Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards E-Book

Tony Moral

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 240

Beschreibung

To coincide with the 100th anniversary of his directorial debut in 2022, this stunning coffee table book focuses on the storyboards, including never before published images and incisive text putting the material in context and examining the role the pieces played in some of the most unforgettable scenes in cinema. Hitchcock author and aficionado Tony Lee Moral takes you through the last 100 years of cinema, with the Master of Suspense as your guide. Join him behind the scenes as he reveals the locations, characters and motifs which make up a Hitchcock movie, with exclusive on set photography, concept art, costume designs, scene breakdowns, and more, accompanied by cast and crew interviews.

Leseprobe

Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards

ISBN: 9781789099546

e-book ISBN: 9781835411186

Published by

Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St

London

SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: January 2024

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© Tony Lee Moral 2023

Unless otherwise indicated in the caption, all images in this book are from the AlfredHitchcock papers, Core Collection Production files, Gregory Peck papers, HenryBumstead papers, JC Backings collection, Production artwork collection, Productiondesign drawing collection, Robert Boyle papers and Saul Bass papers of the MargaretHerrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, ortransmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission ofthe publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other thanthat in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on thesubsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

TONY LEE MORAL

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

6

Chapter 1—THE 39 STEPS (1935)

20

Chapter 2—SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943)

32

Chapter 3—SPELLBOUND (1945)

44

Chapter 4—VERTIGO (1958)

54

Chapter 5—NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959)

68

Chapter 6—PSYCHO (1960)

86

Chapter 7—THE BIRDS (1963)

98

Chapter 8—MARNIE (1964)

114

Chapter 9—TORN CURTAIN (1966)

126

CONCLUSION: TOPAZ (1969) & FAMILY PLOT (1976)

136

GLOSSARY

140

FILMOGRAPHY & INDEX

141

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

144

THIS IMAGE Portrait of Alfred Hitchcock by Thomas Wright, 1969. Wright was thestoryboard artist for Topaz (1969).

“There is a rectangle up there—a white rectanglein a theater—and it has to be filled.”

– Alfred Hitchcock

N o other director is more strongly associated with storyboarding than Sir Alfred Hitchcock. His iconic storyboards for the cropduster attack inNorth by Northwest (1959), the shower murder in Psycho (1960), and the crows flocking outside the school house in The Birds (1963) have created some of the most memorable moments in movie history and are indelibly etched in our minds.

2023 marks the centenary of Alfred Hitchcock’s complete assistant directing debut with the short film Always Tell Your Wife (1923). At the same time, he was also working as the assistant director and co-screenwriter on Woman to Woman (1923) at the Famous Players-Lasky studios in London and would sketch storyboards himself.

Hitchcock used storyboards and production illustrations and sketches to refine his directorial vision, ensuring that his intention was translated to the screen for his collaborators, long before the shooting actually began. Such was his reliance on storyboards, he often said that he rarely looked through the camera, since it was the photographic equivalent of an image that he had storyboarded earlier. As long-time assistant Peggy Robertson remembered, “Every picture I worked with him on was storyboarded and was one of the first requisites of his work.”

What exactly is a storyboard? A storyboard can be defined as an illustrator’s rendition of the vision of the content creator or director. Storyboards consist of a series of images, like the panels of a comic strip, that gives you an idea of how to compose different scenes. For today’s content creators, storyboards are a blueprintor script for the visual medium. They depict how a scene will play out before committing to digital, whether it’s a long-form film or a short, viral video.

When storyboarding for a Hitchcock film,the illustrator or storyboard artist is guided by the script, which has benefited from numerous conferences with the director and the screenwriter. The storyboard artist takes the script and documents individual frames and shots, which determine the lighting, editing, props, camera movement, costume, and any other script element.

“[Hitchcock] knew how to hone his visual style so that the movie that he had created in his mind through careful planning, scripting, storyboarding, conferences, and pre-production meetings looked like the one that is shot,” remembered Donald Baer, Hitchcock’s assistant director on Torn Curtain (1966). “He developed his own film language using unconventional camera

angles, moving camera, and point of view to convey the feelings of his characters. His style of directing was pretty much in tune with the staging of how he saw the picture to be shot, and as a result, most of the scenes were storyboarded, and he pretty much directed the film based on his selection of setups.”

Hitchcock’s usual way of working with his art department began with meetings early in the production schedule to go over each scene. He would sometimes draw rough thumbnail sketches to elaborate a sequence, but this process was also intended to allow his creative team to draw inspiration from each other’s ideas. From these preproduction meetings, a general plan was devised for each scene, some more detailed than others.

Through his meticulous preplanning and storyboarding, Hitchcock had a way to visualize a film before the first frame was filmed: “One of the first steps I take upon completing a final draft of a screenplay is to storyboard. As a director, it is my job to communicate my vision of the screenplay to the director of photography, the production designer and the actors. The most important part of communication is what will be captured in the frame. Anything outside of the frame is superfluous. The one thing that the student has got to do is learn that there is a rectangle up there—a white rectangle in a theater—and it has to be filled.”

As Patricia Hitchcock, his daughter, recalled, “He had a finished script, he would take a pad, with three rectangles on it, and he would then even draw every single shot in the picture. He would then go over it with the cameraman, so by the time he got on the set, he knew exactly what that movie would look like up on the screen.” These storyboards often described the size of the shot, whether it was a medium or a close-up, and whether the camera pulls back or pans left or right. “That’s why Hitch says it’s a bore for him to get the picture on the screen, because it has all been done already in his office,” said Ernest Lehman, who wrote the original screenplay for North by Northwest.

Hitchcock famously said he wasn’t interested in photographs of people talking. He was more interested in the visual when storyboarding, and telling the story purely in cinematic terms

through a succession of images on the screen, which in turn created ideas and emotion, and only seldom leads to dialogue. Hitchcock often boasted that he never needed to look through the camera viewfinder, as everything was in the preplanning and storyboarding. He was most interested in composition and filling that rectangle.

When Scottie takes Madeleine to Muir Woods in Vertigo, Hitchcock creates a truly memorable and haunting sequence through framing. Heused different frame sizes when storyboardingso that the audience runs through the gamut of emotions that the characters are feeling; especially the long shots of the giant redwoods dwarfing the actors, making them seem small and insignificant, as well as conveying how life can seem short and inconsequential. Hitchcock likened himself to a conductor. “At times, I have the feeling I’m an orchestra conductor, a trumpet sound corresponding to a close shot and a distant sound suggesting an entire orchestra performing a muted accompaniment.”

Hitchcock’s orchestration of the storyboarding process determined not only the angle but also the size of the image, and each setup contributed to the scene as a whole. He was conscious that the audience shouldn’t be aware of the change in image size but should be caught up in the story, as in the sudden switches to close-up on an actor’s face to identify with the character.

The future of filmmaking rests with young content creators all over the world today, and storyboards are a legacy of knowledge for the next generation. Alfred Hitchcock was a master storyteller; he had a strong appreciation of the human condition and felt a social obligation to portray that. As all art is about communication and eliciting feelings, it is through storyboarding that artists and content creators can influence the world and make it more relatable through our shared experiences.

OPPOSITE & NEXT SPREAD Storyboards for Vertigo (1958). ScottieFerguson takes Madeleine to Muir Woods where they wander among the tallredwood trees, always green, ever living.

Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards

8

Introduction

9

Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards

10

Introduction

11

BIOGRAPHY

Alfred Hitchcock was born in 1899 in Leytonstone in the East End of London. After attending a Jesuit school, he graduated from the London County Council School of Marine Engineering and Navigation and then began taking night classes in life drawing at the University of London. He started working for the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company in 1914 in the sales department, before being transferred to the advertising department.

In 1920, Hitchcock was hired by the American company The Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, based in London, designing title and dialogue cards for silent films. Working in the art department, as a writer and designer of movie titles, gave him invaluable experience in the power of design to attract an audience. Hitchcock devoted himself

to learning his craft, and in 1922 he became a set designer for the newly formed Gainsborough Pictures, having worked his way around the studio’s many departments.

He had the instinct for directing right away. ‘As a young man and as an art director, I was quite dogmatic… I would build a set and say to the director, ‘Here’s where it’s shot from,’” Hitchcock remembered. For the next three years from 1922 to 1925, he worked as an art director on films such as Woman to Woman (1923) and The Blackguard (1925), assisting the British film director Graham Cutts. “I was very content then when I was going to get a job as an assistant director,” recalled Hitchcock. “Then they said, ‘Do you know a good writer?’ and I said, ‘I’ll write it,’ and then my friend would be the art director on the picture.[Then] he said he couldn’t come, he had another job.

ABOVE Storyboards for Notorious (1946). Alicia Huberman visits Sebastian and his mother at their home in Rio de Janeiro where she infiltrates a Naziorganization at a dinner party. In a key sequence Alicia becomes aware of the importance of a bottle of wine being served to the guests, which Hitchcock calledthe MacGuffin. Graphite pencil on paper 8.5” x 10.25”

Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards

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THIS IMAGE Alfred Hitchcockʼshand-drawn storyboards for Saboteur.The drawing shows two views of a manclimbing up the arm of the Statue ofLiberty. The first view is from above andthe second is from the side. Graphitepencil on paper 9.5” x 8”

‘So what are we going to do for an art director?’ I said, ‘I’ll do the art direction.’” All this while still serving his apprenticeship!

1925 was an influential year for Hitchcock as he traveled to Berlin to work at the UFA studios on an Anglo-German coproduction. UFA was one of the biggest production studios outside Hollywood and the home of German Expressionist cinema. It had a huge impact on the young Hitchcock, especially the utilization of high- and low-angle shots, and the contrast between light and shade, which Hitchcock incorporated into his own visual style and became instrumental to his films suchas The 39 Steps (1935), Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Vertigo (1958).

Returning to England, he directed his first feature film in 1925, The Pleasure Garden for Gainsborough Pictures, followed by The Mountain Eagle (1926). From then on, the young Alfred Hitchcock was unstoppable as a director. As he began in silent films, he had a tendency to rely on the camera to tell his story visually. He believed that dialogue should be part of the atmosphere and not the focal point. He would pass his knowledge to his writers, so that they too knew how to tell a story visually rather than relying on words. This script was then translated to the storyboard artist who would often tell the important sequences pictorially.

The storyboards drawn up would then be shared with the cameraman, production designer, and wardrobe. Hitchcock was so meticulous that

he considered this phase of the production, the drawing and planning, to be the essential part of making the film, with the filming itself being a ‘necessary evil’. The storyboarding is where the creative work and heart of the engine took place.

“I have a strongly visual mind. I visualise a picture right down to the final cuts,” Hitchcock wrote in Encyclopaedia Britannica. “I write all this out in the greatest detail in the script, and thenI don’t look at the script while I’m shooting. I know it off by heart, just as an orchestra conductor needs not look at the score… When you finish the script, the film is perfect. But in shooting it you lose perhaps forty percent of your original conception.”

During Hitchcock’s career, which spanned the classic and golden eras of Hollywood, storyboards were drawn for the cameraman, who would follow them for camera placement. That suited the way Hitchcock worked; he liked to plan ahead. Storyboards then dictated more than they do today, as they are now mostly used for special effects and special sequences.

Shortly after Hitchcock moved to America to work in Hollywood, he was working side by side at the same drawing table with his production designer Robert Boyle on Saboteur (1942) when they heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Such was their dedication to designing the movie, they just looked up, and said “Oh, okay”, and went back to work! No response aside from that they had to carry on and make this film.

Introduction

13

Hitchcock himself hand-sketched the famous Statue of Liberty sequence in Saboteur, where actor Norman Lloyd, playing the villain Frank Fry, is hanging off the statue and is being held by the sleeve by the hero Barry Kane, played by Robert Cummings. Norman Lloyd remembers Hitchcock showing him the storyboards for that scene; “I had just come from the New York theater and I didn’t know anything about filmmaking. Hitch asked me, ‘Would you like to see the Statue of Liberty scene?’ And I said, ‘But we haven’t shot it yet!’ So Hitch laid it out in a scroll-like affair, all the storyboards he had done. It was like a Biblical scroll.”

Boyle remembers that the newly transplanted Hitchcock became fascinated with America. “He wanted to end the picture on the Statue of Liberty, which he did, just as he wanted to end North by Northwest on the four heads, which he did. He became very interested in America and he became a very staunch supporter of America and American ideals.”

As Hitchcock started his profession as an art director, the sketches for Saboteur show his propensityfor storyboards and filling in that rectangle. But the finer, more elaborate work was done by other specialists. Hitchcock worked with some of the best production designers in the business, including Boyle on Saboteur, North by Northwest, The Birds, and Marnie (1964); and Henry Bumstead on Rear Window (1954),The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo, and Family Plot (1976). These production designers created the extraordinary sets for some of Hitchcock’s most iconic set pieces, including the top of the Statue of Liberty, the Albert Hall, Mount Rushmore, and location filming in England, the South of France and Morocco. He also worked with graphic designer Saul Bass, who designed the titles for Vertigo and North by Northwest as well as being the pictorial consultant on Psycho.

The studios where Hitchcock made his films employed professional storyboard artists and he worked with some of the best. Illustrators Dorothea Holt, Mentor Huebner, Al Lowenthal, Harold Michelson, Thomas J. Wright and Joseph Musso were all trained in their craft, and superb artists who could paint and draw. Through their sketches, they indicated camera setups, design angles, costume, and production ideas.

When designing for storyboards, an illustrator covers three aspects of the shot: a key sketch to convey

tone, atmosphere, mood, lighting, and time of day; a form sketch that shows the size of the image; and an angle sketch that relays the camera position. It’s not what the camera sees, it’s what the audience sees on the screen that counts, the succession of images moving through the frame.

What’s the difference between an art director and a production designer? In a 1963 interview, Hitchcock explained: “Well, art director is not a correct term. You see, an art director as we know it in the studios is a man who designs a set. The art director seems to leave the set before it’s dressed and a new man comes on the set called the set dresser. Now, there is another function which goes a little further beyond the art director and is almost in a different realm. That is the production designer. Now a production designer is a man usually who designs angles and sometimes production ideas… The art director is set designing. Production design is definitely taking a sequence and laying it out in sketches.”

In the same interview, Hitchcock mentions the famous production designer William Cameron Menzies, whom he worked with on Foreign Correspondent (1940), and who is best known for his work on Gone with the Wind (1939). Menzies would take a sequence and by a series of sketches indicate camera setups.

Despite Hitchcock’s fondness for storyboards, only rarely would an entire film be storyboarded, such as The Birds, which required various technical departments to come together to create the complicated special effects required. Storyboards were often created for complicated special effect sequences that required a lot of edits and were dependent on montage. These included the chase up the bell tower in Vertigo, the shower scene in Psycho, the horse accident in Marnie, and the runaway car in Family Plot.

For Hitchcock’s last film, Family Plot, assistant director Howard Kazanjian recalls that ninety- six percent of all storyboards were drawn by storyboard artist Thomas Wright and four percent of the storyboards were done by Hitchcock. Wright did ninety-nine percent of the runaway car illustrations from Hitchcock’s instructions, and most of the car sequence was second unit filming also directed by Wright. But a number of the shots didn’t pass Hitchcock’s critical eye so had to be reshot. The storyboards were shown to the director of photography Leonard South on occasions, as

Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards

14

ABOVE LEFT Alfred Hitchcockʼs hand-drawn Saboteur storyboard is divided into frames marked 17, 18 and 19. The first frame shows three figuresstanding in the torch of the Statue of Liberty. The second frame shows a view from above the statue as Frank Fry falls. The third frame shows Barry Kanetrying to reach out for him. The text reads: 17 Beginning of fall / 18 angle to see water / 19 19a Barry Kane moves off to finger.

ABOVE RIGHT Hitchcockʼs hand-drawn storyboard for Saboteur. Storyboards 20, 21 and 22 show Frank Fry holding onto the arm of the Statue ofLiberty. The second frame depicts Barry Kane as he starts down to help Fry. The third frame shows Kane starting down the arm of the statue with a close-upindicating a second shot as Kane gets further down the arm. As Norman Lloyd recalled, “When I fall from the Statue of Liberty, that scene had to be workedwithout a cut. Hitch said we have to stay with me all the way to the bottom of the statue. That is storytelling, that is camera logic. This is what Hitch had toperfection.” Graphite pencil on paper mounted on board

Introduction

15

well as the production designer Henry Bumstead or whomever needed them. But generally speaking, the crew did not see them or receive a copy according to Kazanjian.

In 1975, twenty-four-year-old assistant trainee Don Zepfel was involved in the preparation for Family Plot, working with Kazanjian, and second assistant director Wayne Farlow. Zepfel’s job was to go and get the actors when they were ready for a take. “[Hitchcock] was a very prepared director and an example of how to make a movie,” recalls Zepfel. “He had all the storyboards ready, there was really

no need for discussion. He had it all planned out in advance. He was involved all the time, sat in his chair next to the camera, never looked through the lens for what I saw. He’d ask what lens was up and always knew what the image would be and didn’t bother looking through the camera much. We didn’t do a massive number of takes.”

For Hitchcock, storyboarding meant that he only shot what was needed, which is why he routinely filmed from 9am to 5pm, a fact much appreciated by the cast and crew, who respected his economy and preparations.

ABOVE Ben and Jo McKennaʼs hotel suite in Marrakech where a strange man asks for Monsieur Montgomery. The production designer on The Man Who KnewToo Much (1956) was Henry Bumstead.

Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards

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LAYOUT

Through the next few chapters we examine the storyboarding techniques of some of Hitchcock’s most famous and popular films, from The 39 Steps to Torn Curtain, his fiftieth feature, and how they encompass Hitchcock’s early British period and influences to his golden years in Hollywood under the studio system.

The 39 Steps has all the ingredients of classic Hitchcock and has been rightly lauded as one of the best films from his British period before moving to Hollywood. The screenplay is storyboarded and celebrated for its sudden switches of location, with an effect like one short story after another. Today’s content creators and TikTokers can learn from its rapid switches of scene that lead organically to make a whole film. Hitchcock’s experience of German Expressionism is keenly felt in every frame with the help of his Austrian-born art director Oscar Werndorff.

As one of Hitchcock’s most celebrated black and white films, lighting plays an integral role in the look of The 39 Steps. Hitchcock believed that cameramen, who normally rose up the ranks in the studio starting as assistants, should be sent to the art galleries to study the Dutch masters like Vermeer and gain an understanding of the logic of light. The use of light and shade is again inspired by Hitchcock’s time in German cinema.

Hitchcock often cited Shadow of a Doubt as his favorite film because of the way plot and character were integrated. In contrast to the dark film noirs of its time, he was keen to avoid cliché, such as the dark alleyway, the cat at night, and the sinister stranger lurking in the shadows. Instead he brought evil out in broad daylight, in the middle of a small American suburban town, in this case Santa Rosa in Northern California. “For once there was time to get the characters into it,” said Hitchcock.

The duality of light and shade is reflected in the film’s storyboards. Uncle Charlie is often only half lit to show the two sides of his personality. He is often filmed in profile so the audience only sees half his face, such as the famous scene at the family dinner table where he likens the fat greedy women to swine. The theme of the double plays throughout, as demonstrated in the carefully storyboarded opening

sequence that draws a psychic connection and parallel between Uncle Charlie and his niece Charlie.

Even though many of Hitchcock’s films were fantastical, he was very concerned with achieving realism, which is why his films have often been compared to waking dreams or nightmares. In Spellbound (1945), Hitchcock was keen to show the vividness of dreams and hired celebrated Surrealist Salvador Dalí to design the famous dream sequence,as his paintings were uncanny but often rooted in the ordinary and the everyday. As Hitchcock said, “When you have a nightmare, it’s awfully vivid if you’re dreaming that you’re being led to the electric chair. Then you’re as happy as can be when you wake up because you’re relieved. It was so vivid. And that’s really the basis of this attempt at realistic photography, to make it look as real as possible, because the effects themselves are actually quite bizarre.”

Storyboards not only determine exactly what the shot will look like, they can even decide what kind of lens should be used. When preparing for Vertigo, Hitchcock invented a new lens technique to create the distorting effect required for the character’s viewpoint, which is shown in the storyboards, along with a forced perspective. The storyboards also describe the size of the shot, whether it’s a mediumor a tight close-up, whether the camera pulls back and pans to the right or left, or whether it tilts slightly down or pans up. More sophisticated storyboards have arrows within that indicate where a character or the camera is moving. In North by Northwest, arrowson the edges show the camera movement in the Mount Rushmore sequence.

Hitchcock’s preferred lens was a 50mm because he said that was the lens of the human eye. Many of his storyboard artists would sketch for a 50mm lens, often called a “normal” lens, because objects remain in perspective approximately as they do with the human eye. As Hitchcock was so keen on subjective viewpoint and a character’s point of view, he was very fond of using a 50mm lens, which is frequently used to give a character’s point of view. The camera is the audience all the time, and they are seeing it with their own eyes.

Hitchcock spent half of his time avoiding the cliché when writing scenes and storyboards, so

Introduction

17

that his films were fresh and inventive. While writing the film, which took a year, Ernest Lehman would come up with an idea, and Hitchcock would often say, “Oh, that’s the way they do it in the movies.”North by Northwest’s storyboards are a great example of using locations to their fullest to enhance and propel the plot, with not only the cropduster sequence but also Roger Thornhill’s crazy bidding inside the auction house.

Hitchcock was adamant that he would never film a shot without it having a clear dramatic purpose, one which moves the story and enhances the narrative. He disliked shooting master scenes like television, but shot only what was necessary. This is where storyboarding can help plan content. As Jeff Gourson, an assistant to the editor on Topaz (1969), remembers; “[Hitchcock] would shoot a master, but today they shoot a master from beginning to end.What I learnt from him is that you shoot the beginning of the master, which is where your characters would come into the room, and they’llsit down. Then he would stop the camera andthen jump down to the end of the scene and pick up the scene where they’d all get up and leave. Because he knew everything in between would be in the coverage that he’d shot. If a scene was three minutes long, he didn’t waste three minutes of film shooting stuff that he knew he wasn’t going to use. He was so prepared, he knew exactly what he wanted, he had a storyboard, where he wanted to be, and that’s how I learned filmmaking.”

Storyboards are instrumental to an editor when cutting together montage—the assembly of pieces of film to create a sequence. Montage is the process of editing where one shot, a strip of film or video, is joined with another. Hitchcock often referred to the use of montage and the effect of what he called “pure cinema” to create an emotional response in the audience, namely “the complementary pieces of film put together, like notes of music make a melody.” The most famous example of this is Marion Crane’s shower murder in Psycho, which is made of seventy-eight shots and fify-two cuts, as well as the later killing of Detective Arbogast in the Bates house.

Hitchcock also storyboarded sequences to build suspense by cutting between shots and scenes, and switching between multiple points of view to shift perspective, cutting between one image size and another to increase shock. In The Birds, the crosscutting between Melanie smoking a cigarette