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The Telegraph (02/Dec/2006) - Filmmakers on film: Allen Coulter on Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo

(c) Daily Telegraph (02/Dec/2006)

Filmmakers on film Allen Coulter on Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)

"Polanski's Chinatown is a film that I have purposefully and consciously imitated," says Allen Coulter, "but Vertigo is one that has got into my bloodstream. Every time I reappraise things that I've done, the influence is there, time and time again."

Rewatching his first ever film, a 40-minute short called The Hobbs Case, Coulter noticed the heavy shadow of Alfred Hitchcock. "It was a mystery about a man who thinks he has witnessed a crime, and, in the course of the film, we discover that nothing has happened - at least nothing that relates to him. Yet he develops this paranoid delusion that he is implicated in the crime.

"I didn't realise the similarities while I was making it. In fact, the guy in my film wears a brown suit identical to the one that Jimmy Stewart wears in Vertigo: he even looks like him. I realised later that, in the same way that Stewart's character Scottie remakes Kim Novak's character into the woman of his dreams, I was remaking this actor into Jimmy Stewart."

Vertigo is the story of Scottie, an ex-cop employed to follow Madeleine (Novak), the wife of an old friend, who is becoming increasingly concerned about her eccentric behaviour. Scottie, who quit the police after developing a debilitating fear of heights, becomes obsessed with Madeleine, but she then dies in mysterious circumstances. So who is the identical woman that Scottie subsequently bumps into?

"I was a child when I first saw Vertigo," says Coulter, "and it was very disturbing because I didn't really understand what was going on. However, I was mesmerised by the erotic overtones and by the unbelievably potent mood that is established."

That mood, says Coulter, owes an enormous debt to Bernard Herrmann's thrilling score. "Truly, it is one of the great film scores. I don't think any composer has ever written music that so perfectly captures a combination of romance, eroticism and deeply neurotic longing. As it poured over me, as a child, I found it incomprehensible but moving and disturbing. I'm still curious that my parents seemed comfortable with my seeing it."

Among the other key elements in the film is Stewart's performance. "He is," says Coulter, "simply one of the great American actors.

"The character of Scottie is so troubled in some profound way; there's some kind of emotional worm that's got into him. Very few American actors could have played that role. Cary Grant couldn't, and I'm not even sure that Henry Fonda could have done it.

"There is nobody else that I'm aware of who could play the two or three emotions that are warring simultaneously within Scottie the way that Jimmy Stewart does. Which, of course, makes him a great protagonist for Hitchcock, who had so many strains pulling in different directions inside his own psyche.

"And Stewart was able to put all that into the world in such a deeply empathetic way because he cries with stress better than any man. He suffers so well on screen."

The choice of San Francisco as the setting for the narrative was another inspired decision, says Coulter. "It works brilliantly - the winding streets and hills, and the way the vistas suddenly open out, all the ups and downs, the little alleyways, the rather gothic, architecturally disturbing buildings.

"I think Hitchcock had a thing about hills: think of the house on the hill in Psycho. Then, in Vertigo, Scottie is forever traversing the city, going downhill all the time as he goes deeper and deeper into himself. It's as if Hitchcock is using San Francisco as a psychological map."

And the director is unafraid to use well-known landmarks - the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower - to establish location, something, Coulter points out, that most seasoned filmmakers would be at pains to avoid. "But he does it without seeming to resort to clich."

Hitchcock also plays some strange visual tricks with the city. "I'm still not sure why he did it, but the rear projection outside [Scottie's friend] Midge's apartment is in black and white - a very odd choice. Perhaps what he is saying is that, in this movie, San Francisco is not a real place; it is a state of mind, a state of emotion."

Vertigo is, Coulter believes, Hitchcock's most truthful film about himself, his most revealing. Scottie's obsession with grooming Kim Novak's character echoes strongly the director's own notorious obsession with blondes. Yet it is also true that Hitch treats Novak - and her character - more sympathetically than any of his other leading ladies.

As a director of the era-defining TV series Sex and the City, was Coulter ever tempted to put his quartet of fiery New Yorkers through the emotional wringer? "I hope not. Ultimately, I thought those stories were sad, and I always tried to include one or two images that caught the poignancy of their situation."

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