Introduction

Alfred Hitchcock was the creator of the classic horror movie Psycho and he is the
undisputed master of the thriller. In 1979, Hitchcook received the Life Achievement
Award of the American Film Institute. This Interview was taken in 1964, Hitchcock,
along with Bernard Herrmann, is being interviewed by Fletcher Markle.

Transcript
Markle: Quite so. Well, let us go on to further pictorial aspects of film making, you
first used color in rope, I believe, and ten of the fifteen films you’ve made since then
have been in color, though many producers seem to believe a thriller should always
be filmed in black and white, which do you prefer?

Hitchcock: I prefer color because there is plenty to dramatize in color by NOT using
color until you need it dramatically.

Markle: In the same way that music is often valuable?

Hitchcock: Sure. I think music is very good, especially when it is needed for silence.
(Smiles impishly)

Markle: The absence of it?

Hitchcock: Of course.

Markle: Obviously you think very highly of the work of Bernard Herrmann

Hitchcock: I certainly do.

Markle: He's been involved as the composer and conductor of the music in so many
of your recent films. How do you and Mr. Herrmann go about examining the
contribution of music in a film?

Hitchcock: I don't know. As far as I'm concerned he does as he likes.

Herrmann: I'm brought it at the very beginning of the idea of a film. And by the time it
has gone through all its stages of being written and rewritten and the final process of
photographing it, I am so much a part of the whole thing that we have all begun to
think one way.

Hitchcock: But, I've always found with musicians you're in their hands anyway. What
can you do? So very often I've been asked - not necessarily by Mr. Herrmann, but by
other musicians - they say, "Come down, I want to know what you think of this." You
go down and you say, "I don't care for it." [And they say,] "Well you can't change it;
it's all scored." So the next time you take care and you say, "Can you play me some
and let me hear some before you go to the expense of an orchestra?" [And they say,]
"Oh no, no. You can't play it on a piano. It's not possible." So there is no way to find
out. So you are in the hands of a musician.

Herrmann: (Amused and a little taken aback) Well, ah, Psycho is a very good
example of the - if I might put it - of the freedom with which Hitch thinks about music.
Originally the plan was in our discussions not to have any music over any of the
murder scenes. However I differed with Hitch about this and I felt that music was
needed.

[Start of clip from Psycho: Arbogast's murder. Herrmann's voice over continues.]

And, ah, when the music was recorded and we were dubbing the film and we got to
the murder scene and we ran the scenes without the music and then I suggested to
Hitch that I would like to show him the same scenes with music. And he said, "I
thought we agreed not to have any." And I said, "We can have it that way, but at least
listen to it the way I feel about it, that way I have written it." And he said immediately
[after seeing the scored version], "We must have the music, of course!" And I said,
"But you were against it." And he said, "Oh, no. All I made was an poor suggestion."

[Clip continues to the end of the scene with a fade out of the stabbing knife and
Arbogast's groans.]

Hitch has his own world of film. He's created characters and places and stories for it
very much the way Dickens did. It's not a question of whether it's a real world, or an
actual world, but it's a world that has been imagined and realized. Dickens was able
to do it through the page and Hitch does it through film. And although many of the
stories he has told are stories of our time, I believe the presentation and the
motivating psychology is essentially of the period of Dickens and the great Victorian
writers.

[Clip from Psycho. Herrmann's voice continues in voice over.]

Psycho is very much, for example like a Wilkie Collins story. I think this is part of
Hitch's great heritage as an Englishman and one he has been able to transmute and
carry forth in the world of the cinema.