Hitchcock Truffaut Quotes

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.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Alfred Hitchcock: [First lines]Why do these Hitchcock films stand out well, they don't look old fashioned? Well, I don't know the answer.
Franþois Truffaut: I think its because they're so rigorous. They're not tied to a particular time either...
Alfred Hitchcock: That's true.
Franþois Truffaut: Because they are made only in relation to you, yourself.
Alfred Hitchcock: Yes.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
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.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
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.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Alfred Hitchcock: Actors are cattle.

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

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
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.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Franþois 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.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
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.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Franþois 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.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
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.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Alfred Hitchcock: My mind is strictly visual.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
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.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
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.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Franþois Truffaut: Your type of picture, people get enjoyment but pretend that they haven't been fooled and then, begrudgingly, their pleasure later on.
Alfred Hitchcock: Yes.
Franþois Truffaut: When I say pleasure I don't mean amusement...
Alfred Hitchcock: They're obviously, they're going to sit there and say show me and they expect to anticipate, I know what's coming next. I have to say, Do you?

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Franþois Truffaut: This is something one finds often in your work, the expansion of time.
Alfred Hitchcock: Yes, that's what film is for - to either contract time or extend it, whatever you wish.
Franþois Truffaut: Yes, that's very interesting.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
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.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
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.

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

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Franþois Truffaut: Do you dream often?
Alfred Hitchcock: Not a lot, no.
Franþois Truffaut: Are dreams important to your work?
Alfred Hitchcock: Daydreams, probably.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Franþois Truffaut: Your films seem to fall into the domain of dreams of danger and solitude.
Alfred Hitchcock: Well, that's probably me, within myself.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
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.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
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.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
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.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Franþois Truffaut: [Last lines]In most of your films, you've shown characters divided by a secret that they refuse to reveal to one another. The atmosphere becomes more and more oppressive until finally, they decide to open up and thus liberate themselves. Does that ring true to you?
Alfred Hitchcock: It's true. Yes.
Franþois Truffaut: In the end, you are mostly interested within the framework of the crime story, in filming moral dilemmas.
Alfred Hitchcock: Sure, that's true.
Franþois Truffaut: So, that's my conclusion.

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

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
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.

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
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.

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

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Alfred Hitchcock: [1929 filmed screen voice test for Blackmail]Do you realize a Squad Van will be here any moment?
Anny Ondra: No, really? I may gosh, I'm terribly frightened.
Alfred Hitchcock: Why, have you been a bad woman or something?
Anny Ondra: Well, not just, bad, but, eh...
Alfred Hitchcock: But, you've slept with men.
Anny Ondra: Oh, no!

Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut