HITCHCOCK: Why do these Hitchcock films stand up well?
They don't look old fashioned.
Well, I don't know the answer.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
HITCHCOCK: That's true, yes.
FINCHER: My dad was a big movie buff,
and it was one of the books that was in his library.
From the time I was about seven years old,
he knew I wanted to make movies,
so he recommended it to me.
And I remember picking over it,
and I must've read it... Sections of it.
Like, there's the Oskar Homolka sequence from Sabotage.
Where it sort of lays out all of the cutting pattern.
It's not even a book anymore,
it's like a stack of papers because it was a...
You know, I had a paperback and it's just...
You know, it's got a rubber band around it.
NARRATOR: In 1966, Frangois Truffaut
published one of the few indispensable books on movies.
A series of conversations with Alfred Hitchcock about his career,
title by title.
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 Truffaut was the first one where you really
felt that, you know, they're talking about the craft of it.
That was incredibly fascinating to me
that these two people from very different worlds
who were both doing the same job,
how they would talk about things.
(ASSAYAS SPEAKING FRENCH)
I think it conclusively changed
people's opinions about Hitchcock
and so Hitchcock began to be taken much more seriously.
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 Truffaut-Hitchcock book was,
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 could go."
NARRATOR: In 1962, Hitchcock was 63 years old,
(ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS THEME PLAYING)
a household name in television, and a virtual franchise unto himself.
He had already been known for many years as the "master of suspense,"
and he had scared the wits out of audiences all over the world with Psycho,
and in the process, upended our idea of what a movie was.
And in this house, the most dire, horrible event took place.
Let's go inside.
NARRATOR: He had just completed his 40th feature, The Birds.
(INAUDIBLE)
Truffaut, half Hitchcock's age, had made only three features,
but he was already an internationally renowned and acclaimed filmmaker.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
Truffaut wrote Hitchcock a letter.
He proposed a series of in-depth discussions
of Hitchcock's entire body of work in movies.
For Truffaut, the book on Hitchcock
was every bit as important as one of his own films,
and it required just as much time and preparation.
(m FRENCH)
The meeting was documented by the great photographer Philippe Halsman.
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.
HITCHCOCK: My mind is strictly visual.
Hitchcock was born with the movies.
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,
it's just light and shade.
The function of pure cinema, as we well know,
is the placing of two or three pieces of film together
to create a single idea.
(WOMAN TRANSLATING INTO FRENCH)
NARRATOR: Hitchcock was trained as an engineer,
then moved into advertising.
HITCHCOCK: Through that, I went into the designing
of what were,
in those days of silent films, the art title.
And then art direction, script writing, and production duties.
HITCHCOCK: They said, "How would you like to direct a picture?"
And I said, "I've never thought about it."
I was 23.
My wife was to be my assistant.
We're not married yet, (WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
but we're not living in sin either.
(BOTH LAUGH)
NARRATOR: Hitchcock had many close collaborators,
but none of them was closer than Alma Reville.
She was credited on some films, uncredited on many others,
but Hitchcock consulted his wife on every movie he ever made.
HITCHCOCK: The Lodger was the first time I'd exercised any style.
FINCHER: He is making floors out of glass
so that he can show people walking in circles in the apartment above.
He's playing with all those things
that make cinema fun
and magic, the tricks of it.
He was also conceptual
with the way he approached many of these films.
This movie, I have an idea for a way that I've never worked before.
This is somebody whose mind is racing, filled with ideas
and that's why, you know, we refer to him all the time.
Do you realize the squad van will be here any moment?
No, really! Oh, my God, I'm terribly frightened.
Why? Have you been a bad woman or something?
Well, not just bad, but...
But you've slept with men?
Oh, no!
WOMAN; Knife.
He directed the first British talkie.
And if you use a penknife! Or a pocketknife!
MAN: Alice, cut us a bit of bread, will you?
WOMAN: I mean, in Chelsea you mustn't use a knife!
And then, in 1934,
he made the first 100% Hitchcock picture.
HITCHCOCK: St. Moritz was the beginning
of The Man Who Knew Too Much.
It was the place of our honeymoon.
NARRATOR: And of course, Hollywood beckoned.
HITCHCOCK: I wasn't attracted to Hollywood as a place.
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
HITCHCOCK: That had no interest,
what had interest for me was getting inside that studio.
(SPEAKING JAPAN ESE)
Hitchcock did some of his best work in the '40s.
But in the '50s, he soared.
I have a murder on my conscience, but it's not my murder.
NARRATOR: And curiosity of James Stewart,
in this story of a romance shadowed by the terror of a horrifying secret.
Look, John, hold them.
Diamonds.
SCORSESE: There was a spell that was cast with those films
in the '50s and the '60s.
And it's a special blessed time for me
because I saw them as they came out.
NARRATOR: Truffaut began as a critic in the early '50s.
(INAUDIBLE)
He started at the great French film magazine, Gamers du Unema.
For the writers at Cahiers, soon to become the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague,
Hitchcock's greatness as an artist was self-evident.
(JEAN-LUC GODARD SPEAKING FRENCH)
Before they made their own movies,
the Cahiers critics erected a new pantheon of cinema-
The directors who were the true artists,
the authors who wrote with the camera, the auteurs.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
(ASSAYAS SPEAKING FRENCH)
(SPEAKS FRENCH)
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.
(MAN WHISTLING)
MAN: All together! Pull!
(SPEAKING FRENCH)
Hitchcock often told the story of being sent to the police station as a boy,
where he was locked up for a few minutes as a symbolic punishment.
He said that it led to a lifelong fear of the police.
But Truffaut really was locked up.
He was delivered to the police by his own father,
(SPEAKING ANGRILY IN FRENCH)
and then sent to a juvenile detention center,
an episode he put into his autobiographical first feature.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
Truffaut had a fierce attachment to freedom.
It's there in all of his films.
And it sent him in search of another father, a father who would liberate him.
(INAUDIBLE)
He found the great film critic Andre' Bazin,
who virtually adopted Truffaut and brought him to Gamers du Unema.
He found Jean Renoir,
and Roberto Rossellini.
And he found Alfred Hitchcock.
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.
(CASSETTE RECORDING)
HITCHCOCK: Well, let me check with him and see if he's running yet.
(CLEARS T HRO AT)
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
HITCHCOCK: You started?
You're up?
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
HITCHCOCK: All right, you're running now, huh? Okay, fine.
We are now on the air. (LAUGHS)
(WOMAN CONTINUES SPEAKING)
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
WOMAN". Your type of picture?
(TRUFFAUT CONTINUES SPEAKING)
WOMAN: People get enjoyment but pretend not to be fooled.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING)
WOMAN: They sulk, they begrudge...
They give their pleasure grudgingly.
HYYCHCOCK'. Yes. Well...
WOMAN: When I say pleasure, I don't mean amusement. I mean their enjoyment.
HYYCHCOCK: They are obviously...
They're going to sit there and say, "Show me!"
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
HITCHCOCK: They expect to anticipate- "I know what's coming next- "
I have to say, "Do you?"
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
HYYCHCOCK: Yes, but you see, to me,
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
plausibility for the sake of plausibility
does not help, you know.
(HORN HONKING) (TIRES SCREECHING)
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
(BIRDS SCREECHING) (GIRL SHRIEKING)
HYYCHCOCK: I have a favorite little saying to myself, "Logic is dull."
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
(TRUFFAUT CONTINUES SPEAKING)
WOMAN: Is it possible now for us to define suspense?
That is to say, are there many forms of suspense?
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING)
WOMAN: People believe, uh, somewhat naively...
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING)
...that suspense is when one is afraid. Which is wrong.
HITCHCOCK: No, no. In the film Easy Virtue...
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
HYYCHCOCK: ...a young man was proposing to this woman.
(WOMAN CONTINUES SPEAKING)
She wouldn't give an answer,
she said, "I'll call you up when I get back around 12:00."
And all I showed was the operator on this telephone switchboard.
(WOMAN CONTINUES SPEAKING)
That girl is in suspense!
And she was relieved at the end,
so that the suspense was over.
The woman said, "Yes."
The suspense doesn't always have fear in it.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
FINCHER: He talks about things,
contextualizing what the work of a director truly is
at its most fundamental and most simple.
HYYCHCOCK: Emotionally, the size of the image...
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH) is very important.
You're dealing with space.
(WOMAN CONTINUES SPEAKING)
You may need space and use it dramatically.
(WHIRRING)
When the girl shrank back on the sofa,
I kept the camera back and used the space
to indicate the nothingness from which she was shrinking.
FINCHER: If you have some kind of understanding
of color and design and light...
Directing is really three things.
You're editing behavior over time,
and then controlling moments that should be really fast
and making them slow,
and moments that should be really slow and making them fast.
NARRATOR: It is indeed a solemn occasion.
I switch you over to our microphone...
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
HYYCHCOCK: Yes. That's what film is for.
To either contract time... (WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
...or extend it. Whatever you wish.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING)
UNKLATER: Hitchcock, in a way, was the master,
let's say sculptor of moments in time
to take you through a sequence
or to direct your perception in a way
where he could elongate time or telescope it.
HYYCHCOCK: Well, there are moments when you have to stop time.
(BOYS CONVERSING IN FRENCH)
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
HYYCHCOCK: Describe to me in detail what the action was.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING)
HYYCHCOCK: Cutting to the mother before the boy saw her?
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING)
WOMAN: She was not looking at the child yet.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING)
WOMAN: And then you show the mother who saw them walking away.
(SPEAKING FRENCH)
HYYCHCOCK: I'm asking from a story point of view, what was the intention?
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING)
(BOTH SPEAKING FRENCH)
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING)
HYYCHCOCK: I would have hoped that there was nothing spoken.
(SPEAKING FRENCH)
(ASSAYAS CONTINUES SPEAKING)
ANDERSON: The thing I think about the most with Hitchcock is
the visuals are so graphic and precise.
There is a lot to learn from that.
BOGDANOVKZH: 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.
I mean, he sees the picture in his head.
I imagine he just sat alone and these images came to him
and hejust never questioned it.
You don't feel like he's ever not confident in every shot.
That's one guy you don't really question.
It always works within his world, kind of perfectly.
(KU ROSAWA SPEAKING JAPAN ESE)
(KUROSAWA CONTINUES SPEAKING)
lthoughtyou didn't like to cook.
No, I don't like to cook.
(KUROSAWA CONTINUES SPEAKING)
I'd be delighted.
ANDERSON: Even if they go all the way across the room,
he is going to move with them in the kiss
and the actors are going to say,
"This is the most bizarre thing,
"we are walking while we are kissing."
But he knows how it fits in the frame
and he knows that the tension won't be broken
and, um, the spell won't be broken.
This is a very strange love affair. (DIALING PHONE)
Why?
Maybe the fact that you don't love me.
Hello?
HYYCHCOCK: I was giving the public the great privilege
of embracing Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman together.
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
HYYCHCOCK: It was a kind of temporary menage e trois.
And the actors hated doing it.
They felt dreadfully uncomfortable- - - (VVCDIVIAN CONTINUES SPEAKING)
...in the manner in which they had to cling to each other.
And I said, "Well, I don't care how you feel,
"I only know what it's gonna look like on the screen."
He obviously had contentious relationships, in some cases, with actors.
You know, he definitely solicited movie stars.
You know, there is no doubt in reading the book
that he is very cognizant of the value
of faces that people want to see.
And sometimes, the complications that come with that baggage.
LINKLATER: Montgomery Clift is transcendent in I Confess. He's great.
But I don't think Hitchcock cared
if they had a good time or not or how they felt about him.
Obviously, that wasn't (LAUGHS) a huge concern of his.
HITCHCOCK: Sometimes you need a look to convey something.
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
...or to look at something and react.
I had a conflict with Clift.
I said, "Monty, I want you to look up at the hotel."
(WOMAN CONTINUES SPEAKING)
Uh, so he said to me, "I don't know whether I would look up to the hotel."
I said, "Why not?"
He said, "I may be occupied by the people below."
I said, "I want you to look up to the hotel windows
"and please do so."
I was telling the audience across the street is the hotel.
So an actor is gonna try and interfere with me,
organizing my geography.
That's why all actors are cattle.
(WOMAN CONTINUES SPEAKING)
UNKLATER: With Hitchcock you get a sense of a kind of a self-contained psychology
that we were gonna explore his obsessions
and what he was interested in.
I think his collaboration there
didn't go much farther than that.
FINCHER: Acting, it's a great part of movie making
but it's not the only part of movie making.
And I think Hitchcock was one of the first people to say
there is a structure to this language.
He probably did more for the psychological underpinnings
of characterization
in motion pictures than anyone.
And on top of it, wouldn't allow any of his actors
to explore that kind of behavior on set.
It was the rigor of dramatizing it in narrative terms,
and then not allowing for it to, like, spill over the edge of the bucket.
SCORSESE". Coming out of World War H,
which is the worst recorded war in history.
Destruction of civilization,
no peace or comfort from religion.
The paranoia, the anxiety.
Who are we? What are we?
Post-World VVar ll, there was a rupture, a change.
Um, particularly in the nature of what a performance
or a persona onscreen would be.
And that is that the actor is the main instrument really.
And this is all expressed I think in Brando, James Dean, and Clift.
Alfred Hitchcock was able to get the soul of the actors on screen,
whether it's Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, Grace Kelly, Jimmy Stewart.
But it comes of another tradition.
FINCHER: (CHUCKLING) I'd love to see De Niro, Pacino, Dustin Hoffman.
To see that school of actor,
you know, try to flourish under the iron umbrella of
this is what this next three and a half seconds is about.
HYYCHCOCK: I would like to ask you.
Do you feel it's too much trouble
having to direct actors in their acting?
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
WOMAN: What I'd like is an intermediary formula.
(TRUFFAUT CONTINUES SPEAKING)
That is to say, to speak with an actor the evening after dinner,
and then create the dialogue in the night
with the words which he himself has been using
from his own vocabulary.
HYYCHCOCK: Yes. Will that mean you have to write overnight?
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
(TRUFFAUT CONTINUES SPEAKING)
WOMAN: Alive perhaps, but which are very dangerous for the curve...
HITCHCOCK: For the shape, the shape of the picture.
HITCHCOCK: I often am troubled as to whether! cling to the,
what I call the rising curve-shape of a story
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
...and whether I shouldn't experiment more
with a looser form of narrative.
Sometimes it's very hard- - - (VVCDIVIAN CONTINUES SPEAKING)
...because if you work for character direct,
they'll take you along where they want to go.
And I'm like the old lady with the boy scouts.
I don't want to do go that way.
(WOMAN CONTINUES SPEAKING)
And this has always been a conflict with me.
FINCHER: It seems to me he finds material
that he can kind of, you know,
it's an applied science.
He can sort of apply the Hitchcock thing to this story.
By now I have my series of linear plot devices
leading to a fall from a high place.
(SCREAMING)
HYYCHCOCK: Quite obviously, I'm, uh...
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
I suppose like any artist who paints or writes,
I'm limited to a certain field, you know.
(ASSAYAS SPEAKING FRENCH)
HYYCHCOCK: I went high because I didn't want to spend a lot of footage
on people getting out hoses... (WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
...and starting to put out a fire.
If you play it a long way away,
you aren't committed to any detail.
ltwasn'tjust, um, simply to show the whole town
and how the birds are coming in.
It took on another kind of apocalyptic, religious feel.
It was omniscient.
It's the cleansing of the Earth.
Whose point of view is it when you cut to above everything?
God's point of view? Are we all being judged from above?
You know, that kind of suggests that.
(INDISTINCT CHATTERING)
Where are those papers now, exactly?
SCORSESE: For me that angle is always something
that has a kind of religious element to it.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
HYYCHCOCK: Go off the record.
SCORSESE: You know, you have Martin Balsam going up the stairs, right?
And that's so deliberately slow,
you just know he's gonna get it,
but you don't expect that high angle.
There's something omniscient about it that's kind of frightening.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
HITCHCOCK: Yes.
(TRUFFAUT CONTINUES SPEAKING)
WOMAN: Everyone always has something to feel guilty about.
SCORSESE: They're asking, "Did you ever hear of topaz?"
Colonel Kusenov, does the word "topaz" mean anything to you?
SCORSESE: It cuts to the defector
and the camera's sort of up above him a little bit.
And you see his eye shift.
The eye is not covered. That means the angle had to just be right.
Now, you know he's lying, it's that poem.
You may leave the religion, but the Hound of Heaven is always there.
That infuses everything, the whole thought process
and the storytelling process.
MAN: And continually turn our hearts from wickedness,
and from worldly things unto thee...
(DESPLECHIN SPEAKING FRENCH)
Over the years, I keep revisiting it
by watching it, watching it over and over again.
This is the average man, decent man I should say.
Family, kids... Uh, suddenly picked up.
Your name Chris?
You're calling me?
SCORSESE: And everything...
Yes, it is.
(CHUCKLES) Everything points to him doing it.
And you know he didn't.
One, two, three, four...
MAN: You're sure?
Absolutely.
(SPEAKING FRENCH)
SCORSESE: Those extraordinary inserts
where Henry Fonda's just sitting on the bunk,
he looks at the cell around him.
And it cuts to different sections of the cell.
What makes you feel oppressed?
The lock on the door, but from what angle?
Is it really his point of view?
All these things are remarkable, I think.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
HITCHCOCK: Yes, that's right.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING)
(DESPLECHIN SPEAKING FRENCH)
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
HITCHCOCK: Not a lot, no.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING)
WOMAN: One senses in your work the importance of dreams.
HYYCHCOCK: Daydreams, probably.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING)
HYYCHCOCK: Well, that's probably me within myself.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING)
Look.
HYYCHCOCK: I think it occurs
because I am never satisfied with the ordinary.
I can't do well with the ordinary.
SCHRADER: Hitchcock keeps referring to these, sort of, fetish objects.
Keys and handcuffs and ropes and stuff,
which are kind of dream objects
which have a kind of Freudian weight to them.
(ASSAYAS SPEAKING FRENCH)
(DESPLECHIN SPEAKING FRENCH)
HITCHCOCK: Silent pictures are the pure motion picture form.
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
There was no need to abandon the technique
of the pure motion picture
the way it was abandoned when the sound came in.
The craft was of course developed in silent cinema first.
So the whole idea was,
"How do I tell the story without any dialogue?"
This is a brilliant way to train someone to think visually,
and part of the reason the films have
that incredible dream-like feeling.
(DESPLECHIN SPEAKING FRENCH)
UNKLATER". So many Hitchcock films would work silently.
You could watch a Hitchcock film without any dialogue or music
and I think you'd still get a really high percentage of it.
(DESPLECHIN SPEAKING FRENCH)
SCORSESE: They're meant to achieve a realism,
but it's more of a... How should I put this?
Spirit of realism. (CHUCKLING) It isn't objective.
(DESPLECHIN SPEAKING FRENCH)
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
HYYCHCOCK: Yes, but you are dealing with the point of view
of an emotional man.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING)
HYYCHCOCK: I was intrigued with the effort to create a woman...
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
...after another in the image of a dead woman.
FINCHER: If you think that you can hide what your interests are,
what your prurient interests are,
what your noble interests are,
what your fascinations are...
If you think you can hide that in your work
as a film director, you're nuts, you know.
And I think that he was one of the first guys who said,
"I'm gonna go with it." (CHUCKLES) "I'm just going to...
"I'm gonna be... I gotta be me."
And in the case of his best work,
there is a more direct umbilicus to his subconscious.
Certainly I think that is true of Vertigo.
HYYCHCOCK: The sex psychological side is that...
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
...you have a man creating a sex image,
but he can't go to bed with her
until he's got her back to the thing he wants to go to bed with.
It should be back from your face and pinned at the neck.
I told her that. I told you that.
We tried it.
HYYCHCOCK: Or metaphorically indulged
in a form of necrophilia.
That's what it really was.
Please, Judy.
HYYCHCOCK: The thing you see that I liked and felt most
when she came back from having her hair made blond
and it wasn't up.
This means she has stripped, but won't take her knickers off.
(TRUFFAUT CHUCKLES)
You see.
She says all right, and she goes into the bath and he is waiting.
He's waiting for the woman to undress,
and come out nude, ready for him- (VVCDIVIAN CONTINUES SPEAKING)
(DOOR OPENS)
HYYCHCOCK: And while he was looking at that door, he was getting an erection.
We will now tell a story. Shut the machine off.
What I love about Vertigo is just, it's so perverted.
It's just so perverted.
Here, Judy, drink this straight down. Just like medicine.
Why are you doing this? What good will it do?
I've always felt that the most interesting view of Vertigo
would be her story.
The color of your hair.
Judy, please, it can't matter to you!
FINCHER: And it's almost more honest than the guy's point of view.
If...
If I let you change me, will that do it?
FINCHER: I guess taking Scottie's point of view was...
Will you love me?
FINCHER: ...Hitchcock's point of view.
Yes. Fine.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
HYYCHCOCK: Yes, I enjoyed it, yes.
You know, I had Vera Miles tested and costumed.
We were ready to go with her.
She went pregnant,
and that was going to be the part
that I was going to bring her out.
She was under contract to me.
But I lost interest.
I couldn't get the rhythm going again with her. Silly girl.
SCHRADER: I don't think he would have been able
to take Vera Miles into that Judy place.
Into that real, kind of, a slutty place.
And so I think that he surmounted his restriction in that way.
I saw the film fairly early in my life
as a film person and I saw it through Marty.
SCORSESE: It became a lost film, so to speak.
I can tell you that 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.
SCHRADER: It was a kind of forbidden document,
a kind of sacred document that only certain insiders had privilege to.
Which is kind of hard to imagine
in today's world of indiscriminate access to virtually everything.
So, the number of people who had seen Vertigo weren't that many.
Hitchcock wasn't talking about it that much
because it wasn't very successful.
(HEAVY BREATHING)
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
HYYCHCOCK: The hole in the story.
The husband who pushed his wife off the tower.
How did he know that Stewart wasn't going to run up those stairs?
GRAY: In the case of Vertigo,
the machinations of the plot...
Well, they do work, they function,
and they function rather brilliantly,
but the subtext seems to be bubbling up
almost to the point where it's text.
SCORSESE: I can't really say that I believe the plot.
And I don't take any of the story seriously.
I mean, as a "realistic story."
So the plot is just a line that you could hang things on.
And the things that he hangs on there
are all aspects of, you know, cinema poetry.
And that's a film that I can't really tell
where things start and end. I don't care.
And when he's following her in the streets in the car,
what is he looking for?
What is he looking for?
GRAY: The frustration is on his face.
And you're like, "Where is this going?" And you realize,
"No, that's totally connected to who he is in the film."
SCORSESE: The city itself is a character...
The architecture itself.
The mystery of old San Francisco.
That painting...
We cannot see Kim Novak's face looking at that painting.
How important her gaze must be.
But no, it's not, because it's all a ruse.
The connection that Kim Novak has with that painting
is bullshit. Right?
The only gaze that matters
is Jimmy Stewart's gaze watching
the curl in the hair and how it's similar to the painting on the wall.
I'm sure he didn't shoot coverage from the front.
Someone like me, I would do that. We're not that good.
We don't understand the power of the image, the way that he did.
I don't want anything. I wanna get out of here.
Judy, do this for me!
SCORSESE: This whole business of remaking her. Yes, we get it.
Everyone's talking about the fetishism of it.
I don't like it.
Yeah, we'll take it.
Fine, it's good.
But it's this extraordinary sense of loss
that he's trying to fill that void.
Um, maybe it reaches out to everyone, because of that.
You know. We could bring our own
sense of melancholy or loss to it.
Judy.Judy, I'll tell you this.
These past few days have been the first happy days I've known in a year.
I know.
It's about desire, but we all understand that.
We all understand the idea of desire.
That's part of what makes us us.
GRAY: I think Kim Novak coming out of the bathroom
is the single greatest moment in the history of movies.
At that moment, everything that Hitchcock was about,
everything that cinema is about,
comes together in the most beautiful way, which is...
Yes, it's a fantasy, but the fantasy is real to him.
That kiss is so extraordinary.
That's the one moment where he gets some kind of fulfillment.
And then after that, it's time to go.
There was where you made your mistake, Judy.
You shouldn't keep souvenirs of a killing.
You shouldn't have been...
You shouldn't have been that sentimental.
SCORSESE: It's a world that he creates that reflects,
I think, what it is to be alive.
And what it is to live in fear.
A good fear. A natural fear.
But fear just the same.
Of just the human condition of who we are.
It's more than a story.
It really is like living a lifetime with him.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
HYYCHCOCK: It was a break-even.
(TRUFFAUT CONTINUES SPEAKING)
HYYCHCOCK: I suppose so, yes.
It's tricky. You know, people will learn
the wrong lessons from failures
just as they sometimes learn the wrong lessons from success.
And the thing that I find so depressing about Hollywood is
how often people really feel the first three months of
anyone's response to your film... That's it.
Carve that into marble. That was the response.
It's not true. It wasn't true for Vertigo.
HYYCHCOCK: There is sometimes a tendency among filmmakers...
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
...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 one seat.
This, to me, is the power of the cinema.
It is the greatest known mass medium there is in the world.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHING)
(ASSAYAS SPEAKING FRENCH)
(ASSAYAS CONTINUES SPEAKING)
(SHRIEKS) (MUMBUNG)
(DESPLECHIN SPEAKING FRENCH)
NARRATOR: Directors of Hitchcock's generation,
the ones who came up under the studio system,
were all mindful of their audience.
But in Hitchcock's case, it ran deeper than that.
His films are made in a dialogue with the public that's close, almost intimate.
HITCHCOCK: It doesn't matter where the film goes.
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
If you've designed it correctly,
the Japanese audience should scream
at the same time as the Indian audience.
SCORSESE: Could you still play an audience
the way Hitchcock can? They do.
But it's a different audience, and it's different playing.
See, the audience has been raised on films which are very loud,
uh, which have a climax every two seconds.
Now, we are so pummeled by stories
and visual hyperbole
that it's a very different world in trying to
move the needle in terms of
getting humans to accept your theses.
Hitchcock's coming out of a world
where everything was a proscenium,
and everything was structured,
and he was able to take that structure and bend it
and twist it and exaggerate it
to a greater or lesser effect.
By the time you get to Psycho,
people are watching television.
And Ed Gein is informing what's happening in the movies.
We're starting to borrow from the real world.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
HITCHCOCK: I believe so, yes, in Wisconsin somewhere.
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
HYYCHCOCK: Psycho, in order to get the audience effects...
(WOMAN CONTINUES SPEAKING) ...on the audience,
I would say that this is pretty well
as cinematic as a lot of pictures.
(TRUFFAUT MUMBLES IN AGREEMENT)
HITCHCOCK: It was a very interesting construction.
I tried for a long time to play the audience.
Let's say we were playing them like an organ.
Why don't you call your boss and tell him
you're taking the rest of the afternoon off?
SCORSESE: The scene with John Gavin and Janet Leigh
in the beginning...
The element there is the bra.
Okay-
But it's shot very simply, but ominously.
There's something ominous about it.
The scenes in the office are kind of all right, you know.
With that Texan...
I'm buying this house for my baby's wedding present.
$40,000 cash.
SCORSESE: For his style, the blandness of the scenes
and the blandness of the framing,
um,
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.
I never carry more than I can afford to lose.
How benign can we make these images that just connect the dots?
I don't even want it in the office over the weekend.
Put it in the safe deposit box in the bank and...
HYYCHCOCK: It cost only $800,000 dollars...
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
...and I used a complete television unit to do it.
He was flirting with you.
I guess he must have noticed my wedding ring.
HITCHCOCK: 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.
MAN: Come in.
HYYCHCOCK: Where I slowed up
was when I came to the scenes that indicated time and trouble.
Hitchcock really does love to surprise people
and to take you in unusual directions.
He sort of thrived on that and he was very proud of that.
That's what his cinema is kind of based on.
The beginning of Psycho... It's one of the great misdirections.
FINCHER: He is playing with your expectations of
where you're supposed to be in a movie,
where you're supposed to be in a Hitchcock movie,
where you're supposed to be in a Universal movie.
You can argue the value of Janet Leigh's performance.
You can say, "Well, that's a little flat,
"it's a little this, that's a little Kabuki."
Maybe all of those things are leading you to believe
as an audience member
there's a bigger cumulative effect.
She's servicing an expectation.
SCORSESE: The best scenes for me are the ones he must have spent time on,
the driving shots.
You had to have spent 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.
'Cause 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.
So that's like the perfect size.
In quite a hurry?
Yes, I didn't intend to sleep so long.
I almost had an accident last night.
SCORSESE: 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's something about the restraint of those frames.
See? And 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...
MAN: Caroline, get Mr. Cassidy for me.
After all, Cassidy, I told you, all that cash...
And there's a sense of movement ahead, movement ahead...
She steals money.
Then she decides to drive away.
Then she becomes guilty about it.
Gee, I'm sorry, I didn't hear you in all this rain.
Then she meets this guy in a motel,
and he's telling her all his problems.
A few years ago, Mother met this man.
And he talked her into building this motel.
SCORSESE: You're watching, you wanna know what happens.
Is she gonna bring that money back?
Now what is Anthony Perkins really gonna do?
You know, he has his mother there.
Maybe there's gonna be this whole thing
going on with the mother and him and her.
When he died too, it was just too great a shock for her.
SCORSESE: I mean, you're really... You're taken down a path,
but what's great about it is that
all your expectations are taken and turned upside down.
FINCHER: You know, there are certain rules,
and he pulled the pin and rolled a grenade
into the middle of that conference room
and destroyed all those rules.
GRAY: The camera is very much with Marion, right?
Even to the point where you have that
very famous shot of the showerhead.
All of a sudden, you go from Marion,
and the camera is then in this very strange place
where you see both her showering,
and the shadowy figure behind that kind of Visqueen curtain.
He did it with an eye towards having to shift
point of view 35 minutes into the film.
BOGDANOVRH: 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... Ahh! Ahh! Ahh! It was like... Ahh!
Like they wanted to close it out.
(SCREAMING)
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 like, "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.
HITCHCOCK: Seven days, 70 setups.
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
I used a nude girl a lot,
and 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.
(WOMAN CONTINUES SPEAKING)
That's when you feel like this guy really has his finger on the pulse of,
not only just audience response, but the world in general,
that the world was ready for a film like that.
It didn't know it was, but it was.
This was a small story.
But it represented probably something much larger on the horizon.
SCORSESE: At that time as it is now, we expect certain things.
And it took storytelling at that time and says,
"No, I'm not gonna give you that.
"I'm gonna give you something else."
Because you think everything is so cool.
You're at the end of the '50s, the '60s are gonna look glorious to us.
I think it was really important for who we were then.
You have Vietnam, you have world 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.
Even the stories I'm gonna tell you are not like that now.
HITCHCOCK: My main satisfaction is...
(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
...the film did something to an audience.
I really mean that.
And in many ways, I feel my satisfaction with our...
Our art achieves something
of a mass emotion.
It wasn't a message,
it wasn't some great performance,
it wasn't a highly appreciated novel that stirred an audience.
It was pure film.
People will say, "What a terrible thing to make."
(WOMAN CONTINUES SPEAKING) 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 film in constructing this story
caused audiences all over the world
to react and become emotional.
My only pride in the picture
is that the picture belongs to filmmakers.
It belongs to us, you and I.
(WOMAN CONTINUES SPEAKING)
HYYCHCOCK: Yes, how do you want to handle this?
HALSMAN: I am the cameraman, you are the director.
And you are directing a double portrait
of a Mr. Hitchcock and of a Mr. Truffaut.
Whatever you want, any idea that comes into...
HYYCHCOCK: Really, it's my directing Mr. Truffaut, isn't it?
HALSMAN: Yes, but you direct also yourself.
HYYCHCOCK: Ah, I got what you want. Okay.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
(TRUFFAUT LAUGHS) WOMAN: You look less worried than he is.
HITCHCOCK: Now, here we are. Look, here's the angle.
Now, I'm gonna be like this, you see.
Now, Mr. Truffaut should half turn around and look back to me.
(HITCHCOCK SPEAKS FRENCH) (TRUFFAUT CHUCKLES)
HYYCHCOCK: Like this. You see, then?
(ALL LAUGHING)
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
HYYCHCOCK: We better not have cigars, you are right.
Otherwise, it might make us look like movie directors.
And God forbid we ever look like that.
NARRATOR: The conversation that began in 1962 extended far beyond the book,
and bloomed into a real friendship.
Hitchcock and Truffaut spoke and wrote to each other constantly.
They read each other's scripts,
made story and casting suggestions, and screened each other's films.
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?
Could anyone really claim to be an artist,
working within the factory conditions of Hollywood?
(AUDIENCE CLAPPING)
In America, you call this man "Hitch."
In France, we call him "Monsieur Hitchcock."
(AUDIENCE CONTINUES CLAPPING)
"Two weeks after the American Film Institute tribute," wrote Truffaut,
"resigned to the fact that he would never shoot another film,
"Hitchcock closed his office, dismissed his staff, and went home."
Frangois Truffaut's energy and his love of cinema seemed inexhaustible.
The idea that he would be dead at the age of 52,
only four years after Hitchcock, was unthinkable.
It still is.
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.
HITCHCOCK: Isuppose... (WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)
...the films with atmosphere,
suspense and incident
are really my creations as a writer.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)
HITCHCOCK: Sure, yeah.
(TRUFFAUT CONTINUES SPEAKING)
HYYCHCOCK: Sure, that's right.
(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING)