Hitchcock and Truffaut offer film 101

By Jay Stone

In 1962, a young director named Francois Truffaut asked one of his idols, the filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, if he would agree to a long interview about his work. Before he made movies, Truffaut was one of film critics of the French nouvelle vague who rediscovered several American moviemakers — not just Hitchcock, but men like Howard Hawks — and lifted them into a new pantheon of cinema. The French theorists declared that these men were “auteurs:” the authors of their movies, and true artists.

Hitchcock agreed to the interview, which took place over a week in Los Angeles. The result was a book entitled Hitchcock/Truffaut, a close examination of all of Hitchcock’s movies to date. It included scene-by-scene analysis of famous scenes (the shower scene in Psycho got special attention) as well as long question-and-answer sessions about Hitchcock’s theories of filmmaking.

The book is a classic, and it became a kind of bible for both film buffs and for a new generation of directors. Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Wes Anderson — whose copy of the book was so well-thumbed that fell apart, turning into “a collection of papers” — who were learning from a master whose reputation had been rescued by the New Wave theorists.

Hitchcock/Truffaut itself has now been given new life in a documentary about both the interview and its resonance. Directed by Kent Jones, a film critic who has also made documentaries about directors Elia Kazan and Val Lewton, it is both entertaining and educational, a kind of illustrated Film 101 class filled with Hitchcock’s mordant humour — his explanation of how Jimmy Stewart’s character had to achieve an erection in a key scene in Vertigo is a classic — and deliciously pungent details of his moviemaking. His famous observation, “Actors are all cattle,” is repeated in the film, but now, when Hitchcock explains the trouble he had persuading Montgomery Clift to raise his eyes in a key scene from I Confess — Clift thought it was a gesture his character wouldn’t make — we see the scene. Needless to say, Clift is raising his eyes: Hitchcock wasn’t a man to be resisted.

The documentary is more than that, however. As well as playing the audio tapes of the interview and showing still photographs of the sessions, Jones talks to a score of filmmakers — not just Scorsese, Fincher and Anderson, but such men as Paul Schrader and Richard Linklater — about how they were influenced by both the book and by Hitchcock’s films. It’s a surprising roster: you’d be hard pressed to find Hitchcock’s influences in, say, a Linklater movie, but grand visions (creating suspense, for instance) become true for everyone. Psycho, says Linklater, “represented something much larger on the horizon.”

The movie, narrated by Bob Babalan, is sharply focused. We don’t see examples of Hitchcock’s influences on the other directors; we hear very little about the great man’s shortcomings, like hiss love of cool blondes and his way of tormenting some of them, notably The Birds’ Tippi Hedren. Indeed, the female voices are entirely missing from Hitchcock/Truffaut.

Like the book before it, Hitchcock/Truffaut is more an examination of filmmaking, and of the quirks and the genius of the man at its centre. “I play the audience like an organ,” Hitchcock tells Truffaut. The movie shows us the stops.

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