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think there’s always room for company or some kind of amusement at all times. If I made a musical the audience would wonder which of the chorus girls I was going to shoot.
I think the English have a macabre sense of humor more than most people. They seem to have made crime a national spectator sport. I always put in lines like, ““The leaking trunk or the Blood Necklace.” To give an example, a most famous true story dealt with the death of a very famous comedian. Around the graveside were all his fellow comedians. As the coffin was being lowered into the grave, a rather young comedian turned to a very old one and said, “‘How old are you, Chappie?” He: answered,» “Fm eighty-nine, hardly seems worthwhile going home, does it?” You mustn’t confuse it with sick humor. It is not. It is genuine humor. _
Take the word Macguffin that comes from two men in an English train. One says to the other, “‘What’s that package in the baggage rack over your head?” He answers, “‘Oh, that’s a Macguffin.” He’s asked, “What a Macguffin?” To which he replys, “Well, it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.” “‘But there are no lions there,” is remarked. Then, “that’s no Macguffin!” is the response. The Macguffin is really sort of a nickname for what happens in spy stories. That’s something the characters in the film care a lot about, but it doesn’t worry the audience too much. When Cary Grant speaks of the heavy or the spy, he says, ‘Well, what’s he after?” The CIA head answers, ‘““Oh, government secrets.”’ It can be a lot of gibberish, it doesn’t matter you see. I once designed a picture called Notorious that dealt with sending Ingrid Bergman, as an agent in company with an FBI man,
down to Rio to see what some Nazis were up <to.. They. were. up: to something you see. I thought I’d have them search for samples of Uranium 235. My producer asked ‘“‘What’s that?” I said, this is in 1944, “That’s the stuff they’re going to make the atom bomb from.” He said, “I’ve never heard of it.” And, I said, ‘‘No, it isn’t out yet.” Although it was a full year before Hiroshima, I had a hunch.
nature for granted. It’s like man digging for uranium. He plays around with nature and, look, it ends up in an atom bomb. There have been so many case histories of birds attacking people. Crows are extremely intelligent. I’ve even read books about crows holding their own court with a judge and so forth. But we just take them for granted, which is wrong. There’s too much complacency in the world. We're unaware of the catastrophe that surrounds us all.
My hero is always the average man to whom bizarre things happen, rather than vice versa. By the same token, I always make my villians charming and polite. Don’t forget, most crimes are committed by very ordinary people. If you make a murderer too sinister, he’d never get near a girl. In Frenzy the murderer’s a very cheerful fellow. The really frightening thing about villians is their surface likableness.
I believe in giving the audience all the facts as early asI can. It is possible to build up almost unbearable tension when the audience knows who the murderer is all the time and from the very start they want to scream out,
I went to see Doctor Millikan of Cal Tech to ask him a natural and not startling question, “How big is an atom bomb?” He almost dropped his teeth. ““‘Do you want to be arrested and have me arrested too?’’, he blurted out. Then he spent an hour telling us how impossible it was to make an atom bomb. We didn’t know it, but the Manhattan Project had already been launched and he was one of the big wheels in it. He did his best to keep his knowledge top secret by telling us how ridiculous our notion was.
“The Birds” shows how we take
‘Watch out for so and so! He’s a killer!”
The point is to let the audience know but not let the characters in my story know. It’s like a bomb planted under my desk, set to go off. The suspense will be harrowing to them. You’ve driven them to a point of anxiety, breath holding waiting. They’ll react with a gratifying crawling of the flesh, but only if you ultimately come through with a real marrow chiller.”
That’s why the master of suspense always tops his openers with a grizzlier finale *?*
HOLLYWOOD STUDIO 11