During the scripting stage of production on Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, a second-unit crew was sent to Europe to shoot establishing shots. Hitchcock later told interviewer Francois Truffaut of the dangers of travel at that time: "this was in 1940, you see, and the cameraman who went over the first time from London to Amsterdam was torpedoed and lost all his equipment. He had to go over a second time." Location shots for the film were sparse, however. For the most part, Hitchcock utilized elaborate and expensive sets. The director always had a keen interest in set design and would do rough sketches of ideas for his art directors. Alexander Golitzen was the art director on Foreign Correspondent, and additional set design was by an uncredited William Cameron Menzies. Menzies had just come off the enormous task of serving as production designer for Selznick's Gone with the Wind (1939).

According to press release information, more than 600 laborers - electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and prop men - worked on the sets for the film. A 600 x 125 stage was used to recreate Waterloo Station for a few scenes, and even more extravagantly, an entire square in Amsterdam was constructed on a 10-acre site at a cost of $200,000. The scenes in the square, including the elaborate assassination and getaway shots, took place during a rainstorm, so the set had to be rigged with an elaborate drainage system. Hitchcock took great interest in the scenes of the spy ring operating inside of a Dutch windmill; the creaky, atmospheric set was three-tiered and equipped with working gears - important to the plot as our hero's coat becomes entangled in them. Also built for the film was an airplane equipped with four propeller motors, a wingspan of 120 feet, and an 84-foot fuselage, most of which ended up in a giant studio tank.

The crash of the clipper was, in fact, the most famous and costly scene in Foreign Correspondent. Regarding this sequence, Hitchcock told Truffaut "there's one shot so unusual that it's rather surprising that the technicians never bothered to question how it was done. That's when the plane is diving down toward the sea because its engines are crippled. The camera is inside the cabin, above the shoulders of the two pilots who are trying to pull the plane out of the dive. Between them, through the glass cabin window, we can see the ocean coming closer. And then, without a cut, the plane hits the ocean and the water rushes in, drowning the two men. That whole thing was done in a single shot, without a cut!." The shot was achieved by unconventionally combining two tried-and-true filmic devices: rear projection and an on-the-set dump tank. As Hitchcock explained, "I had a transparency screen made of paper, and behind that screen, a water tank. The plane dived, and as soon as the water got close to it, I pressed the button and the water burst through, tearing the screen away. The volume was so great that you never saw the screen."

After the plane crash, the main protagonists escape the fuselage and climb out onto a floating wing. Hitchcock told Truffaut about the challenges of this sequence: "A little later on there was another tricky shot. Just before the plane sank, we wanted to show one of the wings, with people on it, breaking away from the body of the plane. At the bottom of a large water tank, we installed some rails and we put the airplane on those rails. And we had a branch rail, like on the railways, so that when the wing broke away, it moved off on that branch track. It was all quite elaborate, but we had lots of fun doing it."

In Hitchcock at Work, Bill Krohn quotes Walter Wanger as the producer challenges Hitchcock's claim that he didn't even need to open his script during shooting. On the contrary, Wanger observed that Hitch's copy of the script was dog-eared before the first week of shooting was completed, and that it had "...dialogue corrections on one side, sketches showing the composition of scenes, medium shots and close-ups on the other....In addition to having art directors prepare many sketches showing lights, shades and suggested composition, Hitchcock will make as many as three hundred quick pencil sketches of his own to show the crew just how he wants scenes to look." Wanger did not see a bored director on the set either. Instead, the producer described Hitchcock as "fat, forty and full of fire. I've seen him climb a ladder with unbelievable agility." In his treatment of the actors, the producer did not notice Hitchcock as cruel or cold, but rather as "an alert and sensitive movie fan."

Principal photography for Foreign Correspondent wrapped on May 29, 1940. Hitchcock spent most of June in London, returning to the States on July 3rd. London was bracing for the anticipated Nazi Blitzkrieg, and Hitchcock and Wanger decided to film a final scene for their film. Famed reporter-turned-playwright (and frequent script doctor) Ben Hecht was brought in to write a stirring speech for Johnny Jones to deliver to his fellow Americans, telling of the "death coming to London." The sequence was filmed on July 5th. Since the movie opened only six weeks later, Wanger was ultimately successful in his goal of having an up-to-date and timely release. The final cost of the film was a then-staggering $1.5 Million. The costs charged to the script alone - accounting for a total of fourteen writers - was $250,000. When Foreign Correspondent opened on August 16, 1940, the United States was still sixteen months away from withdrawing its neutrality and entering World War II. Hitchcock must have been proud to have made such a strong pro-British film, and yet wrap the propaganda into a pure cinematic entertainment, his first American film to be unhesitantly called a "Hitchcock picture."

by John M. Miller