MR. HITCHCOCK: The film is going to open with a girl, back view, going into a railroad station at Hartford, Connecticut. At present, I don’t know what time of the day we can shoot it because we don’t want it full of crowds because it may cover her up. The essential part is that we follow her back view into the station as she goes to the desk or booking office.
EVAN HUNTER: The ticket window. But Hitch, it should be on a Friday evening because she goes directly there from robbing the safe.
MR. HITCHCOCK: Well, we needn’t say it’s Friday evening as long as we don’t people it with too many people; we’re going to have to put our extras in it anyway however we shoot it there. And she goes to the ticket window and buys a ticket. We still follow her into the station as she looks up and we go up to New York, you see. We go close enough to her to see the color of her hair, and finally she goes on to the platform down toward the train. Or it can be empty waiting for the train to come in. I don’t know, we’ve got to look into that, you see, or you can probably be going east to find out all this information for us. And we end up with a close shot on a rather bulky handbag under her arm. So that would constitute the first scene which we’ll have to investigate whether we shoot it all in the station, whether we make a traveling plate of it or what is the best way to handle that, you see. I feel that we ought to cheat like they do in the Italian films and have nobody around if we can. Because otherwise we don’t draw enough attention to the girl. The next sequence cuts immediately to an open safe and a crowd around it in an office. This would require an impression of an office, and maybe we can have one of those kind of offices with glass screens around it. So we get an impression of an office beyond, which we can either make as a backing or something because we needn’t show too much activity or we can fake a set behind it. And the essence of this scene is that the safe has been robbed and there is a group of people. Mainly that constitutes the scene in which the manager or proprietor or the high official, whoever he may be, he is known in the story as a Mr. Strutt, is the self-conscious figure who apparently gave this girl a job, without proper references and we indicate that he was obviously impressed by her other than her ability as a clerk or whatever she was, so he becomes a central guilty figure. So pictorially it’s a group scene, you see.
MR. HUNTER: Also, it’s an accounting firm, Bob.
MR. BOYLE: Wouldn’t Hartford—would it be insurance? Probably would be insurance, wouldn’t it?
MR. HUNTER: Well, we want it to be accounting because he comes in later on—
MR. HITCHCOCK: He comes in later on in the story. This man is a very important figure, because he comes in, that’s why we—the scene will be concentrated on this man and we read a complete picture of this man falling for the girl when he shouldn’t have done. It’s the chief cashier who’s a girl—almost accuses him of having an affair with her—which he didn’t. As we shall find later—but nevertheless he feels very guilty about the whole thing and he’s right on the spot. There’re police around and so forth, etc. Now, from that we continue the next scene down a hotel corridor—still back view on the girl and she’s now carrying a suitcase which is brand new, wrapped in brown paper and—
MR. HUNTER: Excuse me, may I break in here a minute—do we need to tell Bob what we need in the way of a physical thing in the office since modus operandi’s going to figure in this, you know. Her access to the safe.
MR. HITCHCOCK: I don’t think so.
MR. HUNTER: We don’t?
MR. HITCHCOCK: Not for our opening scene. As long as we show the safe as being robbed but our dialogue will tell us a lot there. Now in this next scene, following the office scene as I said, we’re going down a corridor in a hotel and we can establish this as a hotel by possibly a clear—a floor weight or, I don’t know, depends what type of hotel we use. I don’t think it should be a big hotel. It should be a small hotel, rather cheesy. But we have to establish within this corridor what it is, you see.
MR. HUNTER: Not too cheesy, you know. Not like the 47th Street ones, off Broadway.
MR. BOYLE: Where are we in this hotel?
MR. HUNTER: New York City.
MR. BOYLE: New York City.
MR. HUNTER: But not a luxury hotel, either.
MR. HITCHCOCK: No. And she finally goes into a room and there we see another suitcase, clothes on the bed, and now she tears the paper in which is the brand new suitcase and there are other boxes on the bed showing purchases, and the scene in this little bedroom constitutes her change of clothes and the cutting out of labels and so forth, you see, and then eventually we go and follow her into a bathroom and she goes round behind the door and by this time she’s taken off probably part of her clothes and we hear the water go on and so forth and eventually we go into the bathroom and we just go to the head and we’ve never seen her face yet and right on the head down into the basin and we see the dark, very dark brown dye flowing out of the hair into the basin. And it just swirls around this dye—and for the first time she lifts her face. The hair is now blond and we see her face, for the first time. Now—we go then to Penn Station or a Greyhound station—have we decided . . .
MR. HUNTER: I think the bus terminal would be better. You know, we’ve had one railroad station—
MR. HITCHCOCK: Whatever it is—it will probably be the bus terminal.
MR. HUNTER: The Port Authority Bus Terminal on, I think, it’s 38th and 8th.
MR. BOYLE: Not to leave the hotel room so soon—she has no reason. She’s just trying to pick something that’s a nonentity, isn’t she? It’s neither too poor nor too rich. It’s some lost hotel.
MR. HITCHCOCK: Quality of the hotel—you’re talking about the quality of the hotel?
MR. BOYLE: Well, yeah, I’m going back to the hotel. What kind of a hotel she would pick. Obviously, she has money, so she could live anywhere.
MR. HUNTER: Yes, but she doesn’t want to call attention to herself, in any way, you see; she’s going in there to change her identity really.
MR. HITCHCOCK: That’s all she is—so that she would choose a very quiet hotel. Very quiet, very unobtrusive hotel. So you can debate this again, you know. A girl can get lost in the biggest hotel, just as well. You know, so that you see that there are many people up and down the corridors and the elevator and so forth, but . . .
MR. BOYLE: Yes that’s true.
MR. HITCHCOCK: We could debate that, but we don’t have to decide that finally now.
MR. BOYLE: Could be a business hotel.
MR. HITCHCOCK: Like the New Yorker or the Commodore.
MR. BOYLE: People come and go all the time.
MR. HITCHCOCK: As a matter of fact . . .
MR. BOYLE: Or the Biltmore across from . . .
MR. HITCHCOCK: The way to establish that is to establish a facade of a hotel with so many windows, you know.
MR. BOYLE: Yeah.
MR. HITCHCOCK: So if you state that fact, you know, a mass of windows . . .
MR. BOYLE: The Commodore would be very good.
MR. HITCHCOCK: The Commodore—Anyway. We can debate that afterwards. Now—the only reason I bring up the question, Evan, as to whether it should be a railroad station or bus station. Can you leave a suitcase there—for good? In the lockups, it’s no good.
MR. BOYLE: Well, sure it is. Why not?
MR. HITCHCOCK: Because they empty them every 24 hours.
MR. BOYLE: Well, what does she care what they do with it? It’ll vanish from sight. She’s going to throw the key away, anyway. So they’ll take the bag out of the locker and take it someplace else. She’s never going to claim it. What does she care?
MR. HITCHCOCK: Right. Well, anyway this bus depot. She deposits the old bag. She arrives with two bags, you see. An old one and a new one. The old bag is deposited and then she goes to the bus with the new bag, you see. And the bus drives off. I think we’re going to label it to Maryland, Laurel—
MR. HUNTER: Well, no, I play a scene where she buys a ticket. There’s dialogue. At the window, she buys a ticket to Laurel, Maryland. And he tells her when the bus is leaving and when it’s going to arrive and all that.
MR. HITCHCOCK: On arriving at her destination there’s a station wagon belonging to a hotel waiting for her at the destination, which we’ve got at present as . . .
MR. HUNTER: Laurel, Maryland.
MR. HITCHCOCK: Laurel, Maryland, you see. This isn’t final, you see. Laurel, Maryland, of course, is a well-known race track center and so forth. From here there’s a station wagon waiting with the name of a hotel on the side. And she’s driven . . . and we may have a couple of establishing shots of going through the countryside to establish we’re in the country, you see. And then it eventually arrives at what we call the Old Colonial Hotel. This hotel has to have a bit of class about it, you know, it’s where retired people can live, there are horse people. It’s in—it should be a hotel within its own small grounds in this area and it should be related to racing, hunting, you know, that’s the atmosphere that we take her into. Because don’t forget we’ve got a strange mysterioso working for us. Because after all you’ve seen a girl who’s a petty thief or a small thief changing her hair, clothes and so forth, and now she’s arriving in completely contrapuntal surroundings—beautiful countryside and a rather smart or traditional hotel—
MR. HUNTER: And she’s been here—you know—she’s recognized here—she’s been here many times before.
MR. HITCHCOCK: Now we come into the lobby. The lobby of this hotel conveys the same quality. And when she goes to the desk a man carries her bag in and the woman clerk recognizes her immediately, addresses her by name and says “Your riding clothes came back a week ago” or something or yesterday or whatever we establish “and they’re in your room” or she asks, you know. We establish anyway she’s left clothes there, which still sets up a mystery. And now she goes from there and we see her change—is that right?
MR. HUNTER: No, I think we should simply show her coming right into where the horse is kept.
MR. HITCHCOCK: That’s what I meant.
MR. HUNTER: Oh, I thought you meant showing her change.
MR. HITCHCOCK: No, no, she goes upstairs and from there that indicates she’s going upstairs to change and now we go right to the stables, where she arrives.
MR. HUNTER: This is another place now. It’s not a part of the hotel grounds.
MR. HITCHCOCK: That’s why we might have to show the station wagon taking her there. So she might get out of the station wagon at some stables. Now, these stables should be—I think they’re a type of stable where they train yearlings and other people are allowed to keep horses. This is very important to find out—what kind of stables this would be. She keeps a horse there. But it’s vital to our story that she knows about the training of horses, especially race horses. And we have to get that over. You see, what happens now with a regularly trained race horse . . . it goes to stables from one meet to another, that’s how it works out now. That, I found out—they don’t go back to training stables. In England they do. But they don’t necessarily—once a horse has been trained—so this should be a training stable—
MR. BOYLE: And also a boarding stable.
MR. HUNTER: It’s a boarding stable. She’s not training a horse there, she’s just boarding it.
MR. BOYLE: Exercise boys and people like that who work with the horses.
MR. HITCHCOCK: And also they might—we might choose a place where they have a track—a training track.
MR. HUNTER: They would have.
MR. BOYLE: Or training rings, at least.
MR. HITCHCOCK: Well, I know tracks where they have them out here in Northridge. Lot of these people have training tracks. Starting gate, schooling, what they call schooling, and so forth. Now—we show her riding, which calls for some beautiful landscapes and her riding in the distance on this horse. Not any particular way—around and so forth and then we go to close-ups, which will mean plates and things . . . for her close-ups showing her enjoying it and her hair blowing and it’s very important that we establish here one big close-up of the hair blowing and as she’s riding—
MR. BOYLE: And come back to that.
MR. HITCHCOCK: And it’s a motif, you see—it’s a leitmotif that goes through the film. Again, it’s going to be presented in such a way that you say, well I don’t get this—we want to mystify the audience. The contrast between the thievery and the way she was dressed . . . quite modestly, as a clerk, and so forth, with this proprietary interest in this particular horse-riding thing she has. Now, from there we go to visit her mother. Her mother is going to live in Baltimore. In one of those streets where they have all those steps—you know—the whitewash steps? This again is a tremendous contrast ’cause you see, we’ve practically shown, we’ve done all this cinematically—we’ve told the mystery of this girl in a series of images of pictures and settings and backgrounds. That’s why they’re all very important because they do make statements all the time. Now we get this cheesy, long Baltimore residential street. It’s almost like a—you haven’t been to Baltimore, have you? Well, it’s like the north of England street—just the same—oh yes, just like the north of England. Rows of houses and chimneys but the one feature of Baltimore is that people take great pride in their steps ’cause all the houses have one step up from the sidewalk. And they’re always done with pumice stone or whitewashed or painted white. You get this vista of all these steps, you see, and she drives down the street, maybe in a taxi . . .
MR. HUNTER: If we can, Bob, if we can get it near the water someplace . . .
MR. HITCHCOCK: What would be nice if at the end of the street we could see masts of ships ’cause this is very important later on. And they do have them, there’re probably streets around there with this terribly sordid atmosphere—the saloon at the corner and the ships down at the bottom. And the taxi stops and she gets out. Then, you know, opens the door—or the door’s opened for her. Now she’s in her mother’s home, which is pretty . . . it has to be the size of the real house—quite small, narrow passage, the sitting room in the front and the one story up to the bedrooms, staircase up in the hallway. There, of course, we have the scene where she meets her mother and the little woman who looks after her. And we play the whole scene—and the girl’s familiar with the place and there’ll be a kitchen required.
MR. HUNTER: This should be a pretty dowdy place.
MR. HITCHCOCK: Oh, it will be dowdy. Bob, we’ll eventually get the photographs of the real interior there. That’ll all be done. We’ll get all that. But the external atmosphere is very important, to show again, the contrast of the riding and she’s now in a nice suit, not too showy but fairly conservative and she’s blond. And she goes in and now we introduce the mother and now something of her—the fact that she brings gifts to them and that she works for a millionaire and her mother believes her. We characterize her mother as a cautious woman. . . .
“Hitchcock at Work” was originally published in Take One 5, no. 2 (May 1976): 31–35. It was edited from a transcription of a production conference during preparations for Marnie.