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François Truffaut’s interviews with Alfred Hitchcock offer deep insights into his cinematic methods, the history of film, and his career from silent films to Hollywood classics.

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Iconic, groundbreaking interviews of Alfred Hitchcock by film critic François Truffaut—providing insight into the cinematic method, the history of film, and one of the greatest directors of all time.

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.

Biografie

François Truffaut (1932–1984) was an award-winning film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and film critic. Regarded as a founder of the French cinema’s New Wave, some of his works include The 400 Blows, Day For Night, and The Wild Child. 

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CONTENTS

Preface to the Revised Edition

Introduction

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: A Cinderella-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

Details