from: Hitchcock by François Truffaut, 1967

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. If you ever want to be a filmmaker, you should definitely put this book under your pillow!

⇒ about NORTH BY NORTHEWST

T. I'd like to talk about that long sequence with Cary Grant in the cornfields which starts long before the plane appears overhead. The scene is completely silent for some seven minutes; it's a real tour de force. In The Man Who Knew Too Much there is a ten-minute scene showing the concert at the Albert Hall with no dialogue, but that scene is sustained by the cantata music and by the anticipation of an incident we're expecting. I believe the old way of handling this sort of thing was to accelerate the montage by using shorter and shorter cuts, whereas in North by Northwest all of the shots arc of equal duration.

H. Here you're not dealing with time but with space. The length of the shots was to indicate the various distances that a man had to run for cover and, more than that, to show that there was no cover to run to. This kind of scene can't be wholly subjective because it would go by in a flash. It necessary to show the approaching plane, even before Cary Grant spots it, because if the shot is too fast, the plane is in and out of the frame too quickly for the viewer to realise what's happening. We have the same thing in The Birds when Tippi Hedren is attacked in the boat. If the gulls arc made to fly in and out of the picture in a flash, the audience might think it just a piece of paper that flew into her face. By doing that scene subjectively, you show the girl in the boat, you see her watching the dockside, and suddenly something hits her head. But that's still too fast. So you have to break the rule of the point of view. You deliberately abandon the subjective angle and go to an objective viewpoint, by showing the gull before it strikes, so that the audience might be fully aware of what is happening. And we apply that same rule in North by Northwest, so as to prepare the public for the threat of the plane dive.

T. I believe the accelerated tempo is used in many pictures to get round a technical difficulty or to patch things together in the cutting-room. Frequently, when the director hasn't shot sufficient footage, the editor makes do by using the out-takes of various shots and editing them as short takes, but it's never really satisfactory. They often use that technique, for instance, to show someone being run over by a car. H. You mean that everything happens too quickly.

T. In most pictures, yes.

H. I had a car accident, as the basis for a trial, in one of my recent television shows. What I did was to use five shots of people witnessing the incident before I showed the accident itself. Or rather, I showed five people as they heard the sound of it. Then I filmed the end of the accident, just as the man hits the ground after his motor-cycle has turned over and the offending car is speeding away. These are moments when you have to stop time, to stretch it out.

T. I see. Now, let's go back to the scene in the corn-field. The most appealing aspect of that sequence with the plane is that it's totally gratuitous—it's a scene that's been drained of all plausibility or even significance. Cinema, approached in this way, becomes a truly abstract art, like music. And here it's precisely that gratuity, which you're often criticised for, that gives the scene all its interest and strength. It's deliberately emphasised by the dialogue, when the farmer, who's about to get into the bus, points to the oncoming plane and says to Cary Grant, 'Look, here comes a crop-dusting plane.' And then he adds, 'That's funny, there are no crops to be dusted!' And he's right, of course; that's the whole point: there's nothing to be sprayed! How can anyone object to gratuity when it's so clearly deliberate—it's planned incongruity? It's obvious that the fantasy of the absurd is a key ingredient of your film-making formula.

H. The fact is I practise absurdity quite religiously! T. Since that scene doesn't sense to move the action forward, it's the kind of concept that would simply never occur to a screenwriter; only a director could dream up an idea like that! H. I'll tell you how the idea came about. I found I was faced with the old cliché situation: the man who is put on the spot, probably to be shot. Now, how is this usually done? A dark night at a narrow intersection of the city. The waiting victim standing in a pool of light under the street lamp. The cobbles are 'washed with the recent rains'. A close-up of a black cat slinking along against the wall of a house. A shot of a window, with a furtive face pulling back the curtain to look out. The slow approach of a black limousine, et cetera, et cetera. Now, what was the antithesis of a scene like this? No darkness, no pool of light, no mysterious figures in windows. Just nothing. Just bright sunshine and a blank, open countryside with barely a house or tree in which any lurking menaces could hide. You'll remember my theory about using chocolate in Switzerland and windmills in Holland. Well, in that spirit, as well as because of my feeling for free fantasy, I thought up a scene for North by Northwest, but we never actually made it. It occurred to me that we were moving in a north-westerly direction from New York, and one of the stops on the way was Detroit, where they make Ford automobiles. Have you ever seen an assembly line? T. No, I never have. H. They're absolutely fantastic. Anyway, I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the assembly line. They might, for instance, be talking about one of the foremen. Behind them a car is being assembled, piece by piece. Finally, the car they've seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, and all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at it and say, 'Isn't it wonderful!' Then they open the door of the car and out drops a corpse!

T. That's a great idea!

H. Where has the body come from? Not from the car, obviously, since they've seen it start at zero! The corpse falls out of nowhere, you see! And the body might be that of the foreman the two fellows had been discussing.

T. That's a perfect example of absolute nothingness! Why did you drop the idea? Is it because it would have made the scene too long?

H. It wasn't a question of time. The real problem was that we couldn't integrate the idea into the story. Even a gratuitous scene must have some justification for being there, you know!

⇒ about PSYCHO

T. In that whole picture there isn't a single character with whom a viewer might identify.

H. It wasn't necessary. Even so, the audience was probably sorry for the poor girl at the time of her death. In fact, the first part of the story was a red herring. That was deliberate, you see, to detract the viewer's attention in order to heighten the murder. We purposely made that beginning on the long side, with the bit about the theft and her escape, in order to get the audience absorbed with the question of whether she would or would not be caught. Even that business about the forty thousand dollars was milked to the very end to that the public might wonder what's going to happen to the money. You know that the public always likes to be one jump ahead of the story; they like to feel they know what's coming next. So you deliberately play upon this fact to control their thoughts. The more we go into the details of the girl's journey, the more the audience becomes absorbed in her flight. That's why to much is made of the motor-cycle cop and the change of cars. When Anthony Perkins tells the girl of his life in the motel, and they exchange views, you still play upon the girl's problem. It seems as if she's decided to go back to Phoenix and give the money back, and it's possible that the public anticipates by thinking, `Ah, this young man is influencing her to change her mind.' You turn the viewer in one direction and then in another; you keep hint as far as possible from what's actually going to happen. In the average production, Janet Leigh would have been given the other role. She would have played the sister who's investigating. It's rather unusual to kill the star in the first third of the film. I purposely killed the star to as to make the killing even more unexpected. As a matter of fact, that's why I insisted that the audiences be kept out of the theatres once the picture had started, because the late-comers would have been waiting to see Janet Leigh after she has disappeared from the screen action. Psycho has a very interesting construction and that game with the audience was fascinating. I was directing the viewers. You might say I was playing them, like an organ.

T. That reminds me that Psycho is particularly universal because it's a half-silent movie; there are at least two reels with no dialogue at all.