Since our 14 Day script yesterday was Psycho, and we featured an interview with the the movie’s director Alfred Hitchcock, I thought we should feature the screenwriter as well. So here is a written interview conducted with Stefano in 2003. A fascinating excerpt about his initial involvement with Hitchcock on Psycho:

It was after this that Hitch called, and I was told, “Hitchcock’s office is sending you a book. Read it and you’ll meet with him on Tuesday morning.” So I read the book and I thought it was kind of fascinating, about this boy and his ball-breaking mother. They seemed very interesting characters to me, especially as I was in analysis at that time. And then when I got to the end of the book, I found out that the mother is dead, and had been dead all through the book, and I had a terrible sense of this book being unfilmable. How do you film a scene between a man and his mother when she is dead – unless you want to tell the audience that, unless that becomes the premise of the movie. But then there would be no shock at the end! So I came up with the idea that the movie would be about a girl who is really in only two chapters of the book, but she comes to the motel and gets killed in the shower. In the book it says, “. . . and then someone came in, and she screamed. And the person with the knife cut off the scream and her head.” I knew that I would not like to write that in the script, that somebody’s head would be cut off. I mean, this was 1959, remember?

So I met with Mr. Hitchcock, and he seemed very nice. I didn’t want to sit and do any small talk, so I said to him, “Mr. Hitchcock, may I tell you how I would do this movie?” and he said, “Of course,” and sat back. I proceeded to pitch the whole opening sequence that you see in the movie. I said, “It starts up with a girl who’s spending her lunch hour shacking up with her boyfriend who comes from another state, and they’re in this kind of shabby hotel.” I didn’t know that I was pushing one of the best buttons in that man: the phrase “shacking up” just kind of delighted him. I am not sure he had ever heard it. But you didn’t have to tell him what it meant: he knew what “shacking up” meant. So I told him the whole story, all about her and her trip to her boyfriend with her money that she had stolen, and how she’s going a little mad, because there was no way that stealing 40,000 dollars is going to help any of her problems or any of her boyfriend’s problems. I really had the sense that this character doesn’t know what is going to happen as a result of doing this, so I based the character on a momentary act of madness, which I used later on when I wrote, “We all go a little mad sometimes.” So it created a kind of tension from the very beginning, especially for Janet, who was so wonderful. I said to Janet, ”After the camera goes under the shade and into the room, you’re onscreen until you get killed in the shower,” and she liked it. I thought that she grabbed that opportunity in such a great way and showed that tension. I thought it was a breathtaking performance.

Stefano’s writing credits include movies such as Psycho (1960), The Naked Edge (1961), Eye of the Cat (1969), and The Kindred (1987), and episodes for numerous TV series including “The Outer Limits” (12 episodes, 1963-1964), “Marcus Welby, M.D.”, and “Star Trek: The Next Generation”.

You can read the rest of the interview here.