The Stab Heard ’Round The World: (clockwise) Czech, American and Italian promotional material for Psycho.
Describe the experience of seeing Psycho for the first time. HILTON GREEN: People were screaming and had to turn away. I saw it once with a real audi-
ence and it was kind of fun because, of course, to me, it wasn’t all that frightening.
STEPHEN REBELLO: I saw it when it first came out. No movie had, up to that point, ever hit me in my young twisted mind and body the way that movie did. I saw it several times, and after experiencing the thrills of the movie, I started to go to see it just to observe the audience, which was weird because I probably knew everyone in the theatre since I lived in a small town. It was so bizarre to see my schoolteacher run up the aisle, the people that supposedly hold your future in their hands, now the colour of a sheet, on the way to the washroom to barf.
DAVID THOMSON: I first saw it in the UK and I was very excited because I thought Hitchcock was brilliant after Vertigo and Rear Window. I was just scared rotten. I remember after the shower scene just saying, “Please don’t do that again.”
WES CRAVEN: I saw it when I was in college, years after it came out, and I was struck by how far ahead of its time it was and how sophisticated it was and how radical and daring it was, not just for the shower scene but in killing off a major character in the first part of the film. That was an extraordinarily daring thing to do.
What do you think were the key changes in the film from Robert Bloch’s novel? HG: I think the novel was pretty gory, and Hitchcock couldn’t translate that to the screen. What
he really brought out of it was the character of Norman Bates.
SR: The novel was really a different experience because it has an unreliable narrator. We are sometimes very much in the head of Norman Bates and there are all these conversations be- tween Norman and Mother, and of course you cannot do that in the movie. Hitchcock was often attracted to material because of one element and in this case it was the shower murder and the chance to cast a big star in that role and really rock audiences. I think Hitchcock and [Psycho screenwriter Joseph] Stefano really brought it to another level. Hitchcock had the idea of casting a younger man; that was great for audience identification. Finally, for many reasons, the movie made the character of Marion Crane stronger. It gave her shading and complexity.
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off as has been reported? HG: I suppose you could say that. By the time he would get on the set, he would say to the cameraman and me, “I’m through with making the movie; you’ve got to finish it.” In other words, he was trying to say that everything was prepared, he knew ex- actly what shots he wanted, what mood lighting he wanted and it was up to us to make it happen. That was his great thing. So, in that way, he was hands-off. He had the same way with the cast. They knew their parts, they knew what they were sup- posed to do, so do it.
And how would you describe Anthony Perkins? HG: He was really a fine actor, but there’s no getting around it
– Tony was a strange guy. He had some weird, wild ideas. He liked to play them off of you, I won’t say in a Norman Bates- like manner, but he liked to play mind games with you, so to speak, and he would wait to see how you would react. He was very intelligent but he did some very strange things.
Why do you think he played such an effective heavy? HG: People had sympathy toward Norman Bates even though
he was doing horrible things. If you had a guy who wasn’t pleas- ing on the screen, I don’t think that you’d have that level of sym- pathy. You liked the character of Norman because even with everything that he did, you knew it wasn’t really Norman that did it.
Hilton, what was Hitchcock like on set? Was he as hands-
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