Hitchcock wanted Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck for the leads in Saboteur and also reportedly pursued Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullivan, but he was unable to get them. The tight budget meant he would have to consider a less stellar cast, although he did meet briefly with Joel McCrea, star of Foreign Correspondent (1940), who would have been happy to do another Hitchcock picture, even for less money, if he had been available for the scheduled production time.

Hitchcock finally had to settle for Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane. He thought Cummings was "a competent performer" but found his performance, and the picture, suffered because Cummings "belongs to the light-comedy class of actors" and had "an amusing face, so that even when he's in desperate straits, his features don't convey any anguish." He thought Lane "simply wasn't the right type for a Hitchcock picture."

The director was particularly distressed about not getting the villain he wanted. To convey the sense of these homegrown fascists being regular people, the ones you would least likely suspect, he wanted the very All-American former silent film actor and Western star Harry Carey. But Carey's wife was very indignant about the suggestion. Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut she said, "I am shocked that you should dare to offer my husband a part like this. After all, since Will Roger's death, the youth of America have looked up to my husband!"

Hitchcock also tried to get John Halliday for the villain role. The suave actor had retired from the screen after playing Katharine Hepburn's father in The Philadelphia Story (1940) and a supporting role in the Merle Oberon vehicle Lydia (1941). He was living in Hawaii, and travel restrictions imposed after Pearl Harbor made it difficult for him to be available in a timely fashion. Hitchcock finally settled on Otto Kruger, a capable actor but one the director found too much a "conventional heavy" for the counter-casting he wanted.

For the saboteur himself, Hitchcock wanted an unknown. Houseman recommended stage actor Norman Lloyd, who he felt fit Hitchcock's description of the character to a T.

The director wanted to be sure of a degree of authenticity for certain roles and was not averse to unconventional casting to achieve it. For instance, he pulled the company's best boy from the electrical crew to play the friend killed in the factory fire because Hitchcock thought he looked perfectly like a working man.

The filming of Saboteur took place between mid-December 1941 and February 1942.

Even with the budget restraints and casting compromises, Hitchcock was thrilled to be at Universal, away from Selznick and working with a new team, including studio cinematographer Joseph Valentine, who had just shot The Wolf Man (1941), an atmospheric horror film the director admired.

Universal was concerned with the 50+ sets Hitchcock ordered, including a vast desert scene to be built on Stage 12 with a reconstruction of part of a river and waterfall, as well as the set for the Park Avenue mansion's grand ballroom. Hitchcock cut corners wherever he could. The mansion set was built onto a staircase left over from a Deanna Durbin musical; a back-lot storage building became the doomed aircraft plant. He also included a number of mattes and rear projections, the use of which has long been the subject of debate about the director (ingenious cinematic statement or obvious special effect?). According to Associate Art Director Robert Boyle, Hitchcock knew "almost any shot will not hold longer than five seconds and that a matte in particular is going to be on for no more than five seconds. Then the audience doesn't have time to find the problems."

For the factory sabotage, Hitchcock simply used a shot of the front of the building with black smoke slowly billowing into the frame. Boyle said the director made a drawing "in which he drew just the big doors and then he did a big scribble. He said, 'There will be an explosion.' And I thought that scribble more illuminating than the finest drawing you could make."

For the shots of police inspecting the long circus caravan at night, Hitchcock created perspective by using vehicles––and people––of different sizes, starting with full-sized trucks and extras at the closer end of the caravan, using smaller trucks and shorter people as it receded into the distance, and finally miniatures and cutouts with workable arms with tiny illuminations to simulate flashlights at the far end. In relating the story of how the sequence was created, Boyle said, "Hitchcock was never afraid to try anything, and if it didn't work exactly as he wished, it didn't bother him that much, as long as he got the sensation correct."

Hitchcock sent a crew under the supervision of special-effects cameraman John Fulton to New York to film Radio City Music Hall, the launching of a liberty ship in New Jersey, and the Statue of Liberty, shooting both stills and action footage.

The special effects crew took stills of the statue's upraised hand, her torch, and the ledge beneath it. These were recreated to scale on the Universal soundstage.

When the French liner the Normandie burned and partially sunk in New York Harbor, Hitchcock quickly dispatched a Universal newsreel crew to the scene to get footage that he later incorporated into Saboteur, intercut with studio shots of the saboteur smiling from the back seat of a taxi as he looks out on the supposedly sabotaged ship.

Even though he left the project before the beginning of principal photography, John Houseman's remarks about working with Hitchcock were indicative of the experience many people had on his films: "His passion was for his work, which he approached with an intelligence and almost scientific clarity to which I was unaccustomed. Working with Hitch really meant listening to him talk-anecdotes, situations, characters, revelations, and reversals, which he would think up at night and try out on us during the day and...the surviving elements were finally strung together into some sort of story in accordance with carefully calculated and elaborately plotted rhythms."

"He was very exacting," Priscilla Lane said of Hitchcock. "Unswervable in getting you to do exactly what he wanted. But he was always pulling little gags to keep the set a happy place."

Norman Lloyd was impressed by what Hitchcock called his "camera logic," i.e. knowing exactly where the camera should be to tell the story. He was also amazed at the detail of the storyboards for the Statue of Liberty sequence. In turn, Hitchcock was thrilled that Lloyd could do the back flip over the Statue railing himself so that he wouldn't have to cut away to a long shot or use a double but could stay tight on the actor for that shot.

A couple of slightly different versions have been offered about how Hitchcock got the shot of Frye falling from the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur. One version claimed Norman Lloyd sat on a revolving, tottering chair, making appropriate movements; another says he was suspended on a wire. What is for certain is that he was shot against a black background while the camera swiftly pulled up and away from him, and the Statue and ground below were matted in later.

The only actor Hitchcock gave much direction to was Otto Kruger, who never pleased him as the head villain. Otherwise, he preferred to let the actors work out their roles in rehearsal and gave them direction mostly on timing in front of the camera. He believed he could solve any acting problem with camera work, such as filming Kruger's lengthy fascist soliloquy from a disconcerting distance.

Hitchcock's cameo appearance (a tradition) in Saboteur was originally going to be shared with Dorothy Parker. In the scene where an older couple drives by the hero struggling with the reluctant model on the side of the road, the director drove the car and the writer, as the wife, delivered the line, "They must be terribly in love." After watching the dailies, however, Hitchcock thought their appearance was too distracting from the story, so he re-shot it with professional actors. He then decided to cast himself in a cameo as a man using sign language to convey an apparently bold comment to a deaf woman (played by his secretary Carol Stevens), who promptly slaps him. But the studio thought that would be offensive to people with hearing disabilities, so Hitchcock decided to make his cameo extremely brief, appearing at the window of a drugstore. Blink and you'll miss him.

Saboteur required more than 4500 camera set-ups, 49 sets, and about 1200 extras.

Actors were sometimes shot from a great distance to convey the vastness of the American landscape.

A scene of the hero and heroine caught in a sandstorm was cut during editing and replaced with a shot of them huddled together on a rock.

To achieve the sensation of the people at the ship launch being thrown up in the air during the explosion on the dock, Hitchcock had the cameras pan quickly down each of the extras, from head to toe, and cut them together quickly.

by Rob Nixon