The Story of Frenzy (2001) - transcript

Transcript for the documentary "The Story of Frenzy", based on the subtitle track from a DVD.

The following people appear in the transcript:

Transcript

Laurent Bouzereau

Hi, I'm Laurent Bouzereau, producer of this exciting DVD presentation of Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy. For those of you familiar with the trailer of Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock was shown floating on the River Thames. As you can see, I settled for something a little more simple. Yet, since I travelled all the way to London, to meet with the screenwriter of Frenzy, Anthony Shaffer, and the cast members from the film, I've decided to introduce this exciting documentary from the famous Tower Bridge, where the movie begins. So here are some very exciting stories about the making of Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy. And for those of you wondering what happened to my tie, well, some very suspicious fellow bought it from me last night.

Alfred Hitchcock (archive footage)

How do you like my tie?

Patricia Hitchcock

Frenzy was one of those movies where the Hitchcock touch came back.

Jon Finch

This was just a good, rumbustious Hitchcock with a few scary bits in it.

Anthony Shaffer

He wanted to become more explicitly violent.

Barry Foster

There's a texture which you can get by using humor and giving it to the blackest character in the piece.

Anna Massey

Hitch made a lovely atmosphere on the set. It was good fun. Good ironic fun.

Peter Bogdanovich

Really, the world has become darker than ever in Frenzy.

Anthony Shaffer

I had just done Sleuth on Broadway, and we had received a notice like the Second Coming, which was very gratifying. And Hitch, you know, always used successful writers. And I had had that success, and therefore I was not completely surprised that Hitch got in touch with me. Mind you, it's such an honor to be invited, because he was such an incredible legend.

At first, I thought it was a bit of a hoax, because this happened on New Year's Eve. Someone, you know, answered the phone for me and said, "It's Alfred Hitchcock on the line." I said, "Yeah." I thought it was one of my mates in New York saying, "It's time to come out and have a drink." A few minutes later, the actual book arrived, which was the book from which the film was derived. A book by a writer called Arthur La Bern called Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square. This tended to convince me this was not a hoax, and we took it from there. And that's how that started.

Alma was, of course, his wife, and she was a tiny little lady. And whilst we were here trapping Frenzy, she had a heart attack. Not he. He had a pacemaker, you know. But the one who had the heart attack was Alma. It slightly affected the work necessary for doing the picture, but, um, she recovered very quickly, and, in fact, survived him.

man (archive footage)

And this particular shot is a helicopter coming along the river, and turning around onto you all listening to the speech. Albeit, you're not sort of aware of the helicopter at all. It's purely a camera shot. Nobody looks at the helicopter. You're all looking at the minister, listening to his speech. Okay? All right, back around. And, action.

Anthony Shaffer

He was very strange about those cameo appearances. They were always very modest, weren't they? He wouldn't use makeup or make himself look in any way fanciful or ridiculous. He was very shy of doing things like that. He would be himself, but he wouldn't be anybody else. Do you see what I'm saying? And he elects to do that on the embankment. There are actually two shots of him looking fairly lugubrious under a bowler hat.

We did research into the serial killer. In 1970, I don't think it was so prevalent a crime, and these serial killers are what are called "aggressive sexual psychopaths." There are a lot of passive sexual psychopaths about. It's the aggressive ones you have to worry about, because they simply cannot control that impulse when it comes upon them. It was a very interesting character because little had been written about that kind of a character at the time. He fascinates us. He still does.

Jon Finch

I think why Hitchcock asked me to play it was, at that moment, I hadn't had a big film released, but I'd just finished Macbeth for Roman Polanski, which was big news at the time. Hadn't opened. And, of course, I was gonna be cheap, you see. Now, it was a very cheap film, Frenzy. They didn't spend a lot of money. They didn't, for example, provide cars for anybody to go to the set or go to the studio. You just got your own taxi or you came on a bike or whatever you did.

So, anyway, they asked me... just asked me to do it, see? They go through a book. You know, you got a casting director. Casting directors don't do a lot. I mean, there's not much they can do. But they say, "Well, this so-and-so. How about him?" And Hitchcock presumably said, "Yeah, I think he looks all right. What's he doing at the moment?" So suddenly my agent went, "Oh, yeah. Would you like, I'll get Roman Polanski?" Roman's doing everything down in Shepperton. He's saying, "I'll do anything. You wanna see the film? I'll show you rough cuts. I'll do this and do that." Hitchcock didn't want to see a frame. Nothing. But he said, "I've got to see whether he can act and what he looks like on film." And my agent got a television movie that I'd done — simple thing shot in black and white in ‘69, I think it was — and showed it to him. So he said, "Yeah, he'll do."

So I came to see him around the corner from the Dorchester, which is where we are now, and he said, "Jon, nice to see you." Ba-ba-ba-bom. I was, you know, like half in shock seeing the man anyway. "Do you like the script?" I said, "Yes, of course." You know, as you do. And, uh, so he said, "I've seen the film that your agent showed me. You can act. That's good. Would you like to do it?" "Yes, I would." "Okay. Let's go and have lunch." And that was it. So it was done. And, I, you know... Of course I couldn't believe it. I was stunned. Absolutely stunned.

Anna Massey

I went up, in fact, for the part of the secretary. I didn't go up for Babs. And we went into this huge — I went alone — to this huge, vast room in Piccadilly where he was doing the auditions. And he sat behind this desk. I sat down. And he started talking about deep refrigeration and how to make batter. There was this huge room he said he had in his house which was his fridge, and he told me how he made batter for batter pudding, and he kept it in this vast fridge. So I was completely mesmerized by this.

Then he started talking about this barmaid. I was totally confused by this time, ‘cause he hadn't asked me to read for the secretary or anything. Anyway, this barmaid had to be quite short, and I found myself taking my shoes off. I don't know why, because I wasn't up for the barmaid. I was up for the secretary. Anyway, when I got up to go — I'd forgotten I'd taken my shoes off, so I had to put my shoes on — and he didn't say whether he wanted me or not. Nothing, and no script was given. And the next day, my agent rang, and he said, "He wants you for the Cockney barmaid, Babs." I said, "This is amazing." So I said yes to work with Hitchcock, of course. Count me in.

Barry Foster

I'd had a couple of successes in the West End onstage, and I was doing a play by David Mercer at the Criterion called After Haggerty, uh, with Billie Whitelaw. Someone said, "Oh, Alfred Hitchcock's in tonight." "Oh, really. Mm-hmm." Uh, next morning, my agent said, "Mr. Hitchcock would like to meet you at 100 Piccadilly." So, along I went. He said, "I'm making this picture about a murderer. I'd like you to take the script away and tell me if you'd like to play it."

So, well, the short story is that he sent for a couple of books about a pretty well-known murderer we had over here called Neville Clevely Heath, who masqueraded as a squadron leader. And I went off on a short holiday to read and came back and made the picture, and I always thought, when people asked, "How on earth did you get the part?" I said, "Well, he came to see the play."

It was halfway through shooting the picture. I was talking with his personal assistant, Peggy Robertson, and she said, "Oh, no, no, no. That isn't how you got the part." Um, what happened was that I'd made a film a few years earlier called Twisted Nerve — again with Billie Whitelaw. And this picture, in almost all the notices, they referred to it as sort of having a Hitchcock flavor to it, and, apparently, seeing me in the part I played in that, that decided him I would be okay for Bob Rusk in Frenzy. So, that's how wrong you can be about, uh, where you got where you did.

Anthony Shaffer

Food is continuously used in the movie. Look at the package of grapes that he is given at the beginning of the picture. He is completely broke, he cannot back the horse that Rusk has tipped him, and so he takes it out on the grapes.

man (archive footage)

Now turn. Go. Better go faster than me, Paul. Now, he's pretty furious. He's just thrown the grapes on the floor previously.

Jon Finch

He'd say, "Do you want to run the jokes?" Which is an old English way of saying, "Do you want to rehearse?" He'd say, "Does Jon want to run the jokes? I think he wants to run... Do you want to run the jokes, Jon?" I'd say, "I wouldn't mind." It does help, you know, get through. Especially in, maybe, a bit of a wide shot, you know, where you've got more than two lines of dialogue.

So you do it. They say, "Right?" You say, "Yeah, of course." "All right." Shoot it. Bang. You just do it like that. But, of course, because it was Hitchcock, you didn't worry about it that much.

Barry Foster

He hired the actors the same way he hired the stage carpenter — on the assumption that they knew their job, they knew what to do. So rehearsal was minimal. But on the other hand, the build up to the rape and murder scene with Barbara... There I was completely free. He'd set up the camera for the scene, and I remember saying, "Well, I'd like to walk around there and pull the file out and slam it back," or do whatever he did. And he said, "That's fine. Okay. Uh, we'll move the camera, accommodate what, uh, Mr. Foster wants to do." Absolutely no problem. Absolute freedom I felt.

The rape and murder scene with Barbara Leigh-Hunt took three days to shoot. Before we started, we had Hitch's storyboard, which is an incredibly helpful thing for the actor. Fortunately, it involved chopping up the action into short and intense sequences.

There's a mid-shot of the two of us, Barbara splayed out on her swivel chair, me on top of her. We got to get through two or three lines, mostly hers, of course, protesting. There might have been six or seven takes of that. That was extremely distressing. The flashes of nudity, of the breasts and so on, were done by a professional model. It's not at all pleasant, doing that stuff.

The tie, of course, is pre-tied and stitched so it can't move. I can do all this... till the cows come home, just as you'd have to do onstage. All the work is being done by the actress. We would just console each other. "Just another day and a half and we'll be through with this."

She sticks her tongue out, as Hitch asked her to, and the effect is genuinely horrendous. Hitch did experiment with having an extremely close lens at her mouth, getting through makeup, saliva and blood. Hitch, I think, was trying to plumb the ultimate in horror there.

Anthony Shaffer

And I saw it in, uh, rushes. I said to Mr. Hitchcock, "I don't think you should use that scene." He said, "Why not?" I said, "Because it's disgusting." "Nonsense, dear boy," was his response, and he put it in the very first rough assembly of the film. He had taken it out by the time we got to the second assembly.

This was all part of setting up the framing of the wrong man. This was a key moment in the film, and for this act of synchronicity, if ever a man was in the wrong place at the wrong time, it's Blaney. We spent quite a long time looking for that location, because it had to have a number of streets that actually intersected.

man #1 (archive footage)

The light's a little too dark at the moment. Going to wait a minute. Would you like to rehearse it again?

Alfred Hitchcock (archive footage)

Yes, I don't see why not.

man #1 (archive footage)

It's a timing thing.

Alfred Hitchcock (archive footage)

Sure it is.

man #1 (archive footage)

Can we have the governor's chair here please, while we rehearse this?

Alfred Hitchcock (archive footage)

I'll do without it.

man #1 (archive footage)

Oh, it's there.

man #2 (archive footage)

All right, Paul? All right. Background action and action.

Alfred Hitchcock (archive footage)

You've got to face the camera the whole time, until the very end, when she goes by the camera, and you pan ‘round with her, and she goes in this door. But she's full face the whole time. She'll look off. She'll be profile when she looks off down the alley.

Anthony Shaffer

Hitch was not afraid to hold that shot where nothing happened. Nothing happens at all, but you know what is going to happen because, obviously, the secretary is going to find the murdered woman.

Barry Foster

Blaney's wife's secretary, who's played by Jean Marsh... It was a stroke of genius to make her look so dowdy and dull and spinsterish, and obviously very repressed. Because Jean was then and still is an extremely beautiful, vivacious, marvelous woman.

Anna Massey

At the Coburg Hotel, when Jon Finch and I went in for an amorous encounter, the lady at the desk, the porteress was Elsie Randolph, the famous actress. She was in Rich and Strange, which Hitch directed in 1932. So they were old friends. He surround himself by people he liked and remembered.

Jon Finch

The idea of showing a naked woman getting out of bed and then putting on socks is a wonderful piece of writing/direction combined. There's no deep significance to it. It just... You know. The girl gets out of bed. "It's gonna be cold." Puts on socks. Simple.

Anna Massey

At my interview, and certainly when I had other meetings with Hitch, he never said, "Do you mind stripping in the bedroom scene?" I'd assumed that I'd be doing it, but the double did it. So, when you cut away, and this nude figure just wearing socks goes into the bathroom, that's not me.

Anthony Shaffer

I think Truffaut it was who said that Hitchcock made the same film many, many times, by which he meant that his formula was that a man, unjustly accused, runs and thus further incriminates himself. And Frenzy is one of those pictures. It's a middle-cut Hitchcock movie in that sense.

man (archive footage)

All right, rehearsal bell.

Alfred Hitchcock (archive footage)

You know her very well. Something's up. Uh, on the other hand, Anna, you don't know her.

Anna Massey

He was most respectful. Terribly kind. If you were in trouble, you could ask him anything. If you didn't understand how to play a scene, if you wanted a line changed, which sometimes we did...

Billie Whitelaw (archive footage)

May I say something? This has been put here.

Alfred Hitchcock (archive footage)

Yes.

Billie Whitelaw (archive footage)

It's going to be fairly crucial later on. I don't know whether that's meant to be here.

Alfred Hitchcock (archive footage)

Wait a minute. A handbag with gloves have been placed in a strategic position.

man (archive footage)

We were going to ask you before where you would like them. She says she's going shopping at the end, doesn't she?

Alfred Hitchcock (archive footage)

Yes, but a woman like that would leave her handbag and gloves in the bedroom. They would be on the dressing table if she went shopping. Fishy?

Jon Finch

I used to write notes every single night to his secretary, Peggy. And he was very good. Most of the time he'd say, "All right. Correct it." He wasn't annoyed that I'd pointed out, maybe, a syntactical error or something like that. He did say once, "Jon, I said you could make alterations. I didn't say you could rewrite the whole script," which I was trying to do, I must have been.

Barry Foster

Frenzy was shot almost entirely in Pinewood Studios in sets built in the studios. Things like the inter... the office... where the famous murder took place. The interior of the pub and so on. The rest of it was shot mainly in Covent Garden itself. Covent Garden was then the fruit and vegetable and floral market for London.

Anthony Shaffer

It's a very London film, and I know he wanted to make that. I think he thought — whether he thought rightly or wrongly is another matter — that people thought that he had rather sold out and gone to live in Hollywood. I personally don't think that he would have been the world success he became had he stayed here in England.

Alfred Hitchcock (archive footage)

Here is the scene of another horrible murder. This is the famous London wholesale fruit and vegetable market — Covent Garden. Here you may buy the fruits of evil... and the horrors of vegetables. I've heard of a leg of lamb, a leg of chicken, but never a leg of potatoes.

Anthony Shaffer

When we were filming in Covent Garden, a curious thing took place that a very old man came up to him. I remember security men running in very quickly because you know what goes on these days, or even in those days. It wasn't quite as bad, but nonetheless... And he said, "I remember your father here in the market."

Patricia Hitchcock

His father was a very well-off, uh, green grocer. He had, um, a chain of stores, you know, where he sold fish and green grocery and all that. So he grew up with this.

Anthony Shaffer

Hitchcock was delighted, of course. He said, "Leave him alone," sat him down, had a long talk with him about his dad, gave him a great meal and sent him on his way. It's a nice touch, but he was finding and feeling his roots as they had been.

Anna Massey

He had a crack team. You know, fabulous operator. Fabulous Gil Taylor. Fabulous lighting.

Jon Finch

He had great fun with the cameramen, especially the camera operator. He used to say, uh, "One button up so," or something like that. He'd be that precise. He'd know. Whatever lens you put on, he could tell exactly what the end result was gonna be in the camera.

Anna Massey

When I come out of the pub, Paul, the camera operator, said to Hitchcock, "Where do you want to cut this shot?" Hitch said, "Two inches above her hem," or I don't know what he said, but anyway he said something technical. We did the take, and Hitch was sitting at a really weird angle, because he had to be away from the camera. And he said to Paul, "You were an inch out, weren't you, on the cut. Where you cut on her skirt." And Paul said, "How did he know, sitting from that angle?" And he did. His eye was so acute.

Barry Foster

When she turns around, and there I am behind her, how did he do it? Well, it's quite simple. I'm just crouching, uh, just below the camera, like a little urchin. Anna hits her mark. I come up behind her. The camera lens can't see me until she moves.

Peter Bogdanovich

I think, was it Truffaut who said after he saw it, said to Hitchcock, "It's a young man's picture." By that he meant it's a film with a lot of experimentation, a lot of risks. There's that moment when Anna Massey's walking into the street and all the sound goes away. That's unusual to do that. You have to have nerve to pull something off like that.

Anthony Shaffer

When we had done the first murder, it's a pretty graphic account of a rape and strangulation, and I didn't see any point in repeating ourselves. And so I introduced a phrase into the first murder. I said to Hitch, "Let's not see another murder." Why don't we just have the murderer take her up to his apartment, open the door for her and say, "You're my kind of woman" and close the door. We know exactly what is happening behind that closed door, and there's a wonderful shot that follows that. It's what Hitch called his "good-bye to Babs." The camera retreats and down a narrow, twisting staircase.

Barry Foster

Along the hallway and out into the street. And I think it's a fairly well-known cinema trick. In the studio, we had the stairway built. The U-shaped stairway, and with a railway for the, uh, cradle... with the operator and the camera sitting in the cradle so that he's coming down and ‘round the "U" and back down the stairs, along the hallway, and as the camera clears the lintel of the front door, which was built in the studio, an extra dressed like a Covent Garden porter with a huge sack of potatoes wipes the screen. Go out to location in Tavistock Street, have the man walk across and wipe the screen with the potato sack and track back. Cue pedestrians, cue the cyclists, cue the cars, and it seems to be an uninterrupted sequence.

Peter Bogdanovich

Late in his career, Hitchcock was, you know, working on all cylinders, and that he was able to bring an enormous amount of creativity and excitement even, basically, at the end of his career.

Anna Massey

He suddenly realizes that the tie pin is in my clenched hand. The audience could not possibly have gathered that without a flashback sequence, which Hitchcock storyboarded. I knew from the start that I wasn't going to have to go in the potato sack, other than the close-up on my face, but I was never in the truck. Uh, they always had a double for that.

Barry Foster

The potato lorry sequence was another three-day affair, though very much more light-hearted and bearable than the three days of rape and murder. It was something like 114 cuts. There again, how useful the storyboard was, because, uh, I'm scrabbling away, and all of a sudden this bare foot comes and hits me in the jaw. And, of course, Hitch's drawing was, uh, you know, quite grotesque, which immediately told the actor he wants a laugh there. Amidst all this gruesome business, the audience will laugh.

That was the model's hand when I finally found the tie pin. Given the right sound effects, you could just do that. If you've got the right sound effects, you'll think that really is a broken finger. It was a very dusty, messy business, but on the whole most enjoyable, and a most instructive three days.

Anthony Shaffer

We, the audience, know what has happened. We know why he's there. There is a courtroom, there is a judge, and there is the fellow in the box. You don't need to do more than that. One thing we don't know is what sentence he's going to get. That's the one piece of information we're given when the door finally opens. That's all you need.

The difference between the novel and the movie script is that we added a lot of comedy noir, which Hitch was always very fond of. And in particular, in those scenes of exposition, where the detective, Alec McCowen, is brought to realize that, on the basis of a lot of circumstantial evidence, he has arrested the wrong man who is currently in jail. And how does he come to realize that he has made that mistake?

So the way to do it, I thought, was to do it as comedy. And the comedy comes, of course, from his wife, played by Vivien Merchant, who is a gourmet cook. And she keeps giving him the most repulsive and inedible meals. And he is struggling desperately, I think, with a pig's trotter or knuckle of pork or something like that, whilst reprising the entire deductive plot.

Even if you're laughing and you don't hear it, no one can complain later that there's a big hole in the picture. Because how did the detective suddenly realize that he had made a mistake? The audience have been actually told word by word. It does seem to me that we had our cake and ate it, for once, which is always nice.

I think what we wanted to do was extend to the last possible moment the fact that our hero is in danger — that he's a loser... that he cannot win this one. He, uh, hits this creature in the bed, believing it to be Rusk, on the head. The arm falls out of the bed. We realize it's not a man at all. It's a woman. Just another victim of the Necktie Murderer. In the book, we have a different victim in the last scene. The secretary of Blaney's wife in the matrimonial agency is the victim, and in the film we have an anonymous lady who we never met before.

Barry Foster

The last scene of the picture is one of the few occasions I had direction from Hitch. I drag up this huge trunk up into my apartment. I get it through the door, and waiting in my room is the chief inspector of the police. And I sort of dropped my head or something... something corny. And Hitch said, "Don't drop your head." He says, "That is the last thing a serial murderer is going to do, as it were, admit defeat." So he said, "Just don't... don't drop your head. Drop the trunk, but don't drop your head."

Peter Bogdanovich

The music in Frenzy is good. It's one of the best scores he had without Bernard Herrmann. Henry Mancini, I think, did the original score, and then was let go. He brought Ron Goodwin in after letting Mancini go, and I think he did a very good job. It's the return to England, too, that Hitch probably infused that in the composer. There's a certain kind of nostalgia that Hitch must have felt that comes across in the score.

Jon Finch

He was a revered character. He's one of the greatest names in, uh, in 20th-century history, let alone the film industry. I thought it was right up there in terms of his later work in as much as it had chasing the wrong man, the amusing villain, and the discussion of married life and its ups and downs.

Anna Massey

It's a very brutal film, but it's full of things he loves, like food and London. It's a very loving portrayal of the Covent Garden Market, because now that's moved over to Nine Elms and Battersea, and we knew at the time that Covent Garden wasn't going to be there forever, and Barry and I remember saying to one another this will be a very exclusive piece of film.

Anthony Shaffer

By putting him in London with Frenzy, in touch with his roots, and by telling the story — when I say an old-fashioned way, I mean a very carefully constructed way — and I think the public responded to that very strongly. I know they did, and he got a big smash hit out of it, which cheered him up a lot and put him back on his pedestal again, where he remains to this day.