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Overview
In Hitchcock, film critic François Truffaut presents fifty hours of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock about the whole of his vast directorial career, from his silent movies in Great Britain to his color films in Hollywood. The result is a portrait of one of the greatest directors the world has ever known, an all-round specialist who masterminded everything, from the screenplay and the photography to the editing and the soundtrack. Hitchcock discusses the inspiration behind his films and the art of creating fear and suspense, as well as giving strikingly honest assessments of his achievements and failures, his doubts and hopes. This peek into the brain of one of cinema’s greats is a must-read for all film aficionados.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781501143229 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 12/04/2015 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Sales rank: | 873,286 |
| File size: | 42 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT. Mr. Hitchcock, you were born in London on August 13, 1899. The only thing I know about your childhood is the incident at the police station. Is that a true story?
ALFRED HITCHCOCK. Yes, it is. I must have been about four or five years old. My father sent me to the police station with a note. The chief of police read it and locked me in a cell for five or ten minutes, saying, "This is what we do to naughty boys."
F.T. Why were you being punished?
A.H. I haven't the faintest idea. As a matter of fact, my father used to call me his "little lamb without a spot." I truly cannot imagine what it was I did.
F.T. I've heard that your father was very strict.
A.H. Let's just say he was a rather nervous man. What else can I tell you? Well, my family loved the theater. As I think back upon it, we must have been a rather eccentric little group. At any rate, I was what is known as a well-behaved child. At family gatherings I would sit quietly in a corner, saying nothing. I looked and observed a good deal. I've always been that way and still am. I was anything but expansive. I was a loner -- can't remember ever having had a playmate. I played by myself, inventing my own games.
I was put into school very young. At St. Ignatius College, a Jesuit school in London. Ours was a Catholic family and in England, you see, this in itself is an eccentricity. It was probably during this period with the Jesuits that a strong sense of fear developed -- moral fear -- the fear of being involved in anything evil. I always tried to avoid it. Why? Perhaps out of physical fear. I was terrified of physical punishment. In thosedays they used a cane made of very hard rubber. I believe the Jesuits still use it. It wasn't done casually, you know; it was rather like the execution of a sentence. They would tell you to step in to see the father when classes were over. He would then solemnly inscribe your name in the register, together with the indication of the punishment to be inflicted, and you spent the whole day waiting for the sentence to be carried out.
F.T. I've read that you were rather average as a student and that your only strong point was geography.
A.H. I was usually among the four or five at the top of the class. Never first; second only once or twice, and generally fourth or fifth. They claimed I was rather absent-minded.
F.T. Wasn't it your ambition, at the time, to become an engineer?
A.H. Well, little boys are always asked what they want to be when they grow up, and it must be said to my credit that I never wanted to be a policeman. When I said I'd like to become an engineer, my parents took me seriously and they sent me to a specialized school, the School of Engineering and Navigation, where I studied mechanics, electricity, acoustics, and navigation.
F.T. Then you had scientific leanings?
A.H. Perhaps. I did acquire some practical knowledge of engineering, the theory of the laws of force and motion, electricity -- theoretical and applied. Then I had to make a living, so I went to work with the Henley Telegraph Company. At the same time I was taking courses at the University of London, studying art.
At Henley's I specialized in electric cables. I became a technical estimator when I was about nineteen.
F.T. Were you interested in motion pictures at the time?
A.H. Yes, I had been for several years. I was very keen on pictures and the stage and very often went to first nights by myself. From the age of sixteen on I read film journals. Not fan or fun magazines, but always professional and trade papers. And since I was studying art at the University of London, Henley's transferred me to the advertising department, where I was given a chance to draw.
F.T. What kind of drawings?
A.H. Designs for advertisements of electric cables. And this work was a first step toward cinema. It helped me to get into the field.
F.T. Can you remember specifically some of the films that appealed to you at the time?
A.H. Though I went to the theater very often, I preferred the movies and was more attracted to American films than to the British. I saw the pictures of Chaplin, Griffith, all the Paramount Famous Players pictures, Buster Keaton, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, as well as the German films of Decla-Bioscop, the company that preceded UFA. Murnau worked for them.
F.T. Can you single out a picture that made a special impression?
A.H. One of Decla-Bioscop's most famous pictures was Der müde Tod.
F.T. Wasn't that directed by Fritz Lang? The British title, I believe, was Destiny.
A.H. I guess so. The leading man, I recall, was Bernhard Goetzke.
F.T. Did you like Murnau's films?
A.H. Yes, but they came later. In '23 or '24.
F.T. What films were being shown in 1920?
A.H. Well, I remember a Monsieur Prince. In England it was called Whiffles.
F.T. You've often been quoted as having said: "Like all directors, I was influenced by Griffith."
A.H. I especially remember Intolerance and The Birth of a Nation.
F.T. How did you happen to go from Henley's to a film company?
A.H. I read in a trade paper that an American company, Paramount's Famous Players-Lasky, was opening a branch in Islington, London. They were going to build studios there, and they announced a production schedule. Among others, a picture taken from such and such a book. I don't remember the title. While still working at Henley's, I read that book through and then made several drawings that might eventually serve to illustrate the titles.
F.T. By "titles" you mean the captions that covered the dialogue in silent pictures?
A.H. That's right. At the time, those titles were illustrated. On each card you had the narrative title, the dialogue, and a small drawing. The most famous of these narrative titles was "Came the dawn." You also had "The next morning..." For instance, if the line read: "George was leading a very fast life by this time," I would draw a candle, with a flame at each end, just below the sentence. Very naïve.
F.T. So you took this initiative and then submitted your work to Famous Players?
A.H. Exactly. I showed them my drawings and they put me on at once. Later on I became head of the title department. I went to work for the editorial department of the studio. The head of the department had two American writers under him, and when a picture was finished, the head of the editorial department would write the titles or would rewrite those of the original script. Because in those days it was possible to completely alter the meaning of a script through the use of narrative titles and spoken titles.
F.T. How so?
A.H. Well, since the actor pretended to speak and the dialogue appeared on the screen right afterward, they could put whatever words they liked in his mouth. Many a bad picture was saved in this way. For instance, if a drama had been poorly filmed and was ridiculous, they would insert comedy titles all the way through and the picture was a great hit. Because, you see, it became a satire. One could really do anything -- take the end of a picture and put it at the beginning -- anything at all!
F.T. And this gave you a chance to see the inside of film-making?
A.H. Yes. At this time I met several American writers and I learned how to write scripts. And sometimes when an extra scene was needed -- but not an acting scene -- they would let me shoot it. However, the pictures made by Famous Players in England were unsuccessful in America. So the studio became a rental studio for British producers.
Table of Contents
Preface to the Revised EditionIntroduction
1: Childhood
Behind prison bars
"Came the dawn"
Michael Balcon
Woman to Woman
Number Thirteen
Introducing the future Mrs. Hitchcock
A melodramatic shooting: The Pleasure Garden
The Mountain Eagle
2: The first true Hitchcock: The Lodger
Creating a purely visual form
The glass floor
Handcuffs and sex
Why Hitchcock appears in his films
Downhill
Easy Virtue
The Ring and One-Round Jack
The Farmer's Wife
The Griffith influence
Champagne
The last silent movie: The Manxman.
3: Hitchcock's first sound film: Blackmail
The Shuftan process
Juno and the Paycock
Why Hitchcock will never film Crime and Punishment
What is suspense?
Murder
The Skin Game
Rich and Strange
Two innocents in Paris
Number Seventeen
Cats, cats everywhere
Waltzes from Vienna
The lowest ebb and the comeback.
4. The Man Who Knew Too Much
When Churchill was chief of police
M
From "The One Note Man" to the deadly cymbals
Clarification and simplification
The Thirty-nine Steps
John Buchan's influence
Understatement
An old, bawdy story
Mr. Memory
Slice of life and slice of cake
5. The Secret Agent
You don't always need a happy ending
What do they have in Switzerland?
Sabotage
The child and the bomb
An example of suspense
The Lady Vanishes
The plausibles
A wire from David O. Selznick
The last British film: Jamaica Inn
Some conclusions about the British period.
6: Rebecca: ACinderella-like story
"I've never received an Oscar"
Foreign Correspondent
Gary Cooper's mistake
In Holland, windmills and rain
The bloodstained tulip
What's a MacGuffin?
Flashback to The Thirty-nine Steps
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
"All actors are cattle"
Suspicion
The luminous glass of milk
7: Sabotage versus Saboteur
A mass of ideas clutters up a picture
Shadow of a Doubt
Tribute to Thornton Wilder
"The Merry Widow"
An idealistic killer
Lifeboat
A microcosm of war
Like a pack of dogs
Return to London
Modest war contribution: Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache.
8: Return to America
Spellbound
Collaboration with Salvador Dali
Notorious
"The Song of the Flame"
The uranium MacGuffin
Under surveillance by the FBI
A film about the cinema
The Paradine Case
Can Gregory Peck play a British lawyer?
An intricate shot
Horny hands, like the devil!
9: Rope: From 7:30 to 9:15 in one shot
Clouds of spun glass
Colors and shadows
Walls that fade away
Films must be cut
How to make noises rise from the street
Under Capricorn
Infantilism and other errors in judgment
Run for cover!
"Ingrid, it's only a movie!"
Stage Fright
The flashback that lied
The better the villain, the better the picture
10: Spectacular comeback via Strangers on a Train
A monopoly on the suspense genre
The little man who crawled
A bitchy wife
I Confess
A "barbaric sophisticate"
The sanctity of confession
Experience alone is not enough
Fear of the police
Story of a ménage á trois
11: Dial M for Murder
Filming in 3-D
The theater confines the action
Rear Window
The Kuleshov experiment
We are all voyeurs
Death of a small dog
The size of the image has a dramatic purpose
The surprise kiss versus the suspense kiss
The Patrick Mahon case and the Dr. Crippen case
To Catch a Thief
Sex on the screen
The Trouble with Harry
The humor of understatement
The Man Who Knew Too Much
A knife in the back
The clash of cymbals
12: The Wrong Man
Absolute authenticity
Vertigo
The usual alternatives: suspense or surprise
Necrophilia
Kim Novak on the set
Two projects that were never filmed
A political suspense movie
North by Northwest
The importance of photographic documentation
Dealing with time and space
The practice of the absurd
The body that came from nowhere
13: Ideas in the middle of the night
The longest kiss in screen history
A case of pure exhibitionism
Never waste space
Screen imagery is make-believe
Psycho
Janet Leigh's brassière.
Red herrings
Directing the audience
How Arbogast was killed
A shower stabbing
Stuffed birds
How to get mass emotions
Psycho: A film-maker's film
14: The Birds
The elderly ornithologist
The gouged-out eyes
The girl in a gilded cage
Improvisations
The size of the image
The scene that was dropped
An emotional truck
Electronic sounds
Practical jokes
15: Marnie
A fetishist love
The Three Hostages, Mary Rose, and R.R.R.R.
Torn Curtain
The bus is the villain
The scene in the factory
Every film is a brand-new experience
The rising curve
The situation film versus the character film
"I only read the London Times"
A strictly visual mind
Hitchcock a Catholic film-maker?
A dream for the future: A film showing twenty-four hours in the life of a city
16: Hitchcock's final years
Grace Kelly abandons the cinema
More on The Birds, Marnie, and Torn Curtain
Hitch misses the stars
The "great flawed films"
A project that was dropped
Topaz made to order for the front office
Return to London with Frenzy
The pacemaker and Family Plot
Hitchcock laden down with tributes and honors
Love and espionage
The Short Night
Hitchcock is ill, Sir Alfred is dead
The end
The Films of Alfred Hitchcock
Selected Bibliography
Index of Film Titles
Index of Names