In his invitation letter he explained his motive for wanting to conduct the interviews: "the propaganda we initiated in the Cahiers Du Cinéma, while effective in France, carried no weight in America because the arguments were over-intellectual." In the pages of the prominent French film journal referred to, Cahiers Du Cinéma, Truffaut and others had long argued that Alfred Hitchcock was a great artist and not merely a director of popular thrillers. Rather than being a great meeting of minds indulging in Kuleshov and Murnau between lunches and witticisms, the whole thing was in fact probably one of the most successful publicity campaigns of the 20th century. Rear Window was "a purely cinematic film" because it is entirely about the act of watching in that "you have an immobilized man looking out…The second part shows what he sees and the third part shows how he reacts."Īs a result of the near mythical status that the interviews took on, their importance has been overblown and the more cynical back story of how the interviews were used as a crude marketing tool is rarely told. They lament the passing of the silent film era as this was "the purest form of cinema", according to Hitchcock, since it "told the story in a cinematic way, through a succession of shots", as opposed to "photographs of people talking". The French avant-garde idea of "pure cinema" is key to much of the discussion, with Hitchcock and Truffaut discussing how the best, or most "pure", films should use the camera and sound design to tell a story. A textbook explanation of the mechanics of eliciting emotion from the editing together of moving images. It has since been cherished as a rare moment where the secrets of film were prised from the great Buddha of suspense by one of his most dedicated followers. The book of the interviews was published four years later in France and five years later in America under the original title of Hitchcock. What followed has been heralded as one of the most important encounters in the history of cinema.
Hitchcock eagerly accepted and in August of that year the pair met in Hollywood for a week long discussion of every single one of Hitchcock’s films. In it he requested an extended interview of 500 questions to run over the course of a week and to be recorded on tape.
In 1962 the accomplished French New Wave director and film critic Francois Truffaut wrote a letter to Alfred Hitchcock.
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