Hitchcock and actors

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I can­not find the exact cita­tion, unfor­tu­nately, but I recall read­ing back in the ’90s a magazine story chron­ic­ling the mak­ing of dir­ect­or Gus Van Sant’s ostens­ibly shot-by-shot recre­ation of Psycho, and said piece con­tain­ing many quotes from the par­ti­cip­at­ing act­ors in which they justified/rationalized their par­ti­cip­a­tion in the pro­ject, which, depend­ing on who you were talk­ing to was either a sense­less kockamam­ie scheme or some kind of con­cep­tu­al coup. And I remem­ber William H. Macy, who was play­ing the part of Arbogast that had been ori­gin­ated by Martin Balsam, opin­ing that one good reas­on, for him, to get on board with what many might con­sider a desec­ra­tion was to get some kind of pay­back with respect to Hitchcock, because Macy did­n’t like that thing Hitchcock said about act­ors, that they were “cattle.” And I read this, and I sighed. Because Macy is a soul­ful and not unin­tel­li­gent man, and his mis­be­got­ten notion that Hitchcock was some­how the enemy of act­ors is unfor­tu­nate. And, I guess, very hard to kill. 

The Hitchcock of 1939, anti­cip­at­ing a trip from Great Britain to Hollywood, in an inter­view in Film Weekly (reprin­ted in the invalu­able Sidney Gottlieb-edited com­pil­a­tion Hitchcock on Hitchcock), revealed not just a great enthu­si­asm for American stars, but (and this should­n’t really come as a sur­prise) an acute sens­it­iv­ity with respect to both par­tic­u­lar abil­it­ies and poten­tial. On Gary Cooper: “[He] has that rare fac­ulty of being able to riv­et the atten­tion of an audi­ence while he does noth­ing.” Andre De Toth saw this in Cooper too, although he did not artic­u­late it in quite the same way. On Carole Lombard: “I should like to cast [her] not in the type of super­fi­cial com­edy which she so often plays but in a much more meaty comedy-drama,giving her plenty of scope for char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion.” Once in Hollywood, Hitchcock and Lombard became friends. And they col­lab­or­ated, on Mr. And Mrs. Smith, a 1941 divorce com­edy that Hitchcock, in one of his legendary inter­views with François Truffaut, kind of pooh-poohed: “That pic­ture was done as a friendly ges­ture to […] Lombard…I did­n’t really under­stand the type of people por­trayed in the film, all I did was pho­to­graph the scenes as writ­ten.” It was on the set of this pic­ture that Lombard played the fam­ous prac­tic­al joke in which she built a mini-corral on the set and stocked it with three pieces of live­stock tagged with the names of the film’s three prin­cip­al players. 

Hitchcock’s ret­ro­spect­ive dis­con­nec­tion from Mr. And Mrs. Smith, jux­ta­posed with his pre­vi­ously stated eager­ness to push Carole Lombard’s per­form­ance envel­ope, sug­gests sev­er­al ques­tions, the most obvi­ous being “What happened?” Well, it’s entirely pos­sible that noth­ing happened. That while Hitchcock’s obser­va­tions con­cern­ing the vari­ous act­ors were sharp and truly meant, his stated desire to remold them in cer­tain ways was little more than public-relations bluster/diplomacy.On the oth­er hand, the fact is that Hitchcock did approach Gary Cooper for the lead in Foreign Correspondent, and Cooper turned it down, which he (Cooper) later regret­ted.  But wheth­er or not Hitchcock’s cre­at­ive struggles with David O. Selznick dur­ing the mak­ing of Rebecca made the dir­ect­or sub­sequently dig in his heels harder with respect to her­met­ic­ally seal­ing his cre­at­ive pro­cess in the future, it’s dif­fi­cult to argue against the notion that the act­or had a very spe­cif­ic and kind of immov­able sec­ond­ary place in Hitchcock’s cre­at­ive pro­cess. But it’s also incor­rect to trans­late this into an atti­tude of actu­al hos­til­ity. In his auto­bi­o­graphy, Elia Kazan goes over the ways that dif­fer­ent dir­ect­ors handle/respond to act­ors. His view: “Hitchcock told his screen stor­ies as much as pos­sible without help from his act­ors’ per­form­ances. When Cary Grant, going into a film, asked him how he should play his part, Hitchcock answered, ‘Just do what you always do.’ Hitchcock relied on his cam­era angles and his mont­age […] to do what on stage we relied on the act­ors for.” Note the neut­ral­ity of Kazan’s descrip­tion; recall also Hitchcock’s obser­va­tion on Gary Cooper’s abil­ity to res­on­ate while doing “noth­ing;” jux­ta­pose with the the­ory behind the Kuleshov effect; and there’s all the more reas­on to regret that Cooper and Hitchcock nev­er got together.

Of course, Hitchcock made no bones or apo­lo­gies for the fact that he con­sidered shoot­ing to be the most bor­ing part of mak­ing a film. His pre-production work was the pro­cess by which he developed the movie in his head and assembled the means by which it could be mater­i­al­ized. So the actu­al shoot­ing became a mech­an­ic­al pro­cess, not unlike stuff­ing saus­age cas­ings. You could under­stand why an act­or who was savvy to this atti­tude might build a resent­ment toward this. You can also under­stand how one act­or might take “Just do what you always do” as a com­pli­ment and sign of respect, or as an insult. Until the peri­od when he was get­ting all weird with his lead­ing ladies, Hitchcock’s expect­a­tion of a per­former was that he or she would bring their best abil­it­ies and have whatever home­work they felt they needed to do, done. Various act­ing meth­ods and the work of dir­ect­ors like, well, Kazan, brought a notion of a more act­ive col­lab­or­a­tion between act­or and dir­ect­or to the fore. The act­or would not be play­ing a role in someone else’s motion pic­ture but cre­at­ing a character/characterization, and hence the act­or’s notion of what was prop­er for the pic­ture was to be taken rather ser­i­ously. This kind of idea, I don’t think it’s an exag­ger­a­tion to say, was ana­thema to Hitchcock, who was only con­cerned with film­ing what HE saw. Here’s how he describes (to Truffaut) his dif­fi­culty with Paul Newman dur­ing the film­ing of 1966’s Torn Curtain, dis­cuss­ing a scene that was ulti­mately cut from the film: “As you know, he’s a ‘meth­od’ act­or, and he found it hard to just give me one of those neut­ral looks I needed to cut from his point of view. Instead of look­ing toward Gromek’s broth­er, toward the knife or the saus­age, he played the scene in the ‘meth­od’ style, with emo­tion, and he was always turn­ing away.” If we look at the cam­era as a pen, then here we can see Newman as runny ink. Martin Scorsese can be seen as hav­ing, in some ways, syn­thes­iz­ing Kazan’s sym­pathy for act­ors with Hitchcock’s plastic storytelling style. Talking about work­ing with Newman some twenty years after Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, for 1986’s The Color of Money, he recalls (in the Faber and Faber book Scorsese on Scorsese): “Paul [is the] kind of act­or who does­n’t like to impro­vise that much on the set, so […] everything was rehearsed before­hand. We did it the way he sug­ges­ted, which was to take two com­plete weeks and just work out with the act­ors in a loft. I was really nervous, because it was like the theat­er […] So when he said, ‘What you do is take a tape and mark out an area for a chair; then you tape out an area for a bed,’ I could fore­see those ter­rible theat­er things when people pre­tend a door is there, which I hate. I said, ‘What if we use a real chair?’ ‘A chair is good,’ he said, to my relief.”

While we can­not ima­gine Hitchcock in such a situ­ation get­ting any­where near to, let alone bey­ond “just work out with the act­ors in a loft,” we should­n’t, by the same token, beat his ghost or his films over the head with some con­cep­tion that he, and they, are anti-human-performer. That’s a rap more applic­able to, say, Michael Bay.