In North London, on the banks of the Grand Junction Canal, stands a tall building topped by a giant chimney. In 1924 the film critic of the Daily Express said, concerning a film made in this building, that it was “the best American picture made in England.”
That film, Woman to Woman, starring Clive Brook and Betty Compson, was made at what are now the Gainsborough studios and was produced by the embryonic Gainsborough Company for Famous Players-Lasky. Therein lies my debt to America, for in the beginning I was American trained and under the old F.P.-L. banner dug myself in and studied the branches of the movie game.
On Woman to Woman I was the general factotum. I wrote the script. I designed the sets, and I managed the production. It was the first film that I had really got my hands on to. Up till then I had been trained as an engineer, studied art, earned fifteen shillings a week in an advertising agency and, finding this depressing, finally managed to sell myself to the American unit at Islington as a writer of subtitles on the silent films.
Michael Balcon took over the studios from F.P.-L. and under him I made my first film, The Pleasure Garden. Others which followed were The Lodger, The Ring, Juno and the Paycock, Blackmail, Murder!, and The Skin Game. I played about with “technique” in those early days. I tried crazy tricks with violent cuts, dissolves, and wipes with everything in the room spinning round and standing on its head. People used to call it “the Hitchcock touch,” but it never occurred to me that I was merely wasting footage with camera tricks and not getting on with the film.
I have stopped all that today. I have not the film time to throw away on fancy stuff. I like my screen well used, with every corner filled, but no arty theories clamping the action down. Nowadays I want the cutting and continuity to be as inconspicuous as possible, and all I am concerned with is to get the characters developed and the story clearly told without any directorial idiosyncrasies.
The creed that I chalk up in front of me today is that we are making Motion Pictures. Too many men forget that. A film has got to be ocularly interesting and above all it is the picture which is the thing. I try to tell my story so much so in pictures that if by any chance the sound apparatus broke down in the cinema, the audience would not fret and get restless because the pictorial action would still hold them! Sound is all right in its place, but it is a silent picture training which counts today. Naval men have a theory that the finest navigators nowadays are the men who learnt their craft in the out-of-date sailing ships. Similarly I maintain that the young men of America and Britain who strike out into the film game should first go through a course of silent film technique.
There is not enough visualizing done in studios, and instead far too much writing. People take a sheet of paper and scrawl down a lot of dialogue and instructions and call that a day’s work. It leads them nowhere. There is also a growing habit of reading a film script by the dialogue alone. I deplore this method, this lazy neglect of the action, this lack of reading action in a film story, or, if you like it, this inability to visualize.
I try to do without paper when I begin a new film. I visualize my story in my mind as a series of smudges moving over a variety of backgrounds. Often I pick my backgrounds first and then think about the action of the story. This was the case in The Man Who Knew Too Much. I visualized the snow-clad heights of the Alps and the ill-lit alleys of London and threw my story and characters in amongst it all.
I do not despise sound in my preference for pictures first, but when I am told that the talking picture has a bigger range of subjects, I argue that it also lessens the field of appeal. What appeals to the eye is universal; what appeals to the ear is local.
My methods of filmmaking and the introduction of those legendary Hitchcock touches are quite straightforward. I like to keep the public guessing and never let them know what is going to happen next. I build up my interest gradually and surely and, in thrillers, bring it to a crescendo. There must be no half measures, and I have to know where I am going every second of the time. If there is a secret in doing this, it is perhaps in knowing your script by heart. Then you know automatically the tempo of each succeeding scene and it matters not whether they are shot out of proper order. But also I have to guard against going too fast in a film. This is fatal. I have to remember that, whereas I know the story backwards, the audience has got to absorb it gradually. Otherwise the whole thing would be too sketchy to be intelligible.
My artistes, too, must behave as human beings, and in my determination to achieve this ideal perhaps arises the story about my loathing of women in my films. I don’t loathe them, but if they are going to appear in one of my pictures, they are not going to look too beautiful or be too glamorous. Glamour has nothing to do with reality and I maintain that reality is the most important factor in the making of a successful film. The very beautiful woman who just walks around, avoiding the furniture, wearing fluffy negligees, and looking very seductive may be an attractive ornament, but she does not help the film any. I hate it when actresses try to be ladies and in doing so become cold and lifeless, and nothing gives me more pleasure than to knock the ladylikeness out of chorus girls. I don’t ask much of an actress and I have no wish for her to be able to play a whole list of character roles, but she must be a real human person. That is why I deliberately deprived Madeleine Carroll of her dignity and glamour in The 39 Steps, and I have done exactly the same thing in Secret Agent. In this last film, the first shot you see of her is with her face covered with cold cream!
Next to reality, I put the accent on comedy. Comedy, strangely enough, makes a film more dramatic. A stage play gives you intermissions for reflections on each act. These intermissions have to be supplied in a film by contrasts and, if a film is dramatic or tragic, the obvious contrast is comedy. In all my films I try to supply a definite contrast. I take a dramatic situation up and up to its peak of excitement and then, before it has time to start the downward curve, I introduce comedy to relieve the tension. After that, I feel safe with the climax. If the film petered to an end without any contrast, the climax would probably turn into an anticlimax. Which heaven forbid!
I am out to give the public good, healthy, mental shake-ups. Civilization has become so screening and sheltering that we cannot experience sufficient thrills at first hand. Therefore, to prevent our becoming sluggish and jellified, we have to experience them artificially, and the screen is the best medium for this. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, in The 39 Steps, and now in Secret Agent I have been all out for wholehearted thrills, the more exciting the better. But my thrills are not horror thrills, but full-blooded, healthy stuff for which there is always an eternal demand.
But it must be pictures first and last. A little sound certainly, but used only when the story offers a perfectly natural opportunity for it. I aim today to jolt cinemagoers in their seats with stories that move—with unexpected thrills, with comedy, with reality, and with backgrounds that tell, and finally with human beings, and that means if any actress comes onto my set and dares . . . !
[Finally I have been very lucky. My ideas, my methods, my tricks in film production have all been given free play. I have been allowed to experiment. This I owe to one man, Michael Balcon. Balcon, Director of Productions at the Gaumont-British studios, has been associated with me since I began. It is he who has allowed me to follow my celluloid whims and I am grateful to him.]
“Close Your Eyes and Visualize!” was originally published in Stage, July 1936, 52–53. It was also printed, with slight changes, including omitting the last paragraph, as “I Make Suspense My Business,” a copy of which is on BFI microfiche no. 10, but with no indication of the place of publication or date. Also on BFI microfiche no. 10, there is a copy of a typescript called “Production Notes—6 July 1936” written by Hitchcock, titled “I Try to Make ‘Motion’ Pictures.” It begins with paragraph four of the above essay and includes a paragraph at the end that is not in the printed version, which I include in brackets here.