Alfred hitchcock interview with francois truffaut biography

It’s a rare occasion in film history when two famous directors sit down and have a long interview on one’s work.  It is even more rare to have those interviews on tape. That is what happened when newly introduced Francois Truffaut sat down with Hitchcock in an interview he was doing for a book dedicated to Hitchcock’s cinema.  In his “cookbook of cinema”, some believe that the interview really provided both filmmakers with a lot of helpful exposure.  Truffaut learned a great deal of information on film theory and techniques from one of his mentors.  Hitchcock on the other hand finally gained the respect as an artist and a master of cinema techniques.

             Conducted with the help of a translator, Truffaut’s interview went chronologically through the life of Alfred Hitchcock life.  The interviews cover a lot of information of his early films shot it Britain such as Blackmail, The 39 Steps, and Secret Agent.  Truffaut continues on into Hitchcock’s later well-known Hollywood productions like North by Northwest, Psycho and Vertigo.  In total, the two filmmakers talked for over 12 hours, and provided both Truffaut and the world of filmmaking with an astounding assortment of information both on the works of Hitchcock, critical analysis, and filmmaking techniques.

             Truffaut takes the role as a film critic in these interviews instead of a director.  Truffaut does have moments where he mentions his own films but he tries to limit the dependency on relating to his own films due to the fact that Hitchcock had not seen any of Truffaut’s films at the time.  When Truffaut goes back and relates a scene of his to Hitchcock’s work, he has to use such details in order to paint the picture for Hitchcock.

Even though Hitchcock at the time may not have been familiar with Truffaut’s work, Truffaut had definitely seen all of Hitchcock’s films at the time starting with The Pleasure Garden, which he made back in 1925.  T

Part 1 of the 25 part French radio broadcast of the Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut interviews from 1962.

Audio

Transcription

Of the period of the childhood, they always tell a story of the police station when your father had you locked up. Is that a true story?

I was just sent along with a note, I must have been four or five years of age, and the head of the police read it and then put me into the cell and said “that’s what we do to naughty boys”.

And what had you done to deserve that?

I cannot imagine because my father used to call me “the little lamb without a spot”!

[laughter]

But he was very severe, very stern?

Yes.

They say that in school you were very [an] average student but very strong in geography.

I was usually with the—— You see, I was with the Jesuits, you see, and I was usually about four or five in the form, in the class.

Four or five – that is the [???]

I was never first. I was second once or twice. But average, four or five.

And your ambition at that moment was to become an engineer?

Well, all little boys are asked what do they want to be when they grow, you know. And, you know, you say “engineer” and my parents took me seriously, so they sent me to an engineering school.

But perhaps you did have a more scient—— curiosity for science?

Well, I was able to pick up quite an amount of knowledge of practical engineering. The theory of laws of force and motion. Electricity, theoretically and applied. I learned to be a draughtsman, which helped me later on when I became an art director.

This was following the Jesuit college?

Yes.

This would be the period of about 19 years of age. But, at that time, you see, I had great enthusiasm for theatre and for films. [I] would go to the theatre first nights alone.

I would like to situate that period. This was after the Jesuit college, because when you were with the Jesuits you couldn’t go out very much, could you?

No, no, no

1966 book by François Truffaut about Alfred Hitchcock

For the documentary film about this book, see Hitchcock/Truffaut (film).

Hitchcock/Truffaut is a 1966 book by François Truffaut about Alfred Hitchcock, originally released in French as Le Cinéma selon Alfred Hitchcock.

First published by Éditions Robert Laffont, it is based on a 1962 dialogue between Hitchcock and Truffaut, in which the two directors spent a week in a room at Universal Studios talking about movies. The book walks through all of Hitchcock's films, from his early British period to Torn Curtain. After Hitchcock's death, Truffaut updated the book with a new preface and final chapter on Hitchcock's later films Topaz, Frenzy and Family Plot, as well as his unrealized project The Short Night.

Background

In the preface to the revised edition, Truffaut explains that "In 1962, while in New York to present Jules and Jim, I noticed that every journalist asked me the same question: 'Why do the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma take Hitchcock so seriously? He's rich and successful, but his movies have no substance.' In the course of an interview during which I praised Rear Window to the skies, an American critic surprised me by commenting, you love Rear Window because you know nothing about Greenwich Village. To this absurd statement, I replied, 'Rear Window is not about Greenwich Village, it is a film about cinema, and I do know cinema.'

"Upon my return to Paris, I was still disturbed by this exchange. From my past career as a critic, in common with all of the young writers from Cahiers du Cinéma, I still felt the imperative need to convince. It was obvious that Hitchcock, whose genius for publicity was equaled only by that of Salvador Dali, had in the long run been victimized in American intellectual circles because of his facetious response to interviewers and his deliberate practice of deriding their questio

In the fall of 1962, whilst The Birds was in post-production, François Truffaut carried out extensive interviews with Alfred Hitchcock at his offices at Universal Studios. The interviews were recorded to audio tape and the content eventually edited down into Truffaut's Hitchcock book.

Although Truffaut could speak a little English, he hired Helen Scott (of the French Film Office in New York) to act as the translator for the interviews.

Truffaut had intended to quickly publish the book of the interviews, but the first edition wasn't published until several years later (1966 in France and 1967 in America). To bring the book up-to-date, Truffaut conducted further interviews to discuss Marnie and Torn Curtain.

In 1984, Patricia Hitchcock donated a set of the interview tapes to the Margaret Herrick Library, where they are now part of the Hitchcock Collection. Although Truffaut claimed that the recordings lasted 50 hours, the surviving tapes — which cover the 1962 interviews — last for less than 26 hours.

Research by Janet Bergstrom has made clear the fact that the book often does not contain a verbatim transcript of Hitchcock's responses to Truffaut's questions...

Certain categories of information seem to have been omitted from the published interview for reasons over and above the need to keep the page count down or omit Hitchcock’s slightly off–color jokes and descriptions of individuals that might offend them or even prove libelous. Information was dropped that would be considered precious today, particularly by film historians: explanations of technique were greatly limited compared to the original, references to television and the film industry as such, including observations about people who were not necessarily well–known and what they did, as Hitchcock remembered this or that film or phase of his career.

The interviews were used as the basis of Alain Riou and Stéphane Boulan's French stage play Hitch: Wh