Production
Alfred Hitchcock first hired Leon Uris to adapt his own novel for the screen. Reportedly, the two differed on aspects of character development, with Hitchcock claiming that Uris hadn't humanised the villains of the story. Uris also did not appreciate Hitchcock's insistence of adding black humour. After a portion of the draft had been written, Uris left the film. Hitchcock attempted to hire Arthur Laurents to complete work on the screenplay, but he refused, leaving an unfinished draft and the shooting schedule rapidly approaching. Ultimately, Samuel A. Taylor, co-writer of Vertigo was hired, but the film began without a completed screenplay. Some scenes were filmed just hours after they had been written.
Like his previous films Rope and The Trouble with Harry, Hitchcock intended the film to be an experiment for whether colours, predominately red, yellow and white, could be used to reveal and influence the plot. He later admitted that this did not work out.
Read more about this topic: Topaz (1969 film)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)