[instrumental music]
[water running]
[water gurgling]
[intense music]
[music continues]
[thunder rumbling]
[music continues]
I was 21 years old.
I was a pin-up model.
I was working with a photographer
and he said that Universal
or UI, as it was called then
are looking for somebody to pose in a film.
So I called and made an appointment.
I went and spoke with Mr. Hitchcock
and basically had to strip down.
Got dressed again and then
was interviewed by, uh, Janet Leigh
and I had to strip down for her, too.
Well, just in my underpants, but anyway..
My body was very similar to hers. So I got hired.
I had to report for makeup
I don't know, one or two days later
and there's the red light flashing
and "No admittance" and all of this.
And I thought, "Oh, God.
You know, here they're expecting a stripper."
I was not quite completely nude.
I had, uh, what we called a crotch patch.
During filming with the shower
going and everything
it would come loose.
I told Hitchcock, I said
"Why don't we take this thing off?"
And he says, "No. No."
The whole time he wore a suit
black tie, white shirt.
I was hired for two or three days
and wound up working for seven.
It's extraordinary that it took so long
to do that p... one particular scene
because that was about a third of what
Janet Leigh had to work for the movie.
There were 78 pieces of film
in about 45 seconds.
Spending seven days on one small set
shooting, you know, such a short scene
was pretty much unheard of.
Generally these days, you're lucky
if you get one day to kill someone.
Oh, it has to be an obsession.
You're shooting that over the course of seven days
that is absolutely an obsession.
Hitchcock thought to film this murder
separately from the rest of this movie
which meant in a way that
murder was now going to be
an acceptable part of entertainment.
There was violence in American films
but nothing like "Psycho."
Nothing that intimate, nothing that designed
nothing that kind of remorseless.
I think he knew what he had on his hands.
And he probably felt like
the whole film hinged on that moment
that's this crucible moment.
You should've seen the blood.
The whole, the whole place was..
Well it's, it's too horrible
to describe. Dreadful.
It's, I think the first modern..
...expression of..
...the female body under assault.
And in some ways
it's its most pure expression.
Because it is devastating.
Women had top billing in the '30s and '20s.
And that slowly evaporated during the forties.
And by the time we got to the end of the '50s
women were, you know, secondary in movies.
And Hitch, sort of, that's what the movie does
in a way, say that
he's killing off the woman.
And it was really the first A movie
to deal with this kind of
horror, trashy, tabloid stuff.
Nobody wanted to make it
and they went, "Are you nuts?
"You just did "North by Northwest"
"this incredible hit
"now you want to do this like
"black and white, what is this thing?"
I have just made a motion picture
"North By Northwest."
"North by Northwest" was like
the ultimate achievement in... on every level.
It was grand entertainment, it was classy
it had movie stars, and it, you know, it was, it was
beautiful, it was colorful.
So, w... how are you gonna follow that up
with a prank?
I once made a movie, uh
rather tongue-in-cheek, called "Psycho."
- Yes. - It was a..
It was, it was a big joke, you know?
And I was horrified to find that
some people took it seriously.
It was intended to cause people
to scream and yell and so forth
uh, but no more than the screaming and yelling
on a switchback railway.
Those of us who work in the horror genre rarely wear tuxedos.
This is not a movie that wears a tuxedo either.
This is a movie that's very much jeans and a T-shirt.
But it's told by a guy who wears a tuxedo.
He wanted to stray beyond his comfort zone.
One of the things he was up to is
"You don't know me at all."
And that's what "Psycho" is really about.
What attracted you to this one then?
I think the murder in the bathtub.
Coming out of the blue
you know, that was about all.
Hitchcock was very, very aware of his competition.
He realized that Clouzot had done the kind of movie
that he felt that he should and could be making.
And of course, when critics started
calling Clouzot "The French Hitchcock.."
Well, you were invading his territory then
and he, believe me, he took notice.
"Psycho" is really the moment
where the gloves come off.
It does feel like Hitch's revenge
on Hollywood to some extent.
In so many levels, it's, um, his masterpiece.
I s... continue to feel like, the movie is an act of aggression
against his fans, his critics, actors.
- Yeah. - It's, it just feels angry.
Like, he was hurt and he had to hurt back.
The sudden violence of the shower scene
in "Psycho" was meaningful to him
for reasons that dated back you know, 20 years
to the origins of World War II.
Hitchcock thought that the UK
and the United States were insufficiently prepared
for the dangers and horrors of World War II.
There were several moments in his movies that spoke to that.
You can hear the bombs falling on the streets
and the homes. Don't tune me out.
Hang on a while, this is a big story and you're a part of it.
It's too late to do anything here now
except stand in the dark and let them come.
What's the matter with us?
We not only let the Nazi do our rowing for us
but our thinking!
Ye Gods and little fishes!
One of them was "Shadow of a Doubt"
only about a year and a half
after Pearl Harbor
set in Santa Rosa in California.
You can see how in that movie
he's kind of chastising
this town for being naive.
You live in a dream.
You're a sleepwalker, blind.
How do you know what the world is like?
Do you know the world is a foul sty?
Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses
you'd find swine?
He was basically saying
"America, you were way too naive.
"You think you're safe in your shower, at home
"with, you know, your family and loved ones nearby?
No. You're not. Sorry."
Hitchcock had many obsessions
but one of them that he talked about with "The Birds"
was the randomness of life.
There is no explanation for the birds attacking.
To him that was life.
There you are, everything's fine and then
someone gets cancer and they're dead two weeks later.
Or your life is good and then you get hit by a bus.
Hitchcock was someone who, for several years now
was showing up on people's TV sets, on Sunday nights.
The victim tumbled or fell with a horrible cash.
I think the back broke immediately it hit the floor.
It was, it's difficult to describe
the way that the, the..
He was an icon.
He was this sort of
avuncular, yet creepy guy
who was presenting sex and violence to Americans
leavened with black humor, every Sunday night.
And Americans were comfortable with him by 1960.
If someone else had made "Psycho"
it's quite possible that the reaction
would not have been the same.
"Psycho" came at a very unique time in American pop culture.
It almost pre-dates the turmoil and the shock
and the trauma that were to come
in the 1960's with racial violence
with political assassinations.
I'm not saying that Hitchcock anticipated it
and knew what he was up to.
But what he did know
is that he was trapped by his past
that it was not a time anymore for Grace Kelly.
It was not a time anymore for
what he called "Beautiful technicolor baubles."
When you look at "Psycho"
and you look at those magnificent
elegant, big, rich
technicolor films of the fifties
you know that something changed.
I think that "Psycho'
was his response to movies changing
and to upping the ante
and not wanting to be forgotten.
1959 is, that was the year of "Some Like it Hot."
"Suddenly, Last Summer," and "Anatomy of a Murder."
All three of those movies pushed boundaries.
So, there was something in the air, culturally speaking
that Hollywood was already tapping into.
"Psycho" comes out at this period
where we're post atomic age
but pre-civil rights.
You know, if you think about
the horror movie violence
they were science gone wrong
but you don't really feel like it was going to happen to you.
"Psycho" you felt could happen to you.
This was the first movie that showed, yeah
you can be vulnerable, naked, alone in a shower
and someone who is wearing the clothes
of their dead mother is going
to come in and just stab you
because that's what they're going to do.
Americans were kind of obsessed with domesticity.
They wanted to tell themselves that
in their private personal domestic spaces
at least there
they were safe.
The Soviets and whomever else
they couldn't possibly get to you
in your bathroom!
A few days after "Psycho"
begins shooting in November of 1959
the Clutter family in Kansas is murdered.
Those are the "In Cold Blood" murders.
You're not living next door
to the Norman Rockwell family anymore.
You're living next door to the Manson family.
This is the new, modern American family
which is v... very much inspired
Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
[screaming]
The first Playboy Club opens in Chicago.
The most famous sitcom stars
of the 1950s
Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo are divorced.
The birth control pill is approved by the FDA.
You could look at the shower scene
as this buildup of tension of all of these things
all of these American fears
in the, of the quiet 50s.
It's... it's all gonna explode
and it comes out in this scene.
[intense music]
While I was on the critic's list in New York for review.
The press was all invited to the theater
the day it opened at 10:00 or 10:30 in the morning
with the first performance.
As you went in, Hitchcock's voice was
blaring on loudspeakers saying
"Nobody will be allowed in after the picture starts
and please don't reveal the ending."
Before "Psycho," you know, movies for
as a form of entertainment were relatively disposable.
There was a tremendous, compared to today
a tremendous coming and going in movie theaters.
And Hitchcock brilliantly said we don't want
anyone coming in after the beginning of this film.
It changed the way films are exhibited.
The reason was because the leading lady, Janet Leigh
was killed off a third of the way through
I didn't want people whispering to each other
"When is Janet Leigh coming on?"
He wanted to build anticipation.
The bathroom.
Something terrible happens in a bathroom.
We know this from the trailer.
We don't know it's Janet Leigh
because it's Vera Miles in the trailer
and not Janet Leigh.
[screams]
The minute the curtain opened
and started stabbing
there was, there was a sustained shriek
from the audience.
[screams]
Like that, cons... you, uh, you couldn't hear
anything of the soundtrack
through the entire shower scene.
So you had the screams from Janet Leigh
the screams from all the women
surrounding you in the theater
and the high shrieking strings from Herrmann.
That must have been total mayhem.
It was actually the first time in the history of movies
where it wasn't safe to be in the movie theater.
And when I walked out into Times Square
at noon..
...I felt I had been raped.
In 1895, when the Lumiere Brothers
really first showed film to an audience
one of the fragments they showed was
of a train pulling into a station.
And the, the legend has it
they thought the train was going to hit them
and they were screaming and it was like
caused a... a stampede of people
trying to evacuate this
this room that it was screened in.
They did not, they didn't understand the concept.
You know, "Psycho" comes along
and has a similar kind of impact.
It's the only movie in my childhood
that my mom wouldn't let me go and see.
Which was kind of ridiculous
because I was seeing nothing but horror films
every single weekend, two of them, in fact.
But "Psycho?" No. I couldn't go.
As a kid when I would hear about it
I thought the name was cycle.
Like it was about some killer on a motorcycle.
But, um, I actually got, got this Super 8 version
and just, like, constantly ran
the movie over and over again.
When audiences saw this
really likeable character.
Someone who is quite relatable in terms of, I need more money
I'm growing older, the man that I love won't marry me.
They, they were really hooked.
Oh, Sam, let's get married.
Yeah, and live with me in a storeroom
behind a hardware store in Fairvale.
We'll have lots of laughs.
"Of course she's going to survive the movie!
It's Janet Leigh."
Instead, she takes a shower.
Out of nowhere, she's murdered
by... an old lady?
Who I can't even see?
What the fuck is going on here?
He has broken the covenant of filmmaker and audience
and the audience cannot wait to see more.
He was a respected director
and you know, she was a bona fide movie star
and I think you kind of get into the thrill
of that possible shockwave
which obviously happened.
And I think that moment signaled
new American cinema.
Maybe new world cinema, in certain ways.
Now I don't know that that had ever been done.
- Right. - Uh, you know, uh..
Or maybe there's some obscure Czechoslovakian film
that did it and there's a guy going like..
[groans]
- I did it first! - Yeah.
I can think of things that culturally have got us
thinking about that structure for instance
um, the first season of "Game of Thrones"
in which our most appealing
character of Ned Stark
is just sort of cruelly killed in front of us.
Culturally, we had to be reminded of the power
of that narrative trope.
The reality is, he used the whole first half of the movie
as a ruse to get you to this house.
And the only way you're going to get to this house
is if you believe that she's someone who's
stolen $40,000.
And that she's gotten off on the wrong freeway exit
and is on this little tiny road where nobody goes by.
There's a lot of things he's saying here about
our society that was changing at that point.
We were trying to get as fast as we could
from Los Angeles to Chicago or New York.
And going into these little towns
was not necessary anymore.
And Norman doesn't even seem to mind.
He's ready to change the bed sheets
every day with nobody there.
One by one, you drop the formalities.
I shouldn't even bother changing the sheets
but old habits die hard.
When she's driving off with the $40,000
she's on the road and she's in the west.
There's something fundamentally American about that dating back
all the way to Manifest Destiny.
"Go west! Find your fate, find your freedom."
Marion tries to do just that.
And that's where she meets her fate.
[intense music]
It's interesting to compare the novel "Psycho"
with the movie "Psycho."
The shower scene is a lot different.
It's really brief in the book.
So on page 28
um, here's the shower scene.
[water running]
"The roar was deafening.
"The room was beginning to steam up.
"That's why she didn't hear the door open
"or note the sound of footsteps.
"And at first when the shower curtains parted
"the steam obscured the face.
"Then she did see it there
"just a face, peering through the curtains
"hanging in mid-air like a mask.
"A half-scarf concealed the hair
"and the glassy eyes stared inhumanly.
"But it wasn't a mask. It couldn't be.
"The skin had been powdered dead white
"and two hectic spots of rouge centered on the cheekbones.
"It wasn't a mask, it was the face of a crazy woman.
"Mary started to scream and then the curtain parted further
"and a hand appeared, holding a butcher knife.
"It was the knife, that a moment later cut off her scream..
...and her head."
The fact that Hitchcock brought Saul Bass in to work
on the shower scene as its own, kind of independent thing
uh, says to me that he knew
that, uh, he had to do something special
with the shower scene.
"Interior, Mary in shower.
"We see the bathroom door being pushed slowly open.
"The noise of the shower drowns out any sound.
"The door is then slowly and carefully closed.
"And we see the shadow of a woman
"fall across the shower curtain.
"Mary's back is turned to the curtain.
"The white brightness of the bathroom is almost blinding.
"Suddenly we see the hand reach up
"grasp the shower curtain, rip it aside.
"Cut to Mary, extreme close up.
"As she turns in response to the feel
"and sound of the shower curtain being torn aside.
"A look of pure horror erupts in her face.
"A low, terrible groan
"begins to rise up out of her throat.
"A hand comes in the shot.
"The hand holds an enormous bread knife.
"The flint of the blade shatters the screen
"to an almost total silver blankness.
"The slashing.
"An impression of a knife slashing
"as if tearing at the very screen, ripping the film.
"Over it the brief gulps of screaming.
"And then silence.
"And then the dreadful thump as Mary's body falls in the tub.
"Reverse angle, the blank whiteness
"the blur of the shower water
"the hand pulling the shower curtain back.
"We catch one flicker of a glimpse of the murderer.
"A woman, her face contorted with madness
"her head wild with hair
"as if she were wearing a fright-wig.
"And then we see only the curtain
"closed across the tub
"and hear the rush of the shower water.
"Above the shower-bar we see the bathroom door open again
"and after a moment we hear t he sound of the front door slamming.
"Cut to the dead body.
"Lying half in, half out of the tub.
"The head tumbled over, touching the floor.
"The hair wet, one eye wide open as if popped.
"One arm lying limp and wet along the tile floor.
"Coming down the side of the tub
"running thick and dark along the porcelain
"we see many small threads of blood.
"Camera moves away from the body
"travels slowly across the bathroom
past the toilet, out into the bedroom."
I think that the shower scene elevated film.
Not the horror genre specifically, but film making in general.
Over and over again and it keeps showing you new things.
I think it's one of those spectacular pieces of work.
The film is moving inexorably to that scene.
You don't know it as a, as a viewer.
Sam, this is the last time.
I pay, too.
They also pay who meet in hotel rooms.
There are plenty of motels in this area.
You should've, I mean, just to be safe.
M... mother. My, my, my mother, uh, what is the phrase?
She isn't q... quite herself today.
Hitchcock was amazing at setting everything up.
When she's packing to go to see her boyfriend
you see the showerhead in the background.
And it's very specific
the shower is right over her shoulder.
You know, when it comes to Norman, when he
t... t, he talks about the bathroom and he like stutters
and he can't really say "Toilet"
you know, or, or "Bathroom."
And the, uh..
...over there..
- The bathroom. - Yeah.
That's what's, what's great about Hitchcock.
I mean, he always, really, like
tunes into those c... character moments.
That desperate drive at the beginning.
It's crazy good.
The notion of getting clean
that's her ark.
She can't see because
of the density of the water
which is really beautiful
because she's drowning in her worry and fear.
The slashing of the wipers
presages the slashing of, of the knife.
It sort of, it's a very violent and wet
and sloshy, sharp, stabbing motion.
And it's a long build-up
but we have no idea that the rain that's going to
come down upon her later is going to
include her own blood.
I certainly get the sensation
that the shower scene was something that Hitchcock
had probably been working towards all of his life.
[intense music]
Is he cleaning house?
He's washing down the bathroom walls.
Hmm! Must've splattered a lot.
Well, why not? That's what we're all thinking.
He killed her in there, he has to clean up
those stains before he leaves.
W... you really can't talk about the shower scene
without talking about the rest of the film.
Without the parlor scene, obviously
the shower scene doesn't really work nearly as well
because the parlor scene is a sort of really sad
beautiful connection
that comes before this savagery.
Is your time so empty?
No. Uh..
Well, I... I run the office.
And, uh, tend the cabins and grounds and, and do little
uh, errands for my mother
the ones she allows I might be capable of doing.
Do you go out with friends?
Well, a... a boy's best friend is his mother.
There's a very loaded preamble to the shower scene.
Wouldn't it be better if you put her..
...some place..
You mean an institution? A madhouse?
Look how still he is.
Whereas before he was fidgety and moving around
suddenly he became very still.
Maybe that's the moment he decided to kill her.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
Yeah, he's super confident now.
Yeah, he's barely moving his head.
[laughing]
- Just his eyes - Wow.
Oh, he's so angry.
- And she just got terrified. - Yeah.
Oh, y... you're not, uh
you're not going back to your room already?
"Perhaps I'll go back to my room now, Norman.
"It's been lovely to chat.
Terribly sorry about your loneliness."
[laughing]
Whoa!
This is the first moment that you're with him and not her.
Yeah, she literally walks away from camera.
- Yeah, right. - And then we're with him.
- My job here is done. - Yeah.
I'm no longer the protagonist of this story.
There was a private supper here.
And, uh..
Oh, by the way, this picture..
...has great significance..
...because..
Uh, let's go along to cabin number one.
The painting that Mr. Bates removed
to become the peeping Tom, was actually
a 16th or early 17th century painting.
[instrumental music]
"Susanna and the Elders" is actually a morality story
about a virtuous woman who bathed in her garden
and was spied on by two elder men.
And the theme burgeoned
possibly as the result of counter reformatory motives.
It was either that or it was simply an excuse
for painting female nudity.
Now, the interesting thing about it is, it's about adultery.
And it's fascinating because
Mary, who's in the shower
is kind of cleansing herself
of committing adultery with a married man.
In art history, there were about three
or four different phases of how artists
depicted Susanna and the Elders.
Lucas van Leyden shows the two Elders in prominence
whereas the small Susanna
is bathing in the far distance.
But by the time you get to Tintoretto
she's full frontal.
Rubens begins to take and probe
the psychological intensity of the moment.
Rembrandt's using the power of lightness and darkness
of highlights to enhance the drama.
The interesting thing about the painting
is that you've got full frontal nudity of Susanna
and yet the two elders are not simply looking at her
they're actually groping and violating her.
It's an almost a rape scene
that's taking place before our eyes.
It's... it's an amazing painting that he picked.
It's not any old baroque painting.
It's voyeurism.
He removes the voyeuristic painting
to become the voyeur looking in on the shower.
He could have picked from 50 different examples
but he chose this one because it had the most amount
of information that he could use for his film.
I love that there is a hole in the wall
the size of his face
which tells you that he's been doing this more than once
and he's made it comfortable for himself.
The notion that he's looking just as you are
it binds you with him.
And when you eliminate those walls
and you're now watching him
and you're watching, and you're watching together
then you are in a new place
where things can get a lot scarier.
"Psycho" is delineated from the other works
of his oeuvre by those gazes.
The birds are looking at us
each individual bird
dead bird, is looking at us.
Mother is looking at us from eyeless sockets.
Dead Marion with her eye open.
The stare includes and indicts us
at the same time.
It's a mirror image, you know, it goes both ways.
We're looking into the eyes of death
and the eyes of death are looking at us.
And it's inclusive and horrifying.
The laughing and the tears..
...and the cruel eyes studying you.
My mother, there?
God is studying you, because there are a number of
you know, God point-of-view shots in "Psycho"
just as there are in "The Birds."
Hitchcock's God is cruel and arbitrary
a bit like some kind of bird of prey or raptor
which is, uh, gazing down rather coldly and disinterestedly
on its human subjects.
In the shower sequence, the violence is directed
and that knife is coming towards us
so we're being punished for being the voyeurs.
There are consequences to watching
and being watched.
In the character of James Stewart
if we identify with him in "Rear Window"
has a very literal, great fall at the end of it
where he breaks the other leg
meaning another six, eight months of pain and itchiness
and not being able to screw Grace Kelly.
All of those things are pertinent to Hitchcock.
I'll bet you nine people out of ten..
...if they see something across
like a woman undressing and going to bed
or even sometimes a man puttering around
his room doing nothing..
...nine people out of ten will stay and look.
They won't turn away and say
"It's none of my business"
and pull down their own curtain.
They won't do it.
In the beginning in the movie
you're flying into a window with the blinds closed
so you're starting off as a voyeur.
And if you think about it, if the movie's opening
from the point of view of a fly
it changes the whole context
of what the meaning of the movie is.
I'm not even going to swat that fly.
I hope they are watching. They'll see.
They'll see and they'll know and they'll say
"Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly."
I think the voyeurism actually has a payoff
in the shower scene.
It's Hitchcock's way of setting the bomb under the table
which is something he liked to do to create dramatic irony.
Hello?
I think at this point, we start to wonder
what's going on in his head and what's gonna happen
because of this look on his face.
This is so interesting, as an actor, what is he playing.
He's playing, "Oh, God, don't let my mother kill this girl."
Norman Bates is presented in all these little
you know, encapsulated moments throughout the film
and in much the same way that the murder is presented
in encapsulated moments of images
and compositions cut together.
So, I think that th... the movie is
it's about fragmentation.
It is fragmentation.
Norman goes up to the house.
It's very important that the audience
sees him leave
because he is reacting to a third character
that we think is in the house
mother, but that is really in his mind.
He goes to the stairs and he looks up and he looks like
he's sad 'cause he realizes mom's not at home upstairs.
Then he goes and flops into the kitchen
like a dejected little school boy.
Then he sits there like, "Oh rats, I can't have dinner with
the lady I want to have dinner with."
I imagine he must have done that a lot when mother was alive.
That she must have yelled at him and he would just go
in the kitchen when he couldn't get what he wanted
when she was berating him for whatever he wasn't
living up to her standards.
There's a lot one could say about Hitchcock mothers.
[instrumental music]
Are you quite sure she didn't come down here to see you
to capture the rich Alex Sebastian for a husband?
Now, get shaved before your father gets home.
You gentlemen aren't really trying to kill my son, are you?
When you talk about what is sacred in America
people talk about mom and apple pie.
Mom is good, we love mom.
We are mom. We are good.
On the other hand, there's something else going on
in 1950's American culture and society
where mom
is also suspect.
There was a serious social panic in America
about juvenile delinquency.
One thing that this social panic resulted in
was this fear that moms were going
to shelter and spoil children
possibly America itself, to death.
All of the sitcoms
"Father Knows Best"
"Ozzie and Harriett"
where mother never did anything.
All she did was take care
of the house and the kids.
Lunch is practically ready and David has to get dressed.
Get dressed? You mean dressed up?
Well, yes. You want to look nice when Nancy gets here.
The director who exposes
the horror of the American family in the '50s
without making a horror movie is Douglas Sirk.
You see, Kay, I love Ron.
You love him so much you're willing to ruin all our lives?
You can't really think that.
What else can I think?
In Sirk, it's the whole construction of the family.
It's not until "Psycho," though, where the mother
is literally a monster
when you see her at the end.
I think my mother scared me
when I was three months old.
You see, she said, "Boo!"
I don't know how many times in "Psycho"
do people talk about mother.
Oh, we can see each other.
We can even have dinner.
But respectably.
In my house, with my mother's picture on the mantel
and my sister helping me broil a big steak for three.
And after the steak, do we send sister
to the movies, turn mama's picture to the wall?
Sam!
Patricia Hitchcock
talks about, she offers her a tranquilizer.
Have you got some aspirin?
I've got something, not aspirin.
My mother's doctor gave them to me the day of my wedding.
Teddy was furious when he found out I'd taken tranquilizers.
A... any calls?
Teddy called me. My mother called to see if Teddy called.
Even in that office, the influence
the negative influence of mothers
and here it's on women, not on men.
So, the fact that Norman Bates' mother
we realize eventually it's Norman Bates himself
might have, on an unconscious level, audiences saying
"A-ha! I knew it!
"Mom is gonna kill us!
Mom is gonna be the death of us all!"
[instrumental music]
Okay, once more onto the bridge.
Back to the primal moment.
Marion is doing her accounting here
figuring out how much she spent on the car.
She's making the decision to
return the money.
Nice little bit of handy exposition.
I always write down my math.
It's charming, you know.
It's still an old movie, let's face it.
She throws the paper in the toilet bowl
and then, to cap it off, she flushes it.
Right from the beginning you know you're in new territory.
In 1960, nobody had shown a toilet before.
The flushing toilet is a clear indication that
the scene to come is going to break one or two taboos.
Details are important, you know, in the building of suspense.
You know that those details are all going to add up
to something much more monumental
than the simplicity of these shots.
Hitchcock was a Victorian.
Victorians thought that a bright
white, tiled bathroom was sanitary.
That's the term they used.
His bathroom in his home was bright, white tiles.
He thought that invading the sanctity of the bathroom
was a cool and subversive thing to do.
He did it in his silent films, he did it in "Spellbound."
But showing that brightness, it was a way of saying
look at how I'm defiling the sanctity of the bathroom.
And I'm doing it almost bloodlessly.
Coincidentally, this scene was extremely influential
on a scene in "The Conversation"
which I edited back in 1973.
A murder has been committed
and Gene Hackman comes into
the bathroom of a hotel room
but the room is completely clean.
And he pulls the curtain apart
just as in "Psycho" the mother
pulls the curtain apart but it's empty.
He goes to the drain of the tub and runs his fingers
around the drain to see if there was any telltale
signs of blood, and there's nothing.
He goes over to the toilet to jiggle the handle
and the toilet suddenly backs up.
So it's a kind of i... inverse version
of the "Psycho" scene.
The toilet and the flushing of the toilet
the shower curtain, the drain, all of these things were
definitely imprinted upon us by "Psycho."
Now, one of the most beautiful
famous leading ladies in 1960
just stripped in front of us and stepped into a shower.
It's like, "Holy shit, where are we going now?"
Man, that must have been crazy racy for 1960.
I don't even understand.
Hitchcock knew that
American men were curious
about Janet Leigh.
And so the idea of having her in a shower
in a stance that seems very suggestive, was a huge deal.
Seeing her full body behind that curtain
it's brilliant because it's translucent.
It's not transparent
it's not opaque, but it's translucent
enough to see her and titillate us
but not enough to really be graphic yet.
Whole theory is that you have to discover
the sex in the woman
and not have it..
...stuck all over her like labels, you know.
And, uh, there's nothing else to look for
nothing to discover.
Do we know anybody who turns a shower on before it gets..
Uh, I mean, I don't act that way.
I don't turn a shower on... like that.
I run it and then get in when I know that it's safe.
And look at that almost sexual expression on her face.
She's being rained upon, and it's cleansing.
It's warm and she's happy and she's like, made up her mind.
The natural sounds kind of put you in the perspective of
you know, we all become Janet Leigh, but not as attractive.
Through other movies like "Rear Window" and "Birds"
he knows when the lack of music can be as effective as music.
[footsteps approaching]
I think there's almost no moment
when we see Marion with a genuine smile.
There's almost no moment where, where she's allowed to feel
good about what her life is like.
She's happy for the first time.
We're going into a scene which on the one hand
is, um, quite liberating for the character
but at the same time, it's clearly really
what we're watching is the liberation of Hitchcock
of his own repressed desires
finally being writ large on screen.
Hitchcock viewed the world
as a very imperfect moral machine.
And he always had this..
...biblical, almost, sense of doom and punishment.
You know, that befalls those that tangle
with sin in a casual way.
Even his most un-Hitchcockian movie
which is "Mr. and Mrs. Smith"
which I love, punishes banality.
She makes a moral decision to take back that money, and in
you know, and suffer whatever punishment will come her way.
I stepped into a private trap back there
and... I'd like to go back and try to pull myself out of it..
...before it's too late for me, too.
This is very important.
Very important narratively because
it doesn't come, uh, in the middle of a heist
or in the middle of the robbery
or as she's escaping with the money on the road.
And it turns out, bang, it doesn't make a damn
bit of difference because the universe doesn't give a shit.
I think, uh, that is, um
a true sign of his Catholicism
and... and his sense of doom
about a sin that cannot be washed away
literally, with water.
You know, it cannot be purged
except by blood and violence and paying the price.
She's punished for the worst crime
which is sexually arousing Norman Bates.
You know, you get this strain again and again.
I mean, think of "Strangers on a Train"
where Robert Walker, you know, strangles this poor girl.
Again, what does he strangle her for?
Because she's a loose woman
who is in Farley Granger's way..
I... I mean, that's a foreshadowing of "Psycho."
That's her point of view of the shower
that puts us, the audience
as if we're in the shower with her.
It makes us feel just as vulnerable as she is.
It's spraying at us and it's creating a sonic curtain.
She can't hear him coming.
Gee, I'm sorry I didn't hear you in all this rain.
And that's why that shot is bad news.
You know, the shots change in their level of symmetry
during the course of the sequence.
That's order at the beginning
and then oddly, it'll be echoed by the eye, and the drain
and Norman Bates' peephole through his office
and those things start to rhyme after awhile in a great way.
How do you point a camera at a shower head
without the lens getting sprayed?
Move the camera back enough
plug some of the holes so that the spray shoots outward.
Very simple and elegant solution.
There's nothing unusual about the pacing here.
It's at a rather leisurely four and a half seconds
per cut on average.
So it's the calm before the storm, let's say.
And now here's what I would call a strange cut
what I call the wet hair cut
which is her washing herself
with her head tilted back
and then it suddenly cuts
to the same kind of an angle
really a jump cut, except now her hair is completely wet.
This would give the lie to somebody who said
this scene was shot exactly
as the storyboards were done
because you never would storyboard
a moment like that.
You think you're gonna be watching her
go through the whole process in real time
but that cut jumps you ahead.
It feels very bold and confident.
Now, we... we cut to the showerhead
but it's a side angle on the shower head
not this sort of subjective point of view.
When we were looking at her, she was facing left to right
away from the shower.
And when we cut back to her
we come around to the other side of the stageline.
What's behind her now is the shower curtain
not the wall.
And now there's another cut
again it's a kind of awkward jump cut.
Objectively, there would be no reason to do that.
But it's unsettling because
there's a big empty space, which is itself unsettling.
What is going to fill that empty space?
The audience starts to look over into that negative space
and feeling like, "Why am I looking over here?"
The door opens, you see the shadow
and then Norman's figure.
And that's the mounting terror
where you say to yourself
"Oh, my God. Oh, my God."
And that is the difference between suspense and surprise.
The idea of menace in a shadowy figure.
I think that that's Hitchcock's fear.
Who is the menacing figure
in A... Alfred Hitchcock's own life?
By the time he gets to "Psycho," that person is unleashed.
Here you see, uh, Margo Epper
the stunt woman, coming toward.
How do you not reveal who that is?
I've been taking the rap for that sequence for 20 years now
but that's not me behind the curtain.
I was in New York that day rehearsing a Broadway show.
Every time they kept shooting it
you kept seeing the stunt woman's face.
One of the makeup men decided
what if we blackened her face?
And so they... they tried that a couple of times
and they went darker and darker and darker
until they... they achieved that effect.
I talked with Janet Leigh about what she thought
she saw coming at her, and, and she clearly
saw Norman coming at her
and that's what she played.
So the reality for her was
I'm going to die this way by this person
who tried to befriend me
and I tried to be polite to.
You're very kind.
It's all for you. I'm not hungry, go ahead.
It really does lend an extra air of horror
and pathos to that moment.
And that wallpaper in the background
"The Shining," so many horror movies try to have that like
perfect Hitchcock, Bates Motel wallpaper.
This floral pattern that juxtaposed with this
black silhouette of the knife and the hair of mother
it's really, really terrifying.
The shape always kind of tortured me.
Almost like a weird mushroom-shaped head.
I don't know, kind of lame to me, for some reason.
I, I'd always wished that this shot looked a little scarier.
When my grandfather first saw the first rough cut of "Psycho"
um, he didn't like it at all
He was just gonna cut it down to an hour
and make it part of the TV show.
Bernard Herrmann convinced him to create the most like
famous scared chord music in... in horror cinema history.
It's so engrained in pop culture, to where..
[imitates dramatic music]
It, it is, it is transcendent.
My seven year old daughter knows that
but she doesn't know what it comes from.
But, you know, she's made that joke.
[imitates dramatic music]
Like, I don't know where she got it.
- That's incredible. - She has no idea it's from "Psycho."
It's evolutionary, like we're just born knowing
the shower scene from "Psycho."
I wanted a tattoo
and I thought, it must be that one cue
by Bernard Herrmann
the most amazing cue ever made in cinematic history.
It has so little to do with harmony.
It is just sheer terror.
The way that music was used in movies to scare people really
changed after "Psycho."
If you wanna make something scary
you put in those strings, and you're like..
[imitates dramatic music]
If you slow it down you get..
♪ Ta-dan-ta-dan ♪♪
What I really adore about Herrmann is
the way that he realized that in the limitation
there is actually a much more
powerful statement to be made.
He did "The Day the Earth Stood Still"
and he wrote it for seven Theremins and only copper horns.
[instrumental music]
Herrmann wrote, "Living Doll"
which I think is one of the best scores
that they had on "Twilight Zone."
It's like a bass clarinet
or it might have been a contra bassoon
a glockenspiel and a harp.
He was definitely an experimenter.
He's the one who taught me that you can kind of do
anything anywhere, if it works.
What I think is also absolutely genius about
the shower scene is that the way Herrmann spotted it.
Uh, the spotting is deciding when do you start a cue
when do you end a cue.
It starts with the... the toilet flushing.
She steps into the shower
there is no music at all whatsoever.
This composer does not prepare us for the onslaught
that is about to happen.
When Janet Leigh walks into the shower
and she pulls the curtain closed
you can actually hear the sound
of the rings on the bar that and it goes
[whooshing]
You see the villain coming too
no music, no music at all.
The curtain gets swept aside, we get the first sting..
[imitates dramatic music]
This is... this is the rush of Janet Leigh's heartbeat.
From the moment that we, as an audience, completely realize
"Okay, this girl is being brutally butchered here"
and we see this, and the music goes..
[humming]
[intense music]
She falls to the floor
the heartbeat slows because she's dying.
And then, in her last gasp
that music basically leaves her
and all we have is the sound of the falling curtain
and her head smacking to the ground.
How genius is that?
That's Herrmann. That's not Hitch.
That's Bernie.
We used the original score
um, Bernard Herrmann's original score
for our temp music, of course.
[chuckles] While we were editing the film
and then Danny came and re-recorded it
and it was so beautiful.
It's a perfect score.
When I was given the job, I mean
it really was a holy scripture for me.
There was one beat in a meeting with some of the producers
of like, maybe because it's in color, we should do it with
uh, brass and woodwinds and percussion and do it
with a full orchestra, I was like
"No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Please, please. I beg you. Don't make me do that."
I had visions of a very grumpy
Bernard Herrmann
his ghost coming into my room and I'd wake up
in the middle of the night and he'd be there going
"You little asshole, what have you done?"
A knife is raised up
and now, the murder scene begins
and the pace of the cutting
it's going to shrink dramatically.
And there it is, beautiful
cathartic, unbelievably savage..
...intimate and just wrong on so many levels.
That... that looks awful. That... that is..
[chuckles]
[gasps]
Wow. Wow. Man, oh, man.
And he his way of reaching out and grabbing you
by the throat and saying, "Look! Look!
You will look at this."
It was a perfect, stainless steel trap.
You could not run away from it, it was, uh, inflicting damage
but at the same time, you knew
you were in the hands of a master.
There was nothing to do but submit.
The "Psycho" shower scene is cut very much like a... an action scene.
George Tomasini was a master.
What he did with the shower scene changed
the language of cinema.
Uh, the editor suddenly became a much more important
piece of the puzzle.
You had to think about a cut
'cause a cut was gonna take you four minutes to make
and splice and check it.
And now, you can make a cut every 12 seconds or something.
The planning, the consideration, the thinking that went
into designing some of these films is astonishing.
Motion pictures were 14 years old before somebody got the idea
that you could make a cut.
Because it's violent what's happening
you're looking at an image, a visual field
that is very detailed and full of motion
and then, instantly
it is removed and replaced with another image.
In a sense, the audience should kind of
crash through the windshield of this experience.
Hitchcock and Tomasini knew exactly
where the audience was looking.
They ended up working the disorientation
drawing you into Marion's sense of confusion and terror.
Every single cut that Tomasini does is you..
By the time you've caught up to what you're looking at
in the new shot, he's already cut to another shot.
It's a kaleidoscope of these images crashing
into your cranium, but it's very planned, and it feels that way.
It's order and chaos come crashing up against each other.
- It's a magic act. Truly. - Yeah.
'Cause people walked out of the cinema feeling
like they had seen, like shocked, you know, beyond belief
'cause there was nothing like that in cinema prior to that.
And yet they hadn't actually seen the things
that they thought they saw. That's an incredible thing.
The use of the sound effects, um, that... are
I think, I think a huge contributor
to the violence of the scene.
The stabbing sounds in particular.
How do you come up with the sound of
what happens when a butcher knife strikes flesh?
The soundman came up with the idea of
what about a knife stabbing melons?
[instrumental music]
So, knowing Hitchcock, you would have to bring
lots of melons and arrange them on a big table.
There'd be Crenshaw melons, and you know
any kind of melon that you can imagine
of very, very different sizes.
So, I think they had about
two dozen and some backups.
So, there's the prop man
stabbing melon, melon, melon, melon.
Next melon, melon, melon.
And so by the end of it Hitchcock knew the one
that sounded most like, sinew and
sounded the way he thought it should sound.
So, when they were through demonstrating
all of these different melons
all he said was..
"...Casaba."
That's all they needed to know.
[instrumental music]
I think the whole key to the sound of the Casaba melon
is that the inner gooey part is very small
and there's a very thick layer of fruit
that you have to stab through.
- It's very dense. - Dense?
Not hollow, like a lot of the other melons
sounded a little bit hollow.
And I'm sure, with his eyes closed
Hitchcock was probably hearing that.
To my ear, the Casaba melon sounds more like dry
bony stabbing, as opposed to wet, gooey stabbing.
The starchiness and the thickness
probably gives you, more of that viscera
the crunchiness or the...
- Viscera. - Viscera.
Hitchcock also had them bring a sirloin
a really big thing of sirloin.
I don't eat meat, and so I'm nearly nauseous
telling you this but, uh, in any case
Hitchcock thought that would be a really great idea.
And they did, in fact, stab
a big, big, big slab of steak.
And so that sound is interspersed with melon.
[instrumental music]
And the soundman took it home and had it
for dinner that night.
The stabbing sound in "Psycho"
is not a Hollywood sound effect
it is a natural sound effect
which makes it all the more horrible.
You could take the combination of like, an arrow
a literal arrow or an axe hitting
and you add to that a pipe in the mud kind of gush
and you add to that some sort of like, uh, like a leather rip
and you could make the sound design stab
that would feel horrible.
Marion turns.
We have three close-ups
getting increasingly tighter
to the point that now we're looking at nothing
but her open mouth.
The three quick cuts which makes me
happy to be an editor.
I've seen some of Saul Bass' boards and you'll see
cut one and cut three
but the idea of drawing the three together
really feels like something that's, uh... uh,
kind of a joyful discovery
in feeling your way through things in the cutting room.
Hitchcock does the thing here that he does in "The Birds" too
to show something that's shocking.
An on-axis cut
boom, boom, boom.
It's a psychological cut.
People always think it's s... something that Hitchcock
came up with, but I actually always traced it back
to the original "Frankenstein"
directed by James Whale in 1931.
In a way it was the same effect because
they were showing you something so grotesque
something that you had never seen before.
People wanted to go to the movie just to see how shocking it was.
There's something called an American cut when you're editing, which is
just like jump cutting into a close-up from a wide shot.
And I know whenever I do it in a movie when I'm working with
Sam Raimi, he's always like, tortured.
He's like, "Why do you do those stupid cuts?"
And I always go, "It's, uh, it's an American cut."
And he always says, "That's more like a C... Canadian cut."
There's something really visceral about cutting
from a wide shot jumping into a, a close-up.
Now we have a lower angle
that is not a subjective angle
this is not what Marion sees
but it's maximized for threat.
There's a lot of defensive shots that make it look like
she's trying to fight him off
that makes you feel that you're there.
We've jumped the stage line here
which is another disorienting thing.
In violence, and in love, interestingly
it's actually good to cross the stageline
because it gives you that subjective sense of a kind of
d... dizzy delirium.
You see Norman's hand with the knife come laterally
across and break the lines.
It's so great because it's violating the purity.
The water is going in the opposite direction
of the knife, so there's all these great angles
that are again, like, German expressionist cinema
that Hitchcock had been exposed to
in the early '20's when he first started his career.
This overhead shot, it's like the whole shot is out of focus.
And, you know, they used it anyway.
I can imagine sitting in with studio executives now
and them saying, "Oh, you know, you've got this one shot
"that's so out of focus, we really didn't need to take
that shot out of the edit."
But thank goodness they left it in
because it's such a great shot.
The knife is already through the frame
before we, the audience, are really able to lock onto
what we're looking at.
Our face gravitates to Marion
and then to the negative space to see where did the knife go?
They force the audience to fill in the blank.
Her right to left movement carries us
right to the cut and right where her face is
there's the knife.
That knife never makes connection with her
but in my mind I see him stabbing her.
It's crazy.
Hitchcock is going in 360 degrees.
All of these things that you're not supposed to do
in narrative storytelling, he's doing to give you
this feeling of complete disorientation.
Every time we cut back to Norman's form
we're grounded again.
Back to Norman, but now we're slightly tighter.
Cut to Marion, we are tighter.
Norman, tighter.
And then, in the intersecting water over and over again
to the shot, the one shot
that convinces me as a viewer
that Marion has been stabbed.
The knife never connects with the skin
but what about this shot here?
I'm telling you, folks, that is penetration.
Hitchcock got away with, uh, showing
my belly button on film.
All the beach towel movies, you know, with Annette Funicello
they had bikinis, but they had to have them up
over their belly button.
He explained to me that he, he says
"Paramount Special Effects Department made
"for me a torso of rubber.
"You plunge the knife in, blood would spurt out.
"Oh, it was wonderful.
I didn't use it at all."
"You didn't use it at all?" "No, no, no.
The knife never touches the body."
Goes back to Eisenstein and the whole idea
of editing, uh, cutting.
Montage.
He didn't want a plastic knife or anything.
He use the knife.
He had marks on there like blood, and he pressed it
against my stomach and then pulled it out.
And then, in the film they reversed it
showing it going in.
Hitchcock, I think, it's safe to say
spent an entire career thumbing his nose at the censors.
The last shot of "North by Northwest" is a, is a train
entering a tunnel, like a very unsubtle sexual metaphor
and then we pick that up with a post coitus in "Psycho."
Wow. That's interesting.
[laughing]
You know, the Production Code Administration
still mattered at that time.
And then in trying to get the movie approved
by the Legion of Decency.
If either one of those had been a problem
as far as the production and distribution of "Psycho"
it would not have been the phenomenon that it was.
There was a little negotiation going on.
He said, "I'll reshoot the beginning.
You... you can come and watch me shoot it."
They never showed up.
All he did was tell the whole crew
we're gonna just send the scene back.
We're not gonna cut one frame from it, and he didn't.
He just kept basically telling them, you're prudes
and you're actually horn dog prudes
because you're seeing something that isn't there.
So everything stayed in the way he wanted it.
He got away with it.
You contrast Hitchcock
making a disturbing, shocking movie
that revolves around sex and violence.
and a deeply disturbed protagonist
with a movie that came out the very same year
within a few months of it, like Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom."
That movie, a lot of people see as having ruined
Michael Powell's career.
You know, Val Lewton, who these guys know I'm obsessed with
but you know, he was the master of, you saw nothing, ever.
There's no cat in "Cat People."
Right. Right, right,
There's no cat people in "Cat People."
There's shadows.
There's some shadows.
Every one of his films was
the title promised something that you never actually saw.
You never, there's no leopard man in "Leopard Man."
And the most chilling murder in all of Val Lewton's canon
takes place on the other side of a closed door
from the perspective of a mother
who is hearing her daughter get slaughtered.
And you just see the blood seep in under the crack in the door.
You n... you never see it, you never see it at all.
And that seems to me like the roots of the shower scene.
- Totally. - I would like to throw one in there.
Uh, like, one film into the mix
which has one particular mind-blowing scene
which I would call horror, and that's "Irreversible."
Yeah!
And here's the thing about that rape scene.
It's like, it's, i... it, what is it like, 15 minutes long?
It's something, and they don't really show anything.
There's no nudity, there's no nothing.
It's just one shot that lingers.
[crying]
[speaking in foreign language]
The rape scene in "Irreversible"
and the shower scene in "Psycho"
are exact inverses.
The shower scene is incredibly close..
...and frenetic.
And the rape scene in "Irreversible"
is incredibly distant and still.
The shots of the mother are out of focus
the focus is on the water, not the mother.
You could argue that this is Marion's subjective
point of view that she doesn't see who it is clearly
because she's so confused.
Very quick cutting here, on the average
one shot every three-quarters of a second, 18 frames.
And the audience in 1960 would be having
um, they would be seeing something
in a way that they were not used to seeing it.
I was always surprised that they got away with this.
Just the amount of like, naked breast
that they were able to show.
It had to be done impressionistically.
So it was done with little pieces of film.
The head, the feet, the hand.
Parts of the torso.
The shot of her feet is the very first cut of blood
that we've had in this entire piece.
The blood starts to spatter into the water rather than flow.
You know, you see spots hitting like a dark rain
and then it just is absorbed by the water and it spreads out
in a very kind of haunting, haunting way.
My mom loves to tell me that
"Oh, you know that, uh, the blood going down the drain
in "Psycho" is chocolate syrup, right? - Chocolate syrup. Yeah.
So, is anyone in this room going to tell us
that that's not actually chocolate syrup?
They had a can of Hershey's syrup
which was watered down
and that's what they used for blood.
But they had to dribble it around me and on me.
I deliberately made the film in black and white
because I knew that if it has been in color
uh, the draining away of blood would have been too repulsive.
The knife comes through
and even though it's just swinging through frame
my brain is telling me she's just gotten stabbed
squarely in the back.
And then, to the sneaky cut
that Tomasini has put into the film.
Starting here with her hand out of focus at the front
it's going towards the wall.
Your eyes are super confused here
because you're looking at a negative space
a... and just the wall tile.
Her hand starts to come in and instantly
there's a jump cut.
If you watch that at full speed
itjust looks like, bam.
It ends up making it feel like she's slamming against the wall.
His exit is also tremendous
that quick move, without looking back.
He doesn't even stand there to make sure she's dead. He leaves.
It's almost like a time cut, where he's already out the door.
And I think part of it is, they were really trying to hide
you know, who it was.
And they were tired of showing that lame shot
where his head looked like a mushroom.
The shot of the hand, it looks like a starfish
against the wall.
It's just a hand, the least important part of her body
right now after she's been hacked to death.
And you see the life ebbing out of her body through her hand.
So, the scene becomes all about her hands, if you watch it.
Hand. And then, hand.
And you watch it go.
Trying to grab onto something. Hand going down the wall.
She turns around, where's her hand?
You know, that's kind of the, that's the big question.
And if you actually watch the opening scene of "Jurassic Park"
it's the same thing, it's, you know
it doesn't matter that... that guy
that got eaten by the velociraptor
you barely see his face.
But what's important, and you watch is
he's grabbing onto his hand.
Hand reaches out.
Hands touching the thing.
And I think that's part of the ways that he kind of is able to
bring the audience into her death
rather than just, watching her, watching her die.
Now she's begging for her life, trying to hold herself up.
The way that her hair leaves like a trail behind her
it follows her down..
I mean, it's an incredibly haunting image.
And it's a wall.
You know, you had depth before
and now she's just flat against nothingness.
Nobody did this before.
Deaths were quick in movies.
And although actors loved to make the most of them
this is so obviously directed in such a way.
You know, in "Torn Curtain," there's this endless scene
of trying to kill someone.
It's not bloody but it's graphic.
Even "Frenzy" is fairly graphic
uh, compared to "Psycho."
But "Psycho" has the effect of being graphic
much like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" later was.
I love how slow it is, how much time it takes.
There's all this negative space on the left hand side.
This is absolutely intentional.
Hitchcock is mirroring the shot
at the beginning of the sequence
where Marion is showering
in exactly the right hand side of the frame.
It is the book end that makes the shower scene.
My favorite cut is the hand coming around onto the curtain
and it's all of a sudden from the staccato rhythms
you end up with this really fluid shot
that has a sort of almost, kind of, poetic and sad quality to it.
She's dying and there's a softness to it
and it makes it just instantly emotional.
It's really, really a great cut.
It's... it's one of the best cuts I've ever seen.
You can just barely see the outline
of my breast in that shot. That's my hand.
And you can tell the difference on my knuckles there.
The, uh, ring finger is disfigured a bit.
The nail is darker
than a regular fingernail.
When I was three years old, I... I reached down to help my
brother on a, uh, lawn mower
push lawn mower and, pssh, cut it off.
This is he shot that, uh, Cecil B. DeMille actually did first
in "The Ten Commandments"
where Sally Lung pulls down on the curtain.
This shot, the... the down shot, she just feels so vulnerable
like a, like a dying animal.
It's just such a, again, such a bold shot
because s... so much like, nudity is revealed.
There is a shot in the shower scene
that was never used
that is one of the most heartbreaking shots
I've ever seen.
Anne Heche, she was definitely willing to do stuff.
That one shot at the end, where she's slumped over
that was the shot that Hitchcock could not use.
But it was storyboarded.
There were objections to using that
and perhaps, Hitch felt
that it wasn't really necessary anyway.
Then we return to
the motif of the showerhead
the impassive eye, which has just watched
this horrible thing happen.
This shot of the showerhead at the beginning of the scene
was one of joy, she was going to get a new start.
And now that same water is washing away
the evidence of her existence and the murder.
The water keeps running and the blood flows
but the heart is stopping.
It's just such an amazing image to see her life
flowing down the drain.
You know, what a metaphor that is.
And then switches to the eye, right?
Aw, come on.
That's so good.
I wonder how long this shot is, how long she had to hold.
To get her eye to stay..
Just to make sure that her eye didn't twitch.
You can t... you can see a tiny bit, I mean..
Oh, my God, that's incredible.
The pointless s... spiraling of the universe
and the way that everything is ultimately drawn down
the plughole towards oblivion
towards meaningless death.
I think to some extent we are looking at Hitchcock's fears
as well as his obsessions.
You see it in "Barton Fink," you see it in so many movies.
And you're like, why is he going inside the drain?
Why is he going inside, are we going to go inside?
That is the moment of "Psycho"
where everything changes.
This was made by
an auteur filmmaker
and that is a very personal stamp.
It's a rupture in the movie
but the movie never achieves
this kind of poetry again.
And you begin to realize that
"Oh, this was what really
mattered most to Hitchcock."
Tomasini has done a clockwise turn optically
which then right about here
hooks back up to the 24 frame footage.
I'm just amazed that they were able to get that clean.
Usually, when you do an optical, it's pretty grainy.
But it looks so smooth and so beautiful.
It's surprising an... an... and seamless
from where they go to live action.
It's I... like, one of the greatest opticals
in the history of movies.
It's also kind of like what the title sequence
is doing in "Vertigo."
It's a theme that runs through this film
and then later on, of course
it's not style just for style's sake.
It's... it's got content.
The cameras were huge
and very difficult to manipulate.
You can actually see pictures
of Hitchcock behind a Mitchell
and you get a sense of what it was like
riding on that carriage
behind that huge locomotive of a camera.
Whereas today, it's a snap.
You just do it like Gus Van Sant.
In the remake, he did it all live action.
The pullback from her eye
was a whole robotic camera move.
I seriously followed
the original film shot by shot.
I was able to cut it exactly like the original
and we watched it
and it was weird and it didn't work.
I said, "Well, Gus, you know, come over, watch the scene."
I said, "I have a few reservations
"over like, how it's playing right now
and it doesn't feel like the shower scene yet."
We went in and tried to make it
a little more Gus Van Sant-y.
To duplicate something, like
as iconic as the shower scene
I really think it was just, it wasn't going to work.
It just didn't and it just didn't.
I always love the placement of those drops of water
because they're like tears.
Right at the end, there's a little flicker in her eye
little highlight in her eye.
Yeah, and you can see her eye move.
There's a tight, slight blink of the eye there.
Hitchcock almost fetishistically
lingers in this post-mortem moment.
This is what happens after you die
and no one turns off the water.
Hitch had a little snap of the finger
to let Janet know when the camera had passed
and was going to pan into the room.
It, it took a lot of takes.
I could feel the moleskin
pulling away from my top part.
And so, I could feel this..
It was just kind of like going..
[imitates skin stretching]
And I thought, "You know what?
"I don't want to do this damn thing again.
I really don't want to."
And there are all the guys on the scaffolding.
And I said, "I don't, I'm not going to be modest," you know.
Let 'em look.
[water running]
Why would you cut to the shower there?
I don't think the reason has
anything to do with artistic decision.
It's... it's the solution to some problem that he had.
After my grandfather filmed "Psycho"
it had been shown to all the executives.
The last person he showed it to was my grandmother
and they were sitting in the screening room
and he's panning out and she looks at my grandfather and says
"Hitch, you can't release this."
And he said, "Why not?"
And she goes, "Janet Leigh took a breath."
They couldn't reshoot it, Janet was gone.
Uh, they didn't have the budget.
So they simply cut back to the showerhead spewing water.
And then, that cynical camera move.
She made her moral decision and this is what it got her.
There's an image of the uncaring universe
if you want one.
And you see the headline there, "Okay."
I... i... it is not okay.
Nothing is okay.
He always comes back to his McGuffin
which is the $40,000.
Then he throws the newspaper into the quagmire.
It goes down with the car.
And the audience says, that's j... the
the... the, that's the money
that we thought was important in this story.
It's totally unimportant.
This is the one other thing in the movie
that always tortured me.
The greatest scene in movie history
ends on a sour note
with a bad ADR line
that has been the doom of so many movies.
Here comes Norman
just wondering what happened
and oh, my, he can't believe it.
Another murder at the motel. How did that happen?
It's an extraordinary aftermath.
It's a crucial piece of the filmmaking
to sort of let the consequence of it actually land.
It's not about getting the bloodstains out of the tub.
It's about this
incredibly laborious process
that this unbearably
damaged soul
needs to work through.
It demands not just that we watch as we watched
the murder of Marion Crane
but we're also voyeurs to
the horror of Norman's world.
For me, the cleanup represents
Alfred Hitchcock's sense of orderliness
sense of, I wasn't sexually aroused by this woman
and I'm just going to pretend
that this unhappy episode just didn't even occur.
I think that cleaning always represents
sexual guilt.
You care about this guy.
And I know it sounds crazy, but you do.
You want to know what's going to happen to him.
You want to know is he going to be free of this
or is it going to consume him?
The fact that he is able to get you to care
is one of the miracles of the movie.
"Psycho" obviously has influence
on a whole host of movies.
"Psycho" is the mother of the slasher genre.
The shower scene is really the first, um, fully sexualized
on-screen, um, knife attack.
You have Mario Bava in Italy
and he's taking the visuals of the "Psycho" scene.
In Italy, in the '60s
they didn't have the same censorship laws
Bava takes the Hitchcock style
and really creates the Italian Giallo film.
Dario Argento burst onto the scene
with "Bird with the Crystal Plumage"
determined to present murder as a form of fine art
consistently sexualizes and fetishizes the killings
um, um, tries to present them as something beautiful
cathartic and almost orgasmic which happens
again and again in his work.
Then, of course, the American films
started imitating Italian films.
And you get the wave of slasher films of the '80s kicking off
with John Carpenter's "Halloween."
"Psycho" might have also really have started
the rather negative trend of victims undressing
before they're butchered, which is something
that haunted slasher cinema throughout the '70s.
Martin Scorsese talks about
the construction of the fight
in "Raging Bull," with Sugar Ray Robinson.
I literally got shot-by-shot breakdown
of the shower scene in "Psycho"
and really got my original storyboards
for this one sequence shot-by-shot
and shot it in that order.
I don't believe film influences
the culture in this way anymore.
When a... a moment of violence is so suggestive
so new, so unlike anything we've seen
that it just becomes
part of the cultural conversation
and I think that's what happened
with the shower scene.
[instrumental music]
[music continues]
I'm on this TV show called "Screen Queens."
I've been asked to get in the shower
and take pictures before.
I've been asked to recreate it.
And I've said "No" every time
because of course, um, this is my mother's legacy
and it is not mine to, to play in.
It's her sandbox.
But my mother's been gone now over 10 years.
And this is a great show.
And it was a really respectful
funny, homage.
And so the Red Devil comes along
he rips open the curtain
but I'm not there.
And that second I come from behind the bathroom door
attack him and right before I do, I look at him and go
"I saw that movie like, 50 times!"
[instrumental music]
I went back to Chicago
shot the, uh, September 1960 cover.
I worked at the Playboy Club
until probably October of that year.
I was one of, uh, the original, uh, bunnies there.
I never mentioned "Psycho."
The shot I didn't like was
when, uh, Tony Perkins pulls me out of the tub
and wraps me in the, in the shower curtain.
He picks me up to carry me out to the trunk.
Well, he, he gets me up about, I don't know, six, nine inches
off the floor and drops me back down
because he... he wasn't in a position to pick up a dead weight.
He picks me up, puts me on his knees and then..
...and that's me.
And that's, uh, out to the car and that's the end of me.
[instrumental music]
[wood creaking]
[creaking continues]
[dramatic music]
[music continues]