The Book That Gets Inside Alfred Hitchcock’s Mind

Early August is traditionally the back shelf of the year’s cultural pantry. The cineplex is filled with movies that—like cans of split-pea soup bought immemorially long ago—reëmerge after being dismissed as too paltry for early summer and too lousy for a fall release. Desperate vacationers crack open books they’ve spent all year piling other books on top of; the music of the early month is perplexing, at best. A rare highlight in this overcooked season is Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday, which will fall on Saturday this year, ending an eerily Hitchcockian week. “Hitchcock/Truffaut,” the book in which the master of suspense exposed his most private creative mind in interviews with François Truffaut, is turning fifty, and has become the inspiration for an eponymous documentary, by Kent Jones, which has just been released on HBO. (Richard Brody wrote eloquently about the film when it appeared in theatres, late last year.) The book is worth a refreshed notice, too, though, because, even half a century later, it remains one of the sharpest, most enthralling studies of creative thought—_any _creative thought—that’s still in print.

The project had its basis in fandom. In 1962, Truffaut, still young and radiant with technical discovery, interviewed Hitchcock about his work, using a translator. The transcript was published—Truffaut, who ended up obsessing over the project, called it his “Hitchbook”—first in France and then in the United States. An interview book sounds boring; Truffaut’s shook his whole creative field. Moving, film by film, through Hitchcock’s considerable corpus, “Hitchcock/Truffaut” revealed that Hitchcock, widely considered to be a box-office pigeon, wasn’t just the master that the New Wave critics had suspected but also a formal pioneer driving the progress of a young popular art.

It’s normally the province of critics, interviewers, and historians to analyze the mechanisms of creative work. Their efforts are important, because creative people are usually bad at talking about what they’ve made. Artists such as Ingmar Bergman, Pablo Picasso, and Bob Dylan answered questions about their work for years, but their answers tended to come down as rock slides of near gibberish: unsolid, unhelpful, and full of indirection. Hitchcock, by contrast, was the rare late-modern craftsman who not only knew exactly what he was trying to do but could lay it out in words. If you’re the sort of person who believes that lasting art is often born through the constraints of craft—that genius has a way of creeping in as restless virtuosos push against the pressures of a market, trying to meet the demands of a mainstream audience—then the Hitchcock interviews emerge as a creative Rosetta Stone.

Or so it’s always seemed to me. I received my copy of “Hitchcock/Truffaut” as a high-school freshman, from a first-time English teacher who had tried to match each student with a fitting text. “I got so much out of this book,” she wrote inside the cover. “I know you will connect with it as I did.” It may be the best recommendation that I’ve ever received; I’ve always kept “Hitchcock/Truffaut” close since then. (Today, it occupies a narrow shelf to one side of my desk on which I keep the twenty or so volumes nearest my heart.) I count it as a literary work, although it wasn’t, strictly speaking, written, and although the craft under discussion is, obviously, film. What my English teacher knew grew clear to me as well: the book is about telling stories, and it’s crucial reading for anyone trying to learn to build them in a way that insures that every detail counts.

One of my favorite things to do with “Hitchcock/Truffaut” is to open the book, in biblical fashion, to a random place and read. Here’s the director on “Psycho," explaining his frequent balletic use of overhead cameras to prime the movie’s final revelation:

A.H. I raised the camera when Perkins was going upstairs. He goes to the room and we don’t see him, but we hear him say, “Mother, I’ve got to take you down to the cellar. They’re snooping around.” And then you see him take her down to the cellar. I didn’t want to cut, when he carries her down, to a high shot because the audience would have been suspicious as to why the camera has suddenly jumped away. So I had a hanging camera follow Perkins up the stairs, and when he went into the room I continued going up without a cut, as the camera got up on top of the door, the camera turned and looked back down the stairs again. Meanwhile, I had an argument take place between the son and his mother to distract the audience and take their minds off what the camera was doing. In this way the camera was above Perkins again as he carried his mother down and the public hadn’t noticed a thing.

Here’s Truffaut asking Hitchcock about a love scene, from "North by Northwest," in which Cary Grant, playing an advertising executive on the run, and Eva Marie Saint, playing, basically, a Hitchcock blonde, tryst in a train berth after meeting in the dining car:

F.T. Their bodies glide along the panel, making two complete turns as they kiss each other. On the screen it’s absolutely perfect, yet it must have seemed completely illogical during the shooting.

A.H. Yes, they rotate against the wall. There, again, we applied the same rule of not separating the couple. There’s just so much one can do with a love scene. Something I wish I could work out is a love scene with two people on each side of the room. It’s impossible, I suppose.

If you don’t find this kind of detailed craft exposition—what John Updike once called “the back of the tapestry”—thrilling, well, then I guess you should get yourself a mezzanine ticket to “Hamilton” instead. The acuity of the interviews is thanks largely to Truffaut, who has a director’s experience, a fanboy’s knowledge, and a critic’s offhand bluntness. (Of Hitchcock’s 1940 film “Foreign Correspondent,” he remarks, “It definitely belongs in the ‘B’ category.” Hitchcock, far from being offended, agrees and explains why.) Turning to Hitchcock’s first American masterpiece, “Rebecca,” Truffaut picks up on a subtle innovation crucial to the director’s later films, his discovery that setting a two-shot out of balance could create narrative tension:

F.T. [The female protagonist’s] relationship with the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, was something new in your work. And it reappears time and again later on, not only in the scenarios, but even visually: two faces, one dead-still, as if petrified by fear of the other; the victim and the tormentor framed in the same image.

A.H. Precisely. In Rebecca I did that very deliberately. Mrs. Danvers was almost never seen walking and as rarely shown in motion. If she entered a room in which the heroine was, what happened is that the girl suddenly heard a sound and there was the ever-present Mrs. Danvers, standing perfectly still by her side. In this way the whole situation was projected from the heroine’s point of view; she never knew when Mrs. Danvers might turn up, and this, in itself, was terrifying. To have Mrs. Danvers walking about would have been to humanize her.

As Truffaut presses Hitchcock on decision after decision, in film after film, an elaborate, reasoned logic rises to the fore—a point that both directors, similarly inclined toward meticulous visual formalism, were keen to drive home. Hitchcock is occasionally self-dismissive in a way that seems self-blind. My first destination, on paging through, was the discussion of “Rear Window,” from 1954, which to me seems Hitchcock’s greatest. (The movie has as many tightly structured symmetries and edges as a diamond, yet it’s also one of his warmest and most freely flowing films; characters are conjured fully and with love, which is, for him, hardly a given.) Yet the director’s account extends from indifference to dissatisfaction. He dismisses the Franz Waxman score—whose weaving through a wash of overlapping urban sounds is striking even today—as disappointing. Not even the most deterministic director in the movies, it would seem, could see a clear path to his full achievement.

In an introduction to the volume, Truffaut explained that his goal had been to inspire a reassessment of Hitchcock’s œuvre: “It occurred to me that if he would, for the first time, agree to respond seriously to a systematic questionnaire, the resulting document might modify the American critics’ approach to Hitchcock.” Ultimately, though, “Hitchcock/Truffaut” helped to burnish new myths. At one point in the book, Hitchcock explains his tropism toward “sophisticated blondes”: “I think the most interesting women, sexually, are the English women.” (Truffaut responds the only way a Frenchman could: “I appreciate your viewpoint.”) If the book succeeded in replacing Hitchcock’s reputation as a hackish company man, it simultaneously helped to feed his recent reëvaluation as a domineering, intransigent boor.

In another sense, though, “Hitchcock/Truffaut” did precisely what it hoped to, and a little more. The long-form Q. & A. had critical precedents by the early sixties—_The Paris Review _had begun turning its interrogations to the likes of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Dorothy Parker—but the book was among the first projects to move away from biographical and philosophical questions and to charge into the weeds of technique. Truffaut, in his interviewing, showed that a theory of composition could be lucently explained through process, that invention was not a happy accident but a habit of the mind. Hitchcock, in his replies, proved that the illusion of mainstream effortlessness rose from tiny choices made with intention and care. The legacy of their inquiry rests in today’s pop-cultural hermeneutics, self-reflexive television, probing podcast interviews. “Hitchcock/Truffaut” helped shape current creative life. But it reminds us, too, that art still holds mysteries beyond even the most vertiginous achievements of craft.