would be using. If it wasn’t the right one, he’d quietly say, ‘What if you did it with such-and-such instead?’”

  Marshall Schlom recalled: “Mr. Hitchcock would sit in his chair and, never looking through the camera, say, ‘Now I want to do a two-shot, so use a thirty millimeter lens and put the camera right there. I think the distance will be ten feet, so you’re going to be cutting right in here [pointing to a level on the actor’s body].’ Little photographic problems kept cropping up on Psycho. When [Hitchcock] wasn’t quite sure about the solution, I became a stool-pigeon for him by occasionally looking through the camera just to make certain he was getting what he asked for.”

  Leonard South, one of Hitchcock’s team of feature-film collaborators, recalled the director’s phoning him, sounding “very upset.” South said, “Hitchcock was a definite guy, but not a forceful one. He was too nice to hurt Jack Russell’s feelings. He called me, saying, ‘Lenny, they bloody well don’t understand me,’ meaning the people from Universal-Revue who were only used to doing episodic TV. He described a very sophisticated camera move that the crew had wanted to do in a way that he found completely unacceptable. We literally talked the shot through step by step so that he could tell them how to do it properly. Making Psycho was a terrible struggle for him, at first.”

  Marshall Schlom recalled a potentially volatile situation that arose between the director and his TV-oriented cameraman. Because Hitchcock disliked night shooting, he and his crew had reserved for dusk the shots, to be done on the backlot, of Janet Leigh driving toward the motel, as seen from the vantage point of the porch. The director watched coolly from his chair while cinematographer Russell lit the shot and geared up for the artificial rain that the scene required. Schlom observed: “Mr. Hitchcock noticed an arc light backlighting a big oak tree that would show right behind Janet. He asked me, ‘Is that arc in the picture?’ I quietly got up, stuck my face in the camera, then sat back down: ‘Yes, Mr. Hitchcock, it is.’ He called over the cameraman and said, ‘Jack, is that arc in the picture?’ He said, ‘No Hitch, the tree’s going to cover it.’ We shot it. Next day at noon, I went to the dailies and there was the arc in the picture: It looked like a full moon. My head spun. Jack was a friend and I didn’t want to get him in trouble.

  “My dilemma must have registered in my face because Peggy [Robertson] said, ‘What’s the problem?’ I told her and she said, ‘Well, who pays your check? You’ll have to tell Mr. Hitchcock.’ I went back to the set and Mr. Hitchcock was talking with someone. I started to leave and he said, ‘Sit down, Marshall.’ He continued talking with the other person and I started to leave again. ‘Marshall? Sit down.’ The other person left and I told Mr. Hitchcock that the arc was in the picture. He called Jack over. I was dying. Jack came over and bent down to Mr. Hitchcock, who said, ‘Jack, I just came back from the dailies and I noticed the arc in the picture.’ I’ll never forget how he got me off the hook.” Hitchcock and Russell reshot.

  Despite the technical glitches, Hitchcock kept the proceedings moving along at a smart pace. “He directed it as if it were a television show,” observed Marshall Schlom. “We did between fourteen to eighteen setups a day, which, for a major motion picture director, is a lot. To him it would be a lesser kind of film than Vertigo or The Man Who Knew Too Much. In scale, this was in the same vein as The Trouble with Harry. He loved directing this very good cast in a good script on a small, very manageable movie. He never went past take three or four because he always felt the spontaneity would diminish and the scene would take on a different feeling.”

  Despite the brisk schedule, Hitchcock was not a man to be rushed. Makeup artist Jack Barron observed: “I’ve been on movie sets for forty-five years, but a Hitchcock set was like no one else’s. People were so taken by him, respected him so. If anyone—electricians, crew, whoever—had something to say, they’d practically whisper it, out of respect. On a nine o’clock shoot, he’d come in about eight-thirty. You’d expect him to come in and give the cameraman the first setup. Not Hitchcock. He’d sit down and tell stories until he was good and ready, and then say, ‘I think it’s time for the first setup.’ No one ever dared say, ‘Come on, we have a schedule to keep.’ Everybody would think, ‘God, we haven’t shot anything and here it is ten or eleven A. M.’ By the time you went for lunch, he’d have half his day’s work done. The whole crew especially loved Thursdays because that was his night to go to Chasen’s with ‘Mom’ [Mrs. Hitchcock]. We knew we’d be home by four o’clock.”

  Marshall Schlom, who, on completing Psycho, would leave Hitchcock to work for such directors as Stanley Kramer and John Huston, observed of Hitchcock’s contradictory nature: “There was an aura about [Hitchcock]. He stood there and you didn’t want to get too close to him, but he wanted you to. Normally the cameraman and director are locked together, but not with Mr. Hitchcock. John Huston used to come in and shake everybody’s hand. ‘Did you have a pleasant evening?’ he’d say—very gregarious and European. Mr. Hitchcock was very polite to everybody, but he didn’t give you the impression he was interested in your private life. And at five-thirty, he would look at his watch and say to Hilton [Green], ‘Are we finished?’ Hilton would say ‘Yes, Mr. Hitchcock,’ and Mr. Hitchcock would announce, ‘I think that will be all for today.’ Everyone would say goodnight and he’d walk out to his car to be driven home.”

  From the outset, the warmth and professionalism of Janet Leigh appeared to hearten Hitchcock, just as the dedication with which Anthony Perkins approached his assignment seemed to disarm the director. Wardrobe expert Helen Colvig commented, “Tony was so serious about his role. I believe that impressed Mr. Hitchcock and even touched him.” Perkins has recalled: “Even as the first day proceeded I could see he wanted to know what I thought and what I wanted to do and I was really very surprised by this. I kind of tentatively made some small suggestion about something I might do. He said, ‘Do it.’”

  A Set Divided

  Tempers flared during the filming of the lunch-hour motel liaison of Marion and her lover, Sam. Despite the gamy dialogue and setting, the bra and half-slip worn by the curvaceous Janet Leigh, and the strapping John Gavin baring his torso, Leigh and many crew members claimed that the lack of erotic heat between his co-stars infuriated the director. Hitchcock had no desire to exploit softcore pornography in the scene. Yet he and writer Stefano had carefully designed the scene not only to announce that Psycho was a sixties picture but also to introduce the voyeuristic theme and film technique that runs through the movie. “One of the reasons for which I wanted to do the scene in that way was that the audiences are changing,” the director told Francois Truffaut. “It seems to me that the straightforward kissing scene would be looked down at by the younger viewers; they’d feel it was silly. I know that they themselves behave as John Gavin and Janet Leigh did.”

  Previous Hitchcockian benchmarks of cinema eroticism—the longest kiss in the movies in Notorious (1946) and the sexy badinage of Rear Window (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955)—were to pale beside the opening of Psycho. Wardrobe mistress Rita Riggs said, “It seemed so abrupt for two actors to shake hands and jump into bed together. But Mr. Hitchcock loved the perversity of it all and wanted to see what kind of electricity that newness might spark between the two actors.” Script supervisor Marshall Schlom elaborated: “He was a little imp. He sat in his chair with a straight, serious face, but that scene was a firecracker, a cause célèbre, and Mr. Hitchcock knew it. He felt the hotel scene and the shower scene were the two we had to make sure were right. And since he was getting such flack from the cens
ors, he made sure it was done in good taste.”

  Never before had actors in a mainstream American film played an erotic duet horizontally, let alone in the seminude. “I was so intrigued by the character and Hitchcock’s direction,” actress Leigh recalled, “that it didn’t dawn on me until I was actually on the set that my being in a half-slip and bra was some big hullabaloo. The set was closed, but the funniest thing was everybody up in the rafters looking down like they thought they really saw something.”

  “John Gavin had a great look onscreen; unfortunately, he was an awfully cold fish otherwise,” a crew member commented of the actor who had been highly touted by talent agent Henry Willson, who had previously landed studio contracts for his stable of such handsome young clients as Rock Hudson, Guy Madison, Rory Calhoun, and Tab Hunter. Hitchcock grew visibly more riled as take after take failed to thaw Gavin’s icy reserve. Finally, the director called “Cut” and engaged Janet Leigh in a huddle on the sidelines. “The scene didn’t seem to be going as well as Hitch wanted it to,” said Janet Leigh, choosing her words carefully. “The scene had to establish the passion of the relationship right from the start, so that Marion’s tremendous sacrifice and dangerous act makes sense.” In discrete but descriptive terms, Hitchcock requested that Leigh take matters in hand, as it were. Leigh blushed, acquiesced, and Hitchcock got a reasonable facsimile of the required response. But the director’s annoyance with John Gavin festered. Privately, Hitchcock referred to the actor as “The Stiff.”

  Observed Rita Riggs, who went on to do two more Hitchcock pictures after Psycho, “I never once heard Mr. Hitchcock raise his voice over the incident, but when we began seeing the dailies, we noticed that we saw a great deal of the back of John Gavin’s head.” Helen Colvig added: “He was at odds with John. I remember being there when John conveyed through the assistant director that he wanted to come through a door in a certain way. Hitchcock looked askance and told the assistant, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll just cast a shadow over his face. We can knock him out in no time.’ I think John was trying really hard to impress Hitch, but he was just irritating him.”

  “I dislike conflict,” Hitchcock once said, “but I won’t sacrifice my principles. I draw the line at my work. I loathe people who give less than their full effort. That’s deceit … I cut such people off.”

  Co-star Janet Leigh asserted that one mark of Hitchcock’s genius was his way of exploiting the passivity of Gavin to good effect. “In a strange way,” she said, “it worked for the suspense. Real passion would have justified Marion’s theft. But the lack of the complete abandon with Sam might have led some audience members to think, ‘I wonder if he really loves her that much?’ It made Marion even more sympathetic, which Hitch was very concerned about her being. It also might have titillated the audience a bit into believing that possibly something might develop between Marion and Norman in that very weird but strangely sweet supper scene in the motel den.”

  Although Hitchcock made no overt display of his displeasure with the casting, few could freeze out someone more totally. Gavin became an outsider while Hitchcock discovered in Leigh and Perkins more convivial players. “Tony was and is a very private person,” observed one Hitchcock associate, “but he was very taken with the whole movie, wanted to be part of everything. Hitchcock liked that and helped him a lot. Tony was very serious about the whole thing.”

  Unlike Janet Leigh, on whom Hitchcock lavished considerable preparation time, Perkins had little or no contact with his director prior to filming. Janet Leigh observed: “Tony was surprised to learn that Hitch and I had meetings prior to filming. But I wonder if it wasn’t because he wanted a kind of distance, a not-quite-worldly quality to how Tony played Norman.” Perkins admitted, “In Psycho, I was confused at first. When we started the picture I had never actually met [Hitchcock] but once [prior to the start of production] and I was very apprehensive about making any statements about what I thought, what I felt about the character and about the different scenes. I got to relaxing more with him and making more and more suggestions and ideas. About four weeks in we were getting along very well but I was still hesitant about bringing him a page of dialogue which was as blackly worked over as this one was. He was in his dressing room reading his air-mailed copy of the London Times—which he often does between shots. And I said, ‘Mr. Hitchcock, about my speech in tomorrow’s scene.’ He said, ‘Uh, huh’ (he’s still reading), and I said, ‘I’ve had a few ideas that I thought maybe you might like to listen to.’ I was kind of stuttering around. He said, ‘All right.’ And I started telling him what they were. He said, ‘Oh, they’re all right.’ And I said, ‘But, but, but, you might not like them.’ He said, ‘I’m sure they’re all right.’ He put the paper down. He said, ‘Have you given it a lot of thought? I mean have you really thought it out? Do you really like these changes you’ve made?’ I said, ‘Yes, I think they’re right.’ He said, ‘All right, that’s the way we’ll do it.’ I think I worked on it twice as hard that evening and, sure enough, as we went in, he didn’t even glance at the original pages. It all sounded right to him.”

  Perkins developed a powerful affinity not only for the surface behavior of Norman Bates but also for the inner workings. “It was my idea to have Norman nervously chewing candy in the film,” Perkins enthused about the character who was to become a national folk antihero. “He would not plot malice against anyone. He has no evil or negative intentions. He has no malice of any kind.”

  Despite Perkins’s obvious dedication to his role in the film, Janet Leigh emerged as Hitchcock’s special pet. Between takes, he took constant delight in convulsing her with salty puns, limericks, and off-color jokes. “What he liked to do most,” Leigh said, “was to make me blush and that is not a hard thing to do.” For all his widely reported disdain for actors, Hitchcock took pains to coax the strongest possible performance from Leigh. Nowhere was this attention more focused than in the many moments that Leigh played without dialogue: Hitchcock’s camera seems almost acutely sensitive to the play of emotions on her face. “My part was almost shot alone, in isolation,” Leigh emphasized. “I mean, except for the one scene with Gavin, in the office, and the few scenes with Tony, the rest of it was really me, alone. It was very clear with Hitchcock. He said, ‘This is the result I want. How you get there is up to you.’”

  Although some performers in the film felt their work suffered from the speed and apparent casualness with which Hitchcock shot, Leigh disagreed. “Perhaps none of his other films were shot as fast as Psycho,” she observed. “But any less-well-prepared director might have taken far more time to shoot Psycho. I have a feeling that if one studied the facts and figures on a large-scope Hitchcock picture like, say, The Man Who Knew Too Much, he would find that Hitchcock would do it in a much shorter time than most directors. He was so meticulously prepared.”

  Leigh vividly recalled shooting the scenes in which Marion—about to flee to her lover, her bags packed—drives nervously through downtown Phoenix. In the script, writer Joseph Stefano suggests action and moods:

  We are close on Mary’s car, shooting in at her troubled, guilty face. She seems to be driving with that excess of care of one who does not wish to be stopped for a minor traffic irregularity. She stops for a red light at a main intersection. From Mary’s viewpoint, we see Lowery and Cassidy crossing the street, passing right in front of Mary’s car. Mary freezes.

  Leigh explained: “It was a silent shot, obviously, but as I’m driving and having these thoughts, Hitch completely articulated for me what I was thinking. ‘Oh-oh,’ he’d say, ‘there’s your boss. He’s watching you with a funny look.’” Similarly, Hitchcock articulated for Leigh the off-screen voices of Marion’s boss, her co-worker Caroline, and Cassidy, the Texas oilman, each of whom reacts to her disappearance in conversations the character fantasizes as she flees with the stolen money.

  Marshall Schlom recalled the director’s working “exceptionally closely” with Janet Leigh. “Before every shot, he went to her
very quietly and really gave her direction. He also really liked her, so he loved putting her on. He’d whisper something to her out of earshot, she’d giggle and blush, then he’d go back to his chair with the face of an imp. It was a wonderful relationship.” Writer Stefano: “As I watched her, I knew she was giving an incredible performance. Hitchcock helped her, but it had to come from inside her.”

  In the completed scene to which Leigh referred lies part of the justification for the opening shots of the film. As the camera pans a city skyline, the documentarylike titles appear: PHOENIX, ARIZONA … FRIDAY, DECEMBER THE ELEVENTH … TWO FORTY-THREE P.M. Hitchcock frequently established a precise time and place in the opening shots of his films, but Psycho was different. “Hitchcock was mad as hell because he had sent out a second-unit crew to shoot process plates of the city streets,” set designer Robert Clatworthy said. “When he saw what they’d shot, he noticed that Christmas decorations were hung over the street. He didn’t approve of that at all and said, ‘Hmmm. That will take some explaining.’ He was always thinking about the audience trying to outsmart him. You can see the decorations in the shots when Janet Leigh’s boss walks past her car and peers in the window. There wasn’t time to reshoot. So he added the date in the titles at the beginning and hoped some wiseacre wouldn’t wonder why there was no other reference to the holidays anywhere else in the picture.”