A Macguffin is a film term, popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, which describes a gimmick that seems to be essential to the movie — and which motivates the characters in the story — but which is ultimately irrelevant.

Supposedly it was invented by Angus MacPhail, a screenwriter, who worked extensively with Hitchcock.

The eponymous falcon in the Maltese Falcon is a Macguffin; so too is the uranium in Notorious, and the formula for constructing an aircraft engine in The Thirty Nine Steps. Hitchcock thought that his best Macguffin were the ‘government secrets’ in North by Northwest, since they were virtually non-existent.

Here’s an excerpt from Helen Scott and François Truffaut’s book of interviews, Hitchcock, published 1985 (the first edition was published in 1967, based on 1964 interviews):

Alfred Hitchcock: “… whenever we found ourselves getting terribly involved [in defining a Macguffin], we would drop the idea for something very simple.

Francois Truffaut: In other words, not only is there no need for the MacGuffin to be important or serious, but it’s even preferable that it should turn out to be something as trivial and absurd as the little tune of The Lady Vanishes.

Hitchcock: Exactly.

Elsewhere in the same set of interviews, Hitchcock tells Truffaut this story:

There are two men sitting in a train going to Scotland and one man says to the other, ‘Excuse me, sir, but what is that strange parcel you have on the luggage rack above you?’ ‘Oh,’ says the other, ‘that’s a Macguffin.’ ‘Well,’ says the first man, ‘what’s a Macguffin?’ The other answers, ‘It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ ‘But,’ says the first man, ‘there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ ‘Well,’ says the other, ‘then that’s no Macguffin.'”

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