Alfred Hitchcock

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English film director and producer, closely associated with the suspense thriller genre. He is a well-known man and an award-winning director. He directed and produced three of the American Film Institute Top 100 Films, Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), and North by Northwest (1959), two psychological thrillers and a suspense film. Additionally, Vertigo was rated as the best film of all time in the 2012 British Film Institute Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time.

Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.

Quotes

If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.

• Hitchcock: You know that I think all actors are cattle?
  George Raft: Yes, I know—but I'm no actor.
  • On the set of The House Across the Bay; as quoted in "The New Yorker" by Leonard Lyons, in The Washington Post (26 July 1940).

• [T]he director passed off the phrase as one of his "Machiavellian quips," not to be taken seriously. "Let us say, rather, that actors are a necessary evil," he cautioned, with a straight face. "As a matter of fact, I couldn't work if I weren't on friendly terms with them; I'll bend over backward every time. Besides, I get into each picture I make, if only for a couple of seconds—so I'm probably a frustrated actor at heart myself."
  • Regarding his oft-cited quote stating that actors are cattle; as paraphrased and quoted in "Town Called Hollywood: Director Pleads Off Poundage" by Philip K. Scheuer, in the Los Angeles Times (30 May 1943).

• It still goes. But Pat is the nicest cattle I've ever seen.
  • Reaffirming the "actors are cattle" quote while in Boston to see his daughter perform onstage; as quoted in "The Lyons Den" by Leonard Lyons, in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (20 October 1944).

• The lower lip definitely states that all actors are cattle—including the authorǃ
  • Handwritten note accompanying Hitchcock's sketched self-portrait; as seen in—and addressed to the author of—"Melodrama Maestro" by Hume Cronyn, in McClean's (1 November 1944).

• Actors are cattle. I've always said actors are cattle. In fact, Carole Lombard once built a corral on set and put three live calves into it, in recognition of my feelings. I tell them that, and treat them as such, and we get along fineǃ
  • As quoted in "New York Close-Up" by Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg, in New York Herald Tribune (27 February 1950).

• Deep inside, I am a shy man. And in the presence of colorful characters, I am a clam. I never try to out-eccentric the eccentricsǃ
  • As quoted in "New York Close-Up".

• I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.
  • Newsweek (11 June 1956).

• Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.
  • Picture Parade, BBC (5 July 1960)

• The Birds could be the most terrifying motion picture I have ever made.
  • Movie trailer for the 1960s film The Birds.

• You can't direct a Laughton picture. The best you can hope for is to referee.
  • Films and Filming (Volume 9, Issue 3; 1963), p. 20

• I’m frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes … have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I’ve never tasted it.
  • News summaries (31 December 1963).

• A clear horizon — nothing to worry about on your plate, only things that are creative and not destructive and that's within yourself. Within me I can't bear quarreling, I can't bear feelings between people. I think hatred is wasted energy and it's all non-productive. I'm very sensitive. A sharp word, said by a person who has a temper, if they're close to me, hurts me for days. I know we're only human, we do go in for these various emotions, call them negative emotions but when all these are removed and you can look forward, and the road is clear ahead, and now you're going to create something. I think that's as happy as I would ever want to be.
  • Hitchcock's Definition of Happiness (YouTube video), excerpt from CBC's interview 'A Talk with Alfred Hitchcock' (1964). Quoted in "Hitchcock's Secret to Happiness" by Maria Popova, The Atlantic (20 March 2012).

• We do not recommend suicide as a way of life.
  • Alfred Hitchcock Presents. 1965.

• I deny that I ever said actors are cattle. What I said was, "Actors should be treated like cattle."
  • Speaking at Screen Producers Guild awards ceremony; as quoted in "(Needs New Time Slot, But...) There Is No Excuse for Axing 'Rogues'," by Win Fanning, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (March 8, 1965).

• Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn't change people’s habits. It just kept them inside the house.
  • NY Journal-American (25 August 1965).

• One of television's great contributions is that it brought murder back into the home, where it belongs.
  • National Observer (15 August 1966).

• Seeing a murder on television can … help work off one’s antagonisms. And if you haven’t any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.
  • National Observer (15 August 1966).

• Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.
  • As quoted in Hitchcock (1967) by François Truffaut.

• Puns are the highest form of literature.
  • Dick Cavett Show (8 June 1972).

• Give them pleasure – the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.
  • On audiences, Asbury Park NJ Press (13 August 1974).

• Self-plagiarism is style.
  • Defending his repetition of filming techniques, in The Observer [London], (8 Aug. 1976).

• Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.
  • Interview on CBS TV (20 February 1977).

• [This award is] meaningful because it comes from my fellow dealers in celluloid.
  • On receiving American Film Institute's 1979 Lifetime Achievement Award, recalled on his death (29 Apr. 1980).

• I beg permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation, and encouragement, and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter Pat, and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen. And their names are Alma Reville. Had the beautiful Miss Reville not accepted a lifetime contract without options as Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock some 53 years ago, Mr. Alfred Hitchcock might be in this room tonight, not at this table but as one of the slower waiters on the floor.
  • Speaking on March 11, 1979, accepting AFI's Life Achievement Award; as paraphrased in "A Big Hollywood Turnout for Alfred Hitchcock; "Hollywood Salute to Alfred Hitchcock" by Charles Champlin, Los Angeles Times (March 12, 1979); quoted in Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man (2003) by Pat Hitchcock, pp. 220–221; and heard in "Alfred Hitchcock Accepts the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1979", YouTube (April 16, 2009)

• I’m not against the police; I'm just afraid of them.
  • As quoted in Hitchcock (revised edition 1985) by François Truffaut, p. 109.

• In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life.
  • As quoted in Hitchcock (revised edition 1984) by François Truffaut with the collaboration of Helen G. Scott, p. 102.

• The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema.
  • As quoted in Hitchcock (1967) by François Truffaut

• There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.
  • Attributed to Hitchcock in Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion (1984).

Quotes about Hitchcock

• Hitch is a gentleman farmer who raises goose flesh.
  • Ingrid Bergman, as quoted in Time magazine (1979).

• I'd like to know more about his relationships with women. No, on second thought, I wouldn't.
  • Ingrid Bergman.

• Here is someone … who has an enormous, inordinate, neurotic fear of disorder. And that's from which he makes his art. He always has his people in a moment of disorder. They think they're in control, they think they have power, they think they have order, and then he just slips the rug out from under them to see what they're going to do.
  • Drew Casper, as quoted in "Master of Suspense" on NewsHour (13 August 1999).

• Like Freud, Hitchcock diagnosed the discontents that chafe and rankle beneath the decorum of civilization. Like Picasso or Dali, he registered the phenomenological threat of an abruptly modernised world.
  • Peter Conrad.

• The man with the navy-blue voice.
  • Barbara Harris, as quoted in The Observer [London] (6 August 1976).

• [Hitchcock, on the set of Marnie] I've never gone into detail about this, and I never will. I'll simply say that he suddenly grabbed me and put his hands on me. It was sexual, it was perverse. The harder I fought him, the more aggressive he became.
• I've made it my mission ever since to see to it that while Hitchcock may have ruined my career, I never gave him the power to ruin my life.
• [Explaining her initial silence on his behaviour] sexual harassment and stalking were terms that didn't exist [at the time].
  • Tippi Hedren "Tippi Hedren: Star of The Birds claims she was sexually assaulted by Alfred Hitchcock" The Independent (31 October 2016)
  • The extracts are from Tippi: A Memoir (2016)

• During my ten-year friendship with Hitch the full name is unthinkable to anyone who knows him I have never known him fail to impress strangers with a start of surprise. He has always been chubby, but to-day he is a mellow, exuberant mountain of a man in the late thirties, whose passion is music, whose pleasure is good living, and whose genius is for visual imagery. He is a man who visualises both by instinct and training. He cannot help drawing. As he talks to you his broad, draughtsman's pencil sneaks out, and he blocks in groups and figures on the napkin or table top. When he signs his name to a letter the flourish under the signature slips into a cartoon. His Christmas cards are self-portraits, broadly satiric.
• Actually Hitch, like most heavy men, is the gentlest creature you could meet in a month of Sundays. He has done more kindly turns to out of work actors, assistants, secretaries, and mere sponging acquaintances than anyone I know in this industry. Off set he is many people's angel. On, he is frequently a fiend.
  Hitch has a tiny wife, who helps him with all his scenarios, and a tiny fairylike daughter, who bobs an old-fashioned curtsey to you when she speaks. These are the people who really rule his life. He is an old-fashioned person at heart, believing in the ordinary things of life, the small common decencies, the trivial events that alone make the big ones extraordinary. That is why, I am convinced, he is a good film-maker.
• When I first met Hitchcock he was writing and ornamenting sub-titles for silent pictures. He used to announce "Came the dawn" in black letters on a while ground, or tell us that "Heart spoke to heart in the hush of the evening" in white letters on a black ground. His title cards were both elegant and original, because the man simply could not help drawing. All his instincts were towards visualisation, and all his training towards draughtsmanship.
• [Hitchcock quoted] "I'm on a diet. And I don't do crazy tricks in my pictures any more. You know what a good time I used to have in the old days, with violent cuts and dissolves and wipes, everything in the room spinning round, standing on its head, all that sort of thing. But I've stopped all that. I haven't time to waste any more on technical tricks. I like my screen well filled, every corner used, but I've no fancy theories I want the cutting and continuity to be as inconspicuous as possible. All I'm concerned with is to get the characters developed and the story clearly told, without wasting any footage. I've turned technical ascetic, kid, without either fun or luxuries."
  • C.A.L. "Alfred Hitchcock and His Work: On 'The Set' and Off. A Contrast", The Observer (17 November 1935)
  • "C.A.L." was more usually known as C. A. (Caroline Alice) Lejeune who began her career on The Manchester Guardian and was film critic of The Observer (1928–1960). Identified under the headline as being "By Our Film Correspondent" with her monogram at the end of the text. Lejeune visited the set of Secret Agent while the film was in production. Her wikiquote article has a section on the director's early British period.

• I suppose what surprised me most about Hitchcock was how little he directed us. I had done a number of films for Carol Reed and he seemed quite meticulous in contrast. Hitchcock, however, didn't seem to direct us at all. He was a dozing, nodding Buddha with an enigmatic smile on his face.
  • Margaret Lockwood, as quoted in The Life of Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Side of Genius (1983) by Donald Spoto, p. 174.

• When you think of the visual style, when you think of the visual language of a film there tends to be a natural separation of the visual style and the narrative elements, but with the great, whether it is Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick or Hitchcock what you're seeing is inseparable, a vital relationship between the images and the story he's telling.
  • Christopher Nolan, Chistopher Nolan and David Fincher featurette on Movieweb

• Hitchcock finds women captivating but dangerous. She allures by nature but she is chief artificer in civilisation, a magic fabricator of persona whose very smile is an arc of deception.
  • Camille Paglia, The Birds, p. 7

• In another Hitchcock film, Foreign Correspondent, one of the most exciting and melodramatic sequences ever made, the airplane crash in mid-ocean is accomplished with a minimum of reference, in the speed and economy of image that is to be found in concentrated poems.
  • Muriel Rukeyser The Life of Poetry (1949)

See also

• Category:Alfred Hitchcock films