
In TV interviews, Hitchcock defined a MacGuffin as the object qui around the plot revolves, as to what purpose That object SPECIFICALLY is, he Declared, “The audience do not care”.

On the commentary soundtrack to the 2004 DVD release of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope , writer and director George Lucas describes R2-D2 as “the main driving force of the movie … what you say in the movie business is the MacGuffin … the object of everybody’s search “. Screenwriter Angus MacPhail , a friend of Hitchcock, may have originally coined the term, according to author Ken Mogg. Hitchcock’s term “MacGuffin” helped him to make sure that his films were not actually available on the surface. Hitchcock also related this anecdote in a television interview for Richard Schickel’s documentary The Men Who Made the Movies , and in an interview with Dick Cavett . Interviewed in 1966 by François Truffaut , Hitchcock explained the term “MacGuffin” using the same story. It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, ‘What’s up 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 MacGuffin is actually nothing at all. Hitchcock explained the term “MacGuffin” in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University in New York : The director and producer Alfred Hitchcock popularized the term “MacGuffin” and the technique with his 1935 film The 39 Steps , an early example of the concept. The name “MacGuffin” was coined by the screenwriter Angus MacPhail , and was popularized by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s. In the 1929 detective novel The Maltese Falcon , a small statuette provides both the book’s eponymous title and its motive for intrigue.

The World War I will be actress Pearl White used weenie to identify whatever object (a roll of film, a rare coin, expensive diamonds, etc.) impelled the heroes, and often the villains as well, to pursue each other through the convoluted plots of Pauline and the other silent serials in which she starred. The Holy Grail of Arthurian Legend has been cited as an example of an early MacGuffin.

The use of MacGuffin has a plot device predates the name “MacGuffin”.
