Written Interview: Ernest Lehman
This is a fascinating interview which you simply must read. Ernest Lehman was one of the most critically lauded and commercially successful screenwriters in Hollywood. In a writing career that spanned three decades, Lehman wrote many notable movies including Sabrina (1954), The King and I (1956), North by Northwest (1959), West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music (1965), and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Lehman was nominated 4 times for the Best Writing Academy Award and was the recipient of a lifetime achievement award in 2001.
In this interview, Lehman provides an invaluable chronology about his collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock on the movie North by Northwest. There are incredible details about their creative process and the serendipitous manner that the movie came to be. A few excerpts:
It was. Now, in the process of writing the film, it seems that you began with a list of disparate ideas that Hitchcock mentioned as possible scenes for the movie. Could you discuss them?
Yes. They were all wonderful, and I took them all down, and I never used most of them. For some reason, Hitch wanted to do the longest dolly shot in cinema history. The idea was that the shot would begin with an assembly line, and then you’d gradually see the parts of the car added and assembled, and, all the while, the camera’s dollying for miles along with the assembly line, and then eventually there’s a completed car, all built, and it’s driven off the assembly line, and there’s a dead body in the backseat.
Did you try to work that one into the script?
Not really. It was intriguing, but it had no place in the picture. Then Hitch told me another one: there’s a speech being made at the General Assembly of the United Nations, and the speaker suddenly stops. He’s irritated, and he says he’s not going to continue until the delegate from Brazil wakes up. So a UN page goes over to the man, taps him on the shoulder, and the delegate falls over dead. But he’d been doodling — and that’s the only clue to the murder — and his doodling is a sketch of the antlers of moose. So I said, “Well, that’s intriguing — now we’ve got the United Nations, and Detroit, and what might seem like a reference to northern Canada.” And Hitch said that he’d always wanted to do a scene at Lake Louise where a family is having a reunion — a get-together — and a twelve-year-old girl takes a gun out of a baby carriage and shoots someone. I realize that all these ideas sound very peculiar and unrelated, but I took them all down and thought about them.
Wasn’t there something in Alaska?
Yes. There’s a hole in the ice, and an Eskimo is fishing, and a hand suddenly comes up out of the water. As you can see, all these ideas seemed to be moving in a northwesterly direction, starting in New York. Hitch also mentioned something about wanting to do a shot where people take off in a little plane that has skis on the ice instead of wheels, and that reinforced the idea of heading northwest. So, I started calling the project In a Northwesterly Direction.
Where did Mount Rushmore come in?
That also came up in those discussions. Just like he’d said, “I always wanted to do a dolly shot in an auto factory,” he said, “I always wanted to do a chase across the faces of Mount Rushmore.” And I thought, “Hey, I really like that idea.” And that was the seed of the flower that took eleven months to grow. But I had to ask myself, “Who’s chasing whom over the faces of Mount Rushmore?” and “How do they get there?” and “Why?” And that took quite a bit of doing on my part. I remember that I used to squeeze out a tiny bit of the screenplay every day, fully convinced that it would never actually become a movie. There were many nights when I would be driving home from the studio thinking that we were just kidding ourselves — and wondering how long the charade would go on. The truth is, even with all my experience, I really didn’t know how to write the script. I’d never written a movie like that before, but gradually I eked it out — or, at least, the first sixty-five pages — and then Hitch went off to make Vertigo. So I’d sit there in my lonely office, and many times I’d go home at night having written less than half a page, completely discouraged. And several times I tried to quit while he was away, but my agent wouldn’t let me, saying, “You’ve already quit The Wreck of the Mary Deare, you can’t quit this one too.” So I was kind of trapped into doing it.
Like Roger Thornhill.
Yes, like my own character, always wondering, “How can I get out of this?” And the only way I could get out of it was to “write” my way out of it. And I think that, despite the unpleasantness of having to work under those conditions, I wound up at the top of my form as a writer, and, later, Hitch was at the top of his form when he directed the picture. In a sense, it’s unlike any picture he ever made. And it seems to have legs.
It seems to have legs, indeed! I saw North by Northwest within the last year and it still holds up. In fact, we have the script to look forward to reading later on in our “40 Days” challenge.
For more of the interview with Lehman, go here.
HT to Margit Keerdo for bringing the interview to my attention.