Alfred Hitchcock - simply the best

From The Times
September 11, 2008
Alfred Hitchcock - simply the best
British directors tell James Christopher how they learnt to love the showman of suspense, Hitchcock

Stephen Woolley
(His How to Lose Friends & Alienate People opens October 3)

Of course I love Hitchcock. He’s another Northeast Londoner like me. I once spent an entire day trying to find his original studio, which turned out to be near Green Lanes.

Hitchcock’s droll diction may have marked him down as a Brit for life but his breathtaking grasp of suspense and terror, mixed with the darkest of humour, made him for me the most inspirational film-maker from these shores. The universe of film would be severely unbalanced without Notorious, Rear Window, North by North West, The 39 Steps, Vertigo, but most importantly Psycho, still viscerally shocking after all these years.

Oliver Parker
(Director St Trinian’s)

Hitch is irresistible. Some of the films leave me cold, but others are a master-class. Incredible clarity and control. At times I find him almost stifling, with nothing left to chance, but then I can be bowled over by his ingenuity. My favourite has to be North by Northwest – such panache and amazing set pieces. I wish he had more influence on my work as it would probably improve it.

Simon Rumley
(The Truth Game and The Living and the Dead)

I always thought his films protracted and pretty safe and, dare I utter the sacrilegious word, boring? That said I continued to watch the films over the years and have come to appreciate many.

I think the film I’ve always loved and continue to do so is North by Northwest and I last watched it when I was in a bamboo forest in China researching one of my next films, Stranger, about an American venture capitalist who witnesses a murder in middle-of-nowhere China and is then chased around said nowhere without any idea where he is or how to contact someone who can help him.

Debbie Isitt
(Nasty Neighbours, Confetti)

Hitchcock was one of my earliest influences. I remember the first time I saw The Birds. I was about 10 and it frightened the life out of me. I became haunted but fascinated with Hitch’s vision of the world as a dark and disturbing place.

But it is impossible for me to separate the images of Hitchcock’s films from his composer Herrmann’s music. The music created so much tension in his work and aided and abetted the shocking moments so brilliantly that Hitchcock is almost like the directors from the silent-movie era – letting pictures and music tell the story – in spite of his claim that his films were only as good as “the script, the script and the script”.

James Rogan
(Youngest director of a British feature film, Dead Bolt Dead, made at 18. Has just finished the documentary series Warship)

For ages, I disliked Hitchcock, finding him cool and clinical, even gimmicky. Then, around the same time I started liking whisky, I began to find his films more and more interesting. Now I am positively a fan. The big influence is precision. There are lots of good film-makers/storytellers out there, but the key for me is those that set out to achieve exactly what they want and succeed – that seems to be Hitchcock. It can be really annoying in film school to have someone tell you to cut all your shots on even numbers of frames (like Hitchcock), but the intention rather than the practice is quite instructive. In every movie he does something worth noting with the camera.

Favourite films? Can I have three? The 39 Steps, a perfect action movie; Rear Window, suspense with a dark twist; Frenzy, one of the most brilliantly nasty films ever made. Hitchcock did a lot of nasty things, such as destroying the privacy of the shower and making birds seem evil. But the worst thing, for me, is the rape scene in Frenzy, which turns the word “lovely” into something deeply sinister and violent.

John Crowley
(Boy A, and Is There Anybody There?, shown last weekend in Toronto)

There are a number of Hitchcock films that I used to return to again and again: Vertigo, Psycho, North by Northwest, Notorious and Rear Window. The famous set-pieces are justifiably celebrated but my personal favourites happen to be a couple of passing moments in Vertigo, when James Stewart is following Kim Novak in his car. Nothing much is happening. Just a couple of cars drifting up and down the hills and streets of San Francisco, accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s gently pulsing score, but it’s utterly compelling. Voyeurism, anxiety, an unattainable blonde and effortlessly elegant framing – pure cinema and pure Hitch!”

Mark Locke
(Crust, and director of MTV videos)

I was personally a lot more influenced by Powell/Pressburger than Hitchcock, but in terms of craftsmanship I think he is probably the best British director we ever had. When I think of Hitchcock I don’t so much think “master of suspense”, I think “master of visual storytelling”. I think of the way he builds tension through placing and movement of camera. It still blows me away, but it’s also got less and less meaningful to me as a film-maker because my thing’s comedy.

I agree with Woody Allen that when it comes to directing comedy, less is always more, that “every cut, every angle change, every little extra thing always takes its toll on the joke”. So for me Hitchcock’s bravura style is something I simply marvel at nowadays, rather than attemt to nick scraps of genius from.

Favourite? Rear Window. What a journey we’re taken on!

Neil Hunter
(co-director of Lawless Heart and Sparkle)

I guess North by Northwest would be my favourite. I love Hitchcock for the way he undercuts your security in what you are watching, the way things can turn on a dime and become very uncertain and in-the-moment.

Occasionally we’ve striven for that kind of live unpredictability – it’s when cinema is most electric. But you can do it only once or twice. You have to build up a viewer’s trust before you can surprise them.