Hitchcock/Truffaut: The Interview

Oh, good evening, dear reader.  Before you continue with this entry, I trust that you have listened to the little intro above.  If you have not, I suggest that you do so now.  Fear not, there is nothing diabolical about what you are about to hear or see — unless you have an auditory sensitivity to woodwinds and violins, in which case listening could prove to be quite fatal.  For those of you fortunate enough to survive the 14 seconds of music provided here, I hope that you are now in the right frame of mind to read the following post.  To further enhance the experience, as you read this, you may want to adjust your inner voice to match that of Alfred Hitchcock’s famous droll delivery.

This post will most likely only be of interest to cinephiles and filmmakers, so I’ll assume that you already know who Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut are.  And, I’ll assume that you know that back in 1962, Truffaut conducted a lengthy interview with Hitchcock that was edited  and printed as the book “Hitchcock/Truffaut” in 1967.  However, what you might not be aware of — up until a few days ago I certainly was not — is that thanks to the world wide web, the audio tapes from this interview are now available for your listening pleasure.  Although these tapes are not officially available to the public, they were at some point broadcast on French radio, and have managed to find their way online.  The broadcast was broken up into 25 parts, with each part running at roughly 25 minutes.  That’s nearly 12 hours worth of pure interview time.  The link below will take you to a page that contains all 25 parts in streaming audio.  If you wish to access downloadable versions of the files, you can scroll down to the page’s External Links section where you will find another blog that’s hosting the files as mp3s.

THE INTERVIEW

I listened to the entirety of this interview over the span of two days, and the experience was pure bliss.  By the end, it felt as though I had spent a couple days in discussion with the master filmmaker.  The interview is exhaustive.  Truffaut was clearly a student of Hitchcock’s work, and had prepared for the interview by watching as many of Hitchcock’s films as he could prior to their meeting.  In 1962, at a time before home video technology existed, tracking down prints and public screenings of all those films would have been a great challenge.  There are a few elements that Truffaut neglects to touch upon, but when this happens, Hitchcock is so engaged with what Truffaut is trying to accomplish with this interview, that he makes a point of filling in those gaps himself.

The interview consists, for the most part, of Hitchcock speaking about his personal experiences in the film industry, as well as a self analysis of the films he had made up to that point (the interview was conducted while he was on post-production for The Birds).  He’ll often start the analysis of his films with the phrase “the problem with that picture…” without necessarily having it pointed out to him that it wasn’t an entirely successful film.  And, even for the films that were successful, he is often quick to point out their negative traits.  He is very much aware of his failures and successes, and very rarely throughout the interview does his ego attempt to distort those perspectives.

Some of the best parts of the interview are when Hitchcock and Truffaut pause to reflect on the various aspects of visual storytelling.  How do you accomplish this or that?  Why does this work here, but could never work over here?  And although Hitchcock has had a lifetime to reflect on those problems, it often turns out that even he doesn’t have the answers.  This interview is filled with so many fascinating discussions on filmmaking and storytelling, that it should be required listening for anyone who is a student or creator of films.

As mentioned before, the interview spans from the beginning of Hitchcock’s career right up to The Birds.  It would have been great to have had them discuss some of the films that came after, but his most enduring films were made prior to this interview, so if you’re just interested in hearing about those ones — Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest, Psycho — then you’re in for a treat, because all these films are covered.  Also, it’s important to mention that Hitchcock’s French isn’t very good, and Truffaut’s English is even worse, so they are communicating through a translator.  There are a few awkward moments because of this, but overall the interview flows quite nicely even though everything is being repeated in one language or the other.

And, just because I enjoy it so much, and I don’t know when else I might write about Hitchcock again, below is an extended trailer for his 1960 classic, Psycho.  What’s really remarkable about this clip is that it highlights to which extent Hitchcock himself was the star of his own films.  Although director’s names are often used as marketing tools, the directors themselves are seldom seen.  But here, we see that it’s Hitchcock’s own personality — his persona as the master of suspense along with his macabre sense of humor — that’s being used to sell the film.