Interview by Zach Dennis
This is an excerpt from a 30-minute interview with film historian Dan Callahan on his new book, “The Camera Lies: Acting for Hitchcock.” The full interview transcript and audio can be found on our Patreon channel at patreon.com/cinematary.
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Cinematary: I know you've written a couple books previously about screen acting, which I would also recommend to listeners if they have not read those before. But what about Hitchcock specifically, made him seem like the ideal director to kind of almost branch off and examine on his own.
Dan Callahan: Well, it's interesting, because I did do my first book was about Barbara Stanwyck. And then I did a book about Vanessa Redgrave (and) did an acting book about the big stars – Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, people like that were very dominant. And then I thought what was fascinating to me about Hitchcock is that what he wanted from an actor was this kind of duality. This thing of like the the Kuleshov effect. Jimmy Stewart is looking out the window and he smiles, and you see a baby with his mother, and then you come back to him smiling. Or he smiles, you cut to a woman getting undressed and he smiles again, suddenly, he's a dirty old man.
So you see, it's this kind of thing of Jimmy Stewart, he could be one thing or it could be the other, and Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman are ideal Hitchcock actors, because as I say, in the book, they're always in some kind of transitional state. They're always in suspense. Your Stanwyck, or Bette Davis, or people like that, I can't really picture them in a Hitchcock movie, because they show you too much. They tell you too much. And see, that's what's great about Bette Davis.
But Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, you never know where you stand with them. And that's what Hitchcock needed from an actor. And so I thought that it would be very interesting to get really, really into great detail about what that means and what it means for acting for the camera and Hitchcock movie.
Cinematary: That's a really interesting point because I think that's something that maybe gets lost with Hitchcock is that he worked in such a broad range of time periods for movies, since he started in the silent era, and then carried over into much more of the modern era.
Did that have an effect on how he worked with actors?
DC: Oh, very much so, and I think the other part of when he was in England in the 20s and 30s, he had these big theatre actors who weren't taking it really seriously. The other side of that was, he had some of these actors, particularly some of the female actors, who were just in movies for a few years, and weren't really taking it seriously because it wasn't their thing, particularly. And I think the change was Sylvia Sidney, who was an American star was imported over to play in his movie, Sabotage. And she was very different because she was someone who took her work very seriously, and wasn't going to retire early and had a very long career as a character player as an older woman. And so it kind of changes with her, she gives a major performance in Sabotage. So does Robert Donat in The 39 Steps and Peter Lorre.
When he gets to Hollywood, he’s working with people like Carole Lombard, or Tula Bankhead. With Americans, I think he found exactly what he was looking for. And then someone like Ingrid Bergman, or Cary Grant, this is exactly what he wanted exactly what he was looking for. And then the change that happens after that, we get method actors, we get Montgomery Clift in I Confess, to a certain extent, Kim Novak in Vertigo and they wanted motivation. And that he wasn't too interested in, he would do a little bit of that, but he felt that it was too much. Like with Montgomery Clift, he didn't want to spend all afternoon talking over a motivation about a line. He had already done that in the writing session. He was he was very big on these writing sessions with the writer and usually his wife, Alma. And they would ask any questions they wanted the whole time they were writing it, but once you have the script, he didn't then want to continue that with the actor because he felt like that's writing.
I think what he said about the method actors if they wanted to do improvisation or that, like he said, that is masking – that’s writing. And so he did kind of pull away from that a little bit. The ideal for him were these Hollywood 1940s actors, very stylized, very authoritative like Cary Grant and like Ingrid Bergman, both of whom are on the cover of my book. And I definitely wanted them to be. Yeah, they're the they're the absolute Hitchcock ideal.
Cinematary: What did you notice about what Hitchcock wanted from his leading ladies?
DC: So from my perspective, what's interesting to me is, I think what's a crucial thing to realize is that for Hitchcock, I feel like he identified with the women in his movies far more than he identifies with the men sometimes. And that's what makes him a great artist. If you're a great artist, if you identify with the men and the women in your movie, no matter what your sex happens to be, that's what puts you at the top. So I think that's the key thing to realize with Hitchcock is that he identifies with the women, and that's why the performances are so good. That's why the characters are so good.
We really should mention his wife, Alma, who often was in the writing session with him, and also Joan Harrison, another very important name for him because she was in charge of his television show. And everything went through her and she knew what he wanted, but she had an artistic consciousness of her own. And I think that that was a key part of the women's point of view, and the sympathy for them; having Alma there and Joan Harrison. He needed these people around him to make these movies as great as they were, and the TV show to be as great as it was.
Cinematary: One film in particular I’m interested to get your thoughts on and that’s The Birds. What do you make of Tippi Hedren’s performance, especially with the well-documented production chaos between her and Hitchcock?
DC: Well, I addressed that in the book, but I do think it's important to say that in the case of The Birds, and also in Marnie, she's really, really good in both of those movies. And she did really good in Marnie in particular and it's a very difficult part that she's playing because in the scenes towards the end of Marnie, she’s doing things where she's kind of reverting to being a little girl. And if you really think about that part, it could easily be absurd, if she wasn't really putting herself deeply into it.
We've heard a great deal from her now about her experience with Hitchcock and I just don't think that those two movies and also her performances in them…they should stand apart from what happened between them, but that’s what I think anyway. I think that isn't always the case with films, but I think in the case of The Birds and also with Marnie, I don't think that I would hope that she wouldn't want what happened between them to overshadow the films themselves and particularly her very, very fine and touching performances. On Facebook today, I was putting up images of her in The Birds and that great scene where Melanie talks about her mother, which is another theme that Hitchcock insisted on putting in there, even though it has nothing to do with the plot. And there's something about her speaking voice. She has the most expressive speaking voice. I don't know. I think those are his two last great movies. And I think that she's really very, very touching in them.
“The Camera Lies: Acting for Hitchcock”
By Dan Callahan