> James Stewart, who had already starred in four Hitchcock thrillers, was hoping to make North by Northwest the fifth. Stewart was very interested in playing the lead role of Roger Thornhill, but Hitchcock had another star in mind who would bring that impeccably debonair style to the film - Cary Grant. So the director waited for Stewart to begin filming Bell, Book and Candle (1958), making Stewart unavailable to Hitchcock. The director was then free to hire Grant under the excuse that the studio wanted production to start immediately.

> Alfred Hitchcock was unsatisfied with the studio's costume designs for Eva Marie Saint and Martin Landau, so on separate occasions, he brought each of them to Bergdorf Goodman in New York City, and found the perfect ensembles for them straight off the rack. Hitchcock also brought Martin Landau to Cary Grant's personal tailor, Quitino, in Beverly Hills, California. He wanted for Landau's character to appear even more impeccably dressed than the protagonist and an even more formidable opponent on-screen.

> The famous scene of Cary Grant being chased through a cornfield by a crop duster is an example of Hitchcock at his best. It came about because he had noticed that when most directors try to make a suspenseful scene they use tight alleyways, shadows barely visible through the gloom and the slow building tension of the approaching menace. So Hitchcock did exactly the opposite: full daylight, completely open space and a very fast machine. Similarly, most directors gradually shorten each individual shot in such a scene as a way of increasing the tension, but Hitchcock kept his shots fairly uniform so that a viewer gets a better idea of how far and where Grant is running. The finished scene lasts around seven minutes with no dialogue and is as remarkable as the shower scene he devised for Psycho (1960) a year later.