alfred hitchcock – The Story Department

Hitchcock’s POV Says You’re A Psycho

Karel FG Segers — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 19:25:54 +0000

Over half a century on, Psycho is a tremendous inspiration to low budget filmmakers, as Hitchcock shot the film on a shoestring budget of under a million dollars. Admittedly, to generate the marketing and awareness of the film at the time, studios today would have to spend blockbuster budgets.

Because many “B” movies did well commercially back then, Hitchcock wanted to see if he could turn a solid, inexpensive film into a success. Psycho’s black and white look was not an artistic choice, as colour had long become mainstream. He just wanted to keep the cost down.

Psycho’s black and white look was not an artistic choice.

Hitchcock did everything to make the film a success, including creating hype in any way he possibly could. To keep the movie’s shock twist a secret, he bought the rights to the novel (for only $9,000), and then bought up all available copies he could lay his hands on.

In other words, he created suspense in the market, long before the movie’s release.

Master Of Suspense

Hitchcock was known as the Master of suspense. He famously explained the difference between surprise and suspense using the anecdote of two people sitting at a table, talking. When suddenly a bomb explodes, this is an example of surprise. More effective however, would be suspense: we know about the bomb before it explodes. Hitchcock taught us that not only suspense is cinematically far more powerful, the tension can also be extended for much longer.

Still, the twist in Psycho goes against this golden rule of suspense, because we don’t see Marion Crane’s death coming. It hits us as a terrible shock instead.

The twist in Psycho goes against this golden rule of suspense.

Ironically, when we watch Psycho again today, the whole first third of the film has become pure suspense … as we know she will die in the shower!

Oops. Did I just spoil something?

Breaking His Own Rules

Hitch didn’t really break his suspense rule in Psycho. The long travel sequence from downtown Phoenix to the Bates Motel is one long string of suspenseful moments. As the car scene in the swamp with Norman Bates will illustrate, even after the shock twist, Hitchcock stays true to his suspense mantra.

If he didn’t believe in surprise, why did Hitchcock kill off Marion Crane so suddenly?

Because Hitchcock is also a master of POV.

Removing the main character served a greater purpose. Now he could mess with another golden principle of cinema: the single POV.

This brings us to the scene in question, which is not the shower scene.

Removing the main character served a greater purpose.

Playing With POV

Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is schizophrenic, and indirectly Hitchcock creates a cinematic experience that emulates this condition for the audience, by placing us in his POV.

First we identify with Marion Crane, but once she is gone, there is only one character left — her murderer. Is it possible to immediately shift our POV to the antagonist, and even empathise with him?

Let’s see.

You Are A Psycho

Most viewers will admit after seeing Psycho that – at least for a short while – they moved their empathy from the victim to the killer. “Hold on,” I hear you say, “we don’t ever root for Norman Bates!” Really? Well check out this scene…

[vimeo 89452965 w=960 h=540]

Norman has just murdered Marion, and has to get rid of the body. He puts it in the trunk of the car, and drives it into a swamp.

Agonizingly slowly, we witness how the car sinks … suspense … it gets stuck! We are squarely in Norman Bates’ POV.

The shiny white roof remains visible above the mud. Norman panics – and so do we … with him.

We are squarely in Norman Bates’ POV.

We hold our breath — until the car finally disappears into the black bog.

Q.E.D.

-Karel Segers

Download the Psycho screenplay here: Psycho – Screenplay by Joseph Stefano

Karel FG Segers

Karel Segers wrote his first produced screenplay at age 17. Today he is a story analyst with experience in acquisition, development and production. He has trained students worldwide, and worked with half a dozen Academy Award nominees. Karel speaks more European languages than he has fingers on his left hand, which he is still trying to find a use for in his hometown of Sydney, Australia. The languages, not the fingers.

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Movie Moment: Suspense In Frenzy

Karel FG Segers — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 11:16:39 +0000

Film buffs love referring to Alfred Hitchcock. Invariably you’ll hear them rave about Psycho, Rear Window or Vertigo . Rarely do I hear anyone praise Hitchcock’s personal favorite A Shadow Of A Doubt, let alone his earlier English films.

by Karel Segers

BACK TO ENGLAND

After all, Hitchcock’s greatest successes were his American movies starring Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. Yet, there’s something freshly unique and authentic about his British period that I found lacking in the American films. To me some of the English films had a greater sense of realism

In my view, Hitchcock delivered his last true master piece with the film that brought him back to England in 1972: Frenzy. I agree with Roger Ebert, when he writes

“FRENZY is a return to old forms by the master of suspense, whose newer forms have pleased movie critics but not his public. This is the kind of thriller Hitchcock was making in the 1940s”

At the most exciting moment in this movie, Hitchcock does something highly illegal… He breaks the rule of not showing a key dramatic story moment.

At the most exciting moment in this movie,
Hitchcock does something highly illegal…

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN [spoiler alert]

When the Coen brothers allowed the tragic climax of No Country For Old Men to unfold offscreen, a large part of the audience hated them for it. I was among them. Not only did I feel robbed of a character we had come to love over the course of the movie, I also felt robbed of what could have been a powerful dramatic scene.

In Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock uses a similar technique – but it works a treat.

We see the killer and his next victim enter a house, climb the stairs to an apartment on the second floor. Once at the top, instead of staying with them, the camera retreats down the stairs and back onto the street. For a moment, nothing happens and we are left with the merchants and trades people outside. Only later in the film do we get to see the aftermath of the murder.

Why did it work?

ANTAGONIST POV

Some purists claim you can’t do this or that in movies: no voice over, no flashbacks, no out-of-POV-scenes. The truth is that you can do anything you like – provided you do it well… (even killing off your heroine halfway a movie).

In Frenzy, the offscreen tragedy is not the movie’s climax but the Mid Point. I tend to believe that some of the story’s key dramatic scenes belong on screen, such as the Inciting Incident, the Act One and the Act Three Climax. In any case, all the major events that involve the hero character should be on the screen.

The story’s key dramatic scenes belong on screen.

In the scene above however, it is not the protagonist but the antagonist who disappears off screen. Another good example that proves we need to be aware of who’s point of view the scene is told from, before making structural judgments. If the main character had been part of the offscreen action, the same trick would most likely not have worked as well as it does here.

By the way, Brian De Palma did something vaguely similar around the mid point of The Untouchables. I wonder who he might have learned it from…

– Karel Segers

(first published for ScripTips – with thanks to Brooke Trezise)

Karel Segers is a producer and script consultant who started in movies as a rights buyer for Europe’s largest pay TV group Canal+. Back then it was handy to speak 5 languages. Less so today in Australia.

Karel teaches, consults and lectures on screenwriting and the principles of storytelling to his 7-year old son Baxter and anyone else who listens.
He is also the boss of this blog.

Karel FG Segers

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Inciting Incident: Planting the Bomb

Karel FG Segers — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 15:38:22 +0000

Keeping the audience interested throughout the ‘setup’ is a major challenge as professional readers won’t last until the Inciting Incident if the first ten or twelve pages don’t deliver.

The ‘setup’ is often a complete sequence in which we see the ‘Ordinary World’, the protagonist’s ‘normal life’, an area of the story that by its name and nature risks to be a dull stretch. We see the life of the main character before the overwhelming event that marks the real start of story.

For the solution, we go back to a lesson from Alfred Hitchcock.

Remember the difference between surprise and suspense? Surprise is when a bomb suddenly explodes. Suspense is when we know there is a bomb, and it can explode any moment.

The Inciting Incident is our first story explosion.

How do we make our audience hang in there until it explodes? By foreshadowing the Inciting Incident. By creating anticipation.

Create strong anticipation during the story setup by foreshadowing the Inciting Incident.

DIE HARD: While John McClane argues with his ex, we see bad guy Gruber et al. preparing their actions. Worse is yet to come for John.
JAWS: Swimmer Chrissie is crab meat by the time we meet with hero Chief Brody. We know the reported ‘missing person’ won’t be seen again.
TOUCH OF EVIL: In the classic opening shot we see a bomb planted on a car, it ends on the explosion. This marks Vargas’ (Heston) call to action.
OMAGH: Terrorists from the Real IRA plant the bomb that will later cause carnage in the Northern Irish town, and kill the hero’s son.
E.T.: In the opening scene, an alien is left behind on earth, 12mins later it will disturb the life of little Elliott.
THE UNTOUCHABLES: Capone’s hitmen bomb a pub and kill a girl. In the I.I., her mother calls on Eliot Ness to stop the violence.
BLADE RUNNER: At the end of the Voigt-Kampf test and before we meet with Deckard, we see replicant Leon shoot his interviewer.

Note that these examples show the foreshadowing of an Inciting Incident of such a magnitude that it would not just disturb the hero’s life, but anyone’s under the circumstances. In other words, we don’t really need a lot of exposition or setup to understand that this Inciting Incident will stir the pot.

This approach may not work with just any story.

Most stories will still need you to first set up the protagonist’s character before introducing the Inciting Incident, just because the impact of the Inciting Incident is specific to that particular character.

First we are fully immersed in the life and world of Truman Burbank in The Truman Show before the appearance of his father on the street will be seen as a major event.

We need to know the character – and flaw – of Stu Sheppard in Phonebooth before we fully get how important it is when some stranger seems to know all those secrets he has been carefully hiding.

Even in most of the seven examples above, between the foreshadowing near the opening of the movie and the actual Inciting Incident, the screenwriters make sure they build on the gravity of the I.I.’s impact:

– in Jaws, Chief Brody is relatively new in Amity so he may only have limited authority when he asks to close the beaches.
– in Touch of Evil we learn that Mr. and Mrs. Vargas are still honeymooning, so Mike is not really prepared to take on a case.
– in Omagh we see how close father and son Gallagher really are, before the son dies in the bomb attack.
– In The Untouchables, the domestic scene at the Ness home shows a dedicated father Eliot, so he is the right person to respond to the distraught mother later on.

Karel FG Segers

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Michael Mann and Lev Kuleshov

Karel FG Segers — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 06:05:47 +0000

Michael Mann’s commentary on the Restored Director’s Cut of MANHUNTER focuses primarily on the parallel psychology of the serial murderer and the cop. But let’s skip to the last few minutes of the commentary in which Michael Mann summarises his approach to filmmaking.

“Film is made in the editing room. In the writing and in the director’s preparation you’re planning what you’re gonna do in the editing room.”

He then refers to the Russian theory of montage from the 1920’s, which was followed by the Brits in the next decade (and used later to great commercial success by Alfred Hitchcock a.o.).

Anybody with a real interest in the effect of montage, should really do some reading on Lev Kuleshov and what is still known as the Kuleshov Effect. Using this, one could build a case that, if story is structure (which is what Stephen Gaghan doesn’t like), therefore transitions are structure.

Isn’t it remarkable that seventy years apart, two Russians were telling the world about transitions in their respective art forms?

Gaghan writes like a director. Similarly, Michael Mann is already thinking of what he will do in the editing room and therefore writes his story from scene transitions rather than starting from the overall dramatic arc.

(originally published 06/05/2006, edited 31/10/2007)

Karel FG Segers

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A Director’s Approach

Karel FG Segers — Fri, 05 May 2006 15:04:20 +0000

Following my post on SYRIANA writer/director Stephen Gaghan, I came across an interesting discussion on the necessity of rigorous structuring vs. a more liberal, visual approach to screenwriting.

Jim Mercurio makes the following point about Gaghan’s comments in the notorious CS podcast: “Gaghan’s comments are showing that he is evolving from a screenwriter into a filmmaker. “

With ‘filmmaker’, he undoubtedly means ‘director’ and with his quote he hits the nail on the head. However, Mercurio makes it sound as if this is a natural evolution, when he goes on to explain how his own latest script too is told with transitions. All of a sudden Gaghan is fashionable, and screenwriters are re-inventing Tolstoy. Now let’s not forget the following facts:

1. Tolstoy was a novelist
2. Gaghan is NOT a meanstream screenwriter
3. Transitions do not stand in the way of proper story structuring

What everybody seems to be missing in this discussion is that transitions play on a shot level, or at best on a scene level. Story structure goes way beyond that. Whatever Mercurio may think, a screenplay written solely from transitions will most likely end up in the same tiny niche market as KOYAANISQATSI.

DVD: THE MANN SPEAKS

The same day I stumbled on the discussion above, I heard writer/director Michael Mann’s commentary on the Restored Director’s Cut of MANHUNTER.

Mann’s comments focus mainly on the parallel psychology of the serial murderer and the cop, besides a few killer anecdotes about production nightmares. My favourite: the airplane scene with the little girl freaking out over Will Graham’s bloody crime scene photos. The only way to shoot this was to book the entire film crew on a United Airlines flight from Chicago to Orlando without informing the airline of their plans, keeping all equipment as hand luggage. Mid flight suddenly these hundred or so people got out of their seats and started filming. No need to say that Mann could kiss his United air miles goodbye.

But let’s skip to the last few minutes of the commentary in which Michael Mann summarises his approach to filmmaking. “Film is made in the editing room. In the writing and in the director’s preparation you’re planning what you’re gonna do in the editing room.” He then refers to the Russian theory of montage from the 1920’s, which was followed by the Brits in the next decade (and used later to great commercial success by Alfred Hitchcock a.o.).

I don’t want to get too theoretical here, but anybody with a real interest in the effect of montage, should really do some reading on Lev Kuleshov and what is still known as the Kuleshov Effect. Using this, I could easily build a case to prove that transitions are structure. I’ll spare you that one for now. But isn’t it remarkable that seventy years apart, two Russians were telling the world about transitions in their respective art forms?

To conclude: Mercurio is right when he says that Gaghan writes like a filmmaker. Like Michael Mann, he is already thinking of what he will do in the editing room and therefore writes his story from scene transitions rather than starting from an overall dramatic arc. This approach to script writing is indeed in many ways similar to that of Hitchcock or Mann but I am sure those last two went through far less drafts than Gaghan.

BTW: Don’t rush out to get Manhunter from HMV or Amazon.com: unfortunately Mann’s commentary only features on a rare DVD which has been out of print for a while, which limits your options largely to eBay. But as a bonus from OZZYWOOD, you can download the last four minutes of Michael Mann’s director’s commentary here.

LOOSE ENDS: The First Act Monolith

Recently I watched BRUBAKER, not knowing anything about this 1980 drama directed by Stuart Rosenberg. If you haven’t seen the film but are planning to do so in the near future, don’t read on as I will spoil the pleasure (and surprise).

The film strays from the traditional structure mainly because of its offbeat First Act. For the life of me, I could not detect an Inciting Incident, nor any significant protagonist characterisation. Instead we witness from Robert Redford’s detainee character’s POV how the most appalling injustice and brutality is inflicted relentlessly upon the inmates.

Over thirty minutes into the movie, Redford’s character identifies himself as the new warden and announces in the same scene that he wants to force through some serious reform. Finally we have our 1st Act Turning Point. I am still trying to understand why the warden’s identity was kept hidden from the audience all along. Apart from a sudden surprise, it doesn’t add a thing. The use of dramatic irony (i.e.: the audience knows, but the other characters don’t) would have been much more powerful and it would have allowed for the badly needed character development.

Leading US critic Roger Ebert wrote about this film: “There’s no room for the spontaneity of real human personalities caught in real situations. That’s especially annoying with the character of Brubaker himself, played well but within a frustratingly narrow range by Robert Redford. “

Redford’s performance is rock solid given the material. BRUBAKER’s real problem is its flawed structure: half an hour into the movie, we have run out of screentime to sufficiently set up the protagonist’s character and potential internal conflicts. Redford didn’t have anything to work with, which makes Ebert’s comment rather unfair.

What the screenwriters did achieve quite well though, is the setup of antagonists and external obstacles in the way of the protagonist’s objective. Perhaps this explains why the film did work for me.

It still beats me though why BRUBAKER was nominated for Best Screenplay back in 1980. Perhaps it was a fluke. In my view, this theory gains strength when we look at co-writer W.D. Richter’s latest work: STEALTH…

Karel FG Segers

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