Behind-the-Scenes: Hitchcock's REBECCA (1940)

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•BEHIND-THE-SCENES:
"Rebecca" was Alfred Hitchcock's first American film. Despite the fact
that the story is set in England (and Monte Carlo), and that Laurence
Olivier and many of the other actors were British, the film was shot
entirely in California. Hitchcock later said that had they filmed
"Rebecca" in England "We would have had a sense of location, but we
would have lost the sense of isolation."
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Daphne du Maurier's inspiration for Manderley, the de Winter estate in
"Rebecca", was based on her childhood impressions of Milton, a home that
belonged to a friend of the family, and on a 16th century mansion called
Menabilly, which would eventually become her home. She described Milton
as being, "Long, grey-walled, stone, stretching endlessly, great windows
set one upon the other with crisscross window panes, then more stone,
and columns, while to the left the building turned to form a sort of
square, crowned by a clock-tower. Once inside, what absorbed me was the
magnificence of the great hall, the high ceiling, the paneled walls, and
those portraits hanging upon them, men with lace collars, knee-breeches,
colored stockings, four centuries of Fitzwilliams."
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Before "Rebecca" was cast, both Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick
wanted Ronald Colman for the part of Maxim de Winter. Colman turned the
part down because he thought his public wouldn't like him as a murderer,
and because he feared "Rebecca" would emerge as a "woman's picture".
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After Laurence Olivier signed to play Maxim de Winter, he campaigned to
have Vivien Leigh, with whom he was in love and would marry the
following year, cast as the second Mrs. de Winter. When Leigh agreed to
audition for the part, Olivier broke precedent by personally playing
Maxim for her screen test. (That screen test is included on the
Criterion Collection's DVD of "Rebecca".) Later, when Vivien Leigh did
not get the part, Olivier made no secret of the fact that he was
disappointed to be playing opposite Joan Fontaine.
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Joan Fontaine, the sister of Olivia de Havilland, was 21 and relatively
unknown when she was cast as the second Mrs. de Winter. She later
recalled, "Hitch kept me off balance, much to his own delight... he
would constantly tell me that no one thought I was very good except
himself." Using these and other tactics to impose on Fontaine the
insecurity he wanted for her portrayal of the second Mrs. de Winter,
Hitchcock guided her to an Oscar nomination and stardom.
-

When Judith Anderson was offered the part of the insidious Mrs. Danvers,
she was appearing on Broadway as the Virgin Mary in a religious allegory
called "Family Portrait". She had appeared in only one previous film,
1933's "Blood Money".
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In the novel, Maxim de Winter actually does shoot his wife, Rebecca. In
the film, Rebecca's murder was changed to an accident because the Motion
Picture Production Code at the time dictated that the perpetrator of any
crime had to be punished for that crime, and that a sympathetic lead
character could not simultaneously be a murderer.
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David O. Selznick paid $50,000 to acquire the film rights for "Rebecca".
-

"Rebecca" was being filmed while Selznick was putting the final touches
on his film "Gone With the Wind". Because he was preoccupied, Selznick
didn't interfere with the filming of "Rebecca" as much as he usually did
with one of his productions. However, Hitchcock and Selznick still
clashed over everything from the script to from how many angles a scene
should be filmed. (Hitchcock liked to "edit in the camera", filming a
scene only from the point of view of how he envisioned it would look in
the final film. This upset Selznick because he liked to be able to
choose from among a number of different angles when putting together a
scene.) Selznick's opinion, however, almost always carried the day.
-

During the filming of "Rebecca" Selznick began one of his memos to
Hitchcock,
"I am putting this in writing because there seems to be some difficulty
on the part of Henry and the Production Department in making our
complaints clear, and I want there to be no misunderstanding of any
steps if they eventually become necessary because of your failure, or
(and I dislike to think this) your refusal, to understand what it is
that we are complaining about.." -

Selznick had very specific ideas as to what the handwriting of the dead
Rebecca should look like, and several women from the production
department tried their hand at creating Rebecca's personality through
penmanship. A number of props, including linen, china, and desk
accessories, were monogrammed with the final choice.
-

Laurence Olivier, who had acted much more on stage than in films, drove
both Hitchcock and Selznick to distraction with his habit of alternately
slowing down action to make his role more showy, and then speaking very
rapidly. After filming was completed, Selznick had Olivier re-dub some
of his lines with little success.
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Some of the flames in the final, climactic scene of "Rebecca" were
composites of shots made during the "burning of Atlanta " scene in "Gone
With the Wind".
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After the premier of "Rebecca", Franz Waxman gave the following insight
into his musical score [edited for content]: "Rebecca, the really
dominant character of the story, is dead - in actuality she never
appears in the scenes, yet the entire drama revolves around her... I set
up a normal orchestra playing the accompanying music for the living
characters on the screen, whereas for the dead Rebecca I set up an
individual group of mechanical instruments - a ghost orchestra, so to
speak. It consisted of an electronic organ and two novachords (a newly
invented instrument which produces its sound by means of radio tubes)
which has a peculiar sound of unreality."
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Waxman later claimed that of all of his movie scores, the one he wrote
for "Rebecca" was his favorite.
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It took 63 days for Hitchcock to initially film "Rebecca", after which
Selznick took over and scheduled many scenes for retakes. Before
shooting began, Selznick was outraged when an estimated budget of
$947,000 was submitted by his general manager, calling it "a disgrace"
and declaring that the head of any department that did not stay within a
sensible budget, "is going to be fired!" The final cost of the film was
$1,288,000.
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In 1962, Hitchcock told François Truffaut that "Rebecca", "is not a
Hitchcock picture. The story itself belongs to the end of the 19th
Century."

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