The MacGuffin

Hitchcock interviewed by Oriana Fallaci, 1963: 

MacGuffin. You must know that when I'm making a movie, the story isn't important to me. What's important is how I tell the story. For example, in a movie about espionage what the spy is looking for isn't important, it's how he looks for it. Yet I have to say what he's looking for. It doesn't matter to me, but it matters a great deal to the public, and most of all it matters to the character of the movie.

Why should the character go to so much trouble? Why does the government pay him to go to so much trouble? Is he looking for a bomb, a secret? This secret, this bomb, is for me the MacGuffin, a word that comes from an old Scottish story. . . .

Two men are traveling in a train, and one says to the other, "What's that parcel on the luggage rack?"

"That? It's the MacGuffin," says the other.

"And what's the MacGuffin?" asks the first man.

"The MacGuffin is a device for catching lions in Scotland," the other replies.

"But there aren't any lions in Scotland," says the first man.

"Then it isn't the MacGuffin," answers the other.

Clear? Logical?

Alfred Hitchcock Interviews, ed. Sidney Gottlieb. University Press of Mississippi, 2003. P. 62.

 http://faculty.cua.edu/johnsong/hitchcock/pages/macguffin.html