【世界文化博览】惊悚大师：希区柯克 17

英语自学网

The element of suspense is giving an audience information. Now you and I are sitting here. Suddenly a bomb goes off. Up we go, blown to smithereens. What have the audience had watching this scene? Five or ten seconds of shock. Now we do the scene over again. But we tell the audience there's a bomb underneath this table and it's gonna go off in five minutes. Now this innocuous conversation about football becomes very potent. They say, "Don't talk about football. There is a bomb under there." That's what they want to tell us. Then their anxieties will be as long as that clock ticks away. But the bomb must never go off.
I once committed a grave error in having a bomb from which I extracted a great deal of suspense. And I had the thing go off which I should never have done, because they needed the relief from their suspense. Somebody should say, "Oh, my goodness, look there's a bomb," pick it up, throw it out of the window. BANG! But I made a mistake. I let the bomb go off and kill someone. Bad technique.