Sacha Gervasi discusses deconstructing the tricks of a master magician

HITCHCOCK is a love story about one of the most influential filmmakers of the last century, Alfred Hitchcock, and his wife and partner Alma Reville.  The film takes place during the making of Hitchcock’s seminal movie PSYCHO.

Sacha Gervasi talks about his love of Blu-rays, shooting DVD extras on his iPhone and Sir Anthony Hopkins’s breif encounter with the master of suspense…

What is your feeling about Blu-ray, knowing that the movie you have made will be enjoyed in high definition at home?

“I think that’s the best part, the technology is so advanced these days that you have the satisfaction of knowing – and it was shot so brilliantly by Jeff Cronenweth, so you get this – I think people will be able to see what he really did, and I think that’s fantastic.   I love the fact that home entertainment systems are now so evolved that you can actually get cinema quality in your house. That’s how you want your film to be seen, at the utmost quality. Certainly visually and sound wise.  So it’s great.”

Are you avid collector?

“I have several Blu-rays.  I do, I love Blu-ray.  I have mostly converted my DVD collection, but a lot of films are coming out on Blu-ray still so I don’t yet have everything that I want.”

Is it true you were filming some of the DVD extras yourself on your iPhone?

“I was, yeah.  I filmed on my iPhone.  I’ve got iPhone extras that will be on the DVD.  I just did a personal diary of all the crazy stuff that went on, so it was great to be able to take stuff off my iPhone and put it on the DVD.”

That’s part of the fun of owning Blu-rays isn’t it, getting an insight into the story behind the story?

“Absolutely, I love the idea that on a great Blu-ray you have so many different aspects because you’ve got the movie and then you’ve got the story behind the movie, and how stuff was made.  We’ve got all of that on this DVD, so you can see from my perspective what it was like filming at certain times.   We also some quite off hand stuff with the actors, when they don’t think they’re going to be on a DVD – which is good, and quite revealing.”

Sir Anthony Hopkins is known for being a great mimic, but he’s also an actor adept at playing characters who are holding something back – which is perfect for Hitch.

“Absolutely, just think of Stevens in Remains of the Day. There’s a tremendous feeling from this force of restraint, and the pain of someone who can’t express how he really feels. Hitchcock has a bit of that too, there’s an element of Stevens in him.”

He must be one of the most analysed filmmakers in Hollywood history….

“That’s what was so interesting about him, he’s such a complex character and I think that people are trying to pigeonhole him all the time – was he this way? was he that? – but I think everything about him was true. I think he wasn’t one way or the other, I think he was all of those things.   You see it in the films, the range of different types of movies is so extreme. You’ve got the first Bond movie, as Sam Mendes called it recently, North By Northwest. A drama set in a Lifeboat, a drama of one shot, Rope, you’ve got lush Riviera epics like To Catch A Thief with that mischievous sense of humour – ‘a breast or a thigh my dear?’. 

“So you’ve got such a range of different types of movies that he made, and I think that’s indicative of the range of characteristics that he had. They were so remarkably different. People try and pin him down an pigeonhole him, but you’ll never be able to because often these very extreme, contrasting traits were together in the same person, and they don’t necessarily all seem to naturally fit. But they were really part of who he was.”

Hitchcock reflects all of these things, but it’s a love story between Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville above all isn’t it?

“That was the great thing about this movie. We knew about Alma Reville, but we didn’t know how critical she was to his creative process. How critical she was to life in so many different capacities.  That was the story that I wanted to tell. Everyone knows about the obsessive genius filmmaker. Everyone knows about the complex and often terrifying relationships he had with his actresses.  His obsessive predilections obviously, his fantasy relationships with the women he moulded into these icy cool, distant, aloof blonde goddesses. But what we don’t know was that his wife was his greatest collaborator. That was the revelation to me.  And I didn’t also know that he risked all his money to make this movie.

“I just assumed like most people that he was Alfred Hitchcock, he could do anything. He was coming off North By Northwest, why can’t he just go and do whatever he wants?   Well, people didn’t want him to do whatever he wanted. That’s why I love that idea that he’s feeling imprisoned by his success at the beginning, and suddenly he takes a risk, he rolls the dice, he risks all the cash he has and his reputation on this bargain basement horror movie that not even his wife thinks is worthy of him.  To me, that was a radical, shockingly big thing to do when he didn’t have to. Why did he do that?  I wanted to answer the question why he did that, or at least explore why he did that. And I think he did that was because he was feeling like he was dying, like he was starting to become irrelevant.”

How easy a choice was it casting Sir Anthony Hopkins and Dame Helen Mirren are Alfred and Alma, and were you concerned they would have on-screen chemistry?

“I just knew they would, they’re so good. There was no way I could find out if they didn’t.  I cast Tony, he was the only one, and Helen was the only one.  I said to the producers and I said to Tony that if it’s not him I didn’t want to make the film. I think he felt good about that, but who else is going to do it? So I very much put all my cards on cards on Hopkins and I went for it.  Luckily he loved my documentary film Anvil: The Story of Anvil, and said yes. And then it was about Mirren – but how many other actresses could have got in the ring with Tony?  Not many.  She’s a movie star, she’s brilliant, she has that same sort of fearsome spirit that Alma had even though they don’t look alike. The spirit was very similar.  She also married to a director, all the things added up, it was like it had to be Mirren or no-one.”

Anthony Hopkins actually briefly met Alfred Hitchcock, didn’t he?

“He did, in Chasen’s Restaurant, in 1979.  Hopkins was first being brought around by his agent George Chasen, and he introduced him to Alfred Hitchcock. Tony said he met him, and Hitchcock said something like ‘I hear you’re doing rather well,’.”

Do you think Alfred Hitchcock would have enjoyed your approach to a story about them?

“I think he would have enjoyed the mischief and the sense of humour because, let’s not forget, brilliant filmmaker that he undoubtedly was he also had a tremendous sense of humour. He was mischievous, he was ironic. This character he invented, who he played on television, was not who he was. He was a working class kid, the son of a greengrocer, and then he’s on television going ‘good evening,’ playing this English snob.  He wasn’t an English snob, he just played one of this television show, I think. So this was an invented character. And I think the playfulness of a man who invented this persona is something that he really would have wanted the mischief to be in any film about him. So we played the Hitchcock domestic psychodrama like Hitchcock, we hope, would have done it which is with a sense of fun.”

When you were filming bits of Psycho was it like deconstructing the tricks of a master magician?

“We tried to set it as a backdrop, because obviously Psycho is a masterwork and it stands alone. So we were just shooting in colour, the other side of it, the opposite side. And showing it really in relation to the relationship. So it wasn’t so much we’d show a scene for its own sake, because the scene’s been done and documentaries and books cover the recreation of the scene. For us it was just coming at it from a totally different perspective.”

There’s a revealing scene when Alma suggests he uses Bernard Herrmann’s music in the shower scene, isn’t it?

“I was telling the story that I didn’t know, which was the story of their relationship.  That whole scene that you’re describing is about the scene before, where Alma’s saying ‘put the music on it,’ and he’s saying ‘no’. And then when you see that that scene is about the relationship.  So again, it’s a perfect example that the Psycho stuff is in there, but it’s really not about that.  We weren’t taking it on, so much as showing one aspect of it through the lens of a particular story that we wanted to tell. But at the same time it was a celebration of it, we were celebrating this iconic master and the untold story of the woman who stood by his side.”

Did Danny Huston, who plays Whitfield Cook, offer any insights to you being the son of a Hollywood legend himself, John Huston?

“Absolutely, he talked a lot about the difference between the man and the mythology, and how his father was aware of the mythology around him and would often do things to enforce the mythology even though the man himself thought it was ridiculous. So there was this consciousness, and I’m sure Hitchcock had the same sense of the mythology around Hitchcock.” 

When did you first see Psycho?

“When I was 15, at school. I had a film club, and there were three films we showed in the first month, Don’t Look Now, Easy Rider and Psycho. We would go down to Soho Square, pick up the 16mm print and come back and show it. I remember seeing Psycho and being slightly traumatised, I couldn’t watch it for 10 years. It was too much.”

Was the structure of the film always apparent to you, or did it have to be honed?

“It was honed with the script and obviously we dropped a few scenes in the context of editing.  We didn’t have much time, so we had to really figure out what we wanted to shoot ahead of time. We didn’t have the luxury of let’s do this scene, or that scene, it was 35 days, no money, bang-bang go. Luckily I had an amazing crew, I had half of David O. Russell’s crew and half of David Fincher’s crew so I had really great people from top to bottom, obviously with the actors as well. So it was a lot easier for me to get stuff done because I had the best people in the world working with me.”

Were any scenes lost that will feature on the home entertainment package?

“Yeah, a couple of scenes with the shrink, as Ed Gein – before we reveal it’s Ed Gein. And a few other things, a few little tricks and trinkets.” 

Did anyone approach the production who had worked closely with Hitchcock?

“Absolutely, we had Marshall Schlom the script supervisor who came in. It was quite beautiful, because he’s about 86 and his memory is not what it used to be. He came on, and he watched us film the scene where Hitchcock directs Janet Leigh, and he does this lascivious, mean monologue. I looked over at the monitor when I called cut, and I saw Marshall Schlom with his headphones, and he was crying. Tony came up and he gave him a big hug, and he said ‘thank-you, you’ve given me my memories back,’.  That was a moment when we stepped out of the making of the movie and went ‘wow,’. The people who are actually there were able to able to relive this whole movie.”

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HITCHCOCK IS OUT JUNE 17 ON BLU-RAY AND DVD FROM TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX