10 Genius Techniques Directors Used To Get Great Movie Performances

7. Alfred Hitchcock Told Joan Fontaine Nobody Liked Her - Rebecca

Like William Friedkin, Alfred "Actors Are Cattle" Hitchcock had a reputation for putting his leading ladies through hell, as best evidenced by his flat-out abuse of Tippi Hedren on The Birds (a result of rejecting his romantic advances, apparently).

More than two decades prior, however, Hitchcock took a decidedly less-creepy approach to manipulating his lead actress, Joan Fontaine, on his classic 1940 thriller Rebecca.

Fontaine played the nervy and naive new wife of widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), and in order to ensure Fontaine played-up the twitchy paranoia to maximum effect, he told her that nobody on the set liked her.

Comically, Hitchcock wasn't totally fibbing: Laurence Olivier had previously asked the director to cast his eventual wife Vivien Leigh in the part at her request, despite Olivier not actually thinking she was well-suited for it. Marriage, eh?

When Fontaine was eventually cast, Olivier claimed to have endured plenty of strife from his lover about it, and probably wished Hitch had just complied with his "request."