Director - Alfred Hitchcock

Notable director credits:-

The Birds, Psycho, Stranger on a Train, Notorious, Vertigo, Spellbound, North by Northwest.

An absolute legend in the film-making world and a household name. One of the most prolific director's ever and dubbed "the master of suspense". 

He delivers consistently interesting and entertaining films, usually a crime thriller or mystery that takes you down twists and turns in ways you didn't think possible. Let's find out a little more about him by looking at some interviews, articles and anything I can find. What makes Alfred Hitchcock such a good storyteller?

In this interview, Hitchcock says a few remarkable things. As a man renound for his crime films, he says:

“A who-done-it, you see, is an intellectual exercise like a crossword puzzle”

This is interesting. Does it mean that a who-done-it is a purely intellectual exercise with no room for any emotional connection whatsoever? No so, as he also says in the video:

“What I was really doing was showing a mental process of the man by means of pictures by what he saw”

These two quotes show us what makes him such a well rounded director. He puts his effort not only into the mystery, the crime, the series of questions and answers that lead to unraveling a crime that ends up being a plot, but the emotional state of the people in his films. As an audience we love to have emotional connections to the characters, but we also like to be challenged and tested. He delivers on these two things very often. 

In this video interview, Hitchcock freely opens up his views on film-making once again. He is talking about identification in films. Identification is also called association. it might also be the way that  we empathise with a character, because we identify with them. He says:

“That’s why not only the identification, but the quality of identification matters and is a contributive thing.” 

This point makes a lot of rational sense. Quality is always king over doing less because you didn't think of something or you didn't want to. In depth story and characters which have been nurtured by a director should be presented in a way that their identification is executed with precision. The more you examine your film, the more you find. Striving for quality, will always give you a better film.

So which is more important? The way you made the film? Or the content of the film? The technique, or the content? Hitchcock takes a pretty firm stance on this as he tells the interviewer:

“I’m sure, that the painter is not a bit interested in the apples for themselves alone, but in the technique of his work which stimulates the emotion of the viewer of his picture.”

This sums it all up for me. It is the content that matters. The technique is how you present the content. What it all boils down to at the end of the day, is making your film with the audience in mind all the time.- What will they think? how will they feel? What will they want to see? How will they react? As the master of suspense, he plays with the audience in many films. Hitchcock is such a great film-maker because he tells a story he cares about, to an audience he is always conscious of.