Best 17 quotes in «hitchcock quotes» category

The thing about Hitchcock which is quite extraordinary for a director of that time, he had a very strong sense of his own image and publicizing himself. Just a very strong sense of himself as the character of Hitchcock.

Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn't have to cope with the actors and all the rest. -Alfred Hitchcock

So, Hitchcock wouldn't say anything about my work in the movie but, on the other hand, he wouldn't complain, either.

Staying relaxed was helping him cope with the drug induced juddering vision that could be best described as being like a Hitchcockian visual effect operated by a hyperactive squirrel that shook the whole universe closer and farther away. If you went with it, it was quite pleasant, as long as you didn't introduce any lateral movement like turning your head or the car. This caused the universe to try and slide away from underneath you. The other side effect was the constant feeling you ought to try to twist your head off, in a good way.

Content, I am not interested in that at all. I don't give a damn what the film is about. I am more interested in how to handle the material so as to create an emotion in the audience. I find too many people are interested in the content. If you were painting a still life of some apples on a plate, it's like you'd be worrying whether the apples were sweet or sour. Who cares?

I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes.

I'm a huge fan of Akira Kurosawa, a big Hitchcock fan.

Any great movie in the old days has a red herring. Hitchcock was so good at that.

Hitchcock loves to be misunderstood, because he has based his whole life around misunderstandings.

Hitchcock's murder set-pieces are so potent, they can galvanize (and frighten) even a viewer who's seen them before!

I could never be like Hitchcock and do only one kind of movie. Anything that's good is worthwhile.

I had to change the shape of my own voice. It was quite hard to pull off and so once I had it, I stayed in Hitchcock's voice all day on set.

There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean. We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!" In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

Hitchcock had to fight to the death to make his movies.

I would have loved to have been in a Hitchcock movie.

More than anything else, I'd like to be an old man with a good face, like Hitchcock or Picasso.

Particularly [Alfred] Hitchcock, who takes his time with everything he says. There's a controlling way in how he speaks because he takes his time to finish all his sentences.