Plot summary

Sir Alfred Hitchcock opens his latest movie, North by Northwest (1959), to considerable success, but is troubled by a reporter's insinuation that he should retire. Seeking to reclaim the artistic daring of his youth, Sir Alfred turns down movie proposals, including Casino Royale and The Diary of Anne Frank, in favor of a horror novel called "Psycho" by Robert Bloch, based on the real-life crimes of murderer Ed Gein. Gein (Michael Wincott) appears in sequences throughout this movie, in which he seems to prompt Sir Alfred's imagination regarding the "Psycho" story, or act as some function of Sir Alfred's subconscious mind (for instance, drawing Sir Alfred's attention to sand on his bathroom floor, the quantity of which reveals how much time his wife Alma (Dame Helen Mirren) has been spending at the beach house with Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston)). Sir Alfred's wife and artistic collaborator, Alma, is no more enthusiastic about the idea than his colleagues, especially since she is being lobbied by their writer friend, Whitfield Cook, to look at his own screenplay. However, she warms to Sir Alfred's proposal, suggesting the innovative plot turn of killing the female lead early in the movie. The studio heads at Paramount Pictures prove to be more difficult to persuade, forcing Sir Alfred to finance the movie personally, and use his Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) television crew (over at competitor Revue/Universal Pictures) to shoot the movie, his last with Paramount Pictures.