Behind the Camera on NORTH BY NORTHWEST

Cary Grant's entrance into the United Nations Building was a bit trickier than it looks on screen. It turns out that it was prohibited to film on the grounds of the U.N. To circumvent this inconvenience, Hitchcock concealed a massive VistaVision camera inside a carpet cleaning truck and filmed Grant getting out of a cab and walking up the steps to the U.N. This establishing master shot includes actual U.N. security officers who were unaware they were being filmed.

The director ran into a similar problem at Mount Rushmore. The Department of Interior-which operates the monument-not only wouldn't allow filming on the actual sculpture but they also wouldn't give permission for actors to crawl over a reproduction. A compromise was reached where the actors went between the faces instead of over them, but except for a few exteriors the whole Mount Rushmore scene was filmed at the MGM studios. (Perhaps it's a good thing that Hitchcock gave up his plan to have one of the characters erupt in a sneezing fit while hiding in a statue nose.)

Hitchcock wanted the story to make a pit stop in Detroit, Michigan, where Roger Thornhill would drop by an automobile plant. As Thornhill and a factory worker discussed the factory foreman, a possible link to the mystery Thornhill was embroiled in, they would walk along the assembly line as a car was put together from the most basic rudimentary parts to the final panel. Then, as the car was to roll off the assembly line ready to drive, the factory worker would open the passenger door and out would roll the body of the foreman they had been discussing. Hitchcock loved the idea, as did Ernest Lehman, but neither one of them could figure out how to plausibly incorporate the scene into the story, so the idea was scrapped.

MGM put a great deal of pressure on Hitchcock to eliminate the scene in the woods, after Eve shoots Roger. MGM felt that it was an unnecessary scene that incurred the needless expense of building the set on a soundstage using 100 ponderosa pines. Hitchcock, however, felt that it was an indispensable scene because it's the first meeting between Roger and Eva since he learned she was a double agent. Hitchcock won out in the end, thanks to his contract that gave him complete artistic control of the picture, regardless of production time or cost.

Although he is best known as the composer of the score for North By Northwest, Bernard Herrmann is really indirectly responsible for the creation of the film; it was Herrmann who first introduced Ernest Lehman to Alfred Hitchcock. Their subsequent collaboration resulted in one of the most famous chase thrillers of all time.

Screenwriter Ernest Lehman took a two-week research trip through New York, the United Nations, Glen Cove, Long Island, the 20th Century Limited, Chicago, the Ambassador East Hotel, and Mount Rushmore in order to convincingly plot his narrative.

By Scott McGee & Lang Thompson