An Interview with David Brady
Q. First, Mr. Hitchcock, I wonder if you would tell us why you consider the chase so important in films?
A. Well, for one thing, the chase seems to me the final expression of the motion picture medium. Where but on the screen can automobiles be shown careening around corners after each other? Then, too, the movie is the natural vessel for the chase story because the basic film shape is continuous. Once a movie starts it goes right on. You don’t stop it for scene changes, or to go out and have a cigarette.
Q. You think, then, that the chase may be the best way to exploit the possibilities of the camera?
A. I do, yes. I would say the chase is almost indigenous to movie technique as a whole.
Q. Before we go on, maybe it would be a good idea for you to define the term “chase.”
A. Well, essentially, the chase is someone running toward a goal, often with the antiphonal motion of someone fleeing a pursuer. Probably the fox hunt would be the simplest form of the chase. Now if you substitute a girl for the fox, and put a boy in place of the hunters, you have the boy-chases-girl variation. Or substituting again, the police chasing a criminal. So long as a plot has either flight or pursuit, it may be considered a form of the chase. In many ways the chase makes up about 60 percent of the construction of all movie plots.
Q. Would you say, for instance, that Hamlet is a chase?
A. I’d say there’s certainly a chase in Hamlet because Hamlet is a detective.
Q. If you broaden the term enough, perhaps the dramatic form itself is a chase?
A. I think perhaps it is.
Q. Would Macbeth be a chase, Macbeth being the evil-doer who is pursued by fate?
A. Well, yes, but the moment you make fate the pursuer you’re getting a little abstract.
Q. Then you wouldn’t take it that far?
A. No, I wouldn’t. But I think any aim, any goal in a movie story to be reached, would come under the heading of the chase.
Q. Now what about the dramatic form which is a race rather than a chase, that is, where two people at two different places are converging on getting there first?
A. That is a race, you’re right. But you could call it an individual chase to get to a certain point. Actually, it’s a chase against time.
Q. In Sabotage, you remember, the situtation was the planting of a bomb at a certain hour and the journey of a young boy carrying the bomb. You gave the audience a time factor to observe and the constant showing of clocks toward that time deadline while the innocent victim carries the bomb. Was that a chase against time?
A. Well, I’m not certain you would call that a chase because the boy himself had no goal. But in your mind, I suppose, you were chasing time in the sense that you were chasing the hour of one o’clock when the boy would relinquish the bomb and leave it at a particular spot. That is really almost a kind of extreme suspense.
Q. There’s some doubt in my mind as to the exact distinction between suspense and chase. Can you have suspense without a chase?
A. Oh, yes. In The Lady Vanishes, for example, the scene where the hero and heroine are served drugged drinks is pure suspense. Incidentally, instead of creating suspense in the usual way by having the hero half raise the glass to his lips and lower it again and never quite get down to drinking it, I did it by cinematic means. I had the glasses served and left on the table while the two go on with their conversation. But I still had to make the audience ask “When are those glasses going to be picked up?” So I photographed the whole dialogue through the two glasses in the foreground.
Q. Well, if the audience, instead of merely waiting for the blow to fall, were also waiting for somebody to intervene, to stop their being drugged, wouldn’t you have even more suspense?
A. Yes, but then you would also have a chase. If someone at the far end of the train, in which the two were drinking, knew they were going to be drugged and were trying to get there before they took the drinks, then you’ve got a chase because there’s a time factor in movement. It’s the time factor in movement that makes the chase, as against the time factor that is static which makes only suspense. That’s the difference. But, of course, suspense provides one of the most important elements in any chase.
Q. What other elements would you say are found in a good chase?
A. Well, in the best chase plots there are usually several chases going on at once, for one thing, which eventually run into and influence each other. Then the good chase will also reveal character, and use psychology to build up tension. For example, the first chase I ever filmed, the chase after Jack the Ripper in The Lodger. You remember it? Well, it started with the public and police chasing the Ripper, building up information about him before showing the man himself. So by the time you got to the end of the first reel, you knew that he killed only fair-haired girls, that he did it every Tuesday, and that he’s done in so many. And you also knew how it affected different people. Brunettes, they didn’t care very much, but blondes were very worried about it, you know.
Q. But when did the chase begin? Not with the start of the film?
A. Yes, right from the beginning. In that particular movie you just started with the people who were doing the chasing instead of with the man being chased. The chase was in the mind of the onlooker seeing the picture, you might say. Then I got down to the case of an individual girl. The young Scotland Yard man who loves the girl is also after the Ripper. The Ripper, in turn, has become attracted to the girl who, the audience assumes, will be his next victim.
Q. You have a double chase then?
A. Yes.
Q. But when does the Ripper actually start running, physically?
A. Well, while the Ripper is how shall we say it always on the run psychologically, he really goes on the run in the last reel. That’s when the whole thing is crystallized into the final physical chase. The twist at the end is that the pursued man turns out to be, not the Ripper, but the demented brother of one of the Ripper’s victims.
Q. That business of crystallizing the whole thing, would you explain just what it means?
A. You see, as the picture approaches the climax of the tension, everything should begin to move faster. The threads of the plot become tauter and I even change the style of acting, broaden it. The tension is then released into the final physical chase, which must be short and breathtaking, to avoid the error of anticlimax.
Q. That seems an important thing to understand. Don’t most people think of the chase only in terms of the final action, where it becomes a physical reality?
A. Oh, no, that is only part of a good chase. The more action and movement throughout, the better. In Strangers on a Train, the picture I am working on now, we are really exploiting the dramatic possibilities of movement. The hero plays a championship tennis match, knowing all the while that the villain is moving deliberately toward the execution of a piece of dirty work which will leave the hero hopelessly incriminated. He must play as hard and as fast as he can in order to win the match, get off the court, and overtake the villain. The villain, meantime, confident that his victim is tied to the tennis court, is taking his time and being very methodical. The camera, cutting alternately from the frenzied hurry of the tennis player to the slow operation of his enemy, creates a kind of counterpoint between two kinds of movement. Finally, the tennis player gets away after the villain, with the police after the tennis player, and the wide open chase begins, which winds up in a whirling finale.
Q. Going back for a moment—you said characterization was one of the essentials of a good chase. Can you have much characterization when everybody is on the run?
A. Well, when you have a chase plot with several chases intersecting and knit together, you do have the disadvantage of having little time for careful character analysis or psychological study. A picture has to emphasize one thing or another. The 39 Steps, my film of John Buchan’s novel, for example, emphasized a close-knit chase structure. You remember, it has a double chase pattern—the police are after the hero who is after a spy ring and at the climax the police close in on him at the moment he is exposing the spies. But The Lodger and The Man Who Knew Too Much specialize more in psychology and character. In the ideal chase structure, however, the tempo and complexity of the chase will be an accurate reflection of the intensity of the relations between the characters. But I have found that even in the final physical chase, touches of characterization will embellish it.
Q. But wouldn’t the final chase be almost purely pictorial in any event?
A. In the main, yes. But a little odd comment reflecting the feelings of the people at that moment can be illuminating. For example, in the climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much, the police lay siege to a house and take up various vantage points within as they advance from room to room. In one room they turn a girl out of her bed to get her mattress for a shield, and make cracks about it. At the moment one man is telling another that his wife may hear about it, he’s shot dead. When they take over another room and use the piano as a barricade, a little man watches them in distress, but the only thing he wants to protect is his aspidistra plant on the top.
Q. Now, let’s see, are there any other elements of the chase? What about comedy in a chase?
A. Yes, sometimes I do inject a little comic relief into a chase. But you can’t have broad comedy of the kind that Mack Sennett used to do in his chases. In a serious chase while you might have your hero suddenly fall into a ditch, he couldn’t come out covered with mud. He can get dirty, of course, but he mustn’t look foolish.
Q. What about a situation where he is walking through a dark, deserted place, say, and something frightens him very much and it turns out to be a cat?
A. That you can have, because you get your relief laughs from the fact that the hero, too, is relieved—that it was a cat instead of a stalking foot. In your serious chase, when you have comic relief, it’s important that the hero as well as the audience be relieved. Incidentally, in respect to audiences, I have found that there are certain things we can always count on the audience to feel so long as they can count on us, too. In Sabotage, for example, I played a kind of dirty trick on the audience.
Q. How was that?
A. Well, I broke the rule that the hero is always rescued from danger at the last minute. I had the bomb which the young boy was carrying go off, after all, and kill him. Anyway, he had to be killed for purposes of the story. But there were yowls of protest from everybody, especially from mothers. It’s always been a mystery to me that audiences get apprehensive when the circular saw begins to reach the hero’s neck. So far as I know, it never has yet in all the history of melodrama.
Q. But doesn’t that explain one of the great attractions of the chase, that an audience is always ready to enter into it?
A. Yes, that’s true. But many times you have the problem of determining on which side to enlist audience sympathy. In some chases I have felt that perhaps the audience would really prefer to sympathize with the fugitive. That is why I’m partial to the double chase. There the audience can run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. As the camera cuts from police to hero to real criminal, the audience has the opportunity to identify itself with both the chaser and the chased in the person of the hero without suffering the frustration of a divided allegiance.
Q. Modesty aside, now, what is the best chase you have ever seen?
A. I don’t know . . . I suppose, really, the ice floe scene in D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East. There was the heroine on a block of ice, and the hero leaping to her from block to block and then back again with her in his arms while all the time the camera was cutting to a big waterfall beyond. Griffith was the first to exploit the possibilities of the physical chase. In Birth of a Nation there was the ride of the hooded men, in Intolerance the chase to save a man from the gallows, and in Tale of Two Cities [Orphans of the Storm] Danton’s gallop to the guillotine to save the Gish girl.
Q. Did you yourself derive anything from Griffith?
A. Only, I would say, the suspense of the chase. Griffith’s chase was fairly elementary. It didn’t include any mental action, any characterization. But it was very clearly stated and you had no difficulty following it.
Q. Well, aside from Griffith, have you been influenced by any other filmmakers?
A. I have derived more from novelists like John Buchan, J. B. Priestley, John Galsworthy, and Mrs. Belloc Lowndes than from the movies. I like them because they use multiple chases and a lot of psychology. My chases are the result of using all the resources of modern film techniques to combine what I got from those novelists with what I got from Griffith.
Q. One thing more, have you ever made a picture in which there wasn’t a chase?
A. Oh, yes, several. Some time ago I directed a comedy called Mr. and Mrs. Smith with the late Carole Lombard. It was a pretty successful picture commercially, but it wasn’t considered a Hitchcock picture because it had no chase. Lifeboat was another. Under Capricorn wasn’t really a Hitchcock picture either—that was Bergman. About Under Capricorn there were comments like “we had to wait a hundred and fourteen minutes before any thrill came.” If I seem doomed to make only one type of picture, the movie audience is responsible. People go to one of my films expecting a thriller, and they aren’t satisfied until the thrill turns up.
Q. Can you think of anything else we might have missed?
A. No, I think now that I’ve given away all the tricks of the trade. Treat them with respect.
“Core of the Movie—The Chase” was originally published in the New York Times Magazine, October 29, 1950, 22–23, 44–46. A typescript of the full transcript of the recording on which this piece was based is in the Hitchcock Collection at the Margaret Herrick Library.