How do you make a film not from a book but about a book? It helps if the book’s two subjects are Alfred Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut, two of the greatest filmmakers who have ever lived. “Hitchcock/Truffaut,” directed by Kent Jones, takes the spirit of the original text — a comprehensive interview between the two filmmakers, initiated by Truffaut in 1962, conducted that same year, and then transcribed and translated over the next four and published in French in 1966 and in English in 1967 — and brings it to the screen.“The book really functions like a film,” Jones said in a recent interview. “It has a drive and energy and pace and a shape, like a film does, which is different than other similar books that came after in a very subtle way.”A personal aside: I first came across the book a library book sale near my mother’s home while I was in middle school. I was slightly familiar with the work of Hitchcock, had probably even seen some of his films on VHS tapes rented from that same library at that point, but I did not know Truffaut at all. Opening the book, attempting to follow the conversation and letting my eyes ride across the visual montages spread out through the entire text, it led me down paths that, on a macro level, brought me to writing these very words. I still have that copy of the book, showing its age a little more these days than it did when I purchased it, and will probably keep it until its pages deteriorate.Which is all to say that this film means more to me, and I imagine many others, because of the special place the book holds in my life. And thankfully devoid of meaningless platitudes, “Hitchcock/Truffaut” unfolds like an enthusiastic conversation between a host of filmmakers — Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, James Grey, Richard Linklater, and many others — and the audience that engages with the specific, and highly personal, ways that Hitchcock’s work has affected them.In a recent conversation, Jones, who also spends his time as the director of the New York Film Festival, spoke with ARTINFO about his history with the text, the discrepancies between the original interviews between Hitchcock and Truffaut and the resulting book, and Hitchcock’s struggle to be recognized as an artist.Did you discover the book before you discovered the work of both Hitchcock and Truffaut?For sure before I was familiar with Truffaut, but I was in the process of getting familiar with him. But with Hitchcock, I had seen Richard Schickel’s [television] series “The Men Who Made the Movies” (1973), so I was sort getting into Hitchcock when I got the book, or when it was given to me — I can’t remember which.How old were you when you got the book?I was 12.What struck you about the book initially at that age?The size of it, and I’m not being ironic. There were books like that, that were that format, about movie stars. But with directors it was different. And the design of the book — those things don’t seem important but they count for a lot, because the iconography of the book, to have both of their names so prominent, equally, is interesting. I was talking to somebody about the movie, and they said, “Well, you don’t really find out much about Truffaut.” But that’s not the nature of the enterprise. The nature of the enterprise is this discussion of Hitchcock, a discussion initiated by Truffaut. It’s “Hitchcock/Truffaut” because, as Olivier [Assayas] says in the movie, it’s not just Truffaut doing a book about Hitchcock — it’s much more than that. So there’s that, and I think my experience with the book is close to what [David] Fincher describes [in the film], pouring over it again and again, looking at the photo montages in the book, which were very striking. The visual representation of cinema at that time was different. You would get these really dull books, like “How to Make a Film” — [groans] I can still picture them in my mind.The film was a commission, right?Yes, it was a commission, but a commission that I jumped at.Had the book been in your head before the project came to you?Hitchcock’s been in my head since I was young, and I’ve always watched his films and loved him. They’ve been with me. I’ve shown them to my children, I’ve watched them again and again. You revisit them and it’s a new experience every time, every film — literally. In that sense, yeah, it was very present for me.When you started to make the film, where did the process begin? Did you go right to the audiotapes of the conversation?No, I went right to the book, because I didn’t have access to all of the tapes yet. I had heard the entire 11-hour broadcast version, but the whole 27-hour recording I had not heard. So I went through the book and identified pieces where I felt like there was energy.When you got access the full recordings, did you have an idea of where you wanted to go already from looking at the book?Sort of, but listening is different than reading, especially in this case. The recordings and the book are different, vastly different. Not controversially so — some people try to make a big deal out of it. It’s just that Truffaut didn’t speak English, and he was editing it based on a translation.How was it a big deal?The discrepancies between the tapes and the book are enormous. But they are enormous in the sense that there were misunderstandings, plus Truffaut didn’t speak English, plus it was translated back into English from the French. So you get a very distanced picture. Hitchcock appears much less spontaneous than he is in the tapes, which he privately regretted.Much less spontaneous, and less humorous, which goes against the image we have of him as a public figure. Were you surprised by Hitchcock’s lightness in the tapes? No, I wasn’t. I mean, maybe I was at first, but not really.His films do have a sense of humor, which is often unacknowledged. I also think that the book, in English, jibes with the idea of him as a very premeditated artist, which is what he sold himself as. “All actors are cattle, I’m bored on the set, I draw everything beforehand, I just have the cameraman set it up and go home,” etc, etc. That’s all a smokescreen. When you’re young you read that stuff, but then you go, well, did you really think Teresa Wright was cattle? Carey Grant and Ingrid Bergman were cattle? No. I mean, this was a guy who was down on the floor with the actors. He just did what everybody of his generation did, which was he built a wall around himself. That wall, in his case, with his fame, his image, and his myth — I was locked up in a jail when I was three, a fear of the police, etc. So I think it’s not ultimately surprising that he’s a more spontaneous than he seems to be in the book.I wanted to talk about the people you interviewed for the film. Some of them are maybe more obvious choices than others, but they all seem to have some personal connection to the book. I was going to people I knew and people I knew who were going to respond. When I say respond, I mean sit in front of the camera and say more than, “Alfred Hitchcock was a great artist and I have a deep respect for his work.” There were some filmmakers I asked who said no. Brian DePalma was a perfect example. He said he wanted to save his thoughts for Noah [Baumbach] and Jake [Paltrow]’s movie. Jane Campion said she didn’t have one single thing to say about Hitchcock, which was interesting. So I went to people I have a relationship with. They were all people I knew had something to say on the subject.Knowing that each person was going to engage and not just heap praise on the book, were there things about their specific enthusiasm in relation to the book that surprised you? With Fincher, I was just surprised he said yes. All these other guys — when I’m with Arnaud [Desplachin], Marty [Scorsese] obviously — we talk about older movies. With Fincher, when he’s talking about other people’s movies, generally, he talking about American cinema from the 1970s or John Huston. I’ve never heard him talk about Douglas Sirk, for instance. He doesn’t do that, that’s not his orientation. I mentioned this film to him and asked if he had ever read the book. I was expecting him to say no, and he said, “Not that much, just a couple hundred times when I was younger.” And the thing about Fincher is that he’s so unsentimental about things that other people are extremely sentimental about. In other words, he can look at Hitchcock with a very critical eye and a very admiring eye. I ended up not including a section on “Rope” (1948) — it was just slowing things down — but Olivier said “Rope” is a supreme masterwork, one of his greatest films, and Fincher is just like, “I’m sorry. It’s dull. I don’t even know why they preserved it. Why bother?” [Laughs] He’s got a perspective that’s extremely unusual, but he’s generous — he wants to show people that moviemaking is not this vast, complex machinery that must be studied. Yes, you need to know a few things, but this thing he says in the film, that film is really three things — editing, making moments that should be slow fast, and fast moments slow — is quite right. You need to have done it a lot to make good ones, of course. It’s an interesting perspective. It’s different.How did “Vertigo” (1958) and “Psycho” (1960) end up dominating the film in terms of what’s discussed of Hitchcock’s work?It’s where the conversations went, but they also went toward other movies. A lot of people spent a lot of time talking about “Notorious” (1946). But it was amounting to a bunch of people talking about how much they love “Notorious.” I love “Notorious,” but we’re making a movie as opposed to a historical survey or a tour through Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest hits, and for me making a movie means concision and it means when something is there it just can’t be there because it’s great. It has to be part of the movie. The thing with “Vertigo” and “Psycho” is that they are both great movies but they are also the points where a lot happens. In “Vertigo,” Hitchcock just goes into this other world, and it’s a failure and unlike his other movies, and had this other life where it was kept out of public view and became kind of a legend. At least it was when I was young. Then it was brought back, which jibes with the film itself. “Psycho” is something else.In the film, you include a memo from Hitchcock written later in his life where he voices his doubts about the trajectory of his career.The nature of the enterprise was Truffaut coming to Hitchcock and saying I want to do this thing with you. There’s this emotion between them — that’s why I started the film with Hitchcock saying, “What is it about my films?” On the one hand, Hitchcock is on a fishing expedition for a compliment, but on the other hand he’s also asking a very real question: “Am I an artist?” “Not only are you a great artist,” Truffaut is saying, “but you’re formative to me and many others.” In this whole thing, Hitchcock is asking that question and Truffaut is answering it, continually.So Hitchcock was looking for validation from Truffaut?It’s not the same as coming from a critic. It’s different coming from an internationally renowned filmmaker, who may have been a critic but wasn’t any longer. But there’s also — you can imagine, year after year after year, here you are, a guy who knows this art form and is one of the people who brought it to life, and you’re devoting all of yourself to this art form, and what you keep getting back is: opening up the New Yorker, and seeing some witty putdown headline for the review, or you read Bosley Crowther in the New York Times saying something like, “The master of suspense has done it again!” It wears you down. Hitchcock’s practicing suspense, he’s in a commercial industry, and he’s thinking about the audience, but he’s also a guy who was extremely conversant with modern art. He knew the history of art backwards and forwards. So he’s saying: “Was I an artist? Should I have gone in this other direction?” And Truffaut is saying: “What you did was more than enough.”
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