[Editor's
note. This interview with the late Joeph Stefano was conducted by
Richard Allen, Chair of Cinema Studies at New York University. It
took place in front of a small audience at NYU after a screening of Psycho on
25 April, 2003.
Joe Stefano began his career as a performer and songwriter before going to film and television. He wrote screenplays for The Black Orchid, The Naked Edge, Eye of the Cat, and Psycho IV, as well as Hitchcock's Psycho and Van Sant's Psycho. Joe was the original producer for the sci-fi television series The Outer Limits
and he wrote many of the episodes in the first year of that series. He
also did a lot of other work for television, including an episode for Star Trek: The Next Generation.]
RA: Can you tell us how you moved from being a songwriter in New York to a screenwriter in Hollywood?
JS:
I really felt I was doing very well as a songwriter. I had a lot of
records, and it felt as if I'd already climbed that mountain, and it got
me thinking about other things. About that time my wife and I got a TV
set, and I was watching one-hour dramas on television, especially one
called Robert Montgomery Presents. It was very interesting,
stopping every 15 minutes for commercials, and very nicely done. I felt I
could do that. I thought of something that happened in my own extended
family that always kind of haunted me, about the mother of someone who
never left the room upstairs. I thought: how could I work that so my
cousin would not realize that I've done it? I didn't want any of my
family going over the top about it, so I finally wrote a story about a
widow and a widower who fall in love and everything is fine except that
his daughter doesn't want him to get married, so she locks herself in
the room upstairs and won't come out. That became a TV script. I showed
it to an agent, and within two weeks we'd sold it to Carlo Ponti for
Anna Magnani. When Carlo saw my script he liked it so much that he
thought maybe his wife, Sophia Loren (she had just signed a four-year
contract with Paramount), should get the part because it was too good
for Magnani. It was filmed here as The Black Orchid.
As
a result of that screenplay my Hollywood representatives found out that
20th Century Fox would like to put me on a contract, for seven years,
two pictures a year. I cannot quite remember what the price was, but it
seemed wonderful, and since my wife was pregnant at that time, we would
have to move to LA. So everything looked wonderful. And out we went. I
continued to write songs, but more as something I must do than for a
career. Some people have done my songs in cabaret, and I've always loved
that, but I became mainly a film writer, and just never stopped.
Television entered into it. I had done a screen treatment for a drama,
and it was sold to CBS for Playhouse 90. That was just about the
best show you could get on. It was an hour and a half drama, all shot
live. It was quite a wonderful experience for me. I won a very important
award for that play and I began to feel that I was more successful than
I was ready to be.
I
decided to go with MCA, the biggest agency in town. They had been kind
of romancing me, which they were not allowed to do, because I was under
contract, but they did it anyway. So I went with them and gave them a
list of about ten directors I was willing to work with. My first picture
was successful and everyone thought I was ready to do another one, so I
took a chance. My wife and I felt, "Let's tighten our belt.'' I could
always go back to New York and write songs. Anyway, I got out of the
previous contract, went with MCA, and gave them a list of ten directors
who I thought could teach me how to write movies.
RA: And Hitchcock was on that list probably?
JS:
Yes, Hitchcock and quite a few others that I met with. Quite a few of
them had projects I didn't like, so I passed on them. But the only one
that really upset me was William Wyler, who told me he was going to do a
new movie version of the Lillian Hellman play The Children's Hour, which was done in the thirties as These Three.
He said, "We're going to do it as it was written,'' and I said, "It
sounds very interesting. It would be nice to do a classic play which won
a lot of awards.'' I asked him why Lillian Hellman herself was not
going to write the screenplay, now that it was going to be her play as
it was written. He said that she was busy or just
didn't feel like doing it, but "she would be sitting on your shoulder.''
I had this image of wonderful Lillian Hellman, one of the most
troublesome women in the world, sitting on my shoulder as I wrote a
movie version of her play, and it was ridiculous. I called my agent and
told him that I turned one more movie down.
It was
after this that Hitch called, and I was told, "Hitchcock's office is
sending you a book. Read it and you'll meet with him on Tuesday
morning.'' So I read the book and I thought it was kind of fascinating,
about this boy and his ball-breaking mother. They seemed very
interesting characters to me, especially as I was in analysis at that
time. And then when I got to the end of the book, I found out that the
mother is dead, and had been dead all through the book, and I had a
terrible sense of this book being unfilmable. How do you film a scene
between a man and his mother when she is dead - unless you want to tell
the audience that, unless that becomes the premise of the movie. But
then there would be no shock at the end! So I came up with the idea that
the movie would be about a girl who is really in only two chapters of
the book, but she comes to the motel and gets killed in the shower. In
the book it says, ". . . and then someone came in, and she screamed. And
the person with the knife cut off the scream and her head.'' I knew
that I would not like to write that in the script, that somebody's head
would be cut off. I mean, this was 1959, remember?
So I met
with Mr. Hitchcock, and he seemed very nice. I didn't want to sit and
do any small talk, so I said to him, "Mr. Hitchcock, may I tell you how I
would do this movie?'' and he said, "Of course,'' and sat back. I
proceeded to pitch the whole opening sequence that you see in the movie.
I said, "It starts up with a girl who's spending her lunch hour
shacking up with her boyfriend who comes from another state, and they're
in this kind of shabby hotel.'' I didn't know that I was pushing one of
the best buttons in that man: the phrase "shacking up'' just kind of
delighted him. I am not sure he had ever heard it. But you didn't have
to tell him what it meant: he knew what "shacking up'' meant. So I told
him the whole story, all about her and her trip to her boyfriend with
her money that she had stolen, and how she's going a little mad, because
there was no way that stealing 40,000 dollars is going to help any of
her problems or any of her boyfriend's problems. I really had the sense
that this character doesn't know what is going to happen as a result of
doing this, so I based the character on a momentary act of madness,
which I used later on when I wrote, "We all go a little mad sometimes.''
So it created a kind of tension from the very beginning, especially for
Janet, who was so wonderful. I said to Janet, ''After the camera goes
under the shade and into the room, you’re onscreen until you get killed
in the shower,'' and she liked it. I thought that she grabbed that
opportunity in such a great way and showed that tension. I thought it was a breathtaking performance.
Hitchcock
for some reason really wanted me to work on the movie with him. He
wanted me in all meetings with costumers, set-designers, the cameraman,
the man who did the titles. I didn't know whether this was how all
directors acted or not, but it certainly seemed wonderful for me and I
learned everything then that I know now, really. Not many people taught
me much more through these years.
RA:
Were you aware that there was a prior treatment of this script by James
Cavanagh that Hitchcock had worked on before he hired you?
JS:
No. The Writers Guild rules are that you must tell a writer if someone
has written a previous script. But he never mentioned it, and my agents
never mentioned it. Then somebody during the shooting said, "Did you see
the other script on this?'' and I said, "No.'' His face said, "I'm
sorry I mentioned it.'' But it didn't bother me.
I didn't know he had another script. I thought maybe Robert Bloch had written one, but I didn't know about Cavanagh.
RA: One of the strokes of genius in your script is
to reverse the chapters in the novel. Initially, in the novel, we are
introduced to Norman and his mother, and it's only in Chapter 2 that the
story of Marion is picked up, and then quickly she gets to the motel
and gets her head cut off. You reverse it, placing the narrative of
Marion center-stage.
JS:
I needed a way to hold you before we got to Norman at all. And then you
cared about Marion, which everybody seemed to. I mean, the audience got
very nervous when the policeman stopped her car, you know. It's like
she stole the money but we wanted her to get away with it. And I thought
that if I could get you to like her it would, for one thing, fix a lot
of the anger I felt about victims never really being the central figures
in murder cases. The focus is always on "Who did it?" And the pictures
in the paper are of the suspect, or the witness, or somebody who we
already know committed the crime, and the victims kind of get pushed
aside, as if to say we don't want to look at them. And I said, this time
I want you to look at them. It is all going to be about her. And I
think it worked really well.
RA:
One of the things that interests me, and I think also a lot of people
who study Hitchcock, is the relative contributions made by you, the
writer, other writers, and Hitchcock himself. In this case, for example,
in the sequence in which she goes to the house, there are a number of
aspects that aren't in the book. One especially stands out, and I think
it's a feature of the sequence that a lot of people associate with the
film: the figure of the cop who first appears when she's stopped by
the road side.
JS: That's not in the book.
RA: Did you bring it to the film? Was it Hitchcock, or was it a conversation between the two of you?
JS:
I laid out the whole beginning and he liked it. When I had the job and
we started meeting and talking about it, I think he liked to see the
movie, almost scene by scene, in his head. That's how he directed. When
we first talked, I had thought about this highway patrolman as a kind of
handsome young guy who sees a cute girl driving alone (in those days
you did say "girl,'' you didn't say "woman''), and decides to come on to
her. So it was a very flirty kind of scene, as I saw it in my head, and
Hitchcock said, "I don't know if we ought to stop for that.'' He felt
that after we had established her relationship with her boyfriend, and
then that she had stolen the money, and then that she was making a
getaway and just missed getting caught by the boss, all these things
that he loved, that, "Now we stop for somebody being attracted to her.
It doesn't hold me.'' And I said, "What if he were more threatening?''
The thing that I liked about that scene and the way it was shot, is that
I think the audience wanted her to get away with this. There wasn't
anybody in that audience saying "Oh good, now she's going to go to
jail.'' It was more like "Wait a minute, wait a minute. Don't do this to
her, don't put her away.''
RA: In Gus Van Sant's version, the cop says, "Have a nice day.'' Did you add that or was it Van Sant?
JS: It wasn't in the script, because basically Gus didn't want to alter anything.
RA: There is another scene in that opening sequence which is very important to the overall film, and that's where we see
Marion in the car and she hears what her boss is saying, having
discovered the fact that the money is stolen. Again I think critics have
been very interested in this and feel it's a wonderful part of the
film, because it links to a later scene in the film, where you hear
Norman's mother's voice, also echoing. It provides a kind of connection
between Marion and Norman. Was that again your idea? Did you ever think
it through? Was it more like an intuitive thing?
JS:
No, I thought it was a way that we could know what she is thinking
about, and I felt that it was important all along on this trip for you
to know what was going on in her mind. Hitch's first words were, "Well,
we don't want to flash back to that. We don't want to cut back.'' And I
said that I don't think we should see it, I think she should think about
it. So I did it as a voice-over. It's in her imagination. She's the one
telling you this. What was everybody doing when she didn't come in to
work on Monday? What was her sister saying? Instead of going back to
that, and then picking her up as she arrives at the motel, which would
have been on the cutting-room floor before they even finished shooting
it, I said, "Let her hear what they're saying.'' So we used the voices
of the people playing these parts. Hitch had a wonderful attitude. If he
didn't quite agree with what I was saying, he had the comfort and the
confidence to think, well, go ahead and do it. Show it to me. And there
was never any sense of "I dare you'' in that. He simply said, "Well,
let's see that.'' So I wrote the scene with those other voices, and he
liked it and he kept it. But if he hadn't liked it, I knew that it would
be out. I don't mean this in a bragging way, but a lot of my thoughts
about this picture had to do with the making of it. It wasn't just
writing dialogue. There was a certain sense of my sharing control with
Hitch, instead of him being the boss.
RA:
I suppose what I liked about it is the idea that she's hearing things,
she's imagining what is going on, and it's something in her head. Yet
also what we're seeing had probably taken place. When later in the film
we hear Norman's mother, because we've heard voices like that earlier,
from somebody's head that is actually real, it encourages us to think of
Norman's mother as being a real person. It sort of blurs that boundary
between what is subjective and what is objective. It makes that strange
voice of Norman's mother, when we hear it echoing later in the film,
more credible.
JS: I never thought about it that way.
RA: There
is a consistency in the ambiguity between what we are imagining and what
is real, the inner and the outer, the character and the world.
JS: But I don't think the audience ever thought that Marion was imagining the mother's voice when she got to the motel.
RA: Of course, she heard a voice, the voice is Norman's,
but the film wants us to believe that it's really Mother speaking.
But it is not a normal voice. It is an echoing sound, like the sound of
the voices that Marion heard earlier as she drove the car.
JS: Hmm, yes. I never made a connection between those.
RA:
Another scene that I liked - and although you get the elements of the
scene in the novel, it's obviously not filled out with dialogue - is the
parlor scene, where Norman takes Marion into the inner section of the
motel, and they sit down and have a meal together. I want to show the
sequence. But one of the questions I have about this scene as well as
the film as a whole, is the whole motif of the birds, which of course
Hitchcock picks up again in his next film, The Birds. In the novel there are, at least in the light of the film, what appear to be bird-related names, you have Norman Bates (cf. baits) and you have Marion Crane, and you have Sam Loomis
('is a loom/loon'), but otherwise birds are not mentioned. Norman
stuffs things, but what he stuffs are squirrels; he doesn't stuff birds.
Birds become a big deal in the film, and it's not just a feature of the
mise-en-scène, it's also in the script. There is that wonderful
dialogue you have which opens that sequence where Norman
says, "You eat like a bird.''. How did that whole dimension of the film
come about? Can you remember in your discussions with Hitch how it
developed?
JS:
I never discussed what would be said in the scene with Hitch. He only
needed to know what the scene was going to give us and whether the
audience would react the way he wanted it to react. When I wrote the
scene, I used birds because Norman doesn't like creatures stuffed. And
this was just in my head, because I love animals but I am not crazy
about birds. So I thought, if you're going to stuff anything, make it
birds, because they're very pretty, but I don't want them flying in my
face. Maybe the reason I didn't write The Birds was that it was about birds. They are very scary to me. When I told Hitch that I didn't want to do The Birds,
he asked, "What's wrong?'' and I said, "Well, I have a thing about
birds.'' I love them outside. But once we came home from a vacation and
it was pouring rain and the house was so stuffy, I opened the bedroom
door, and didn't realize that the screen wasn't closed, and I opened the
door and in flew a bird, and I nearly went crazy. "Get it out! Get it
out!'' I later discovered that a lot of this had to do with
superstitions. There is a funny superstition that if a bird flies inside
your house somebody is going to die, or something like that.
RA: Did you know that Hitchcock shared your obsessions with birds, or your fears about birds?
JS: No, he never told me that and I never thought about it, because I didn't know why he would be doing The Birds if he didn't like them. [laughter]
RA:
One question I had while looking at your scripts for the film: there
are a number of places in the film, as you know, where there isn't any
dialogue, especially after the murder. There's nobody to talk to. And in
the film we see Norman cleaning up the mess in the bathroom. In
the script you describe this sequence in some detail. Are the
descriptions in the script the result of conversations with Hitchcock
about how he planned to film this? How did they arise? Some things are
in there and some things aren't. For example, the fantastic camera
movement which ends the shower sequence, when we see the water going
down the plug hole and then Hitchcock moves away from Marion's eyes, is
not written down, but there are a lot of other things which are written
down, including camera movement. I just wondered how it all came about.
JS:
What I did discuss with Hitch was that we needed time. The audience had
just been cut off from a person they've been following for the whole
first part of the movie, and suddenly she's dead. Now what do you do? I
felt that we needed the audience to shift their allegiance to Norman,
and one of the ways I felt we could accomplish that was by making Norman
extremely sympathetic. First of all, the Norman Bates in the book was
not at all like Tony Perkins.
RA: He was a fat alcoholic.
JS:
Yeah. So making him a sympathetic and likable young man who then has to
clean up after his mother, after his mother's homicidal rage of killing
this girl in the shower, makes sense. The main thing it did was keep
you from suspecting that Norman had done the murder, or anyway from
thinking it wasn't Mother who did it. Secondly, it was to give you time
to really digest the thought: this could be any of us. We could all
have a mad mother who kills somebody and leaves us to clean up the mess,
because we don't want her arrested, we don't want her to be put in a
madhouse. And it seems that one of the most sympathetic things would be
that he has to clean up all that blood, all that mess, and get rid of
the clothes, get rid of every sign that Mother had been there. I felt
that if it's too long in the script, you could just shorten it. I don't
mean that I would have shortened it, but I felt that if Hitch thought it
was too long, he could just cut it shorter. But he didn't. He went
along with the whole thing. You know, it was a wonderful sequence. To
me, what the audience was going through was getting over Marion and
jumping on to Norman, to the extent, which surprised even me, that when
the car kind of stops when it's going down in the swamp, the audience is
relieved when it does continue to go down. I thought: you know, a reel
ago, you were upset because you were afraid she might get arrested. But
now we're saying, good, good, get that car under there. We like this
guy. That made me feel very good.
RA: Black humor?
JS:
Well, it was very manipulative; I think it's one of the most
manipulative movies I've ever seen. And I think most of his movies are
manipulative, because he thinks primarily in terms of the audience. What
do you want the audience to think? I wrote the dialogue always by being
the guy who's typing it up and making it up, but also as the audience.
I've done that ever since. The key to all my writing is the audience.
It's the best lesson I've ever learned.
RA:
What about the Sam and Lila characters? They are very interesting.
She's kind of a double of Marion. I read somewhere that there was some
discussion as to what degree she and Sam were going to have a romantic
relationship. I think Stephen Rebello talks about it.
JS: I thought it was insane, when I first heard about this. There was never a discussion about it.
RA: Why insane? Because it seems incongruent with Hitchcock?
JS:
I would never have thought about it. I didn't feel that in a movie
where you've just lost somebody you like, you then fall in love with her
boyfriend.
[Editor's note. But Stephen Rebello in his book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of
Psycho, 1990, Chapter 5, quotes lines in Stefano's original script that
do at least intimate such a possibility. At one point, Lila says
to Sam: "Whenever I start contemplating the panic button, your back
straightens up and your eyes get that God-looks-out-for-everybody look
and … I feel better." Sam then replies: "I feel better when you
feel better."]
RA: Before leaving behind Psycho:
I am interested in the time when you first became involved in the
project, read the Bloch book, and realized that this was the film that
Hitchcock wanted to make. At that stage of his career, he had just done North by Northwest,
and although he always had an ironic side, in the fifties he was still a
director of romances. What did you think when you realized that
Hitchcock was interested in making this novel which even Peggy Robertson
felt was a bit much?
JS: Everybody told him not to do it. Paramount didn't even want to own it. I thought it was interesting because
it was kind of crappy but maybe there was some way that Hitchcock would
make it differently. So I was kind of disappointed. In the first
conference, he said, "Have you ever heard of American International, the
film company? They are making very inexpensive movies and making a lot
of money. I was wondering how it would be if we made one of those.'' I
think he was using the royal "We'' at that point. He meant: let
Hitchcock make a movie under a million dollars to see what happens. My
agent, his face went grey. I don't know why I thought this could be a
typical Hitchcock film. Because actually when you look over his work
that I had seen, Psycho isn't typical at all.
RA: What had you seen of Hitchcock?
JS:
I had seen almost everything. This was why he was on my list. But he
said he was going to make this one for under a million! I was totally
prepared to accept a low salary, but didn't know we were talking about a
low budget. And as it turned out, he made it for about 800 thousand,
and his company spent a million telling you how to go and see Psycho. It was one of the greatest promo campaigns I have ever seen. But I was disappointed because I felt it was kind of lacking. Even if you go back to Shadow of a Doubt, which is his dark movie, it was nothing like Psycho.
He told me, "Someone whose advice I had always taken told me not to do
this picture.'' Yet he went ahead and did it, and he seemed to have his
finger on the pulse. I think I was part of the world that he saw
happening, and maybe that helped him decide to give me the assignment. I
don't think he felt that a lot of the people he had been working with
were down and dirty enough, you know.
RA: He also had an obsession from his youth with Jack the Ripper. The story of Psycho is something you find in his earliest films, before he became rich and famous, Mr. Hitchcock, maker of Hollywood romances.
JS:
He just kept making bigger, more Technicolor, and more expensive
movies, because he was able to cast Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, the top
box office crème in those days. It was around that time that it became
legendary that no actor would ever turn him down, and certainly I never
met any actor who turned him down, and no one ever told me about anyone.
RA:
Although Cary Grant started asking for so much money to work in a
Hitchcock film, that Hitchcock said he wouldn't use him anymore.
JS: Oh really? That was after North by Northwest. I began working on Marnie with Hitch, and when I finished the treatment he said he was not going to make the movie, because Grace Kelly changed her mind.
RA: Did he send your treatment to Grace Kelly?
JS:
No, I don't think he did. She just called and said that she and her
husband, Prince Rainier of Monaco, had already gotten the money they
needed somewhere else. But then after Psycho I had the feeling that he didn't really feel he needed to work with stars - although later he worked with Paul Newman.
RA:
This was at the time when configurations within the industry were
beginning to change, with the breakdown of the old power of the studio
and the increased power of stars. But I guess Hitchcock felt that he,
not the star, was the most important person in the film.
JS: And he was, in a way. I think that Psycho established that fact in a way that his previous films had not done, because it was not a star vehicle.
RA: I want to talk a little about Van Sant's Psycho,
since such a lot has been said about it. How did the film come about?
What kind of conversation did you have with him? What do you think he
was trying to do?
JS: Kill himself. [laughter] He called me on the phone and said that he was going to do Psycho,
and that he was going to make it word for word, scene for scene. I
didn't know he meant movement for movement, but he did. All the
choreography is the same, the clothes are the same. It was weird because
I sat there, looking at him, thinking: I admire this man's work. Why is
he going to do Hitchcock's film? Much later I said to him, "I wish Gus
Van Sant had directed this,'' and he said, "I've been wanting to do this
ever since I was a kid. When I got nominated for Good Will Hunting that gave me the power."
I
thought that he wanted more rewrites in it. It wasn't until we were in
production, really, that I realized he didn't want to use any of the
ideas I had for changes in the script. The only thing he went along
with, just because it would have been insane otherwise, was the amount
of money that is stolen. I didn't think that a woman in our present time
would risk her career and relationship for 40,000 dollars. 40 million
maybe! Plus the fact that I didn't know where this guy was going to buy
his daughter a house for 40,000 dollars. Gus said: yes, I guess we
should change that. He wouldn't let the detective have a cell phone. I
mean, it was like working with a control freak who just had this vision:
I am going to duplicate it in color. And then as I saw some of the
dailies, I began to see that he was sometimes being a little more
lenient or was forced to be, because maybe what I was seeing was the
thirtieth take and the actors were still stepping in the wrong place. It
was strange. I liked him, I liked his producer, and it was a wonderful
relationship, except I just didn't know what the hell he was doing.
RA:
One of the things that does change is the characterization. Although
the lines are the same, there are differences in characterizations that I
wonder if he discussed with you, as your script is also about giving
directions or suggestions about what sort of feelings are being conveyed
here.
JS: I felt that Anne Heche was the worst thing I've ever seen, really. I liked her in Wag the Dog.
But her characterization of Marion was that Marion didn't have to worry
about money, she could just walk down the street and make it, you know.
And she definitely played it like a street walker. When Janet Leigh
says, "I'll lick the stamps,'' it's heartbreaking. When Anne Heche says
it, stamps are not what she's talking about. [laughter]
RA: Let's watch the parlor scene in Van Sant's Psycho.
In Hitchcock's film, Marion is maternal and sympathetic. Anne Heche, as
we'll see, has a completely different response to Norman Bates. [screen
clip]
RA:
The striking difference to me in that sequence, first of all, is that
Van Sant makes strange changes in style. The background is diminished in
its importance compared with the Hitchcock sequence. But, too, in the
characterization of Anne Heche, she is unresponsive. She's very hard and
detached and treats Norman as a freak. There is weirdness about him. She's
kind of cold. Although she's speaking the same lines, the effect of the
characterization is dramatically different from Janet Leigh's
characterization. The whole idea of the maternal that exists in your
script is lost.
JS:
I don't think that with this characterization you would even know that
talking to him had made her see her own folly, when she says thank you.
Because she's so detached from the scene. Nothing affected her. In
Hitchcock's film, Janet Leigh was sitting in an awful position, thinking
that you may not want to hear this about a person, what he's telling
you. So you're offering these little bits of notions and thoughts,
knowing that sometimes this just makes it worse.
RA: Was Van Sant trying to turn Marion Crane into a stronger woman, a more modern version of the character?
JS:
He didn't want anything that would change any character, so when I
watched dailies I wondered who the hell was directing out there and what
was he seeing. In the scene where she buys the used car, she walks
around with a parasol. I saw it and thought, what does this mean? You
know she has very light skin, Anne Heche, and it was very sunny there,
and she didn't want to burn her skin, so somebody gave her a parasol,
and I guess somebody else came up with the idea of matching it to her
dress. And so, you know, it was like seeing a musical version of Psycho.
It was awful, I very soon realized that I wasn't going to have any
input into this. He only wanted me there because I was associated with
the original movie.
RA: Were you on the set much of the time?
JS: No, there was no point, it was kind of embarrassing.
RA: Some questions about The Outer Limits.
Can you tell us something about the reception of that series? How did
you get involved in it? Was it your idea? Did you pitch the project? Did
somebody else bring you in? What were you trying to do in it?
JS:
I got a call one night from my friend Lesley Stevens, who I had known
in New York. We were friends for a long time. He said he was there with
his production executive, and they would like to come over to the house.
They came in ten minutes later. Lesley started telling me that he was
doing a series on ABC and was also going to do a pilot for ABC, and ABC
would not allow him to produce two shows. In those days it was unheard
of. So he recommended me. Quite aside from that I had been meeting with
ABC about doing a series for them. I told Lesley that I had to read the
script. He said we're shooting next week. He told me it was science
fiction. I didn't like science fiction, so I read the script and gave
him a lot of changes, and then suddenly I was on the set and I was a
producer, and we went into production. There was one young man who
seemed to know more than anybody else. He didn't have any particular
title. I went over to him and put my hand on his shoulder, and said,
"You're going to see a lot of me, because you seem like the only one who
knows what's going on here, and I need your help.'' But honestly I had
the feeling by the third day that this was going to be fun.
There is
no star on the show, we made the pilot, and suddenly I saw that in the
cutting room you can work on your script more. I cut out a whole page of
dialogue. What excited me was that there wasn't anything scary on
television, and I was a Val Lewton fan who had this sense of scary
movies that just chill you and sometimes you don't know why. I also felt
that if I went for CBS, and said I'd like to do a drama about the
bullshit going on in the CIA, they would say thank you, we'll call you.
But if I made a science fiction film, nobody would notice. I got to do
great stories about the evil in the world. In the fifties, a lot of this
was sucked in just by breathing the air. I was able to do these movies
that audience picked up on, and I began to get letters from young people
who seemed to know what I was talking about. But the censors never said
a word.
RA:
It’s like your episode "Nightmare,'' for example, where a group of
soldiers are subject to an experiment to see how they behave in a
situation of confinement and enforced isolation. The science
fiction part of it seemed just a pretext, an excuse for you to explore
the implications of being subject to institutional coercion.
JS:
I thought it was quite possible that our government would take a group
of young soldiers, put them on another planet, and torment them to see
how they would react - like mice. These shows, and especially the
ones I wrote, were science fiction that could be filmed, as opposed
to science fiction that you have to read. There was a lot of written
science fiction at that time, which we were not able to use. It was not
filmable.
Audience questions:
Q: Did you have much contact with Bernard Herrmann apropos the music in Psycho?
A: He came
to the office once in a while. The most memorable thing he told me
about the score was that he was going to use only strings. I thought
that was a strange and brilliant idea, and when I saw the movie for the
first time with this score I almost fell out of my chair. Certain movies
went up in value about 30 percent when his scores were added.
Q: Do you recall things that didn't make it into Psycho?
A: I never
really felt that there was something to fight about. I knew how to
dance with Hitchcock. If the movie got too long, it wouldn't have been
very effective to argue about it. As a matter of fact, when I gave him
the initial script that I wrote in three weeks, he went home with it,
and then the next day he came and said, "Alma loved it,'' which was
about as much as you were ever going to get from him about how he felt
about things.
I
outlined in pencil areas of dialogue which I suggested he might cut if
he needed to, but the funny thing was that he shot every one of those
outlined areas. I don't remember feeling like anything was gone. I was
very pleased that he stayed with Norman and all that cleaning up. I
don't remember cutting anything.
Q: One of the strokes of genius in Van Sant's film is the final shot
where you see the crane rising above the swamp, and taking in the whole
environment, and suddenly you see that the house and the motel are
actually part of this primeval landscape, the swamp, where everything
comes from and goes back to. Was that in your script, or was it
something that Van Sant added?
A: [surprised] Well, that's Gus … who didn't want to have any changes.
Q: I am interested in the fact that you revisited a text 40 years
later. Did you at some point think that you could improve upon it, and
in case you did think so, how?
A: All these years the one worthy criticism I've heard about Psycho was
about the psychiatrist scene, which upset a lot of viewers. I told Gus,
instead of having a psychiatrist, let's do a scene where we go in and
the psychiatrist is talking to Norman Bates, so we won't need the
original scene. I thought it was a fantastic idea, to replace a scene
that now we only refer to as having a courtroom kind of monologue by an
actor that I recommended for the part, and was sorry for doing it! Gus,
too, originally thought it was a great idea. But the next day he said to
me we're not going to make that change, and that it wouldn't be
right. The people at Universal are worried about a long scene with Vince
talking like the mother. I thought, well, why the hell are you making
this picture? What is this all about? Are you afraid that people will
think that Vince is gay or what? We'll use the voice, only now it's
the other personality talking. Gus, typically, didn't want to make
a change.