You've probably seen still photographs of interiors of rooms where the ceiling seemed to go up, especially if you're familiar with the room. It was on this basis that I'd gotten them to devise this movement. It's a changing of perspective from the normal to the abnormal -- from the normal of a 50mm lens to the abnormal of the 22mm, say.

The difficulty they had in doing it was that they found the sides moved, and I said, "The sides cannot move!" The sides nearest the camera must stay where they are. At one time many years ago, when I was frustrated in getting this effect, I had thought, why can't we get a still printed on rubber, and I'll make a little wire on the back and pull it. I got so desperate, I even suggested that. And at last, of course, they came up with the effect of dollying back while zooming forward.

QUESTION: Speaking of deliberate cinematic distortion, was the montage of the horse's fall in Marnie a deliberate time distortion?

HITCHCOCK: Oh, yes. Sure. You see, when you deal with an accident of this sort, if you did it at its normal speed, it would happen so flashily that you'd never really realize what was happening; you wouldn't get the full benefit of it. Now for when the horse rears up, we built a low wall -- I think it was only 9 inches from the ground, and then we skimmed the ground with the camera, just leaving the grass out of the picture, and then we got a horse just to roll over. It was a trick horse that loved to roll. So all it was doing was rolling over a 9-inch bit of brick wall, that's all. The rest, when the girl was thrown into the air, was slow motion. We sat her on the arm of the crane and swung her through the air in an arc, in slow motion.

QUESTION: And the unreal quality of the horse-riding process in Marnie?

HITCHCOCK: Strangely enough, over the wall and everything. But it did jig up and down in an unusual way.

QUESTION: And the painted drop of the Baltimore dockyard?

HITCHCOCK: That was a bad horse on a treadmill. The process in back of her was made on the actual field. It was made on a crane, it went that was correct. She was on a trained shot. They said when you get the final Technicolor print, it won't look like that. But they were lying. It was a bad shot.

QUESTION: But do you think that the obvious unreality of the process and set-painting in Marnie could be interpreted as a sign of Marnie's world of illusion?

HITCHCOCK: Yes. I think so.

QUESTION: Saul Bass, the title designer, has said that he is responsible for designing the shower killing in Psycho.

HITCHCOCK: It isn't true. I'll tell you, Saul Bass asked me if he could design a sequence, so I said, "Yes, you can design the sequence of the detective going into the house." So he made up a series of sketches: feet on the stairs, hands on the rail, moving through the bannister with his legs going up, close-ups of him.

Well, I went sick one day -- it was the only day I went sick on a picture -- so I told the assistant and Burks, the cameraman, "There's something you can do to fill in time. Take these drawings of Saul Bass and photograph them." I saw them on the screen exactly as he laid them out, and I said, "We can't use them. None of this can be used. All these things are sinister stealth. He's not a sinister man; this is an innocent man." So we threw the whole lot out, and I took a simple shot of him going up the stairs.

QUESTION: In Psycho, how did you do the shot beginning with Norman going up the stairs to his mother's room and ending with him carrying her body to the fruit cellar?

HITCHCOCK: That was a hanging crane shot. An overhead hanging goes up -- photographs up -- with one side open. And as the camera goes up, you turn and look down the