Script To Screen: “Psycho”

The famous “truth about mother” scenes from the classic 1960 movie Psycho, screenplay by Joseph Stefano, based on a novel by Robert Bloch.

Setup: Lila Crane sneaks around the Bates home in search of her missing sister Marion. Suspicious of Norman, Lila heads downstairs toward the basement…

The movie version of the scene:

It’s great to do a shot-by-shot comparison of the script to the movie because they are very close, typical of an Alfred Hitchcock movie as he blocked it all out ahead of time.

One intriguing thing about the scene description: It’s very novelistic in the sense that Stefano enters ‘into’ the mindset of Lila’s character:

Convinced that he is searching the upstairs for her, she decides to chance an escape… Lila is torn, knows she should get out of the house while she has the chance, is unable to resist the impulse to check that hidden-looking room down below, a room in which, she desperately believes, there must lie some answer to what happened to Mary.

Next time some screenwriting teacher or guru says you can only write scene description that reflects what an actor can act and a moviegoer can see, that you can’t express what’s going on inside a character’s thoughts, feel free to pull out this scene description.

The simple fact is at key moments, we do have the right to engage in both editorial and psychological writing such as this scene.

I’ve referenced this film critic before — Slavoj Zizek. Here he considers the three floors of the Bates house, comparing them to Ego, Superego, and Id:

One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a weekly Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

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