Leonard Leff

Interviewer: When Hitchcock talks an awful lot about how important the experience the experience was. What do you think Hitchcock was seeing? What was going on? That was so different. What what do we take away from that, the young man away from home the first time?

Leonard Leff: I think in certain periods of filmmaking, no matter where America, Germany, England. There are periods of excitement, something in the air. And I think that was the case in Germany. There was a great interest in things visual. And not only that, but translating these things visual to moving visuals. Calegari was an interesting way to kick things off, since there were so many elements of Calegari that were static. Those sets, for example, what the later Germans did and what I think Hitchcock was taken with was the ability to translate that sense of inherent motion, which you saw in the sets of Calegari into real motion. Hitchcock had to have been impressed by a more nowas opening shot or near opening shot in the last laugh of that elevator swooping down the hotel and then going out. Is that supposed to happen? OK. Oh, you got good years.

Interviewer: OK. Let me start by talking about how important, especially this time in Berlin was. What would Hitchcock be seeing on the sets as he’s this kid sort of wandering around? What’s he doing there? What do you think he’s soaking up?

Leonard Leff: He’s an assistant. When he goes there and he’s a he’s a mole. He’s from the British film industry and he’s learning things that he can’t learn over there, things about the moving camera. But I think equally important things about cutting, one of the things we don’t think about with a moving camera is that eventually the camera must stop moving. And the longer the camera moves, the more the anticipation sets in for the cut that will follow that long in duration shot. So I think in some ways he’s preparing for Rebecca and for spelled down a notorious and all of those films in which he uses long sequence shots, building expectation and excitement and tension into the cut that will follow.

Interviewer: What’s what’s what’s the wise move now? What’s he trying to do with movies? That’s different. It’s unique. That makes it special.

Leonard Leff: The rap on The Last Laugh and it’s not altogether true, is that it was a story told without title cards. It might as well be true, though, because Murnau was telling stories in pictures. And for Hitchcock, who’s characteristic gesture was that was all the pictures. That’s all that motion pictures were telling stories in pictures. And he was absorbing that. He was absorbing the pictures that Murnau was taking.

Interviewer: And when you get into something like the laundry, which is the first film that anybody really talks about, what do you do? You see that experience when you see the sort of culmination of the life lived up to that point?

Leonard Leff: Well, I think you do. You see Hitchcock working already in his MTA, which is the thriller, but putting his own brand on the film.

Interviewer: In what way? When you see the. I think I mean, you talked to me a bit about the larger of.

Leonard Leff: Well, I think, for example, of the introduction of the larger into the house and the way that Jonathan Drew approaches the house and the way that Hitchcock sculpts that shot in very German like chiaroscuro. And the lodger is introduced as a kind of phantom before he’s introduced as a character. And that’s something that Hitchcock picked up from the Germans.

Interviewer: Do you think he carries that with him to America? Does he carry any of that knowledge or certainly he carries it all the way through his career. And you see examples of it in Rebecca? I think there are still instances of a certain crudeness, actually, as late as Rebecca. When we see the second Mrs. de Winter, after she has explored her predecessors bedroom and she steps into a zone of the bedroom, and there’s this shadow that falls across her face that’s almost directly out of the lodger, Hitchcock is repeating a device that he used in the lodger and then later in blackmail and in Rebecca. It seems a little surprising because it’s a little late for doing something that he almost graduated from in the 1930s. But it works.

Interviewer: It’s a lovely moment. Do you think that the string of thrillers in the 30s makes Hitchcock a great master in your mind? I mean. Did you have to come to America to be remembered or for as the 39 steps the lady vanishes enough?

Leonard Leff: For some, it is enough for me. It’s not enough. The critics tab these the little British thrillers, and I think they meant that in two senses of the word. They’re little in terms of their budgets. And one of the commentaries that runs through these cells, Nick Correspondance, has to do with the meanness of the films, the smallness of the films, and in some cases, the unfinished quality of the films, the way the miniatures look, for example, which for Hollywood in the 1930s has a crudeness about it. They were necessary films for Hitchcock. They were not nearly as rich in characterisation and character psychology as the American films would come to be.

Interviewer: Great. Great. So how is Hitchcock seen that by the late 30s? What is David Selznick buying? And does everybody think, how do you get another great if you look at the great picture? Is that how he’s perceived?

Leonard Leff: Well, he’s perceived as probably the greatest single director in Great Britain, but that’s rather like the greatest Mexican restaurant restaurant in Brooklyn. What what is the status of that? And I think that Hitchcock is not content with being a little fish. He wants to try his hand in the major international film market, which means coming to America.

Interviewer: Before we get to that point, I want to just pull you back one last layer to Selznick. And, you know, David’s growing up in the studio system. I mean, for black. Word for it. What do you think he’s learning as he’s working his way through through that as he gets this ourselves?

Leonard Leff: Well, he has not learned an important lesson, which is how cruel the studio system can be and the lack of patients that it sometimes has when after greatness, you don’t achieve greatness again. But he is in films almost from his boyhood. My guess that my guess is that he was not only reading the classics, but as he was reading them, adapting them into film. He was seeing the motion picture possibilities. But always and this is important for the relationship with Hitchcock, seeing the potential and narrative as opposed to visual narrative.

Interviewer: Question is who we’re talking about. Why do you say that he sees it as an area, not visual?

Leonard Leff: I think to Selznick, what was most important was telling a story, maybe telling the story period to Hitchcock. What was most important was telling the story on film. Selznick was not a writer, although he fancied himself one and took screenwriting credit on the parody in case. And at one time, he was trying to get a relationship going with a publisher in New York, because I think he thought of himself as perhaps having a career as a writer. And of course, he was a great prudishness writer of memoranda. But for him, literature was rather sacred, and that was one of the causes of conflict between Hitchcock and Selznick when they got together for Hitchcock. Literature was something that you transformed into film for Selznick. Literature, literature was something that you protected.

Interviewer: So 39 vaccine like 37, 38. Why? Why would Alfred Hitchcock want to leaving here as a man?

Leonard Leff: Why so very small heep and very difficult to see from outside Great Britain, its films. And we see Hitchcock today from the perspective of today. But if we go back to the 1930s, ask the person on the street in Chicago, Seattle, outside New York, outside Los Angeles who is offered Hitchcock. Likely they would not know. Hitchcock’s films belong to the arthouse ghetto of the 1930s when they came to America. I would ask the gentleman in Chicago, David felt like they would probably know David Selznick rather like Hitchcock himself. And again, this was one of the causes of conflict between them was a great self promoter. He promoted his films, but he also promoted David O. Selznick.

Interviewer: So what is what’s Hitchcock looking for and what’s the allure? What’s the whole range? Why we just vainglory is just one being well known by guns?

Leonard Leff: No, I don’t think so. It’s the difference between the little soapbox car that you built and the one that’s motorized. What kid would want to stick with the balsa wood when he could actually have a motor and putter around that 10 or 15 miles per hour? It’s bigger toys and the ability to work with these bigger toys. But more important, the product is going to get much wider and visible placement. Hitchcock knows that he’s a great film maker. He’s been telling the British press that since the mid 1920s. But the rest of the world doesn’t know it. And the way to make the world know that is to make pictures in Hollywood.

Interviewer: Beautiful. She learned a lot before, Carol. OK, let’s roll. OK. Shooting land line. Why? He’s going to do it ourselves. Whatever. When I go to MGM, when I go to Paramount, if you want to play with the big boys, when I go to the big studio.

Leonard Leff: Well, the fact of the matter is, I think what do they say? You always have a better time if you have an invitation. And Hitchcock did not really have invitations from MGM, from the other big studios. He had interest from David O. Selznick. And so Selznick was the direction he went. But if I asked, I think Hitchcock would have wanted to go with Selznick because Selznick had a boutique operation. And Hitchcock felt that his pictures, he would be allowed to make pictures his way and his pictures would be regarded as special in the Hollywood marketing marketplace.

Interviewer: Any speculation on why MGM doesn’t? How is Hitchcock perceived that?

Leonard Leff: Well, this goes back to what we were talking about. Hitchcock in the 1930s was not really a known commodity in the United States. And in fact, several studios, MGM, for one, wanted to put Hitchcock under contract, but use him to make pictures in England. They did not want him to come to America. So I think it’s perfectly understandable for Hollywood, reticent about a director who was to some extent pigeonholed as a maker of thrillers. Hollywood was much more comfortable with the director who can make a comedy one month turnaround and make a drama a couple of months later. Hitchcock, they weren’t sure of great.

Interviewer: So sort of almost perfect taking a flyer.

Leonard Leff: Selznick definitely took a flyer, I think, on Hitchcock. Selznick was reticent to to put Hitchcock under a multi picture contract. He was not sure how Hitchcock would fare with his first picture. Hitchcock, for his part, was reticent to come to America with only a one picture contract. He hesitated to move his family over here and then find after the picture was over that he was without work. So there was uncertainty on both sides.

Interviewer: Right now, I want to talk about Selznick as a filmmaker and only a couple of George Coker is fired after the first couple of weeks. And I’m curious what that tells you about David’s relationship with directors and sort of what Chuck may or may not get what you think.

Leonard Leff: It’s difficult to know. The memoranda of Selznick International does not suggest that Hitchcock that Selznick was ever close to taking Hitchcock off Rebecca. And there were times when Cels, when Selznick was not sure that he was getting the footage that he should he relied on his wife to tell him it’s good. David, let it go. The man is doing his job. But Hitchcock must have been somewhat apprehensive working for Selznick because it was not uncommon to replace directors at other studios. But Selznick was brutal. In the case of Gone with the Wind and Hitchcock arrived in Hollywood at the time when Gone With the Wind was in full production. And David most anxious about it.

Interviewer: So he must have had that memory then, Rebecca?

Leonard Leff: Oh, yes. I’m sure that he did. He did what? I’m sure that Hitchcock was apprehensive about being taken off the film. And for this reason, perhaps Hitchcock was more receptive to Selznick’s ideas on Rebecca than he was on subsequent pictures that they made together.

Interviewer: Maybe you’re a little nervous. Everything. I want to get into Rebecca. You know, when Hitchcock starts working on the script, how does he approach the book? Does he try to take that book and turn it into.

Leonard Leff: Well, Hitchcock tells a story of two goats in a junkyard chewing on canisters. And the films that are contained within them and halfway through their meal, one goat turns to the other and says the book was better than the picture, you know. And Hitchcock hated those comparisons. He didn’t want anybody to think about the book when they saw his film based upon whatever it was. He was one who advocated ruthless adaptation, believing that someone who was writing a book was not writing the film. It was his job to bring that to the screen, to realize that as a film, Selznick’s ideas were quite different.

Interviewer: So what is what is his right hand to sell and what’s there?

Leonard Leff: Well, Hitchcock is taking liberties right and left with this. He found Rebecca not to be material. This is rather odd because Hitchcock’s retrospective take on Rebecca was, I think, rather different from his take at the time. Retrospectively, he tells us it was not really a Hitchcock picture. He was not terribly interested in making it, in point of fact, on his own. He was trying to get the rights to Rebecca before he left England. And this is before the deal with Selznick was consummated. So he may not. He may not have intended to make the Rebecca that Selznick intended, but he was interested in it as a prop.. Neither here nor there. Once he had the property in hand, he was going to take liberties with it. For example, he’s got a scene at the beginning of the treatment, his first treatment of Rebecca, where the future Mrs. de Winter meets Maxim on board a ship and there is a scene of seasickness. Selznick takes a look at this and says, What is this? Not only is it not in the book, but it has no place in our movie.

Interviewer: There’s a crazy woman in the belfry, right?

Leonard Leff: Crazy woman in the belfry. And that’s one of the things that David Selznick is very good about. He’s bringing back Hitchcock to the novel again and again and again. And what was great about the novel.

Interviewer: So says Hitchcock, hands in the treatment, I think fully expecting to start production, to start shooting a couple of weeks later with later. And what tell me the story of.

Leonard Leff: Well, what happens is that Hitchcock receives one of Selznick’s memoranda and there are many jokes around Hollywood about Selznick’s memoranda and how some of them were longer than the scripts that they commented on. What Selznick did was to tell Hitchcock chapter and verse. This is the book we bought. This is the picture we are making and this is the way we are making it. Hitchcock Selznick was later to warn Hitchcock screenwriting collaborators Hitch will go off on his bits of business, his gags in bits. And your job is to bring him back. And I think that’s what we see Selznick doing on Rebecca. Bringing Hitchcock back to what was the very reason for buying Rebecca in the first place. Selznick felt that he could see into the mind of his young female audience. They had identified very strongly with the second Mrs de Winter and Hitchcock. Selznick was afraid that Hitchcock was going to lose the charm, the vulnerability of this character.

Interviewer: And he was probably right.

Leonard Leff: And he may have been right. Yeah. Yeah.

Interviewer: Method of their working day. Do they mesh well? Are they two guys that sort of paint the picture of a day of David Selznick and Alfred Hitchcock Monaco?

Leonard Leff: They mesh well as long as they are separated during the day. As long as Selznick is getting into the office at noon and not really coming fully awake until three o’clock when he begins to look at the rushes from the previous day. Hitchcock has already started his day on the set very promptly at nine o’clock, and apparently Selznick would visit the set from time to time in the story that various actors and veterans of the co-production tell is that the set would become a little cold, a little chilly until David left. Obviously, Hitchcock was not comfortable having someone watch him. The watchers, the producers that he had in England were fairly decent, distant. Selznick was hands on.

Interviewer: Do you think that was unexpected for Hitchcock? Do you think Orson. Oh, my God, what have I signed on for?

Leonard Leff: He must have been somewhat apprehensive about that. Yes. Yes. What about. He must have been apprehensive about the close super. Vision and the fact that his work was going to be monitored day by day by day and not only monitored but shaped in certain ways. There’s a wonderful scene in Rebecca. It’s essentially a silent scene. And so you might think it was the epitome of a Hitchcock scene where we see Maxim and his future wife in Montecarlo dancing together. It’s a very simple shot where the camera tilts up until we see them dancing together. That’s the future of Mrs. de Winter, has a dreamy look on her face and she awakens, sees that it’s really maxim, that is who is holding her in his arms and then they continue dancing. That’s the sort of thing that Hitchcock resisted. But that’s just the sort of thing that Selznick wanted into the picture. And that, I think helped to make the picture the popular success that it was. Hitchcock was not accustomed to someone writing and directing a scene for him.

Interviewer: And most certainly struggled very, very much. You know, I want to take you back before we get to the fact that there’s all these tests and I still can look at them. And I’m curious, do you think that the screen tests are really a reflection of indecision or are they more a function of publicity or are they more a reflection of their producer’s growing Pygmalion complex?

Leonard Leff: Well, perhaps all of them, but certainly in decision, Hitchcock did not indecision over.

Interviewer: When you look at the home with the screen test, what you.

Leonard Leff: Well, you see a variety of actors, and I think you also see the difficulty that a producer and a director have when going with an unknown, which is what they really did with Joan Fontaine. She had been in a number of pictures before, Rebecca, but was largely unknown. I think in the case of.

Interviewer: There’s great conflict over Hitchcocks cutting in the call. Nobody even wants pre-cut. If you’re David, what’s the story? Also, David gets what David wants and Dave is not so happy. Why?

Leonard Leff: David Selznick was never happy. Someone said unless he had miles and miles of film running through his fingers in the editing room. It’s interesting that the initial contract between Hitchcock and Selznick did not include Hitchcock services as editor. Now, Hitchcock might have been seen to have the advantage because he cut in the camera as much as possible. He shot what he needed. He had a preconception of what the film was going to look like. And so he gave the editor whether it was Selznick or Hal Kern or whomever, the footage that could be shaped into the film, pretty much the way Hitchcock saw it.

Interviewer: And what is Selznick’s response when David gets what he wants, he gets his pre-cut picture.

Leonard Leff: But he’s not certain that he likes Hitchcock’s so-called jigsaw cutting. He can’t make head or tail out of some of the shots fit together. And part of that, I think, is the magic of Hitchcock, which we see as early as the 1930s and as late as the 1970s, where there is a certain kind of concatenation between one shot and another. It can’t be explained. It’s not logical. It doesn’t follow a Hollywood protocol. Long shot, medium shot, close up. It follows this kind of psychological protocol that Hitchcock has figured out for himself. And that is a code. And it cannot break Selznick’s Selznick’s. He tries to. He tries to. That’s right. He tries to smooth out the film so that it looks more like an American film than a hybrid.

Interviewer: Who is Selznick’s sort of one of the other ways he’s try to control it? Spies on the set? Is this what’s going on, on the set? What’s David really trying to do? He’s got spies everywhere.

Leonard Leff: Or what David Selznick is trying to do is make every picture David Selznick produces. He’s optioning the script. He’s tinkering with the script. He’s intimately involved in the casting. He’s supervising as much as he can, recognizing that his presence on the floor of the soundstage is inhibiting. But he still doesn’t trust things to go off without eyes and ears there. And so Hitchcock’s script supervisor, Lydia Schiller, is supposed to be Selznick’s eyes and ears. And when it gets back to Hitchcock that Lydia Schiller is servant of two masters. He’s furious. You were supposed to be my ally. You were supposed to be helping me with continuity. And now I find out you’re David’s minion, reducing her to tears and putting her. Although Selznick had already put her there, a very difficult position.

Interviewer: He’s voted with her. Yes, he is. He’s vulgar with her. Yeah. What is his cottler as a filmmaker from the experience of Rebecca? In your mind, does he learn anything from David.

Leonard Leff: He learns that a producer can have a tremendous impact on the artistry of a motion picture. Now, Hitchcock is not so naive to come to America that he doesn’t understand the role of the producer, but he’s never seen someone in England quite like Selznick who wants to produce every aspect of the film as an artist.

Interviewer: Does he learn as you grow from the experience?

Leonard Leff: Oh, he absolutely learns from Selznick. Other things that are very useful for for him as an American filmmaker. The take, I think, is that he has learned gloss from Selznick. He’s learned not only how to make a big picture in America in an American studio, but to make a big picture about characters. This will deepen the longer Hitchcock stays in America. What Selznick has done again and again is bring Hitchcock back to the roots of the character. What is the second Mrs. de Winter feeling now? Don’t show us seasickness off overboard a ship. Show us. Show us the small gesture, the telling gesture that will get us inside this character.

Interviewer: You see him a window into a woman’s world. Not to be too reductive, but.

Leonard Leff: Well, Hitchcock has has had some of that in his and his female characters in the British picture. Pictures are wonderfully drawn, but there’s a richness and a deepness in the second. This is the winter that I don’t think was there in England in the 1930s. And that’s the result of Selznick.

Interviewer: And it starts to package his properties in the 40s. And Hitchcock’s one of those sort of more prized as Hitchcock in anything in your mind from being sort of sold like that?

Leonard Leff: Well, he gains a certain amount of freedom they make. I think Hitchcock makes six pictures before he returns to Selznick again. All of them loan out, all of them with rather limited supervision. The only picture where he is supervised is Lifeboat. Whereas Zanuck takes almost as strong an interest in the picture as Selznick took in Rebecca. But even so, Zadik is hands off compared to Selznick. So Hitchcock is allowed to go out into Hollywood and to make his way. He’s not recompensed for it. Selznick is pocketing the profit, but he is allowed to make pictures his way.

Interviewer: Into what methods? Learning Hollywood or is he learning how to make movies? What’s he getting from that?

Leonard Leff: He’s getting a certain amount of freedom and a certain amount of independence at a certain cost. The greatness of Rebecca is in large measure, part Selznick, part Hitchcock. I’m not sure, short of shadow of a doubt that there is any picture which approaches greatness that he makes away from Selznick between Rebecca and Spellbound. So I think that in some way, Hitchcock does find the influence of the close interest of Selznick salutary.

Interviewer: That conflict helps him as a filmmaker.

Leonard Leff: Yes, I think it does. I think it does, because what Hitchcock does is to get at the psychology of the character, but he gets at it through things. David Selznick is not used to thinking about things. He’s not used to thinking of a portrait of Maxim on the dressing table of Rebecca’s bedroom and the way that you might shoot that to make it resonate. But that’s precisely what Hitchcock is thinking about. And so what I think he’s got a good merger between Selznick was very good with characterisation and character psychology and Hitchcock, who is very good with things as they open up a window on character psychology.

Interviewer: But at the end and I’m still now I’m like at Lifeboat. He is using me his right. I mean, you know, David isn’t worried about all of the wind, but shouldn’t Hitchcock be worried about Rebecca? And so talk to me about that. Now, say that again. You know, he doesn’t have any. He’s got this string of low notes. But, you know, isn’t his isn’t Rebecca in danger of becoming. He’s Gone With the Wind. Hitchcock’s. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Talk to me. Yeah. I think people think, well, you know, he’s free from Selznick. Must be wonderful.

Leonard Leff: Mm hmm. I think Selznick is giving Hitchcock something that Hitchcock doesn’t fully realize until he comes back on Spellbound. He’s rebelling against that interference, all the while not realizing that it is that ender. Ference, which is helping to produce something greater than he made before. In part, it’s Hitchcock’s idea to make a picture about cycle analysis, but only in part it’s Selznick. I think who’s somehow tuned into the site guys to the time realizing that a picture about cycle analysis will have a higher profile than anything that Hitchcock had made while on loan out in the early 1940s.

Interviewer: This is one of the things that Hitchcock misses when he’s on loan. So the showmanship shows promote.

Leonard Leff: His ability to promote Hitchcock and his ability to attend to every element of filmmaking from the very optioning of the novel to the way the film is shown in the theater. Selznick takes a very active interest in the physical quality of the film. When Hitchcock goes to RKO on loan out, there is a snafu on suspicion. I think where the film is released on news stock rather than the finer grain associated with feature motion pictures. It’s unimaginable that this would happen at Selznick. Selznick is introducing a beautiful product in almost every sense of the word, and he knows how to promote it.

Interviewer: Good, good showmanship. What what do you think of the teaming up with Spellbound? Is it an important collaboration and why does it give in?

Leonard Leff: It’s an interesting relationship. The Selznick Hecht and the Hitchcock Hecht relationship, because it could have gone in a different direction. Hitchcock found out that Lidia’s Schiller was Selznick’s eyes and ears on the floor of Rebecca. He might just as well have found out that Ben Hecht was Selznick’s eyes and ears because that’s why Selznick wanted Hecht with Hitchcock. Hecht was Selznick’s stand-in. Hecht was the one who was going to keep Hitch on the straight and narrow and not let him veer off into gags and bits and individual scenes that had no coherence. So is a very important relationship. And I think that it’s true generally that Hitchcock’s pictures are often best when he works with good screenwriters.

Interviewer: Right, right. OK. Great. Those. You know, one of the things we’ve been talking about here is that David Hitchcock was his own man. What do you think Hitchcock’s self as a director says of his relationship with self when he goes back? Is he going to be the same as he was?

Leonard Leff: No, absolutely not. First of all, Selznick is perfect. Prof. Selznick is starting over. First of all, Selznick is pocketing the profits that he is making on Hitchcock’s burgeoning salary on these loan outs. Hitchcock is aware of that, is bitter about that. But he also knows that that’s an index of his power in Hollywood and it’s helped to give him some self-assurance. So when he goes back to Selznick, he’s now got seven American films under his belt, a track record with a number of studios. He’s prepared to exert a bit more independence as a filmmaker than he has before.

Interviewer: Right. He not only is Hitchcock, you have been wonderfully talked about, he is in some weird way teamed with Selznick’s analyst. Why is May Ron brought in and then how does. What does Selznick get from me? Before we start talking, what is that? What is Selznick looking for from wrong? Why should there?

Leonard Leff: Well, it’s Hitchcock who likes to put together a bit of a family on the set, and he likes, when he can to work with the same actor as he worked with Joan Fontaine, first on Rebecca and then suspicion and to work with the same cinematographer, an editor as much as possible in his his family is his filmmaking group. David’s family tend to be his his blood family. But May Rahm was almost a part of that blood family. She certainly was privy to many of the family’s secrets. And I think that David prospered to some extent in psychoanalysis and he wanted to bring her in as a technical adviser on Spellbound to ensure that this picture, which was going to has a high profile, would be authentic and it would be taken seriously and that it would be taken seriously. Yes.

Interviewer: So how does Hitchcock respond to having sales analyst?

Leonard Leff: Selznick is not comfortable around psychoanalysis. Stuff like I’m sorry, Hitchcock is not comfortable around psychoanalysis are my guess is psychoanalysis. Is that distinction clear? He’s not comfortable around the discipline. He’s not comfortable around the practitioners. And in one of the early drafts of Spellbound, he was going to take us through an institution and give us a lighthearted look at the people who inhabit the institution. He was going to focus on the inmates, but I suspect that he was going to have a lighthearted look at the doctors as well. Selznick takes this quite seriously. I don’t think that Hitchcock takes it too seriously.

Interviewer: He’s made a measure of having more control, you know, in this personal with me. Does Hitchcock bristle?

Leonard Leff: I think Hitchcock is twice put off by Mayor Wrong. She is Selznick’s analyst. And then she becomes Selznick’s eyes and ears on the set. And Hitchcock is afraid that David through May Rahm is going to exercise control over the final product. Hitchcock is the first to realize that we’re making a movie here. We’re not making a documentary.

Interviewer: That’s right. Shift gears to the actors. You write a lot about the problems that Hitchcock has in the middle of all this with Gregory Peck. What’s the problem with the crux of the problem? And what do you think it tells us about.

Leonard Leff: Gregory Peck to this day does not have fond memories of the paradigm case and to a certain extent spellbound and probably working with Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock was very charming with his actresses. He was often brusque, abrupt and distant with his actors. Gregory Peck was very young, relatively inexperienced at the time of Spellbound. He called out to Hitchcock on a number of occasions for direction for motivation, and Hitchcock put him off, giving him relatively little, lavishing much of his attention on Ingrid Bergman.

Interviewer: But he also is looking for he comes out of the group theater, he comes out of method. He’s looking for those. All things that always talk thing is just drain all expression out of your face. What’s the conflict with the tension between these two men?

Leonard Leff: Well, for Hitchcock, motivation was your salary. Hitchcock believed in working through externals. Hitchcock was a great exponent of negative acting, negative acting. He defined as you have one expression in your face and you let it go to another expression. We see a wonderful example of Hitchcock’s direction. The film becomes transparent in this moment when Maxim de Winter calls Mrs. Van Hopper to his hotel room to tell her that he, Maxim and her former companion are engaged. Hitchcock moves in a bit closer to Mrs. Van Hopper and the smile, the bubbly look that she has had drained from her face. And at that moment, I think I can hear Hitchcock telling Florence Bates, here’s the way we’re going to do it through negative acting. Well, for Gregory Peck in Spellbound, this is not very meaningful. He’s looking for who this character is. And Hitchcock is not giving him very much other than walk here, stand here. Look there, look there.

Interviewer: Birmingham complains about the same things. He says it’s just a fight. How does Bergman deal with Hitchcock? Edith Transgresses. Well, she buys it.

Leonard Leff: She buys it, I think. And there’s something that passes between Hitchcock and many of his very attractive leading women that I think makes them trust him. That doesn’t always happen with his actors. That trust is not transmitted.

Interviewer: What’s the what is the dynamic with Bergman on Spellbound? Because there is a serious affection that starts, right? Yeah.

Leonard Leff: You know, there’s great affection between Hitchcock and Bergman. Bergman liked working with different actors and different directors. And Hitchcock was a great one to tease. Bergman apparently had a good sense of humor. She took teasing. Well, there was just a rapport chemistry between these two.

Interviewer: And it really blossoms in the next production which hold off. What do you think Hitchcock is trying to do with Salvador Dali? Is it like David Selznick? Is it just the filmmakers indulgence or is there something deeper there?

Leonard Leff: Well, I think that Hitchcock and Dali were of similar minds. When you think of Hitchcock, you think of a director of things. He could use things so well in his in his films. Think, for example, of the open razor in Spellbound or the Shaving Cup in Spellbound. Dolly, you think of Dolly’s most famous image, the persistence of memory, and you think of that Binte watch. So here were two visual artists who were very comfortable in extending our understanding of the world through simple objects. So I think that Hitchcock went into the relationship with Dolly wanting something more than the Dolly name attached to his film.

Interviewer: Is it a way of countering the Mitt Romney?

Leonard Leff: Was it maybe a way of countering the May Raam influence? Because Myhren, let’s face it, as a psychoanalyst analyst, is very comfortable with the verbal people who come to her talk and talk and talk. What Hitchcock is trying to do is to convert what is essentially verbal into what is visual. And he knew from the onset in Spellbound that that was going to be the challenge to take a movie about cycle analysis and make it visual.

Interviewer: Does it work that the final product does the attention? I feel the tension between the verbal, between the salesman and the visual. Do you feel that tension and does the film work?

Leonard Leff: It works in unexpected ways. I think the centerpiece of the meaningful psychoanalysis of Gregory Peck in that film is to be the dream sequence. But the dream sequence is a truncated version of what was there originally. We see maybe a third of what was originally shot and assembled. But looking at that dream sequence, it’s difficult to believe that it would have been effective even if it had been as Hitchcock wanted it, as with so many of Hitchcock sequences. It’s the juxtaposition of scenes and shots that matters. And for me, much more meaningful than the recounting of the dream that Dolly visualizes. Is Gregory Peck getting up in the middle of the night and going to that bathroom and those objects, that shaving cup, that sink that basin. And thanks to the sensors, that toilet, which is. We’re offscreen that, I think is very powerful filmmaking, making carrying it all the way through to the drinking of the of a glass of milk and the razor and the razor, of course. And Hitchcock loves that. And that gets back to what we were talking about with Gregory Peck. I think if you recall the scene in Spellbound, Gregory Peck must walk down the stairs and then stop. So that brutal love, Constance’s mentor, is framed by the open razor. A wonderful shot visually alive from the foreground to the background. But what Hitchcock has done in the what Hitchcock has done to achieve that is to turn Gregory Peck into one of his things. Gregory Peck is rather like someone in a television commercial today who’s got to hold the bar of soap or the deodorant in exactly the right place. So Gregory Peck must wonder, is this acting? What is the.

Interviewer: After a series of lukewarm reception in a lot of the loan films, Spellbound does rather well. It’s a big hit. What do you think? Hitchcock gets from Selma?

Leonard Leff: Hitchcock is back in the news again, as he was not with suspicion, as he was not with Lifeboat, with several of the pictures that he made in the 1940s. As it turns out, Spellbound was one of the first of a wave of pictures about psychoanalysis. And although there was a delay in the release of the picture, Selznick was still able to bring it to term before the market was saturated with these pictures. And so the picture was good. Hitchcock was associated with a timely subject. It was very much Hitchcock’s advantage once more to be associated with Selznick.

Interviewer: Getting something he didn’t get when he was unknown.

Leonard Leff: That’s right. That’s right. He gained something that he did not get when he was in lone out. And there is a paradox there, because increasingly throughout the 1940s, the Selznick organization is a bit of a shambles. And you look at the very good sendoff that Spellbound gets and you marvel at the fact that it does as well as it does, given the disorganization.

Interviewer: What is the what is going on with David Selznick at this point? What is the state of mind? What is the state of being of this guy?

Leonard Leff: A lot is riding. Much more is riding for Selznick on Spellbound than it is with Hitchcock. Selznick is still trying to produce another Rebecca. Forget Gone with the Wind. Another Rebecca. And he has been unable to do that. He has become someone who is now dealing in in human traffic, dealing in loan outs of his actors and his directors. So he very desperately needs a picture at this point. And to complicate matters, not only has the original organization that was Selznick International in the 1930s that helped to produce Rebecca. Not only is that beginning to dissolve, but his marriage is also coming apart because because of his interest in Jennifer Jones, which initially is a professional interest, which grows into a personal one.

Interviewer: You know, one of the other things that’s going on is the loss of his brother and the sort of the inner circle of his filmmakers. Is this use as a measure of the megalomania taking over?

Leonard Leff: I think it’s a part of the megalomania. And I think it’s also a part of people being unable to work in the way that Selznick demands that they work. Selznick believed in a seven day week and not all of the people who work for him were as fully committed to that.

Interviewer: How does he keep those? How does sales sort of push himself through?

Leonard Leff: Selznick does it through chemicals better living through Benzedrine, which his doctor prescribes freely for him, which he prescribes freely for many of the people that work for him. And a few, I’m sure, were tempted from time to time to take it as well. Otherwise, you can’t.

Interviewer: You know, one of the things we can talk about is still down with Hecht and Hitchcock is the script meetings with Sylvia. Can you paint that picture? What is those one of those meetings like eight o’clock in the morning? Are they pretty orderly? What is going on? Are they taking place? Paint the scene. Tell me the story.

Leonard Leff: Well, the script meetings of Hecht’s cells. And again, Hitchcock could, first of all, take place at any hour. David didn’t really I don’t know that he had a watch. If he had a watch, he didn’t heat it. Time really didn’t matter to him. He often slept in his clothes. He slept at the studio. And if he was ready to talk about a script at 2:00 in the morning, that was the time the script got talked about. Hitchcock, who had, as you know, an interest in train schedules, must have found this near abusive treatment. Hitchcock had his own modus operandi when he was in conference with a screenwriter, but it was very strict. And on the clock, you convened nine o’clock. You talked about whose party you went to the night before, who was engaged, who was divorcing, so forth at 10 o’clock. You talked about the script for a bit. At 10, 30, the tea trolley came in at eleven thirty. You talked about the script for an hour, the lunch. Trolly came in and then you finished your work early in the afternoon. Selznick was not nearly so orderly as that the script conference could take place in a cabana at his home poolside, and the conversation could range over a host of topics with no apparent organization, no apparent game plan for how you’re going to bring the narrative together.

Interviewer: Hitchcock talks about going to dinner Romanoff’s and then driving to salesman, being up all night and waking up in the morning. A great story.

Leonard Leff: They’re great stories. One hesitates to believe all of them, but certainly the stories about David’s odd hours are substantiated. And Hitchcock was too methodical a person ever to enjoy working like that.

Interviewer: That’s for sure. I want to go into Notorious. No, it starts really with a desire on Hitchcock’s part to use a Bergman again. Do you think Hitchcock is falling in love with Bergman? And some biographers would believe some people would. Really? What’s going on with it?

Leonard Leff: I suspect that if the relationship between a director and an actor is good, that maybe both believe each is falling in love with the other. Maybe that’s necessary. When they talk about making love to the camera, maybe it’s the director that’s responsible for getting that sort of sort of chemistry going. I hesitate to speculate on Hitchcock’s personal life. My guess is that he had one of the richest fantasy lives in Hollywood, but the geometry of that fantasy life. I’ll let me Raam if she could come back and give us some insight on it.

Interviewer: Do it for Christ sake. Love with her. What are the early drafts of notaries? We get into the filming of this script. That’s really what I want to know. How does the early drafts with Hank reflect his role as a filmmaker or not? Is he still just doing the same old stuff?

Leonard Leff: Well, I think that Hitchcock starts off with an idea that he has and I suppose we can speculate on. I suppose one could speculate on Hitchcock’s fantasy life because the idea is of a woman sold into sexual slavery for a political purpose. Now, as someone who wanted to speculate on what kind of person would find it interesting to devote one year of his life to such a subject might come up with an interesting interpretation of the Hitchcock psyche. I’d rather take it in another direction and say that Hitchcock had wonderful ideas, that he could hang on a very narrow narrative line, for example, in the writing of Notorious. He thought it would be wonderful to have a scene where a character fell from a box at the opera. Now, the question that Selznick would have asked and the question that Hecht asked in cells and instead was what opera? Why are characters there? Which character is it that falls? And how does this add to the narrative in Hitchcock’s response was always, that’s your job. I have this wonderful idea for a character who falls from a box at the opera. Now you build me a script that will house it. And I think that was the greatness of David Selznick on Notorious was that he was a wonderful editor of Hecht and Hitchcock’s work.

Interviewer: What did he. What did he add? What was what it was getting from. What was the story that he got from Hitchcock? And what’s he changing? What’s he saying? No, no, no, no, no. Do this instead.