Hitchcock explaining to Truffaut what the MacGuffin is
It's the device, the gimmick, if you will, or the papers the spies are after. I'll tell you about it. Most of Kipling's stories, as you know, were set in India, and they dealt with the fighting between the natives and the British forces on the Afghanistan border. Many of them were spy stories, and they were concerned with the efforts to steal the secret plans out of a fortress. The theft of secret documents was the original MacGuffin. So the "MacGuffin" is the term we use to cover all that sort of thing: to steal plans or documents, or discover a secret, it doesn't matter what it is. And the logicians are wrong in trying to figure out the truth of a MacGuffin, since it's beside the point. The only thing that really matters is that in the picture the plans, documents, or secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters. To me, the narrator, they're of no importance whatever.
You may be wondering where the term originated. It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?"
And the other answers, "Oh, that's a MacGuffin."
The first one asks, "What's a MacGuffin?"
"Well," the other man says, "it's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands."
The first man says, "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands," and the other one answers, "Well then, that's no MacGuffin!" So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.
Hichcock Films with a MacGuffin
- The 39 Steps (the mechanical formula for the construction of an airplane engine)
- The Lady Vanishes (secret hidden in a melody)
- North by Northwest (microfilm containing government secrets)
- Torn Curtain ("Gamma Five" project, concerning an anti-missile missile)
- Similar to, but no MacGuffins are: Number Seventeen (the necklace), The Man Who Knew Too Much (assasination), Notorious (uranium)