Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  A Variety piece dated June 3, 1981, quotes Bass as having detailed the circumstances of how he came to direct the shower sequence. “I showed it [the test footage shot with the IMO newsreel camera] to Hitch and he very graciously said, you do it. He was on the set. It was really a very generous gesture. It was a thrill for me.” Today, Bass, who is internationally known for corporate logos and documentary films, calls the quotes from the London Sunday Times, and others of a derogatory nature toward Hitchcock, “totally inaccurate.” He details the circumstances of the shooting of the scene by saying, “It came time to shoot it and he benignly waved me on. And that was how it came about.”

  From a vantage point of thirty years later, Bass observed: “I’ve directed a feature. It is hell. So complex, wearing, time-consuming. If anybody can help you, you want it. If somebody can relieve you of something, you’re grateful. That was the spirit in which [Hitchcock] asked me to lift certain things, to concentrate on things he couldn’t pay attention to while he was doing everything else.”

  From the standpoint of many crew members, any confusion as to who directed the scene is groundless. “I was on that set every second,” asserted script supervisor Marshall Schlom. “Nobody directs Mr. Hitchcock’s pictures but Mr. Hitchcock. The set was four ‘wild’ walls and so tiny, basically no more than the six-foot tub, he could barely get a camera in there. It was a closed set, with a guard at the locked door. There were no visitors. The woman who was Janet Leigh’s body, the ‘sunbather’ or ‘nudist,’ as Mr. Hitchcock called her, paraded around—which was all new to us. We actually photographed bits and pieces. I don’t ever recall seeing a storyboard as we know them today.”

  Wardrobe supervisor Rita Riggs vividly recalled the shooting and the storyboards. As with other crew members, she verified that the shooting was postponed twice: once when Janet Leigh had a headcold and another when the star had her period. “I was involved daily because it was such a critical sequence,” Riggs said. “It was shot on a tiny set, with screens all around it. Everyone was extremely protective and tried to treat Janet with as much consideration as possible. The storyboards for that sequence were unbelievable, but Mr. Hitchcock absolutely shot it himself. We shot frame by frame from the storyboards because each of us had to look at them to know exactly what the camera would see. Janet, who was a terrific sport and a wonderful professional throughout, was never nude. After she and I had to get the moleskin contraption glued-on and trimmed, then she’d get into the shower only to have the water wash off the moleskin. As a filmmaker, Mr. Hitchcock got impatient several times and would say, ‘Oh, come now, we’ve all seen more than that at the beach.’ But Janet Leigh was right. As a major star and a beautiful woman with children, why should she expose her whole body? This is a devastating business. People talk.”

  The wardrobe supervisor admitted that technical bugaboos in shooting the shower scene vexed the usually unflappable director. “Mr. Hitchcock sometimes walked away because he became so exasperated by three hours of running water, nudity, and wipe-offs [of the moleskin covering]. He may have turned over a brief shot or two to an assistant. I remember him sitting there twiddling his thumbs clockwise or, when particularly exasperated, counterclockwise. I also remember him not trying to generate any giggles to break the tension. Instead, he did a lot of pontificating, which was something he did often to cover his shyness.”

  Janet Leigh recalls the shooting as if it had been yesterday. “Hitch was very clear about what he wanted from me in the shower scene. He said he wanted me to be sure to show that I was not just getting the dirt off, not an I’m-gonna-wash-that-man-right-out-of-my-hair kind of thing, but cleansing the evil Marion had done and being ready to pay her dues. The shower was a baptism, a taking away of the torment from her mind. Marion became a virgin again. He wanted the audience to feel her peacefulness, her kind of rebirth, so that the moment of intrusion is even more shocking and tragic.”

  As Leigh detailed the shooting of the scene, she emphasized, “Saul Bass was there for the shooting, but he never directed me. Absolutely not. Saul Bass is brilliant, but he couldn’t have done the drawings had Mr. Hitchcock not discussed with him what he wanted to get. And you couldn’t have filmed the drawings. Why does there always have to be a controversy? When something turns out as well as this [scene] did and has brought attention to all the people involved, you would think that would be a happy memory.”

  Since the shower murder sequence did not require the services of Anthony Perkins, Hitchcock released him to attend rehearsals in New York for Greenwillow, a Frank Loesser-written Broadway musical for which the actor was preparing for a March 8, 1960 opening night.. Screenwriter Joseph Stefano roared with laughter as he recalled Hitchcock’s discreetly confiding to him that Perkins, whom he thought ‘excessively shy around women,’ should be spared any unnecessary embarrassment or discomfort. “It just wouldn’t be very nice,” the director told his screenwriter. Thirty years later, Perkins, on learning of the qualms of his director, observed: “That was sweet of him. Typical of his generosity. Whether imaginary or based on fantasy, still it was awful nice of him to have the idea. I said, ‘Look, I’ve got to take some of these rehearsals,’ and, through special graciousness on Hitchcock’s part, he said, ‘Go ahead, we don’t need you for this.’ You have only to see the film to see that the silhouette coming in that door has as little resemblance to me as any silhouette could.”

  Perkins has heard and read the claim of Saul Bass. “To set up shot by shot and to shoot it are two different worlds apart. He [Bass] may have drawn it shot by shot, but he wasn’t on the set. Now, I wasn’t either, but that’s what Hilton [Green] tells me. Now, the [rumors about it having been shot by a] foreign crew? That’s crazy. There were no foreign crews in those days coming into Hollywood. Put that one in the circular file. It’s a really a good line—shred it.”

  Assistant director Hilton Green characterizes any question of authorship of the scene “ridiculous.” “I read [the Bass claim] somewhere,” asserted Green. “That really upsets me. That’s absolutely ridiculous. Mr. Hitchcock was there every second of the time, I won’t even say ‘minute.’ I will face Saul Bass in person and say I don’t know where he came up with that notion that he was there and directed it. Saul Bass might have visited the set once or twice. He did the titles. I share billing with Saul Bass in the credits. But Mr. Hitchcock directed the picture—and that’s including the shower scene.”

  “I know he shot it,” screenwriter Stefano recalled. “Because one of my favorite memories of the whole experience was of Alfred Hitchcock standing there talking seriously about camera angles with a naked model.” On-set wardrobe supervisor Rita Riggs elaborated about standin Marli Renfro and her director: “Because of makeup, of course, the model could not wear even a robe. But she became so comfortable, I recall her sitting quite nude except for this crazy little patch we always put over the pubic hair, talking with Mr. Hitchcock. I watched Mr. Hitchcock, the model, and the crew one morning standing around having coffee and doughnuts and thought: ‘This is surreal.’” When the director placed Renfro in position for her setups, he coolly toted the tape measure from camera to the double’s shoulder, while John Russell noted the distance. “I found it no different,” quipped Hitchcock, “than if she had been wearing a floor-length Hawaiian muumuu.”

  For novelist Robert Bloch, the Hitchcock-Bass controversy smacks of the question as to whether it was his original novel or the screenplay by Joseph Stefano that “made” the movie. Bloch, now a veteran of thirty years of dealing with the collaborative art of moviemaking, observed: “Out here, everybody is willing to take bows for success and run like hell from failure. I’ve heard all the stories about people other than Hitchcock being involved, but there’s no corroboration that would lead me to accept it.”

  Hitchcock rarely described to his interviewers the shooting of the scene except in the glossiest of terms. “It took us seven days to shoot that scene, and there were seventy camera setups for forty-five sec
onds of footage,” the director told Francois Truffaut. “I used a … a naked model who stood in for Janet Leigh. We only showed Miss Leigh’s hands, shoulders, and head. All the rest was the standin. Naturally, the knife never touched the body; it was all done in the montage. I shot some of it in slow motion so as to cover the breasts. The slow shots were not accelerated later on because they were inserted in the montage so as to give an impression of normal speed.”

  To writers Ian Cameron and V. F. Perkins, Hitchcock said, “I did photograph a nude girl all the way through. In other words I covered in the shooting every aspect of the killing. Actually some of it was shot in slow motion. I had the camera slow and the girl moving slowly so that I could measure out the movements and the covering of the awkward parts of the body, the arm movement, gesture and so forth.”

  Makeup man Jack Barron shrugs off any question as to the authority or ownership of a Hitchcock set piece: “Hitchcock had such a casual way with directing, it was like he wasn’t doing anything. Maybe he’d sit there slumped over, but those eyes never missed anything. To me, he wasn’t a director’s director. I’m not an actor and I don’t know how much he’d impart to them, but they’d shoot, he’d say, ‘Fine,’ and that was that.”

  As to the controversy about who directed the shower scene, Saul Bass observed: “The interesting question is, So why did I get the credit ‘Special Visual Consultant’? Not for the titles. It has to be something more. A great artist makes a film and has a young man come in and do a few things [on it]. And wouldn’t you know it, when the film gets reviewed, it’s those damn sequences that this kid worked on. It’s a little upsetting. But the truth of the matter is, it was and is Hitch’s film. It’s all his, no matter what I did.”

  To simulate the blood Hitchcock required for the shower scene, Jack Barron and Robert Dawn brought their exacting nothing-less-than-state-of-the-art materials. Barron chuckled as he recollected: “Shasta had just come out with chocolate syrup in a plastic squeeze bottle. This was before the days of the ‘plastic explosion,’ so it was pretty revolutionary. Up to that time in films, we were using Hershey’s, but you could do a lot more with a squeeze bottle.”

  Hitchcock also told several interviewers that he had his makeup and special effects men devise a blood-spurting rubber torso prop that went unused. It makes a good anecdote, but—since Hitchcock preferred understatement and often boasted about never intending to show the blade of the knife puncturing flesh—only an anecdote. Certainly no surviving member of the crew recalled such a prop. “It wasn’t his way of doing things,” asserts Jack Barron. “He tended to show things after the fact, blood going down the drain and such, not the precise spot where the blood spurted from the body.” But when the film was released, sharp-eyed audience-members swore that they saw the knife blade pierce a naked midsection just south of the navel. The frame-by-frame blowup book on Psycho by Richard Anobile published in 1974 validated their claim.

  Advocates of the contention that someone other than Hitchcock actually directed the shower scene point to this alleged discrepancy as one of several that point the finger toward Bass or, at least, away from Hitchcock. Janet Leigh, who admitted that hers is definitely the midsection in question, revealed: “No one but Hitchcock directed me in the shower scene. Hitch used a retractable knife. In fact, he held the knife himself because he knew exactly where he wanted that to be for his camera. But his editing brilliance made you sure you saw something else, right?”

  Stuntwoman Margo Epper portrayed Mother in the sequence. An amused Anthony Perkins recalled: “The crew always referred to Mother and Norman as totally separate people. Mother always has her own ‘backstage’ persona, as it were. It’s not just [acknowledged] that Norman is Mother. It’s just not how people want to see it—neither audiences, nor the people who work on the crew.” Margo Epper, a veteran at “doubling” stars in dozens of films such as Camelot and Paint Your Wagon, comes from a three-generation family dynasty of movie stuntpersons. Yet to this day, she displays a certain reluctance and uneasiness in discussing her “strange” experience with Hitchcock. “Hitchcock was an odd person to work for,” observed Epper, who was twenty-four when she shot her scenes for Psycho in a single day. “We were working on a kind of raised platform. I can remember him standing just below us looking up and saying exactly what to do and how to do it. I was just shown walking with the knife like I was going to stab her. There wasn’t really anybody in the shower at the time but he wanted it to be really real, so he’d have you doing the smallest things over and over.”

  Although Hitchcock would use other doubles to represent Mother in the film, Epper claimed, “When you see her with the knife, that’s me.” Commented Rita Riggs, who “dressed” Epper for the role, “Margo, because of her horsemanship, is long and lean and had almost a male set of hips. Of all the people possible, she came closest to having Tony’s square shoulders and thin hips.”

  Despite Hitchcock’s extensive shooting of Marli Renfro for certain insert shots, Janet Leigh pointed to the irony that Hitchcock only used shots of the actress herself in the final cut. “That was all me except for when Norman wraps the body in the shower curtain,” said Leigh. “Even though you didn’t see a close-up of nudity [in that scene], you knew whoever did that had to be nude. I said, ‘I’d rather not be nude’ and Hitch said, ‘There’s no reason because you can’t tell who it is anyway.’” Makeup man Barron recalled his own and Robert Dawn’s disappointment at being replaced by “body makeup women” for the body double scenes Hitchcock shot on December 23.

  It is not surprising that Hitchcock would have specific notions as to how the Psycho bathroom set should be dressed and photographed. Having once boasted to a baffled interviewer “Visit a bathroom after I have been there, you would never know I had been there,” Hitchcock insisted upon dazzling white porcelain tiles, gleaming fixtures, and an opaque shower curtain. In Spellbound (1945), Hitchcock and cinematographer George Barnes had conjured up an eerily disorienting brightness for the bathroom scene in which Gregory Peck hoists a straight razor and heads toward the sleeping Ingrid Bergman. Obtaining a similar effect in Psycho created additional headaches for the director and his crew. The high-key lighting created by cinematographer John Russell and the lighting men generated so much reflection that the face of stuntwoman Epper, having been painstakingly backlit to mask her identity, was clearly visible. The problem forced Hitchcock to reshoot Mother’s “entry” and stabbing motions. The second time around, makeup man Jack Barron blackened Epper’s face. Similarly, another trick of lighting was required to film the compulsive cleaning-up of the bathroom by Norman Bates following the stabbing. “Hitchcock wanted a strong backlight behind Tony to emphasize the strangeness of the scene,” explained set designer Clatworthy. “He had the crew cut a hole in the set wall and shone a strong lamp right through it. It made everything look sharper.”

  Hitchcock challenged cameraman Russell and his production team by devising a point-of-view shot to heighten audience identification with Janet Leigh. He wanted to show water pulsing out the shower head straight toward the camera. “It was an old-fashioned shower head,” noted script supervisor Schlom. “You couldn’t control the spray every way you wanted it. Everyone’s first and obvious question was, ‘If we shoot right at it, how are we going to keep the lens dry?’ Mr. Hitchcock said, ‘Put the camera there with a long lens and block off the inner holes on the shower head so they won’t spout water.’ By using the longer lens, we could get back a little farther, shoot a little tighter and the water appeared to hit the lens but actually sprayed past it. The guys on the sides got a little soaked but, meanwhile, we got the shot.”

  Hitchcock became equally excited about working out the complicated mechanics of a camera dolly designed so as to enable him to film the scene as one continuous shot. Just after the stabbing of Marion Crane, the dolly move would open on a screen-filling close-up of the lifeless eye of Janet Leigh, then glide low along the bathroom floor past the toilet, then into the motel r
oom to end on the nightstand and, atop it, the newspaper in which the stolen money is hidden. As the camera held the shot, the open window would disclose Norman running down the stairs from the house toward the motel. Marshall Schlom said, “[Hitchcock] was not like some directors who think, ‘Okay, I’ve dreamed up the most difficult shot. Let’s see if the crew can do it.’ He simply wanted this particular idea to work and explained to us how it would. It was not trial-and-error. But because it had so many mechanical and technical aspects, making it look like one continuous shot was tough.”

  In preparation for the shot, Hitchcock had taken Janet Leigh for a fitting for contact lenses. When the ophthalmologist told the director that Leigh might suffer eye damage without at least six weeks to accustom her eyes to the lenses, Hitchcock said, “You’ll just have to go it alone, old girl.” When cinematographer Russell moved in for the first close-up of Leigh’s eye as tightly as safety allowed, Hitchcock was unsatisfied. In postproduction, by use of an optical printer, Hitchcock had the shot of the eye enlarged so that orb appeared to be a perfect “fit” in the bathtub drain as his camera spiraled from the drain. The potent image echoes the credit sequence that Saul Bass designed for Vertigo, with its emphasis on a women’s eye and hallucinatory, gyrating spirals.

  The traveling dolly shot required such split-second cueing of various human, mechanical, and technical elements that Hitchcock needed dozens of retakes. During each attempt, the camera meandered past Janet Leigh—nearly nude—who had to lie slumped on the bathroom floor while holding her breath and a death-stare. As Hitchcock eyed each take, he snapped his fingers to his star to indicate that the camera had moved past her face. Shooting dragged on and on for hours. During an apparently successful take, the shower steam detached the moleskin covering Leigh’s breasts. Trying to shake away the memory, Leigh said, “At that point, with that shot, I didn’t give a damn.”