‘Hitchcock/Truffaut’ revisits the genius of the Master of Suspense
In 1962, a young French director named François Truffaut wrote Alfred Hitchcock a letter, asking to sit down with him for a week-long series of interviews in Hollywood.
At the time, Hitchcock was still regarded as a light entertainer, a perception Truffaut hoped to dispel by diving headlong into the British auteur’s illustrious body of work. Meeting in Hitchcock’s offices at Universal Studios, their conversations formed the basis not only of a lifelong friendship but of Truffaut’s 1967 book, Hitchcock.
Audiotapes from their encounters are woven into a new documentary, Hitchcock/Truffaut (opens Wednesday in New York and Friday in Los Angeles; expands to 19 additional cities throughout December), which explores the making of Hitchcock’s greatest successes ( Psycho, The Birds) and financial flops ( Vertigo, The Wrong Man). Di
rected by Kent Jones ( A Letter to Elia), the movie includes appearances by Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater as they mull the Hollywood legend’s style and influence.
“The film starts with Hitchcock’s question: ‘What is it about my films that makes them so unusual?’ ” Jones says. “Emotionally speaking, it’s Hitchcock asking, ‘Did I really make a difference?’ And Truffaut is saying, ‘Yes, you really made a difference. You accomplished a lot and were a foundation for me and my fellow filmmakers.’ ”
Unlike Fincher, who gushes about reading Hitchcock/Truffaut hundreds of times when he was young, Linklater didn’t buy the seminal book until his early 20s. A five-time Oscar nominee for the Before films and last year’s Boyhood, Linklater says he wasn’t a cinephile growing up in Houston but remembers watching slow-burning classics Psycho and The Birds on TV.
“As a kid, you’re just like, ‘Come on, get right to the good stuff!’ The pace of them was so unique,” Linklater says. “(Hitch- cock would) build up and boom! He delivers the goods in such a big, big way. It makes the wait worth it.”
Linklater admittedly is a bigger fan of Truffaut, who helped define the French New Wave movement in the early 1960s with The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player and Jules et Jim. While he considers Truffaut’s attempts at mimicking Hitchcock’s style ( The Bride Wore Black, Confidentially Yours) to be weaker efforts, Linklater credits the Frenchman for shifting the public’s perception of Hitchcock and giving him renewed admiration among his peers.
Truffaut “was a guy who was at the top of his game, and his love for cinema was so great that he probably lost a film or two of his own just working on this book,” Linklater says. “It was that important to him and that important to film history. We all have to tip our hats to him for grabbing that moment and doing what he did.”
Among the most defining characteristics of Hitchcock’s films are the ways in which he frames scenes and lights actors, treating each shot as its own layered composition.
“His visual structure is so precise that you’re led very carefully at all times. Your eye is directed to the point at a very refined level,” Jones says. More than any other filmmaker of his time, Hitchcock “understood visual terms, saying, ‘How is it all going to fit together? How is this going to look? What is going to happen on the screen?’ ”
Although Hitchcock also had a reputation for being a callous taskmaster on set — famously quoted as saying that “actors are cattle” — Jones believes he was merely “creating (an) illusion. There’s no way that you can get the kind of work with Montgomery Clift, James Stewart, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman or Grace Kelly for any of the movies they did and just say, ‘OK, get your jobs done, I got to get home.’ It’s just not possible.”
Hitchcock died in 1980 at age 80, but his pervasiveness has been seen and felt in decades since through the movies of David Lynch, Brian De Palma and Fincher, whom Linklater calls “the Hitchcock of our generation.”
“His influence is almost so big it becomes cinematic language,” Linklater says. “And yet, when people say, ‘ I’m going to kind of do a Hitchcock film,’ you can’t quite pull it off. That’s proof that he’s his own artist, with bits and pieces that we can all borrow.
“He was just so beautifully himself and such an innovator. That’s why he’s on the Mount Rushmore of cinema.”