Hitchcock/Truffaut Quotes

Alfred Hitchcock: Actors are cattle.

Narrator: In 1966, François Truffaut published one of the few indispensable books on movies. A series of conversations with Alfred Hitchcock about his career, title by title.

James Gray: It was a window into the world of cinema that I hadn't had before; because it was a Director simultaneously talking about his own work, but, doing so in a way that was utterly unpretentious and had no pomposity.

Paul Schrader: There was starting to be these kind of erudite conversations about the art form. But, you know Trauffaut was the first one where you really felt that, you know, they were talking about the craft of it.

Peter Bogdanovich: It conclusively changed people's opinion about Hitchcock. And so, Hitchcock began to be taken more seriously.

Martin Scorsese: At that time, the general consensus and climate was a bullying, as usual, by the establishment - as to what serious cinema is. So, it was really revolutionary. Based on what the Trauffaut/Hitchcock reports, we became radicalized as moviemakers. It was almost as if somebody had taken a weight off our shoulders and said, "Yes. We can embrace this. We can go."

François Truffaut: When I went to New York to present my films, film critics often asked me who my favorite directors were. And when I said Hitchcock, they were astonished.

Narrator: For Truffaut, the book on Hitchcock was every bit as important as one of his own films and required just as much time and preparation.

François Truffaut: I went to Hollywood with an interpreter, my collaborator, Helen Scott. We stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel and every day we went to Universal Studios and sat down with lavalier microphones around our necks and we talked all day about cinema, even during lunchtime.

Narrator: Hitchcock and Truffaut, they were from different generations and different cultures and they had different approaches to their work. But, both men lived for and through the cinema.

Alfred Hitchcock: My mind is strictly visual.

Alfred Hitchcock: There's no such thing as a face. It's nonexistent until the light hits it. There was no such thing as a line. Its just light and shade. Its the function of a pure cinema, as we well know, is the pasting of two or three pieces of film together to create a single idea.

Alfred Hitchcock: "The Lodger" was the first time I'd exercised any style.

Martin Scorsese: It was a spell that was cast with those films in the 50s and 60s. And its a special, blessed time for me, because I saw them as they came out.

Narrator: Being an individual artist meant self-exposure. Pouring all of yourself into your movie, all of your fears and obsessions and fetishes, just like Hitchcock did.

Narrator: Hitchcock had freed Truffaut as an artist and Truffaut wanted to reciprocate by freeing Hitchcock from his reputation as a light entertainer. And that's the basis on which they started their conversation.

Alfred Hitchcock: I have a favorite little saying to myself, "Logic is dull".

Olivier Assayas: If there is one thing he learned from Hitchcock, it's concision, speed. But the difference is that Hitchcock has an absolutely mathematical sense of construction. Hitchcock is a theoretician of space.

Peter Bogdanovich: He said, when I'm on the set, I'm not on the set, I'm watching it on the screen. That's the key to Hitchcock, in a way, he sees the picture in his head.

Alfred Hitchcock: [Talking about "Notorious"] I was giving the public the great privilege of embracing Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman together. It was a kind of a temporary menage-a-trois. And the actors hated doing it. They felt dreadfully uncomfortable in the manner in which they had to cling to each other. But, I said, "I don't care how you feel. I already know what its going to look like on the screen."

François Truffaut: I really feel the sense of guilt in your work. Everyone always has something to feel guilty about.

Alfred Hitchcock: Silent pictures are the pure motion picture form. There's no need to abandon the technique of the pure motion picture, the way it was abandoned when sound came in.

Alfred Hitchcock: [Discussing "Vertigo"] The sex, psychological side, is that you have a man creating a sex image that he can't go to bed with her until he's got her back - to the thing he wants to go to bed with.

Martin Scorsese: [Discussing "Vertigo"] It became a lost film, so to speak. All the filmmakers in the 70s were trying to find copies of it. Some people had 16s. So, it became a picture we were looking for.

Martin Scorsese: [Discussing "Vertigo"] I can't really say that I believe the plot and I don't take any of it, the story, seriously. I mean as a *realistic* story. So, the plot is just a line that you can hang things on - and the things that he hangs onto it are all aspects of, you know, cinema poetry.

Martin Scorsese: [Discussing "Vertigo"] That's a film that I can't really tell where things start and end. I don't care. Or, when he's following her in the streets in a car, what is he looking for? What's he looking for?

Martin Scorsese: [Discussing "Vertigo"] The city itself is a character - the architecture itself. The mystery of old San Francisco. That painting.

Martin Scorsese: [Discussing "Vertigo"] This whole business of remaking her, yes, we get it. Everyone is talking about the fetishism of it. Fine. It's good. But, it's this extraordinary sense of loss that he's trying to fill that void. Maybe, maybe he reaches out to everyone? That, because of that. You know, we bring our own sense of melancholy and loss to it.

Alfred Hitchcock: There is sometimes a tendency among filmmakers to forget the audience. I personally am interested in the audience. I mean that one's film should be designed for 2,000 seats and not 1 seat. This to me is the power of the cinema. It is the greatest known mass medium there is in the world.

Alfred Hitchcock: It doesn't matter where the film goes. If you've designed it correctly, the Japanese audience should scream at the same time as the Indian audience.

Alfred Hitchcock: [Discussing "Psycho"] It was a very interesting construction. I tried, for a long time, to *play* the audience. Let's say we where playing them like an organ.

Martin Scorsese: [Discussing "Psycho"] The scene with John Gavin and Janet Leigh in the beginning, the element there is the bra. Okay. But, it shocked - very simply, but, ominously.

Martin Scorsese: [Discussing "Psycho"] The scenes in the office are, kind of, all right, you know - that Texan. For his style, the blandness of the scenes and the blandness of the framing, is just really a kind of a bridge to get you to the next major moment. I think his instinct is right, in telling stories like that. How benign can we make these images? Is that just connect the dots?

Alfred Hitchcock: [Discussing "Psycho"] It was necessary to make the robbery and what happened to the girl, purposely on the long side, to get an audience absorbed with her plight. Where I slowed up was when I came to the scenes that indicated time and trouble.

Martin Scorsese: [Discussing "Psycho"] The best scenes for me are, one's he must have spent time on, the driving shots. You had to spend time on those, particularly the points of view, somehow. And the framing of Janet Leigh in the center of the frame with the top of the steering wheel in the bottom of the frame. Because, you can make a choice. You can go above the steering wheel, you know, or you can go further out. But, then, maybe you won't see her eyes as well. That's like the perfect size. The scene with the policeman, of course, the framing of him staring into the car, yes, we know, with the glasses, he's scary. But, there is something about the restraint of those frames. You see, the more you restrain, the better it is when the explosion happens. And on the way to the explosion there are these meditative states. Driving. And there's a sense of movement ahead, movement ahead.

Martin Scorsese: [Discussing "Psycho"] She steals money. Then, she decides to drive away. Then, she becomes guilty about it. Then, she meets this guy in a motel and he's telling her all his problems. You're watching, wanting to know what happens. Is she going to bring that money back? Now, what is Anthony Perkins really going to do? You know, he has his mother there, maybe there's going to be this whole thing going on with his mother and him and her. I mean, you're really, you're taken down a path. But, what's great about it is that - that your expectations are taken and turned upside down.

Peter Bogdanovich: [Discussing "Psycho"] The very first screening of that film, none of us had a clue what was gonna happen. And when that - murder - that shower scene came, I've never seen an audience react like that. You could hear a sustained shriek from the audience downstairs. It wasn't like "ah-ah-ah". I was like "aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh". Like they wanted to close it out. But, they couldn't stop watching it. You wanted to close your eyes but you couldn't. Hitch was right, you didn't have to build suspense anymore, they were, they were - blithering idiots. The audience was, "wha-what happened"? They couldn't believe what happened. They kept thinking it couldn't have happened. She's gonna be alive. It was every impulse that you have going to the movies, it was the first time that going to the movies was dangerous.

Alfred Hitchcock: [Discussing "Psycho"] Seven days, seventy set-ups. I used a nude girl, a lot. I shot some of it in slow motion. Because of covering the breasts, you couldn't do it quick. You couldn't measure it correctly.

Martin Scorsese: [Discussing "Psycho"] At that time, as it is now, we expect certain things. And it took storytelling at that time and said, "No, I'm not going to give you that. I'm going to give you something else. Because you think everything is so cool. You're at the end of the 50s, the 60s are going to look glorious to us." I think it was really important for who we were then. You have Vietnam. You have border revolution. You have everything that happened in the 60s. and the society has never been the same. That picture really touched upon that, I think, "Psycho". Of course, you want everything so neat and wrapped up. Well, life isn't like that.

Alfred Hitchcock: [Discussing "Psycho"] My main satisfaction is that film did something to an audience. I really mean that. In many ways, I feel my satisfaction in our art achieved something, often, mass emotion. It wasn't a message. It wasn't some more great performance. It wasn't a highly, appreciated novel that served the audience. It was pure film. People will say what a terrible thing to make and the subject was horrible. The people were small. There were no characters in it. I know all this. But, I know one thing: the use of filming construction of this story caused audiences all over the world to react and become emotional.

Alfred Hitchcock: We better not have cigars, you're right. It might make us look like movie directors and God forbid we ever look like that.

Narrator: After the first edition of the book was published in 1966, Truffaut made a movie a year, sometimes two. Hitchcock made only three more films. Right to the end he was haunted by the question he had raised with Truffaut. Should I have experimented more with character and narrative? Did I become a prisoner of my own form? The same old questions still swirled around him. Was he an artist or an entertainer?

Narrator: The last completed project of Truffaut's life, published a few months before he died, was an updated edition of his book, in which he gave us Alfred Hitchcock. Not the television star. Not the master of suspense. But, Alfred Hitchcock, the artist - who wrote with the camera.

Alfred Hitchcock: I suppose the films with atmosphere, suspense and incident are really my creations as a writer.