The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock

cameraman told him, was that to do this at the top of the staircase would be enormously expensive, around fifty thousand dollars. As Hitchcock told Truffaut, he came up with a neat solution: he laid a miniature model of the staircase on its side, performing a tracking shot and a zoom flat on the ground. The pride and satisfaction at having thought his way through the problem was palpable: “So that’s the way we did it, and it only cost us nineteen thousand dollars.” He tried for something similarly inventive in the beautiful sequence in Shadow of a Doubt in which young Charlie, on her own in the library, reads about her uncle’s horrific crimes. The camerawork and lighting help make this a dramatic high point of the film, but Hitchcock had originally planned an extra element: at the precise moment of revelation, the camera would jolt upward, as though experiencing a sharp intake of breath along with Charlie. Try as they might, Hitchcock and his director of photography, Joseph Valentine, could not find an adequate method. A sanguine Hitchcock apparently brushed it off, telling colleagues that “if I get fifty percent of what I want to get I feel lucky.”

Trial and error, and the toleration of failure, were built into the Hitchcock operation. Considering his reputation for preproduction planning and his stated dislike of on-set experimentation, it might sound surprising that Hitchcock welcomed compromise and disappointment as part of the filmmaking process. Rather than an artist’s studio in which he strove for visionary perfection, his workspaces were more like a technician’s laboratory, where hypotheses were formulated and tested, and valuable lessons were learned. Just as he aimed at playing his audience like an organ, pressing the keys and the pedals at the right times to induce particular emotions, so he used his films as a way of exploring the potentialities and limitations of the technology at his disposal, making it more expressive, closing the gap between our willingness to be moved and the camera’s ability to emote.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in The Birds. The film has myriad obvious flaws. Much of the intended humor falls flat; certain characters appear to have wandered in from some other corner of the Hitchcock universe. What nobody can criticize is the scale of the film’s ambition. In attempting to realize that ambition, Hitchcock assembled a remarkable team of artists and technicians, many of whom were Hitchcock veterans, including Bernard Herrmann, George Tomasini, production designer Robert Boyle, and director of photography Robert Burks. Hitchcock never spoke dismissively of technicians in the way he could do of actors and writers. Partly, this must be because camera operators and set designers represented less threat to his public profile as a sun king in charge of his court. But it’s also because he had such esteem for their skill sets. Gregory Peck felt that Hitchcock regarded actors as animate props, or bits of equipment, in the manner of a camera or a lighting rig. He didn’t so much give “notes” to his cast as command words in order to switch them from one acting mode to another. On one occasion, he is reported to have prepared Norman Lloyd for a dramatic close-up with the instruction, “Please start sweating now.” James Stewart never heard him call actors cattle, but he agreed that Hitchcock had an essentially technocratic approach to filmmaking in which actors were a cog in a machine. “Hitch believed you were hired to do your job . . . know your lines and carry your part.”

When Hitchcock encountered a director of photography, set designer, illustrator, or any other member of production staff he liked and trusted, he kept hold of them. He was “extremely possessive of people who worked for him,” remembered his secretary Carol Shourds, “especially the crew.” Not that it was always obvious whether one was in favor or not. Hilton Green, an assistant director on Hitchcock’s television shows who filled the same position on Psycho, recalls that Hitchcock didn’t speak a word to him when they worked together the first time. Assuming he had fallen short of the director’s high standards, Green was stunned when he got a call asking if he’d like to work on future projects, so pleased had Hitchcock been with his work.

Green was of a mind with other of Hitchcock’s off-camera collaborators who found the experience of working with him stimulating but infuriating. Robert Burks, one of the great Hollywood cinematographers of his era, was frequently exasperated with the late nights spent working through some convoluted technical challenge set by Hitchcock’s desire for a particular effect. “This is the last one I’m going to do for Hitch,” his colleague Robert Boyle recalls him saying on several occasions, “it’s just too much.” Boyle shared the frustration, remembering that seemingly every day on a Hitchcock film “you had to solve a problem, and if you were on location, Hitch would come out in a big black limousine, drive up, lower the window about an eighth of an inch, look out the window and ask you a couple of questions, and then leave!” However, Burks, Boyle, and others stuck with Hitchcock because of the creative latitude he gave them and the respect he paid to their expert opinions. It was “the most collaborative of all the working relationships I had,” was Boyle’s ultimate assessment.

The Birds demonstrates Hitchcock’s understanding of suspense as well as any film he made. The famous scene outside the school in which the birds are seen to gradually amass on the jungle gym was filmed precisely as storyboarded by the illustrator Harold Michelson, but Michelson had taken his cue from Hitchcock’s own vision for the scene: each time the gaze of the camera cuts to the playground, more birds have amassed, the tension rising inexorably. From the beginning, however, Hitchcock knew that the finely wrought suspense would be ruined if the special effects were not adequately convincing. To assuage this, Hitchcock—on the advice of Robert Boyle—pulled in