Hitchcock Truffaut Quotes
Martin Scorsese: It was a spell that was cast with those films in the 50s and 60s. And its a special, blessed time for me, because I saw them as they came out.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Narrator: 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.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Alfred Hitchcock: I have a favorite little saying to myself, Logic is dull.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Franþois Truffaut: In your films, I always get the powerful scent of original sin.
Alfred Hitchcock: Yes
Alfred Hitchcock: Yes
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Franþois Truffaut: Your logic, which has never satisfied your critics, is in a sense the logic of dreams.
Alfred Hitchcock: I think it occurs because I'm never satisfied with the ordinary. I can't do well with the ordinary.
Alfred Hitchcock: I think it occurs because I'm never satisfied with the ordinary. I can't do well with the ordinary.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Franþois Truffaut: Vertigo is one of your most poetic films. It's more poetic than dramatic. The film has a dreamlike quality, a slowness, something contemplative that your other films don't have, which are often built on rapid movement, on speed.
Alfred Hitchcock: Yes. Here you are dealing with the point of view of an emotional man.
Franþois Truffaut: What interested you most about the story?
Alfred Hitchcock: I was intrigued with the efforts to create a woman, after another, in the image of a dead woman.
Alfred Hitchcock: Yes. Here you are dealing with the point of view of an emotional man.
Franþois Truffaut: What interested you most about the story?
Alfred Hitchcock: I was intrigued with the efforts to create a woman, after another, in the image of a dead woman.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Alfred Hitchcock: [Discussing Vertigo]The sex, psychological side, is that you have a man creating a sex image that he can't go to bed with her until he's got her back - to the thing he wants to go to bed with.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Alfred Hitchcock: [Discussing Vertigo]The thing, you see, that I liked and felt most when she came back from having her hair made blonde and it wasn't up, this means she has stripped, but won't take her knickers off. [laughs]
Alfred Hitchcock: You see, she say's all right and she goes into the bath and he is waiting. He's waiting for the woman to undress and come out. He's ready for for her.
Alfred Hitchcock: You see, she say's all right and she goes into the bath and he is waiting. He's waiting for the woman to undress and come out. He's ready for for her.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Franþois Truffaut: Vertigo is a film for which you have a great tenderness.
Alfred Hitchcock: Yes, I-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.
Alfred Hitchcock: Yes, I-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.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Martin Scorsese: [Discussing Vertigo]It became a lost film, so to speak. 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.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Franþois Truffaut: [Discussing Vertigo]What bothers you about the film?
Alfred Hitchcock: 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?
Alfred Hitchcock: 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?
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Martin Scorsese: [Discussing Vertigo]I can't really say that I believe the plot and I don't take any of it, the story, seriously. I mean as a *realistic* story. So, the plot is just a line that you can hang things on - and the things that he hangs onto it are all aspects of, you know, cinema poetry.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Martin Scorsese: [Discussing Vertigo]That's a film that I can't really tell where things start and end. I don't care. Or, when he's following her in the streets in a car, what is he looking for? What's he looking for?
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Martin Scorsese: [Discussing Vertigo]The city itself is a character - the architecture itself. The mystery of old San Francisco. That painting.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Martin Scorsese: [Discussing Vertigo]This whole business of remaking her, yes, we get it. Everyone is talking about the fetishism of it. Fine. It's good. But, it's this extraordinary sense of loss that he's trying to fill that void. Maybe, maybe he reaches out to everyone? That, because of that. You know, we bring our own sense of melancholy and loss to it.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Alfred Hitchcock: There is sometimes a tendency among filmmakers 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 1 seat. This to me is the power of the cinema. It is the greatest known mass medium there is in the world.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Alfred Hitchcock: [Discussing Psycho]It was a very interesting construction. I tried, for a long time, to *play* the audience. Let's say we where playing them like an organ.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Martin Scorsese: [Discussing Psycho]The scene with John Gavin and Janet Leigh in the beginning, the element there is the bra. Okay. But, it shocked - very simply, but, ominously.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Martin Scorsese: [Discussing Psycho]The scenes in the office are, kind of, all right, you know - that Texan. For his style, the blandness of the scenes and the blandness of the framing, 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. How benign can we make these images? Is that just connect the dots?
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Alfred Hitchcock: [Discussing Psycho]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. Where I slowed up was when I came to the scenes that indicated time and trouble.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Martin Scorsese: [Discussing Psycho]The best scenes for me are, one's he must have spent time on, the driving shots. You had to spend 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. Because, 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. That's like the perfect size. 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 is something about the restraint of those frames. You see, 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. And there's a sense of movement ahead, movement ahead.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Martin Scorsese: [Discussing Psycho]She steals money. Then, she decides to drive away. Then, she becomes guilty about it. Then, she meets this guy in a motel and he's telling her all his problems. You're watching, wanting to know what happens. Is she going to bring that money back? Now, what is Anthony Perkins really going to do? You know, he has his mother there, maybe there's going to be this whole thing going on with his mother and him and her. I mean, you're really, you're taken down a path. But, what's great about it is that - that your expectations are taken and turned upside down.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Peter Bogdanovich: [Discussing Psycho]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 ah-ah-ah. I was like aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh. Like they wanted to close it out. 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, wha-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.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Alfred Hitchcock: We better not have cigars, you're right. It might make us look like movie directors and God forbid we ever look like that.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Narrator: 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?
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Narrator: 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.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut
Alfred Hitchcock: I suppose the films with atmosphere, suspense and incident are really my creations as a writer.
Movie: Hitchcock Truffaut