"This is one of the first films where we have a Universal logo." "It's going to be followed by a Paramount logo." "I was so surprised the first time I saw the Universal logo on this film." "It was nice to have the Paramount and VistaVision logos." "This is Bob Harris." "Jim, say hello so we know what you sound like." "This is Jim Katz." "Together we have been working over two years to restore Vertigo, the version which you'll be watching." "We're joined by Herbie Coleman who's credited as associate producer but today would have been considered the producer of Vertigo." "What did associate producer mean, Herbie?" "In those days there were very few, Paramount had two." "I was one and Paul Nathan who worked with Hal Wallis was the other." "In those days, an associate producer title was a title almost equal to producer." "I was the producer on the film, there were no others." "You also produced North By Northwest." "Yes, and The Man Who Knew Too Much," "The Wrong Man and others." "Why did Hitchcock take the producer's credit?" "He didn't take it, you never saw his credit as producer on this film." " No, he takes a director credit." " Right, that's all." "Herbie, do you remember anything about early discussions about the Saul Bass credits?" "Anything special?" "The credit discussion came in after the picture was finished." "During the filming we never discussed the main title with having Saul Bass do it." "He was a sort of designer for hire, wasn't he, at that point?" "He was working at Paramount?" "He had his own office, Saul Bass and Associates on Sunset Boulevard." "He was a very well known..." "What do you call it?" "Graphic designer." "He did Lowry's Restaurant, for instance, one of his logos, one of the first ones I knew about." "This was the only film that Bernard Herrmann composed for which he did not conduct the score." "Tell us about what happened with the recordings." "The ASCAP called a strike just before we were ready to start recording." "Bernard Herrmann, we called Benny, was restricted from conducting the orchestra anyplace in the world." "So I had to take the picture to London and then, after London joined the ASCAP strike too," "I had to go to Vienna to complete the scoring." "For four days estimate, I was gone for six weeks." "And the London part of it was in stereo, wasn't it?" " Right." " And Vienna was monaural." "That's right." "For the rooftop sequence, the first couple of shots are long shots, they're production photography." "Then we go to a number of process shots which were the bane of our existence during the restoration." "Hitchcock loved process shots." "There were about 1,400 feet of them in the film." "The negative was not fully exposed and faded differently to the rest of the film." "Lots of problems." "I shot all of those process shots myself, everything." "Those were all shot in VistaVision also." "In the car, I've had two VistaVision cameras shooting forward and back at the same time to get the traffic in perspective." "That shot, looking down, you said that was the only real perspective." "I meant the people you see below." "The rest of it is a painting." "The buildings are a painting?" "You can see that the people stay away from the buildings." "We've had people ask how Jimmy Stewart got down off that building." "I have no idea either!" "We never tried to explain that." "Something we found during the restoration was that the colour which hasn't been seen in 38 years started to come through and show itself again " "Midge being yellow and Jimmy Stewart being brown." "You mean because of the time?" "Yes, because of the fading of the negative elements in the production of dupes." "You keep getting further away from the original negative." "What you did with it was marvellous." "It's beautiful." "I think we've got to give him the ten bucks now." "What is that background in Midge's apartment?" "Everybody thinks it's a black and white still." "No, it's a painted backing." "The background on the camera sheets, if I'm not mistaken, says it was a plate shot in cloudy weather." "Yeah, some of it was." "What was it like working with Jimmy Stewart?" "Wonderful." "He was one of the easiest actors to work with in all my years in the film business." "Was he involved right from the start?" "Yes, he..." "When we talked about making this picture," "I can't pronounce the French title, it was always Jimmy Stewart, nobody else was considered." "The original title was From Among The Dead." " In English, yes." " I can't say it in French either." "What did Lew Wasserman mean today when he was saying that they were... where you said they were holding up the production for a while?" "He must have been talking about all the things that caused the hold-up." "Like..." "At the beginning, we postponed the picture for nine weeks because Gloria Stewart," "Jimmy's wife, wanted him to have a vacation before we started," " and Hitchcock's operations..." " I don't think he was married then." "That's what Lew said but I thought he was." "Was he instrumental in getting Kim Novak?" " Who, Lew?" " No, Jimmy Stewart." "Jimmy didn't know anything about it until Lew made the deal at Columbia." "Can you explain that deal?" "Do you remember it?" "When Vera Miles turned up pregnant and Hitch was in the hospital and you couldn't discuss business with him," "Lew and I had a conversation and Lew went looking for a new star." "Kim Novak was his, and our, first choice." "He had no problem getting Harry Cohn to agree to a loan-out," "Kim Novak for Jimmy Stewart." "Didn't they have to do a picture first at Columbia?" "No, Jimmy did the picture for Columbia after this." "That was Bell Book And Candle." " I don't remember." " Of Richard Quine." "Samuel Taylor was the one who introduced the character of Midge." "There was no character like Midge in the book but..." "Sam realised that Jimmy had to have somebody to talk to rather than just spit it out on his own," "so he came up with this character." "How did Barbara Bel Geddes get cast in this?" "She was the very first choice." "Was she a client, as well, of?" "I don't know but I suspect she was." "She was quite a well-known Broadway actress at the time." "Lovely person to work with too." "We should probably mention that the film was shot in VistaVision which was Paramount's process which began in 1954 with White Christmas." "It was a double-frame process, two frames of 35mm..." " Going through horizontally." " Correct, from right to left." "The quality of the film that came through was quite extraordinary." "When VistaVision prints were made you had a soundtrack along the upper edge of the film which ran at twice the speed of normal sound which gave you motion picture high fidelity in both picture and track." "Because it was photographed in this process we could convert it frame-by-frame to 65mm for the restoration." "I didn't know that." "We had to make all new elements from Vista, basically taking it on a shot-by-shot basis, creating corrections in gamma or contrast ratios for basically every shot in the film to try and bring back colour and contrast." "The yellow layer was quite faded when we got the negative." "It was actually quite faded by 1983 when Universal got the film elements." "How were you able to restore it?" "One thing was to find as many colour references as possible." "We had no idea what the yellow was in Barbara's sweater and what the yellow was on the stepladder or what colour the Jaguar was or what colour some of Judy's clothes were." "We tried to find as much as we could from in some instances a costume and some instances the Jaguar or the writing..." "It should be mentioned that, as we dissolve from Midge's apartment to the exterior of the shipyard, you see Hitchcock going across the screen." "Did you know when he was going to do that, that it was going to be in the shipyard?" "Yes, I did." "Was he nervous, directing himself?" "No, I directed that." "So you directed Hitchcock in Vertigo." "Was that spontaneous or did he say, "That's the scene"?" "I don't remember that even being in the script." "It was usually thought up during the production." "Once I tried to get him to be in a wheelchair as a nun but he wouldn't go for that." "He was in a wheelchair in Topaz or Torn Curtain." "He wouldn't appear as a nun, though." "With a baby on his lap." " Did you do a lot of takes?" " One take." "And he walked at the correct speed?" "The appearance in North By Northwest, where he couldn't get aboard the bus, that was one take." "No, it was two takes." "But did he understand his character?" "Nobody had to tell Hitch anything." "Just timing." "What does he say after he does his take?" "Did he make some comment or?" " He was just another actor." " Tell us about the set in the shipbuilding office." "In this particular scene?" "This set was one of the most expensive sets." "It really wasn't necessary to spend this much." "There are seven walls on two levels with process plates out of every window." "We had to move the sets around to get it in front of the screen." "Took a long time, cost a lot of money, this set." "A lot of the sets had ceilings, which was unusual." "Hitch liked ceilings." "Do you remember what the budget was?" "On Vertigo?" "No." "I should know but I don't remember." "This is Laurent Bouzereau, producer of this commentary and a personal friend of Thomas Narcejac who co-wrote with Pierre Boileau the novel From Among The Dead that inspired the movie Vertigo." "The novel was published in France in February 1954 and this was the fourth novel that Boileau and Narcejac wrote together." "Their collaboration began in 1951 and they wrote together many novels, short stories, plays, radio programmes even, original screenplays and adaptations of their own work." "In addition to Vertigo, many of their novels were adapted to the screen." "Probably the most famous one is Les Diaboliques, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot in 1955." "They also collaborated with Georges Franju on the horror classic Eyes Without A Face in 1960." "Now back to Herbert Coleman, Bob Harris and Jim Katz." "How did Tom Helmore come to pass, was he the first choice for that part?" "No, we looked at other actors, about four or five other actors." "Do you want to get into that now?" "It's quite long and involved talking about the various scripts." " If you want to do that..." " Do you want to do an overview?" "On the selection of the writer," "I was absolutely opposed to having Maxwell Anderson... do this screenplay because of the problem we had with him on The Wrong Man." "He really had lost touch with reality." "We had a tough time keeping the... actuality of the events in The Wrong Man." "I was afraid that he would be carried away with the story about this strange woman." "Didn't Hitchcock insist that he do this draft?" "Finally Hitchcock tired of me refusing to make a deal for him and had somebody else, I have no idea who, make a deal with Irving Lazar and pay the first $35,000, which I never allowed to be charged to the budget," "and sent him back East to write the screenplay." "Hitch and Alma went up to the ranch, up in Santa Cruz, the redwood trees." "I took Mary-Belle, my wife, and went on a survey of San Francisco and the mission and found mission San Juan Bautista and made a deal with Father Solomon to use that." "We had to know what mission we were using before Maxwell Anderson could write the sequence." "How was it decided that San Francisco was going to be the location?" "Hitch never thought of doing it anywhere but San Francisco." "First thing he said was, "We'll make San Francisco the locale."" "San Francisco's very happy about that." "So was I." "Finally I came back from where I'd selected San Juan Bautista and various other locations, including Ernie's Restaurant." "Ernie's was a set, always, was it not?" "The interior, yes." "We had a shot on the exterior, just one shot of the exterior." "So the exterior was production photography?" "No, that was actually at Ernie's." "So what happened when Maxwell Anderson's script came in?" "I was back from my location survey and I received the screenplay, Hitch was up at the ranch." "I took one look at the title and wondered," ""What in the world does Listen Darkling mean?"" "L-l-S-T-E-N D-A-R-K-L-l-N-G." "I was puzzled about the title, I read it, and couldn't believe it, it didn't make any sense." "I read it a second time and it was worse." "So I called Hitch and said, "I've got to send off Anderson's script."" "He said, "What about it?"" "I said, "If I tell you what I think you'll say I couldn't be fair."" "I said, "I'll read you one scene."" "This is where we're watching Kim Novak." "I can see that." "Shall I tell you about this scene?" "Sure." "This is one of the great entrances in film history." "He sure took care of his leading ladies and their entrances." "I'll tell you about that." "The first time we made that scene, Hitch had her look around and had her eyes stop on Jimmy and then continue on, all one shot without cutting to Jimmy." "After we had done the final editing and Hitch was leaving for vacation in Jamaica or someplace, the Virgin Islands, I've forgotten where, he said, "We should never have allowed her eyes to stop on Jimmy" ""because an audience might realise then" ""that there's something between them."" "He said, "What are you going to do?"" "I said, "Are you gonna do it?" He said "No," ""you'll have to get Kim in and redo it."" "So I got her in and had Bummy put the set up again and reshot the scene, recut the picture." "Then, when we were through, took the picture back to New York and had Hitch come up from vacation." "We ran the picture and everything was going beautifully until we got to that scene of her turning and not letting her eyes stop." "We kept going for about 100 feet and Hitch says, "Stop the running!"" "I knew what he was going to say." "He said, "What lens did you use?"" "I said, "A three-inch lens."" "He said, "I used a two-inch." "Why didn't you use a two-inch?"" "I said, "Because I didn't have enough backing."" "A lot of red backing from Ernie's Restaurant had been destroyed, we only had enough to cover the background with a three-inch lens." "Did he complain about that forever." "You can see a difference in perspective between those two lenses." "At Ernie's you pretty much brought the restaurant down to Los Angeles." "Everything - tablecloths, silverware, china, stemware and the wall decorations." "Ernie's ordered all the beautiful red fabric wall covering, all we needed." "One point on the restoration and film fading, as Jimmy walks into this back door, we had a situation in which the negative was extremely faded." "When a yellow layer fades, things that are black and shadow details go a milky blue and facial highlights go a crustacean yellow." "This part of the film is all from black and white separations which fit together reasonably well." "This is the scene, when this door opens, that everybody is testing the colour, saying, "What did these guys do?"" " Really?" " This is the test." "Marty Scorsese said, "What does the flower shop look like?"" " Who was this?" " Martin Scorsese, the director, when we ran some reels for him in New York." "It's the first real indication of, I think, the success we've had in bringing the colour back." "Although this shot is faded." "There's no denying it." "The black and white separations would not register." "The only way to keep the film in large format was to use the original negative and adapt the contrast and work with the colours as best we could." "It looked beautiful, the restoration." "When people come in to see a restoration, we like to know where they're coming from, what they think." "We have to match a new picture, whether it's supposed to look like it did the day it was made or whether it has to match the standards of movies today." " Was it probable that?" " We tried to... to achieve that without destroying the spirit in which the picture was made." "Here's Kim going into the mission." "All of the shots of Jimmy driving are process shots in which the negative had faded." "This was interesting because we had no idea at first where the fog filters were used." "That affects the timing on the film." "And the fading." "You didn't have camera reports?" "We had full camera reports." "Fortunately, Paramount's files and Hitchcock's records were donated to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which has always been extremely helpful to us, as has the archive there." "We had camera reports, daily continuity reports." " That did help you then." " Oh, yes." "It showed us which takes were using fog filters, whether they were half fogs or quarter fogs or no fogs." "At the bridge sequence, we're going back and forth with halves and fulls and no fogs." "It was a tremendous help." "I think they were Peggy Robertson's notes and they were meticulous." "They were really a tremendous help to us." "Peggy Robertson was the script supervisor on this picture and eventually became Hitch's personal assistant." "Right, Herbie?" "That's right." "Her main job was in casting." "She saw every picture ever once he put her in that job." "She saw every picture that was released and had complete files on them and could suggest anybody for any part." "The other thing that was extremely valuable were George Tomasini the editor's notes on the sound mix, along with Hitchcock's dubbing notes." "We made tremendous use of those." "Interestingly enough, there was no rock and roll in those days, you had to do a pass on the reel and make whatever changes." "If there were subsequent changes you had to go through the reel again." "We figured it was never 100% because a moment would come when it wasn't worth going through the reel again and just moving on." "But we had some meticulous conceptual notes from Hitchcock and George Tomasini, which not only said what they wanted, which was, in some instances "less is more", but in other instances a very specific feel that the reel should have." "We tried to keep to that as much as we possibly can with the materials that we had." "The problem with the sound was that the only surviving composite track was a used 35mm print with a scratched optical track which did not yield wonderful results." " Where did you find that?" " It was one of Hitchcock's prints." "It had been in storage." "It was a regular release print." "The original tracks, all of the original mags had been junked in 1967 with the exception of the music, which resided in Paramount's library, albeit rotting." "But they saved it." "They had no rights to it, so they didn't have a budget to preserve it." "You mean Paramount?" "Fortunately they didn't junk it." "Once we found those we realised that the public had to hear them as we were hearing them because they were extraordinarily beautifully recorded." "The music was just unbelievable." "Herbie, we have the portrait of Vera Miles as Carlotta in our office." "How many portraits were there?" "Can you give us a brief history of the various portraits of Carlotta?" "This portrait was to cause us more trouble than any other prop." "Hitch wanted the portrait painted in England but I wanted it done in Rome." "So I had a colour photograph made of Vera Miles and sent instructions to the Rome office to do this painting exactly as the photograph was except to put an aristocratic face on the woman." "Finally the painting came and it was not usable because they'd hired somebody for 15 cents, I think, to do the painting." "Then we tried England, it came back and it was almost as bad." "Then the studio suggested a painter that did a lot of studio work." "I don't remember his name but I asked to see his work and it was very good so I made a deal with him." " He was in Hollywood, wasn't he?" " He was." "A man in his late sixties." "Met with him, told him the whole story and he started the painting." "One day he said he must meet Vera Miles to keep on going." "Unfortunately I agreed to it." "She went to see him and finally he finished." "He brought it over and it was a beautiful painting of Vera Miles!" " That must be the one we have." " Evidently, yes." "Is he the one who fell in love with her?" "He'd fallen in love with her and that destroyed that one." "I remembered the painter who did the paintings for The Trouble With Harry and I got in touch with him and he did the final portrait we used." " I can't think of his name." " Was it John Ferren?" "Yeah, John Ferren." "He did the one that's in the film that we see Kim looking at..." " Right." "...in the museum?" "Did he also do the dream sequence?" "Yes, I think he did all of the paintings." "Getting back to the sound, once we found the original music we realised we had to use them." "The only composite track available was a used 35mm optical print which held good sound for 1958 but for 1996 standards it really wasn't there." "The sound department pulled out the dialogue as well as they could, separated it, made a stem of it and then created all-new foley, which are the clothing rustlings and body sounds, and went to the point of finding a 1957 Karmann Ghia" "and recording that engine and the DeSotos, all the '50s cars in analogue sound, from police officers' revolvers from the '50s." "So the sound is all very authentic although newly recorded." "There were some effects that we used from the original because they were clean." "This was an interesting point as we screened the film around the country because the purists came to us and said," ""How can you restore a film and redo a soundtrack?"" "We'd tell them that the alternative was not to hear any sound at all, or to hear a mono track from 1958 which is..." "With scratches and holes in it." "Then the picture would've been finished." "The soundtrack pretty much was finished." "We used part of a..." "In the mission sequence the sound was taken from a 1958 Spanish track and that's the only sound that was... the only music that was not taken from the tracks we found at Paramount." "When we attempted to run that track the oxide just dropped off it, so there was literally nothing there." "All the original music tracks had vinegar syndrome, they were rotten." "In fact, Herbie, when we found them they were in these square tin cans and we brought them to Warner Hollywood studios where we tried to transfer them." "We were holding the mag track against the sound head, transferring it onto a 24-track." "As it was going through the machine the emulsion was peeling off." " In your hands?" " Just coming right off." "We knew that this was it, we had one chance to do this." "We managed to get about 90% of the music but it was music with a clarity that has never been heard on the film." "What place did Alma Reville, Hitch's wife, have in the production?" "She was there guiding at all times, wasn't she?" "Hitch always consulted Alma on everything they did in a film." "She had great respect." "She was originally a script clerk." "She was his script clerk on his first pictures." "Wasn't she in the business before him?" "I don't know, I've never discussed that with her." "He always discussed his scripts with her and as a matter of fact she would quite often write on his..." "Toward the end, even, she would rewrite things on his scripts." "What was her opinion of that Maxwell Anderson script?" "The same as mine." "What happened after that script?" "How did Sam Taylor get involved?" "First, after Maxwell Anderson..." "I refused to make any payments to him and that became a problem with Irving Lazar, not worth getting into." "I told Hitch about having settled on mission San Juan Bautista and he said, "You and Mary-Belle come up to the ranch" " "and we can look at the locations."" " And Mary-Belle was your wife." "So we drove up to..." "No, we flew up to San Francisco, then took a car up to the ranch." "When I arrived at the ranch Hitch said, "The boys have found you a new writer."" "I said, "Who's that?" He said, "Alec Coppel."" "I knew one thing about Coppel," "I think it was The Captain's Paradise, a screenplay he'd written." "So we thought we had the right man but he didn't quite come up to the level we wanted, so Hitch was really despairing." "He decided to call Kay Brown in New York, a wonderful literary agent," "I think she was one of Lew Wasserman's people." "She instantly, when he told her the story, suggested Sam Taylor." "We told her, "If he's available, make a deal to send him out."" "He came out and boy, did we have the right man." "We're in the Argosy book store now." "Do you recall anything about the lighting change?" "People come to us in the theatres and they think that the projection lamp is going out." "Or the film's faded, we have all sorts of explanations." "As the story gets more depressing, the picture gets darker, as if a storm is brewing." "What was Robert Burks' role in the films?" "How much did he have to say about the look of the film?" "When you say the look, do you mean the overall?" "The overall concept - lighting, colour." "That was entirely left up to him." "He was a top photographer." "In all my years in the business he was one of the very top ones." "He had a facility for being able to make the actors and actresses look the part." "He was the best at it." "Hitchcock had a pretty loyal team around him all the time." "He had Burks, he had Tomasini, he had Bumstead." "And Coleman." "There was a Coleman, I remember." "Sounds like a double-play combination." "Burks to Tomasini to Bumstead to Coleman." "That's a triple play." "When I went out to Warner Brothers and we found Hitch's assistant on Rear Window, he said, "I'm going to bring, when I come to Paramount," ""Bob Burks the cameraman" ""and a man by the name of Schurr as the operator" ""and Leonard South as the camera assistant" ""and I'll leave the rest of the selection of the staff to you."" "So I selected all the people that worked with Hitch from then on." "One of the best selections of course was George Tomasini." "The unit, as it worked, did Hitchcock have a lot of influence on Henry Bumstead's sets or did Henry come up with ideas?" "Because when we spoke to him he came to our office with Hitchcock's drawings and his drawings and they seemed to conceptualise the sets together." "Was that a collaborative effort or was Henry left on his own?" "After the initial discussions," "Bummy was left almost completely on his own." "Those drawings you're talking about, I can't remember those." " Hitch made little sketches..." " Those are the ones." "But that was not done for information for the art director, he left that entirely up to the art directors." "So the whole concept of Midge's apartment being the way it was, sort of an artist's loft look, was all Henry?" "The one ideal thing for people who worked with Hitch was the fact that the screenplays were always detailed." "It was pretty easy for them to bring that to life having read the screenplay." "The art director was different because they had to get busy before the screenplays were ready." "But Hitch always had in his head the entire story - every move of the camera, everything." "On Rear Window, he had John Michael Hayes sat at a typewriter and Hitch walked around dictating the entire screenplay." "The only thing he didn't write was the dialogue." "An interesting story that Bummy told me recently was that there was a sort of lull on the set of Vertigo and Hitch was sitting in a corner with his arms folded and he was thinking and not saying anything to anyone." "Bummy went up to him and said, "What are you thinking about?"" "He says, "I'm thinking about my next picture."" "He said he had already made Vertigo in his mind, he knew exactly what it would look like." " Was that accurate?" " What picture was that on?" " Vertigo." " Oh, Vertigo, of course." "He had everything in his own mind long before we started the picture." "We have the magic disappearing ice cubes in this scene." "This is in the men's club, the Union Club in San Francisco, which was also a set, I believe." "Yes, it was." "What do you mean about missing ice cubes?" "Watch those ice cubes." "There are two glasses with ice cubes in them." "Elster and Scottie are talking and we're going to see..." "We're gong to cut to an alternate angle in a moment." "I've heard you mention that but couldn't figure out what you were talking about." "I can see the ice cubes in those glasses." "Now they're gone." "Did you ask Peggy Robertson how that happened?" " See that glass there, Herbie?" " That's Peggy Robertson's fault." "We're going to have to go out and have words with her." "We could digitally replace them but that wouldn't be true to the film." "And it would only cost about as much as the entire restoration." "That scene in the men's club was the first time that Elster sucks Scottie into the plot, into his scheme." "As was the case in most Hitchcock pictures, another innocent bites the dust, another innocent is involved in something they have no idea of or have any idea of the big picture, the grand plan." "An interesting thing we found when we went to San Francisco to run the film in April and open it not long ago was that there are Vertigo tours." "People go to the museum and the mission and other locations, expecting to find Carlotta's tombstone and the portrait of Carlotta." "They go to the San Juan Bautista expecting to see the tower, which never existed." "Herbie, what happened with the tower?" "The tower?" "That was all a painting." " Did you find that location?" " I did." "My daughter Judy was responsible." "Hitch liked the Carmel mission but when I went there it was on a busy street and it didn't have the 1890 feel about it." "Judy had told me about San Juan Bautista, so we went from there to see it and that was absolutely perfect." "Here comes the money shot in the film." "This is the signature shot, Herbie." "Was this Hitch's plan?" "Was this shot under Golden Gate Bridge the one?" "Was it given more attention or was it just another day?" "No, this was very important to Hitch." "This location was always in his mind." "He knew exactly." "He told Sam Taylor this is where he wanted the scene to play." "He'd described the actual shots he was going to have made." "Now, was this a stand-in or is that Kim?" "In the long shot." "She was in the long shots except for the jump." " So a stand-in jumped into a net?" " A double." "It had to be something because there's rocks down there." "I don't know what they had, I wasn't there when they shot this." "Here we are with the fog filters, we're on a full fog filter looking at the bridge." " We're going to cut over to..." " This is without a fog filter." "Now we're up to Jimmy with a full fog looking at her." "Back to the master shot." "These are all with fogs." "Now this is without a fog." "As he comes running..." "Back into a fog filter." " Jumps into the studio tank." " That's right." "It's been written that Hitchcock used the fog filter to bring the audience in and out of reality." "Was there any truth in that?" "Did he discuss that with you?" "He never discussed it with me, probably did with Bob Burks." "I didn't even know they were using a fog filter." "On the 70mm you can see that huge bruise on Kim Novak's knee which was not visible in 35." "The interesting thing here is that... actually, an earlier point, where she's gone through this and she's aware of this plot with Elster and is actually... bringing him along." "She's duping him." "But the audience doesn't know that." "The exterior of Scottie's apartment, wasn't that a production shot?" " Exterior of what?" " Scottie's apartment." " Yes." " The interiors are on the sound stage." "At the studio." "You see this shot with the underwear hanging up?" "There's nothing recognisable." "We found in the notes that the Legion of Decency did not want any recognisable female undergarments hanging on the line." "Even though we know that he's pulled her out of the bay, taken her back, taken her clothes off and put her into bed, the audience isn't supposed to really get that because there's no clothes hanging on the line." "No, we wanted the audience to get that." "This is what we call the deer in the headlights shot of Kim." "But the Legion of Decency was doing everything they could to remove any signs of what was actually going on." "They were a problem in those days." "He hands her the robe and today she'd probably say, "I don't need that."" "How did censorship work at that point?" "Did you have to submit scripts?" "Before you started shooting they had to read the screenplay." "Some of the notes are hilarious." "Do you want to talk a bit about Hitch preferring to work on sound stages than location?" "We never had a problem with Hitch about where we'd shoot." "We only did things in the studio that were impossible to do on location." "But on Vertigo, most of the picture was shot in a studio." "As much as we could, because it cost money on location." "What was the situation with Wreck Of The Mary Deare and Vertigo?" "I came into the studio one morning and on my desk was a book called The Wreck Of The Mary Deare." "Hitch came in, he saw the book and said, "Aren't you gonna read it?"" "I said, "I know that story, I read it a year ago." ""My son came home with it and wanted to make a film of it."" "But it would be impossible." "The whole book is at sea - an old freighter, sail boats, rowboats, people swimming in the ocean." "You'd have to build everything on the set, on rockers, it'd take forever to do it." "That's when we decided not to do the picture." "He said, "I'll go to Metro and tell them the story,"" "which became North By Northwest, an idea he'd had for a long time." "What was the original title on North By Northwest?" "The Man On Lincoln's Nose." "How did the title for Vertigo come about?" "How many did you go through?" "Sam Taylor came up with that title." "I can't remember how many." "What time would you normally start shooting?" "How would Hitchcock sets work?" "It was always of course very quiet." "No problems." "Problems were solved long before you got on the set." "Everybody knew how a scene was to be shot because it was in the screenplay." "The camera movements, the mood and everything was in the screenplay." " Do you have a screenplay of Hitch's?" " Absolutely." "If you read it, you'll see it's all written in." "Did that take away any spontaneity, any ideas people came up with on the day?" "Was there room for things like that?" "Very few things were brought up on the set." "Hitch expected the actors to interpret the scenes, because we hired people whose work he had seen and whom he trusted." "There was very little direction on the set." " And he never went to dailies, did he?" " No." "I went to dailies." "He never did." "Any reason why he never went?" "Did he ever explain that to you?" "No." "I never questioned it." "I guess he trusted George Tomasini, the editor, and myself." "Samuel Taylor, co-screenwriter." "It didn't take me very long to write the screenplay but it took a great deal of time doing the preliminaries, the talking took time." "Hitchcock and I discovered immediately that we liked to talk." "We would sit and talk for hours." "And sometimes sit and not talk for a time." "Hitchcock would always say, "We're letting the engine idle,"" "and we would just sit quietly, sometimes for half an hour, then pick up again." "We did an awful lot of talking before I did any writing, except for the first scene, of course." "Because by the time I had arrived in Los Angeles," "I knew that I wanted to create that character of Midge because I knew that the story would never make any sense unless it had some attachment to reality and humanity." "It had to have somebody who was not involved in the fantasy." "I wrote that scene very quickly." "I told him I was going to and explained why." "He said, "Go ahead." I wrote it, gave it to him." "He said, "Fine."" "From then on, we were off." "But there was an awful lot of time spent in just fooling around." "Hitchcock suggested that I go to San Francisco and look at the scenery, which was fine." "And also, he wanted me to scout a few places that he hadn't quite yet picked." "We went to San Francisco for days and we went down to San Juan de Bautista, and that was exciting." "As soon as I saw that stable, I knew what I was going to write." "But I don't remember that it took that long." "I write fast and I'm sure the screenplay didn't take very long." "But hanging around took long and when you're with Hitchcock, you do hang around, because it's fun." "The important thing about that whole time was how much fun we had." "That's the thing I remember most." "We really had a wonderful time writing that story." "The great fun was being with Hitchcock and talking about the story and talking about the people." "But the emotional impact for me came when I was alone writing." "After all, Hitchcock and I would sit and talk all morning, let's say, usually at the house on Bellagio Road." "We'd have lunch and then I would go back to the studio, or sometimes we'd both go back and I'd go into my office and write." "The writing was where the emotional impact came." "The fun came in the talk." "But when I sat down to write, I became aware immediately..." "I think it was all triggered by my invention of the character of Midge." "I discovered that there were human emotions there that the story had never hinted at." "And as I wrote, it went deeper and deeper and I was enjoying it more and more." "I suddenly found I was writing about two human beings." "You see, this picture is only about three people." "Hitchcock always fills his films with so much humanity and so much artistry" "that it seems sometimes as though there's a great panorama of people." "But actually, this is a story about two people... and the third, the observer." "You cannot tell that story about those two people unless you have the observer to plant it in reality, to say to the audience, "This may seem fantastic but it's not." ""It has to do with real people." ""I'm the person who can tell you that."" "In writing," "I found that I could go deeper and deeper so that the story of this man became a deeply human story and not just a fantasy of a plot." "You see, Hitchcock believed that when a screenplay was finished - if it was the screenplay he wanted - that the picture was finished." "He'd say, "Well, there it is." "Picture's done."" "He said that to me when we'd finished Vertigo." " "The picture's done."" " I said, "What do you mean?"" "He said, "All I have to do is go out and shoot it." ""The picture is done in my mind." ""It's made."" "He knew exactly what he wanted." "He didn't change things." "The only time he changed things in a movie was when the script was weak and he had to." "But with Vertigo, he shot what he had." "Hitchcock never presumed to add dialogue or change dialogue, or at least, never with me." "But the scenes came out of the talks." "He and I would talk in the morning and I would write in the afternoon but he never once said to me," ""Would you rewrite that?"" "Because he knew what the scene was going to be like," "I knew what the scene was going to be like and the actual conversations and dialogue, he accepted completely." "He liked them, so we never had any problem about that." "I would like to talk about the attitude of Hitchcock towards the legitimacy of telling a story." "He used to love to use the phrase, "Ice box talk."" "The thing that I liked best about talking to Hitchcock about problems when you were doing a screenplay was if you raised a problem that didn't seem very important, he'd say, "Oh, that's ice box talk."" "After all, people look at a picture and they go home and they start arguing about things they saw and one says, "I can't quite believe that."" "They'd open the ice box and fish around and while they're eating, they'd talk about that." "That's ice box talk and he said, "That's part of the picture."" "Now, actually, Hitchcock was rarely off-base on those things." "You could always find a reason why there was a Hitchcock touch that startled you." "And he always had a legitimate reason or rather an artistic reason for doing it that worked." "I never caught him out." "Never." "If people wanted to argue about a scene in a picture of his you would find that they were arguing about something that hadn't happened." "They'd seen it wrong." "He knew what he was doing, always." "Hitchcock was awfully good about that sort of thing." "There's an old Hollywood phrase, that the perfect Hollywood story is boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl after all." "A play was written with that title - Boy Meets Girl." "And here you had a situation that Hitchcock and I had both talked about one day as having a lovely irony for us because we were telling a story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets girl again, boy loses girl again." "That rather tickled him in a way." "There is an irony there that we enjoyed but also it's the basic element of the emotional story." "And now back to Bob Harris, Jim Katz and Herbert Coleman." "The marks you see occasionally in the top right-hand corner of the frame as opposed to changeover cues at the end of reels that look like a hatch mark, told the projectionist the line-up for the top of the frame" " for different aspect ratios." " Really?" "Yeah." "That's just a note for those folks that are watching." "Here we are at the woods, which is supposed to be Muir Woods but it's not." "It's not supposed to be Muir Woods." "He wanted to use Muir Woods but you couldn't get in there because the trees are so condensed and the department would not allow us in there because the roots of these trees go right along the top of the ground." "So a lot of traffic walking in Muir Woods would destroy the forest." "So we went to Big Basin up at the hills above Santa Cruz." " That's where this is." " These are process shots." " That was a convenient location." " You mean Santa Cruz?" " Yeah." " Oh, yeah." "I knew that location from a picture we'd made years before," "The Forest Rangers." "The original section of the tree is actually in Muir Woods and this was reproduced on..." "Yeah, but we made no shots in Muir Woods." " This was reproduced on the set." " Yeah, Bummy did this." "Can you tell us more about the tower and how it was designed?" "You said your daughter found..." "She told me about the place." "We had to have a tower because the body had to fall out of a tower and I knew when I saw San Juan Bautista that was going to be our location." "The fact it had no tower wasn't a problem because we could paint it in." "In those days, they had a process - I don't remember its name - but they put a glass in front of the camera and sprayed white on it then through the camera the special effects artist cut out the shape of the tower" "and then they painted in the rest of it." " With the matte painting." " Yeah." "People still go to San Juan Bautista looking for the tower." "My wife and I went there after the big earthquake." "I wanted to see if anything had happened to the San Juan Bautista mission." "I went in and the lady knew me and she said, "Mr Coleman," ""sometimes I wish you'd never made this picture." ""We know the people that come here because of the history of the mission" ""and the ones who come because of your picture."" "I said, "How do you know that?"" "She said, "The ones who come for the picture have two questions." ""Where's the tower and where's the toilet?"" "Herbie, Hitchcock's relationship with Bernard Herrmann went on for quite a while and then ended rather abruptly." "Can you discuss that?" "He had great respect for Bernard Herrmann as he should have, as I do." "Of course, I wasn't with Hitch at the time, Hitch told me the story." "He had told Benny that he didn't want a heavy, dramatic music score" " behind whatever picture..." " I think it was Torn Curtain." "Yet, when they went on the stage to record the music, the first phrase he heard was this loud, dramatic score and he walked out and never spoke to Benny after that as far as I know." "What sort of person was he?" "It depends on where he was and what he was doing." "Away from the scoring, he was very quiet, unless you got into a discussion and then he'd scream at you." "But he was a very easy man to know and a very easy man to like." "Musicians had the greatest respect for him." "The score on the restoration is featured." "Tremendous." "It's almost another star of the film." "This was a difficult decision we had to make when we discovered the tracks - the original floor recordings - because we knew then that we would have to digitise the dialogue tracks and lose the effects in foley and therefore have to recreate them." "And we knew that we would hear from the purists and we knew that it was an important decision but subsequently, we decided to feature the score." " Thank goodness." " And we've been pleased with the reaction of the Vertigo aficionados such as Andy Sarris and Kenny Turan and various critics around the country who at least agreed with us on this point." "We're getting beaten up on the internet over this." "That's why I was sorry I didn't get to talk to the music editor from the San Francisco Chronicle" "because I was so impressed with what you'd done with the music." "It's a beautiful score and it's extremely romantic and there's not much like this around these days and it's interesting to see how the audiences are reacting." "These audiences don't know how the film is going to end and have only seen this film with commercials in between or have seen bad prints over the years." "So it's really been gratifying to sit in an audience and really hear reactions to music and picture and performance." "I'm Steven Smith, the author of the book" "A Heart At Fire's Center:" "The Life And Music Of Bernard Herrmann." "I'm going to talk about that important participant in Vertigo - the composer." "This was the Herrmann's fourth film with Hitchcock." "Already theirs had become one of the closest teamings between a director and composer in the history of film." "They first worked together on The Trouble With Harry in 1955." "It was Herrmann who created the sound we associate with Hitchcock, with scores for Psycho, North By Northwest," "Marnie and certainly Vertigo." "Since his death in 1975," "Herrmann has become one of the most imitated composers in cinema history." "You can hear when someone is borrowing from him since his style was very individual." "His approach was different from his contemporaries." "Unlike Henry Mancini, say, who wrote long, memorable melodies," "Herrmann didn't write those kind of tunes - you don't remember his themes but the colour of his music, the choices of the instrumentation, the repeated patterns or ostinatos." "For example, in Vertigo, think of Carlotta's theme - the habanera with that repeated note for harp and those eerie flutes." "Or think of the main title, with its swirling, repeated patterns - obsessively repeated patterns - in just a few minutes Herrmann has told you what the film is about - obsession." "The music can't resolve itself any more than Scottie can find his emotional footing in the film." "Herrmann did his own orchestrations to make sure the colour of the music was right." "He was dismissive of composers who relied on orchestrators." "He was lucky to have found his musical voice early in life, when he was in his late teens." "He was born in 1911 in New York City, he studied at Juilliard and New York University and he was always drawn to iconoclasts, people who stood outside the system like the American composer Charles Ives who experimented with dissonance," "and the Australian Percy Grainger, who was one of his teachers." "During the Depression, when most musicians struggled to make a living," "Herrmann found steady employment and a perfect creative outlet at CBS Radio in New York." "He said he learned to be a film composer working in radio, because each week, he had to score a new programme in just a few days with very little money and often very few musicians." "CBS was also where Herrmann met the man who would change his career " "Orson Welles, who was just four years his senior." "Welles was about 21 when they met, and, despite the many battles they would have, they were a perfect team." "Welles gave Herrmann the freedom to experiment on his radio shows and Welles made Herrmann's film career possible in a single night " "October 30, 1938, when they teamed up on The War Of The Worlds." "It was such a sensational broadcast that it gained Welles a film contract, one with total control over whatever film he wanted to make." "Welles insisted, against studio opinions, on bringing Herrmann to Hollywood to score the film that became Citizen Kane." "In his first film score Herrmann established a method of working, well ahead of its time - he would visit the film set, discuss the cues with Welles during shooting." "Some of the film was shot to playbacks of the music." "Herrmann said the famous finale showing Rosebud was shot to his music." "Unlike many wall-to-wall scores of the late '30s, early '40s," "Citizen Kane used many short music cues, typical of Herrmann, and orchestrations specific to the characters and the setting " "he never used the full orchestra just because it was available." "The Citizen Kane score was nominated for an Oscar." "Benny lost, but to his second film score, for The Devil And Daniel Webster also known as All That Money Can Buy." "In the same year as that Oscar win, 1942," "Herrmann met Alfred Hitchcock at the Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles." "They talked about working together and Benny was very excited about that but 13 years passed before they finally worked together." "Why?" "Well, Hitchcock was working under producer David O Selznick, and Selznick oversaw the music of those films," "Hitchcock had very little involvement in the musical decisions." "When Hitchcock was his own producer, he did choose the composers." "He worked several times with Dimitri Tiomkin but Tiomkin's work dissatisfied him after a while and he looked elsewhere." "Hitchcock worked with Lyn Murray on the 1955 film To Catch A Thief and Lyn Murray was a friend of Bernard Herrmann." "Mr Murray later claimed that he suggested Benny for The Trouble With Harry and Herrmann and Hitchcock hit it off immediately, they had a similar artistic sensibility, and a shared love of stories about obsessive behaviour and characters." "They also had a similar sense of humour, which was useful." "Hitchcock's favourite Herrmann score was The Trouble With Harry." "He felt it perfectly fit the black comedy of the film." "Any composer will tell you how difficult it is to score a comedy well." "Herrmann did something few composers had done in Hitchcock's films - he really brought out the subtext, he didn't just play the level of the action, the way Tiomkin did in Strangers On A Train." "Herrmann heightened the psychological underpinnings of the story, which is why Vertigo and Psycho are two of the most powerful scores ever written." "They manage to heighten the mystery while also giving a sense of being inside the characters." "Benny would say the first job of a film composer was to get inside the characters." "He also once told an interviewer," ""Hitchcock only finishes a picture 60%, I have to finish it for him."" "That may sound arrogant but I think Benny had the breakdown correct." "The teaming survived for 11 years." "I say "survived" because Herrmann was not easy to work with and Hitchcock was an opinionated artist but the two really respected each other and for most of their collaboration," "Hitchcock would let Herrmann do exactly what he wanted in the score." "Two examples from Vertigo - for the climactic love scene where Judy appears as Madeleine" "Hitchcock wrote in his notes, "We should let all traffic noises fade" ""because Mr Herrmann may have something to say here."" "Also, in his notes about the opening rooftop chase," "Hitchcock outlines his sound plan then writes," ""All of this will naturally depend upon what music" ""Mr Herrmann puts over this sequence."" "Hitchcock did have one specific suggestion - he tracked down the music for a 1920 stage production of James Barrie's play Mary Rose, which was another story of a lost love." "He had seen and adored this play in London when he was 21." "He never forgot the score - it used "a background sound effect," ""probably a record offstage, of eerie music " ""angels singing and a low, moaning wind."" "Herrmann didn't use any singing angels but that quality of sound that Hitchcock describes can certainly be perceived in the Vertigo score." "Herrmann makes a musical allusion of his own in Vertigo, when he paraphrases a famous passage from Wagner's opera Tristan Und Isolde." "To be very clear about this, Herrmann despised musical plagiarism, he certainly is not stealing from Wagner, he's making a very sophisticated connection between Vertigo and Wagner's opera, the myth it is drawn from," "which is another story intertwining love and death, about a powerful alchemy that brings two people tragically together." "You hear the Wagner influence most clearly in the love scene, where Herrmann's love theme echoes Wagner's Liebestod, which means "love death", so the parallel is obvious, since Vertigo is about a man who is in love with someone who is dead." "The sequence is also extraordinary for the way Hitchcock eliminated dialogue and sound effects and gave Herrmann the entire soundtrack, something that rarely happens today." "It shows the confidence that Hitchcock had in Herrmann." "Benny was fond of telling people that Hitch told him," ""We'll just have the camera and you."" "Another intelligent, if more obvious, use of classical music in Vertigo is the Mozart and Bach Midge listens to and plays for Scottie, which further links her character to the world of reason, music that is organised and classical in the literal sense." "It's very different from the uncontrollable passions we hear in Herrmann's music, that speaks for the other characters." "One thing you won't hear is a theme song, though Paramount Pictures tried to convince Hitchcock to include one." "They hired Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, who had written the Oscar-winning song Que Sera Sera for The Man Who Knew Too Much, where it works very well." "They wrote a song called - what else?" " Vertigo." "Hitchcock decided not to use it and I can only imagine Benny's great relief." "Herrmann was frustrated when it came to the recording by a musicians' strike." "The music couldn't be recorded in the US with him supervising." "Instead it was done in Vienna until the musicians there went out on strike in sympathy and it was finally finished in London." "The conductor in both venues was the British film veteran Muir Mathieson but Herrmann expressed dissatisfaction with the conducting, claiming Mathieson did a sloppy job and it was filled with mistakes." "What is fortunate is that the strike is the reason part of the score is in stereo." "The Vienna sessions were recorded in stereo, and many of the key sequences of the film were done there." "You may think Herrmann felt as strongly about Vertigo as its admirers do and it was one of his favourite projects but he did not think the film was perfect." "He said, "They shouldn't have made it in San Francisco or with Jimmy Stewart " ""I don't believe he'd be that wild about any woman." ""It should have been an actor like Charles Boyer," ""set in a hot, sultry climate." ""When I wrote the picture, I thought of that."" "Nearly 20 years later, Herrmann got his wish, in a way, when he scored Brian De Palma's Obsession, which is a partial remake of Vertigo that is set in a hot, sultry climate." "Of the two films, Herrmann actually preferred Obsession." "In that film, he quotes from the Vertigo score at one point, quite directly, for a scene in which Cliff Robertson is standing at the grave of his lost love." "Very few critics in 1958 commented on Vertigo's score and that disappointed Herrmann - he felt that film music was very overlooked in America." "Years later, he summed up the project by saying," ""We liked it but even in the States," ""people thought vertigo was a backache."" "These days people are better informed about both the film and the landmark contribution made by the music of Bernard Herrmann." "And now back to Bob Harris, Jim Katz and Herbert Coleman." "Can you tell us about the history of the tower shots and the vertigo shots?" "You told us the first time we spoke, two and a half years ago, that there was some experimentation going on." "Irmin Roberts, who used to do almost all of my second unit photography..." "We'd tried everything anybody could think of." "Irmin said to me, "If you can get me one of those bomber bays,"" "you know, from underneath those big bombers..." " Like a plastic canopy?" " That round thing the gunner sat in." "He said, "I've got an idea that might work."" "We couldn't find one." "I asked Jimmy Stewart to use his influence and he did." "We got one, and Irmin kept using it and came up with the idea of backtracking with the camera and changing the focus." " On the zoom?" " On the zoom." "And that's how they got those effects." "And this is another incredible shot, the matte shot." "It's combined with Jimmy walking out downstairs..." "There's so much going on in this shot yet it looks so static." "You can see the people coming up looking for the body and Jimmy going off - quite extraordinary." "There's a story about Jimmy seeing the body falling." "Hitch wanted a shot from Jimmy's point of view of the camera going down to the body." "I had Doc Erickson get me a big crane with a cage on it." "We put the VistaVision camera on it." "We had a double lying on the rooftop and we had lowered this camera very slowly down to this body until it filled the screen, then backed it up and then had it freefall down to the full length picture of the body." "The most dangerous thing I ever did." "The way the operator was able to do it is he wrapped white tape around the cable from the part where it had to stop back up the cable from where he started." "And he hit that mark exactly every time." "We couldn't do it with the camera running slow motion because there were leaves and things moving." " This shot was done in the studio?" " Right, yes." "Tell the story about that." "Originally you or Henry Bumstead wanted to shoot it on location so the light would come in from the sides." "It was always scheduled for the studio." "We wouldn't bring all those people up there when you can build it cheaply." "One note on the restoration process - the yellow layer fading can be seen on the restoration because we used adapted interpositives from the original camera negative." "All of these suits, which were navy blue, grey or black are all various shades of blue now." "Some actually go to marine blue with clown blue highlights." "We could have gone to the black and white separations but they did not fit together, were dirty and grainy and we lost the highlights in Jimmy's eyes and things like that." "It's always a toss-up, do you go for better colour or do you go to sharpness, and which better represents, though neither can represent..." " You went for sharpness." " We went for the sharpness in this shot." "Sometimes we'd go for colour, sometimes sharpness, it just depended on the sequence." " Henry Jones is wonderful here." " He was very good." "He's the man everyone hates when this scene arrives." "The way they're treating Jimmy Stewart." "This was really a different role for Jimmy Stewart." "You think audiences had a tough time accepting him in this role?" "Absolutely not." "He was believable from the opening scene to the end of it." " He was totally believable." " He was sort of an icon." "He was perceived, I think, by audiences as a totally different person both through the roles he played and the publicity that was put out on him over the years." "In some of the reviews they commented on his playing against character or type in this particular picture and he rarely did it after this." "He was an amazing actor, he had a tremendous career." "The scene with Gavin Elster and Scottie by the window is also important because this was a time Scottie could have gotten away but Elster very cleverly seduces him once again." "He roped him in again." "There's a shot coming up - walking to Madeleine's grave in the cemetery - for which the negative was totally gone, the skies had gone bright yellow in any prints we were able to pull." "We went to the black and white separations which would not fit together and you can see, even on video, they're going to be soft to a point where the markings on the grave are almost unreadable." "Mr Coleman explains how he was hired by Alfred Hitchcock on Rear Window." "The production office called me in and asked me to go out the next morning with the art director Mac Johnson," "to discuss the sets with Mr Hitchcock." "He was doing Dial M For Murder." "We arrived early in the morning and he was rehearsing a scene with Ray Milland and Grace Kelly." "We stood on the side until the rehearsal was over, then Mac introduced us." "Mr Hitchcock didn't offer to shake hands - he never shook hands with anybody." "I said, "It's been rumoured that you're going to make this picture" ""as you made Rope - one reel at a time."" "He said, "You'll decide how many days I need for the picture" ""when you've read the screenplay."" "I knew that he had said, "Send him out, let me see how he parts his hair."" "That was the start of it." "Can we talk about the nightmare sequence in which Jimmy is dreaming?" "Were there different versions of this?" "Was it scripted or did Hitch simply say, "Go and make a nightmare sequence?"" "How was this put together, and the animation also?" "The actual screenplay did not contain all the information, as it usually did, about the way the camera should be used or the way the light should be used." "This scene is credited to John Ferren." "The main title says, "Special sequence by John Ferren."" "This is the only one we could think of that he might have done." "Mr Coleman recalls his first day on the set of Rear Window." "The very first day on the production of Rear Window," "I shot from Jimmy Stewart's viewpoint of the whole stage." "We had, I guess altogether, about 150-200 people and early in the morning I had warned all the people - most of them knew me, because we'd worked together - that I was going to ask for quiet, as I always did," "and if people around you didn't respond, please say, "Herbie has asked for quiet."" "I thought we understood each other and when Mr Hitchcock was ready to make the first rehearsal, he had to walk down a long walkway to speak to Jesslyn Fax." "He was about halfway down and I'd asked for quiet two or three times." "All of a sudden I yelled "Quiet!" So loud it shook the stage." "Mr Hitchcock turned around and said, "Mr Coleman, I don't need it quiet."" "I said, "Mr Hitchcock, I do."" "We became, I guess, friendly from that moment on." "How did Hitch feel about the public and how did the reviews, which were not great when they came out, affect him on a personal basis?" "He almost never read the Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter." "Those were never seen in his office." "He didn't talk very much about the audience reaction to his films." "Can you talk about the flashback sequence being in and out, and in and out?" "I know from the notes we got - the printing continuities - that when the negative was cut initially it was not in the film, it was printed as a separate unit and release cut in." "What was going on there with that whole... the flashback with the secret of the story being given away?" "I can't believe that's true that that was printed as a separate unit." "We wouldn't have had to bring the prints back from all over the US of that reel and recut it..." "This was for the first few prints, the first half dozen." "No, the first time I saw the print was with the sequence in and we'd never had any other idea until Joan Harrison came up with the idea that the scene should be out." "It was cut into the prints but it was physically cut in - but it was not part of the original negative, it was a separate unit." "Did Joan Harrison have his ear?" "Joan, Alma and Hitch had been friends way back, since Hitch's early days in London." "When Hitch came to America, she came along with Alma and Hitch and worked with Alma all the time on the screenplays of the pictures Hitch did." "And now Mr Coleman picks up the story of the flashback sequence." "One day I walked in the office, Hitch was there already." "He said, "I'm a little worried about having that scene" ""when Judy goes into the tower," ""showing Eldridge throwing his wife's body out."" "I said, "What are you talking about?" He said, "I'd like to take that scene out."" "I said, "It's impossible, you'd ruin the picture taking that out."" "He said, "I really would like to see it with it out."" "I said, "The prints are all over the US ready for exhibition."" "He said, "Still, I'd like to see it."" "I told George to take the scene out and we'd take a look at it and we invited Jimmy and Gloria, Sam Taylor and Suzanne, almost everybody who had been on the picture and arranged a room for one particular night." "We ran the picture with that scene out and when the lights came on there wasn't a sound in the theatre." "Not one mumble except Joan Harrison jumped up and yelled," ""How can anybody want the picture any other ways but this?", knowing my feeling about the picture." "I walked over to the side away from everybody, and Hitch came over and joined me and I said, "Hitch, you can't believe that."" "And he said, "I think she's right."" "I said, "Listen to these people - not a sound from anybody." ""That should tell you what they think."" "We started arguing until he'd had enough of my arguing and he said," ""Release the picture this way."" " Then it went to Paramount?" " That was at Paramount." "Then it went to the brass in New York." "To go a little further back, before we cut the scene and had that showing" "Barney Balaban had come out and seen the picture with that scene in and gone back to New York raving about it, this being Hitchcock's very best picture." "And then we took that scene out." "We had to bring that reel back from everywhere in the country and Benny had to make changes in the music." "It cost a lot of money, took a lot of time." "And we finally got it back in shape and sent the reels out again." "Barney Balaban had a running for the top critics in New York, and the next day these critics called Balaban and said this is not a great Hitchcock picture, it's the worst picture he ever made." "And Barney Balaban got on the phone and called us at the studio demanding to talk to Hitch, and Hitch was up at the ranch." "Balaban said, "I want Hitchcock in Jack Cardiff's office tomorrow at 9am."" "So I got on the telephone and sent a car up to the ranch, had to get tickets for Hitch and Alma at the airport in San Francisco, then I called Hitch and told him he had to be in Jack's office the next morning," "it was about the scene we took out, he said, "Have you called Lew Wasserman?"" "I said, "No, I haven't and I don't think you should either."" "So Hitch had to be in Jack's office the next morning." "At 9:18" " I looked at my watch - I heard his secretary say," ""Good morning, Mr Hitchcock," and he didn't answer." "He was in the outer office looking into my office." "He said, "Put the picture back the way you had it," and walked into his office." "And we didn't speak for about a week." "The picture had to be put back the way it was with the scene in." "Do you think he really believed it was better without that flashback scene?" "I don't think so." "As a matter of fact, after our argument, I walked out." "I started for my office and I heard footsteps." "I stopped and Jimmy Stewart came running after me." "He said, "You shouldn't get so angry at Hitch."" "I said, "Was I right or was Hitch right?" He said, "You were."" "I said, "Why didn't you speak up?" "You know he respects your opinion."" "Jimmy said, "It's not worth it, Herbie."" "He said, "Let's go for dinner," and I said, "Not with me."" "That scene, going in and out, was basically our nemesis on this restoration." "In order to duplicate the shots of going into the tower, et cetera, in the '50s, you had to go from the original negative to black and white separation masters which are three filtered black and white positives," "which basically capture the spectrum of colour and then you make a new dupe negative from those." "What they had to do was go from the camera negatives - all in VistaVision - to black and white masters, separations, and then to dupe negatives, combining the scene that you'll see in a moment of Jimmy at the door," "camera moving to Judy, the screen getting darker, then going in and out of the flashback and dissolving." "The two dissolves are part of this, which were unbalanced in 1958 - they weren't done totally perfectly." "The problem is that the dupe negative faded and by the time we got it, and it was cut into the original negative - although it was a third generation element - that unit provided picture that was basically blue and orange," "we couldn't use it." "The black and white separation masters that were made on the entire picture included that section as a dupe of a dupe and once you go through two sets of black and white separations you have total corruption of the colour - green the size of golf balls " "and those separations were fourth generation." "We had to take those - the only thing that survived, as original negatives were either elsewhere in the film or junked - and produce a VistaVision dupe-dupe negative from the masters and a VistaVision interpositive from those which was sixth generation" " then a 65mm dupe-dupe-dupe negative." " My goodness!" "That was 7th generation and the 70mm prints are 8th generation." "The majority of this transfer is being made from a 65mm interpositive, which is produced from the restoration negative but we're trying to go back two generations on that sequence and just clean it up a little bit for the video transfer" "by going off of a Vista element." "But in the new stocks, it doesn't make that much difference since the stocks are so good and all the damage was done by the time the second set of separations were done in the fourth generation element." "In order not to disturb the eye of the audience the picture will gradually go from eight generations back down to four with a stop in the middle at six, so that when she touches the grey suit in the closet you see a little bump" "which brings it back to the level we'd been viewing for most of the picture." "You can see that in the reconstructed print?" "But going into it we jump from fourth generation to eighth generation." "We discussed it, and it's one of those situations where..." "We've been saying for years the problems with Eastmancolor negatives and I think it's part of public awareness." "It's the one area where we wanted it to show through a little bit, the degradation of the negative element." "It's the one point where the audience sees the difference between a restored image and something off just a plain, surviving element." "We could have used some digital technology to help it a bit but, as it turns out, the costs are astronomical..." "There's the dupe cutting in." "But with the cost of the digital technology at about $1,000 a frame, we figured we were better off leaving it the way it was as a sort of reminder to people as to what can happen to these films" "and what this film would have looked like in a year or two all the way through." "The improvement wouldn't have been that great digitally, so we left it." "You can see when the dupe first comes on, as you look in the highlights in Kim's eyes, they're not duplicated, but duplicated twice, they're all over the place." "How did Kim handle the transformations?" " It was amazing." " Was she different with the dark hair as opposed to the light hair?" "On the set, when you talked to her?" "No, she was rather a recluse." "She didn't mix very much with the people." "This particular costume that she's wearing we have in our office." "We used it as a colour reference and it was really strange because everybody who came into the office wanted to try it on." "Kim Novak." "From my point of view, when I first read those lines where she says, "I want you to love me for me,"" "and all the talking in that scene," "I just identified it with so much because going to Hollywood as a young girl and suddenly finding they want to make you over totally, it's such a total change and it was like I was always fighting to show some of myself," "feeling that I wanted to be there as well." "It was like they'd do my hair and go and redo a bunch of things." "So I really identified with the fact of someone that was being made over with the resentment, with wanting to." "Needing approval and wanting to be loved and willing, eventually, to go to any lengths to get that by changing her hair and all of these different things." "And then when Judy appears, it's another story and then when she has to go through that change." "I really identified with the movie because it was saying," ""Please, see who I am." ""Fall in love with me."" "There was nothing phoney about Jimmy Stewart from the minute he walked on." "That, for me, was the most comforting thing." "I felt so assured knowing that he was there." "He was a great support." "All he'd have to do is reach out and touch my hand and I'd feel energised with love and trust." "He's just a simple, beautiful, true, honest human being." "He has all the qualities that anyone could ever want in a man." "I do recall one story that is interesting." "Hitch would write some scenes that I didn't quite understand," "I didn't understand how they got from A to B or C to D and I asked him and he said," ""In a mystery you never want to reveal exactly how you arrived at something,"" "and I said, "But there's a scene that bothers me, it doesn't make sense."" "He said, "That's the point, my dear."" "It was as if something shouldn't add up and that will help the audience participate more." "Hitch had a wonderful way of not having things, not wanting things to add up exactly." "You couldn't keep score and say if she goes to A and B, you will..." "C will be expected." "He loved to move things around and not always totally justify a scene on purpose, to keep the audience alert and to keep them participating." "Hitch just really wanted you to work as you're watching it just as much and be involved in it." "He'd make things make sense but at the same time there were often things that didn't." "Some scenes he said, "It really doesn't matter."" "Henry Bumstead, art director." "Hitch worked with a writer in his office and he went over everything and in Hitch's mind..." "He might suggest colour now and then to me but it was basically my colour and of course I talked colours over with Bob Burks," "I've always tried to stay close to the cameraman." "They can cause you a lot of problems if they get on a set and they don't like the colour of it and then the company is held up." "I think the second picture that I did, that would be Vertigo, and Hitch was sitting in his chair and I was sitting next to him and the lip was out and he was frowning and I said," ""Hitch, what are you thinking about?"" "And Hitch's reply was, "I'm thinking about my next film." ""This is terribly boring."" "He had that picture so well in his mind, he really resented - and many times he told me - he resented the time it took to light a set." "The cameraman would have four or five hours with the actors and he has two." "Hitch never started filming before nine, it was marvellous." "I could go into the studio at six in the morning and do all my work and still be over there when Hitch arrived on the set." "And he always went home early, five, five-thirty." "He got his day's work and..." "I think every film he did he was very much into it." "It's not like somebody gave him a script, he had worked for maybe weeks or months on this script and he knew every scene in it and to substantiate that, he never went to dailies." "Hitch never went to dailies and I asked him once and he said," ""I was sitting by the camera, I saw what I got." ""Why do I have to go to dailies?"" "The only time he'd look at anything was if there was a problem in the print or in the lighting, then he might come and look to see whether it was OK or not." "Many times he would bring Alma, his wife." "He listened to her." "If Alma said it was OK, it was OK with Hitch." "It was a collaborative adventure between the two of them." "Hitch always had certain things on each film that he was adamant about and I think that's when maybe a picture..." "Two or three times during a picture, certain scenes, he would make a rough sketch, which I still have some, fortunately, and he wanted this or that." "They were very rough, believe me." "So I would do just what he said only I would elaborate on it and make it much more sophisticated than what he drew." "Cos Hitch was an art director at one time, back here at UFA." "He did do that and the rest of the picture was up to you." "He didn't want to go look at locations and I remember on Vertigo, and I had this big tower set and everything..." "You've got 100 people working and they all come to the stage in the morning and if things aren't right, what do you do if he doesn't like it?" "So I told Herbie Coleman - and I was working on the set till the last minute " "I said, "Would you ask Hitch if he'd come over here tonight?"" "So pretty soon Herbie returned and he said," ""I asked Hitch if he wanted to look at your set" ""and he turned to me and said, 'ls Bummy a professional?"'" "And Herbie said, "Well, yeah."" "He said, "Then why do I have to look at the set?"" "That was it." "I was very lucky, he came in and liked it, so I crossed another hurdle." "When you did try to show Hitch sets, if you ever did get him on location, you always arrived late and then you had a big lunch then there was no time to look at sets, so you'd have to show him something on the way back to the airport" "and you would ask the driver to slow down and you'd say, "Over on the right, that gothic building,"" "and the head would go like that and he'd say, "That's fine, along those lines, Bummy."" "Although I did take pictures and showed him." "Herbert Steinberg, former Paramount director of advertising and publicity." "During Vertigo I was the director of advertising and publicity at Paramount studios." "When Hitchcock started the film," "I assigned the unit publicity man, the unit publicist, and I also supervised the still photography, so that we would have the material to advertise and publicise the picture when it was released." "And so I had almost daily conversations with Hitch to tell him what we were doing and how we were approaching the picture and, of course, he had a brilliant advertising and publicity mind." "He had been an art director, he drew beautifully." "And so he was very helpful, he would actually sketch some of the things that we photographed." "Hitchcock had a say in the marketing of the film in that he designated San Francisco as the place to premiere it, he designated who he would like to have there for the opening," "who would lend most to the publicity of the film." "He also was very helpful in the design of the advertising, the unique, like the vortex theme that ran through the advertising." "That was Hitch's innovation." "Hitch's favourite restaurant in San Francisco was Ernie's and of course when he came in they treated him like royalty." "So we had the post-premiere party there at Hitch's insistence and they turned everything out like you can't believe." "They had all of his favourite dishes, they had caviar, they had champagne and, of course, Hitch's wine." "The press just had a wonderful time, largely because it was a good movie and there was nothing to cover." "The party reflected the mood that was left by the movie." "It was one of the more successful post-premiere parties of its time." "As far as the studio was concerned," "Hitchcock could have called the picture anything, they weren't gonna argue with him." "You just didn't argue with Hitchcock, once he'd made his mind up, that was it." "They were just so happy to get a Hitchcock picture in the can, they went along with what Hitchcock wanted." "Hitch was not difficult." "Among all of the personalities that I worked with over the years - directors, writers, producers, actors, actresses " "he was as cooperative and as understanding of what your job was and as long as you did your job professionally, he went right along with you." "In the later years, I had lunch with him every Friday in his private office." "We went to Boston one day, this was on a tour that we did - an eleven-city tour - with a private jet." "To tell you how dedicated he was to doing what you thought was good for the movie," "we selected ten cities in the United States and we hired this jet, private jet - it was just he and I in the jet and the pilots " "and we flew to Dallas," "Atlanta, Washington," "New York, Boston," "Chicago, St Louis, Denver - ten cities - and we would set him up in the morning in a set and invite the television critics in to set up their own interview." "We had one camera and we just put different cassettes in each time and he did as many as 10-12 interviews a day." "It took a period of about 12 days." "We finally got to Boston and we got in kind of late." "There's a restaurant in Boston called Jimmy's at the Pier," "I don't know if it's still there or not, and they knew Hitch, he had been there before." "And we literally opened the restaurant at about ten o'clock at night." "They opened it for him so that he would have dinner." "They served him fish, he liked fish." "When it was all over, Hitch said, "What kind of fish was that?"" "And the said, "Grey sole."" "He had been eating Dover sole most of the time but this was very good." "He arranged for a shipment of grey sole to come in from Boston every Friday morning on American Airlines." "He sent his driver out to pick up the package - in ice - bring it to the studio, where they would prepare it the way he liked it, and we would have grey sole for lunch every Friday." "This went on for years." "With his shoestring potatoes which he picked up with his hand, put on his plate and his little glass of wine." "He was just amazing." "He was that casual and that warm when you got to know him." "Patricia Hitchcock O'Connell daughter of Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville." "The thing I remember most was the opening of Vertigo in San Francisco." "We had it up there because of Ernie's restaurant and they became close friends of ours." "It was rather a sad period too because my mother had been taken to the hospital and had been diagnosed with cancer, luckily, if there is such a thing, a minor form and fully recovered but my father was sort of a basket case that whole time" "so it was a little nerve-racking trying to keep everything serene and calm at the opening of Vertigo up in San Francisco." "My mother was involved with my father's pictures from the word go." "She had been actually in the business longer than he had." "They met in England and she was already working in pictures and he was doing titles - drawing the titles for silent movies." "As a result, when he became a director and was able to pick his own stories - he would find a book or a story - the first person to read it would be my mother." "If she didn't think it made a movie, he never touched it." "If she thought it had possibilities, he'd have a treatment written." "Early on, she did work on a lot of the treatments." "Then she would be involved in the selections of the writer and even, to quite an extent, the cast." "So she had a tremendous amount of input." "In fact, when she died, Charles Champlin said about her," ""The Hitchcock touch had four hands and two of them were Alma's."" "I think he was just trying to make a very good movie, which is exactly what he did with every other movie." "I think today people want to see things in his pictures and he says that's wonderful." "My oldest daughter took a course on him when she was at college and she'd go to him and say, they said that in this movie you used the number seven and this and that." "He said, "No, I was just trying to make a movie."" "That's the whole thing, let people get from a movie what they want." "Not everybody is going to see every movie the same way." "And that was fine with him." "He didn't mind anybody delving in, shall we say?" "He just wanted to make a movie that would be enjoyable to everybody and that's what happened." "When Vertigo first came out," "I don't think it was the success that my father hoped it was going to be, either financially or critically." "It seems that it's only been in, I would say the last 20 years, that it really has come into its own, so to speak." "I think people are seeing things in it which, as he said, that's wonderful." "Everybody that buys a ticket to a movie can see whatever they want to see in the movie." "That's the fascinating thing and it's fascinating to me that this is almost, not a cult, but it's fascinating to see how people now think this is a marvellous movie when they really didn't think it was at the time." "Peggy Robertson, script supervisor." "Hitch said to me once that his definition of happiness was a clear horizon." "There was no clouds." "He hated arguments, would never get into them." "If he wanted something, it would be carried out." "If he wanted" " I'm talking about the set now, not the personal life." "Personal life was as happy and blissful as one could imagine." "Hitch and Alma and their daughter Pat were a wonderful family." "Working with him was wonderful because he knew exactly what he wanted." "We had a sketch of every camera movement and this was circulated to everyone who was in charge of..." "The sound man got a copy, the camera operator, the lighting photographer, everyone had a copy of what the shots were going to be so they could all prepare so there was no excuse for wasted time." "You had to know your job, you had to know what you were doing but he was just wonderful." "Everyone adored him, we used to talk about him incessantly." "After shooting, we'd go to have a drink or just sit around and talk about him." "And talk to him with the families too, with our husbands and wives we would discuss him " ""You know what he said today?"" "We would tell jokes, it was a wonderful atmosphere." "As he said, he never worked with horrible people, he always had nice people around and the crew were wonderful." "Everyone worked together, we were all working to get a good film." "Jimmy Stewart was a wonderful actor for Hitch to work with, one of his very favourite ones." "Hitch, right from the beginning, loved Jimmy." "They were friends to begin with." "He was a complete professional in his job, he always came on the set learning his lines." "He knew his lines, what he was supposed to do and what his part was." "Anything he had to say he would whisper to Hitch and Hitch would whisper to him." "And now back to Bob Harris, Jim Katz and Herbert Coleman." "We should get into this scene a little bit, where he's taking her back to the mission." "We had a lot of problems with this scene technically." "What you are looking at is fourth generation, obviously, with the matte shot." "This is all fourth generation." "Actually, starting with this shot, we are in..." "We're still working off the camera negative, with adjusted gamma, and we go for only two or three shots and then when we hit the close-up of the tower, we go to the black and white separations." " For the rest of the film?" " For the rest of the film." "As it worked, with all the studios until the last two or three years, separations would be produced, paid for and vaulted and never, ever looked at or checked and we're dealing with separations here that are totally defective." "The first half of the ending, the gamma is too high, which is yielding a higher than normal contrast." "You'll see things like Jimmy's collar shining." "This is the first black and white separation shot." "The rest of the film is off of black and white masters but his collar is glowing and the contrast is much too high." "It's almost like the orthochromatic look of Al Jolson's gloves in the Jazz Singer." "And then you get about halfway in, and I'll tell you precisely when it occurs, that we go to the third section of separations - actually, the second section of separations " "in this roll because they're short units and the gamma is then too low and it's very flat and we had problems there and we've tried to adjust it on video." "You can hide a number of sins on video, which you can't photographically but I think you can still see where there are problems with the contrast and matching between the two sections." "Do you think the audience would ever see that?" "A lot of people would." "If we don't try to do the best possible job and put up the best that we can from the materials that are available, sure, the audience might not catch every nuance but we see it." "No one can ever accuse you of being careless with what you did because it's so beautiful." "They're worrisome to us and dubbing this in the Hitchcock Theatre, we're dealing with a lot of ghosts and we have a responsibility to the memory of people and the actors who are still around..." "We had some projection problems in New York and a few in Washington and Pat said, "It's just my father having a little joke."" "But this scene, as they're going up the tower, was controversial in the restoration because we've been accused of making it too dark and by checking the notes and checking various..." "Checking the 1958 prints." " It was very dark." " We intended it to be dark." "It basically showed only flickers of her earring as you can see there." "On a couple of shots." "He wanted only to see the necklace and the earrings sparkle, see bits of Jimmy's shirt and as they passed the portals, you could see a bit of moonlight outside." "And then you can see a little bit more." "This is the scene where we go to the other separations and you'll notice we're trying to fix it in video as we can but it is a lower contrast image." "And it should be dark because the violence is implied and it's much more moving and much more dramatic" "by not seeing anything." "Today, we would see her hair messed up, bruises on her face, a torn dress and torn stockings and..." "Yet it's very Japanese in a way..." " We don't want to see those things." " No, we don't." "But if this film was being made today, that's what we would see." "It just works so well the way it was shot and the way it plays in the dark." "One of the interesting things to me is that the performances are so unbelievable." "They were apparently the best that were obtained and these scenes are not out of focus but the action is not in focus, the background is in focus." "Hitch must have decided to do it this way." "And he's solving the crime, we're seeing her being pulled up to the tower and he's getting over his vertigo, there's so much happening in this trip up the tower it's incredible and it builds to the unbelievable crescendo..." "Getting back to the scene being dark, and a couple of critics mentioned it," " it's interesting..." " This leg shot was very important." "Looking at it on the old videos, it's very bright." "It's almost like people in the '70s and '80s were afraid of making something dark on a TV screen but a lot of critics must have seen it on video or in reissue, where it was wrong." "In the reissue of Man Who Knew Too Much, they left out all the fade-outs and fade-ins." "There was a critic who commented on it..." "We take this personally..." "This is a critic for whom we have great respect." "We sent him some clips from the..." "From a 1958 dye transfer print." "Which showed how some frames were completely black." " He criticised it being so dark?" " Being dark." "He thought it was dark." "That's what we wanted." "We went for that." "They talk about an alternate ending but we like to call it an extended ending that we found as we were going through the negative of the picture." "Do you remember anything about that?" "You mean Elster being convicted of murder and all that?" "It was a very simple shot and it was in Midge's apartment we heard Gavin Elster was apprehended." "This is one of the most dramatic endings to a picture..." " This was Sam Taylor's idea." " Really?" "And it was different, this was so..." " I mean the bell tolling." " It's a brilliant idea." "He's a brilliant writer." "After seeing it, it was definitely worth the two and a half years we put into it and to see it with an audience today is really satisfying and to keep the memory of Hitchcock alive." "We should thank you, Herbie, for all the work you did on the picture." "I did very little." "I answered the telephone." "Well, thanks for answering the telephone." "I was happy to do it and especially now having seen what you've done with it." "Commentary credits:" "MCA/Universal Home Video, executive in charge of production, Colleen Benn." "Produced by Laurent Bouzereau." "Edited by Pete Kanazer, image Entertainment." "In addition to those featured in the commentary, we wish to thank:" "Harrison Engle and Signal Hill Entertainment," "Andrew London, Michelle Montanez, Joseph McBride," "Marlene Noble, Jeffrey Sakson," "Pacific Ocean Post and Chase Productions, Inc." "PAL English"