A.H. I suppose so, but you know that to me Janet Leigh is playing the role of a perfectly ordinary bourgeoise.
F.T. But she does lead us in the direction of the abnormal, toward Perkins and his stuffed birds.
A.H. I was quite intrigued with them: they were like symbols. Obviously Perkins is interested in taxidermy since he’d filled his own mother with sawdust. But the owl, for instance, has another connotation. Owls belong to the night world; they are watchers, and this appeals to Perkins’ masochism. He knows the birds and he knows that they’re watching him all the time. He can see his own guilt reflected in their knowing eyes.
F.T. Would you say that Psycho is an experimental film?
A.H. Possibly. My main satisfaction is that the film had an effect on the audiences, and I consider that very important. I don’t care about the subject matter; I don’t care about the acting: but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the sound track and all of the technical ingredients that made the audience scream. I feel it’s tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion. And with Psycho we most definitely achieved this. It wasn’t a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film.
A.H. That’s why I take pride in the fact that Psycho, more than any of my other pictures, is a film that belongs to film-makers, to you and me. I can’t get a real appreciation of the picture in the terms we’re using now. People will say, “It was a terrible film to make. The subject was horrible, the people were small, there were no characters in it.” I know all of this, but I also know that the construction of the story and the way in which it was told caused audiences all over the world to react and become emotional.
F.T. Yes, emotional and even physical.
A.H. Emotional. I don’t care whether it looked like a small or a large picture. I didn’t start off to make an important movie. I thought I could have fun with this subject and this situation. The picture cost eight hundred thousand dollars. It was an experiment in this sense: Could I make a feature film under the same conditions as a television show? I used a complete television unit to shoot it very quickly. The only place where I digressed was when I slowed down the murder scene, the cleaning-up scene, and the other scenes that indicated anything that required time. All of the rest was handled in the same way that they do it in television.
F.T. I know that you produced Psycho yourself. How did you make out with it?
A.H. Psycho cost us no more than eight hundred thousand dollars to make. It has grossed some fifteen million dollars to date.
F.T. That’s fantastic! Would you say this was your greatest hit to date?
A.H. Yes. And that’s what I’d like you to do—a picture that would gross millions of dollars throughout the world! It’s an area of film-making in which it’s more important for you to be pleased with the technique than with the content. It’s the kind of picture in which the camera takes over. Of course, since critics are more concerned with the scenario, it won’t necessarily get you the best notices, but you have to design your film just as Shakespeare did his plays—for an audience.
F.T. That reminds me that Psycho is particularly universal because it’s a half-silent movie; there are at least two reels with no dialogue at all. And that also simplified all the problems of subtitling and dubbing.
A.H. Do you know that in Thailand they use no subtitles or dubbing? They shut off the sound and a man stands somewhere near the screen and interprets all the roles, using different voices.
I. Marion (Janet Leigh) and her lover, Sain (John Gavin), lack the necessary funds to settle down to married life. When her employer gives her forty thousand dollars to he deposited to his account in the bank, she steals the money and leaves Phoenix. That night she stops at a run down motel. The young owner, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), becomes friendly and tells her that he lives in the brooding Victorian mansion nearby with his mother, a sick and apparently difficult woman.
As Marion is taking a shower before retiring for the night, the old lady suddenly appears in the bathroom and stabs her to death. Minutes later Norman appears, and though apparently grief-stricken, he proceeds to wipe away the bloodstains from the bathroom and to haul Marion’s body and her possessions to her car trunk. He then drives the car to a nearby pond and stands by as the muddy waters swallow up all the evidence of the crime.
Three people undertake to trace the missing young woman: her sister, Lila (Vera Miles), Sam, and Arbogast (Martin Balsam), an insurance detective who has been assigned to find the money. Arbogast’s investigation leads him to the motel, where Norman speaks to him but arouses his suspicions when he refuses to allow him to meet his mother. The detective calls Sam and Lila to tell them of his suspicions, then steals back into the house to speak to the old lady. He makes his way to the first floor, and as he reaches the landing, he is stabbed to death, his inert body toppling down the stairs
Lila and Sam now learn from the local sheriff that Norman Bates’s mother has been dead and buried for the past eight years. They go to the motel, and when Lila attempts to search the house, she has a narrow escape from death. In the ensuing struggle Norman is revealed as a schizophrenic, leading a dual existence, and who, when impersonating his dead mother, is also a homicidal maniac.