In short, he delivered a script that made Selznick howl in complaint: "But, Hitch, you've ruined the book!"I do not mean to say that the Hitchcock scenario would not have worked. But Selznick had learned one thing on Gone With the Wind: if in doubt, stay faithful to the book, for millions of readers are prepared to be upset if you make a foolish change. Du Maurier was uncertain, for there was word that Hollywood - with much more money - was also fascinated by the book. David O Selznick was bidding, the man famous for having paid $50,000 for the screen rights to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind Hitchcock could not compete at that level But Selznick was interested in picking up Hitchcock, too. We want to know what happens next.Du Maurier wrote romances, and she liked to have innocent young heroines. But the romance often veers towards something more like horror - I note that in writing on Jamaica Inn, Sarah Dunant said that the bond between the young woman and her towering uncle (the real relationship in du Maurier's book) is like that between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling.At some time during the work on Jamaica Inn, Hitchcock got an advance look at Daphne's next book - Rebecca.

Did he read it himself, or did he get his very shrewd wife, Alma, to analyse it? Who knows, but the Hitchcocks were mad for the book, and Hitchcock tried to purchase the screen rights directly. Jamaica Inn may have problems of logic or tidiness, but it has immense atmosphere, a wild setting (the Cornish coast) and a very strong clash between young and innocent characters and some who are older, darker and far more wicked The story has a hook. Once more, Hitch was not flattering about the material: it was "an absurd thing to undertake", he said, with a story that made no sense But the film was a hit, and it's worth asking why. That's how he came to make the movie of Jamaica Inn, a project dominated by Charles Laughton's desire to play the villain, "Sir Humphrey Pengallan", thus cancelling out the clergyman rogue from the book.

It proved to be more than a regular professional relationship, because Hitchcock and du Maurier discovered that they had a shared hobby: elaborate practical jokes. It has been said that if only, instead of Lord Camber's Ladies, we had the movie of these escapades - of bodies found in dressing-room cupboards; of immense emergency calls that required fools' errands; and the everyday booby-trapping of the prop in the picture.So it was quite natural that Hitchcock should follow the emerging career of Gerald's daughter, Daphne (born in 1907), and coming into her own by the mid 1930s. Movie people have a simple test when it comes to possible projects. They may ask for a written synopsis, a treatment, or even a script. Yet, in truth, many movie people do not read easily, and film scripts - if you've tried it - are somewhere between prose and a blueprint. So film people say to a writer, "Just tell me the story" - in words, as if we were sitting at the same fireplace on a cold night.

And if I'm hooked, if I want to know what happens next, if the hair starts to go up on the back of my neck, then we may be on to something.Alfred Hitchcock was very well disposed to Daphne du Maurier, who was the daughter of Sir Gerald du Maurier, perhaps the leading actor-manager in the London of the early 20th century, a handsome man, and a very accomplished actor in romance and melodrama. The two men had worked together on a picture called Lord Camber's Ladies (1932), produced by Hitchcock, and actually directed by Benn W Levy, which starred du Maurier and Gertrude Lawrence. It helps them feel confident; it encourages them to believe that there is an audience primed for the film. In turn, that fosters the large fallacy: that there is a natural and true way of translating novels to the screen.The point to hang on to is there in Hitchcock's rather brusque treatment of du Maurier's original version of The Birds - "if I like the basic idea". I daresay there was a time when Daphne du Maurier herself took it for granted that, if the book was called Rebecca, she had to be a living presence. Then came the blessed moment when insight struck - of course not, she says, if Rebecca stays a ghost she can haunt the book; and if Rebecca is simply an atmosphere that explains why the second Mrs de Winter, the "I" character is so intimidated, so threatened. Indeed, a Hitchcock might have reasoned: the I character is just the eye that sees the whole thing.You might then conclude, well, why should filmmaking bother with books if they intend to tell every story visually? The answer is commerce.