Please don't spend money on this.

From my favorite movies..

Did you people see the same film I saw?

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

I would encourage anyone who viewed this film to get a copy of the book. For it is in the book that we learn about the master and what he did and how he thought. This was Truffaut's baby and it is incredible that this is left for us. The strength of the film is in the commentaries of the participants. We get a picture of the admiration shared by the two directors. That said, despite the limitations of 85 or so minutes, we are made privy to techniques employed. The focus is really on two films, "Vertigo" and "Psycho." That is enough in some respects because most of Hitchcock's dazzle is employed here. The lesson learned is that Hitchcock as a stylist and a sort of visual tyrant made him what he was. One interesting point made was what would have happened if he had been forced to work with egos like Marlon Brando, James Dean, or Dustin Hoffman, who certainly would have tried to manipulate Hitchcock. Montgomery Clift tried and failed; so we get a sense of that thing. All in all, this is decent, but it is more the observation of the director who attempted to produce a summation of the book. It only works in bits and pieces. Still, I'm glad I got a chance to see it.

1997:After watching Hitchcock's superb Young and Innocent my dad showed me a fantastic looking book called Hitchcock/Truffaut,which along with having an interesting interview on the title,was also filled with startling still images.2016:Seeing a few tantalising clips of their new shows,I decided to take a look at Channel 4 on Demand for new eps.Expecting to find Comedy titles on the front page,I was surprised to discover that a doc had recently been made about the book!,which led to me joining Hitchcock/Truffaut.The outline of the doc:Despite coming from a completely different world of cinema, François Truffaut finds himself to become a huge fan of fellow film maker Alfred Hitchcock. Interested in being able to discuss Hitchcock work in depth, Truffaut asks Hitchcock if he can do an extensive interview with him,and turn it into a book.Hiring interpreter Helen Scott to help,Hitchcock and Truffaut get set to meet.View on the film:Whilst strangely offering no discussion on what was a major collaboration for Hitchcock, directors Serge Toubiana & Kent Jones use Bernard Herman's classic scores to underline the pace of conversations,from the lively,snappy exchanges over Psycho,to the quiet contemplation over Vertigo. Bringing the voices of the directors off the page,Jones and Toubiana unveil an extraordinary amount of audio and visual archive,with the level that Hitchcock let his guard down being highlighted in Hitchcock asking for the tape recorder to be turned off for "off the record" stories. Allowing others to join in on this famous filmmaking encounter, Jones and Toubiana look at the impact of the book,and expand on some of the original conversations with energetic interviews from David Fincher and Martin Scorsese,as Truffaut meets Hitchcock.

HitchcockTruffaut is a documentary about director Alfred Hitchcock inspired by the book of the same name produced by François Truffaut shortly before his death in the early 1980's. The documentary shows pictures of Truffaut and Hitchcock during the course of Truffaut's extensive interview with Alfred Hitchcock as well as frames from some of his greatest films. This film provides a great understanding of Hitchcock as an artist or "auteur", a term associated with great directors who told their stories using the medium of film, not simply shooting actors performing a story. The visuals for Hitchcock were the essence of his art. He planned the sequence of a movie scene by scene and then used each scene in a series to make the film. As one of the interviewees pointed out, he "wrote" the story using the camera. We see modern directors, particularly Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdonavitch, commenting on the artist's method of filmmaking. Scorsese saw Hitchcock as a ground-breaker who brought about a new sense of what film was about and freed it from the staid conventions that had grown up around it. Hitchcock himself was trained in filmmaking during the silent era when movies did not rely on sound but told the stories through the visuals. It was very revealing to see works like Saboteur, Vertigo and Psycho analyzed by showing the visual imagination behind the scenes that gripped audiences in each of these works. There was a great friendship between Hitchcock and Truffaut. Truffaut greatly respected and elevated the stature of the man, who had been overlooked to a large extent by Hollywood, which failed to give him an Oscar until he received a special award near the end of his life. Of course Hitchcock was very successful but his true artistry was overlooked by his huge audience, which didn't see the brilliant imagination behind the camera. This is a great documentary that anyone interested in movie making would benefit from viewing.

Not the usual kind of biographical stuff about the celebrity's childhood and how he "rose to prominence" before he "fell from grace." In other words it's not an episode of "Biography." The object of attention is the book, "Cinema According to Hitchcock" by an admirer and fellow director Francois Truffaut, published in 1966.The film is roughly (but only roughly) chronological and the biographical material is limited but covers both Hitchcock and his interviewer. What makes it more interesting than it might be is that Truffaut was about half Hitchcock's age. They came from different traditions -- Hitch from the silents, when everything needed to be spelled out visually, and Truffaut from the French "New Wave" cinema of the early 1960s, when the rules were thrown out the window.Despite their different styles, they never clash. Truffaut is too good natured for that, and Hitch too distantly polite in his British way. Only once, in the book, not in the film, is there any sign of friction, when Truffaut suggests a different way Hitch might have handled a scene and he replies, "It seems you want me to write for an art house audience." Lots of excerpts from Hitch's movies and several from Truffaut's as well. A good deal of attention is paid to cinematic techniques -- the position of the camera, the lighting, the pattern of the images themselves. Some of the talking heads, and Hitchcock himself, come up with implications that to me seem questionable. I can't manage to convince myself that, while waiting for Kim Novack to emerge fully transformed from the bathroom, Jimmy Stewart is "getting an erection." In fact, I can't imagine Jimmy Stewart getting an erection at all.I suspect the program might disappoint some viewers who don't want to listen to the interlocutors making polite jokes. (Twice, Hitch is about to tell an anecdote and asks for the recorder to be turned off.) Nothing in the movie is critical of either Truffaut or Hitchock, who became an alcoholic during his last years.There are photos from the interview and excerpts from the recording, as well as a description of the surprising friendship that developed between the two. I thought it was all fascinating.