In 1962, just after Hitchcock completed The Birds he sat down with rising French director Francois Truffaut for a series of in depth interviews. The resulting book, published four years later, called Hitchcock/Truffaut has for the last 50 years been considered one of the essential references for all budding directors.
Filmmaker Kent Jones has compiled this documentary using the recordings of those interviews as a starting point for an examination of the work of the master of suspense. It is hard to imagine any classic film lover not enjoying this documentary. From the footage of the interview to the insights from such gifted directors as Richard Linklater and David Fincher and the clips from a large number of his movies, this is a total pleasure to watch. How much you learn that is new depends on your exposure to previous work on Hitchcock.
I have just completed listening to a nearly 20 hour three-part podcast on Hitchcock in the excellent The Secret History of Hollywood series, but there were still nuggets of information that I wasn’t aware of. In addition, I could listen to contributor Martin Scorsese talking incisively about films all day and it is good that he features so heavily here. I must dig out my DVD of his series A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies.
This isn’t perfect. At just under 80 minutes it is strangely short considering the wealth of material to talk about. Additionally, the two main films focused on are Psycho and Vertigo, which seems like a too obvious choice. I’m a big fan of his 30’s British films but they are barely touched on.
On a very limited release, I expect this to be on-demand pretty soon, and it is one worth renting then.
Rating: 8.5 out of 10