Hitchcock \ Truffaut Page #2

And then, in 1934,

he made the first

100% Hitchcock picture.

HITCHCOCK:
St. Moritz

was the beginning

of The Man Who Knew Too Much.

It was the place

of our honeymoon.

NARRATOR:
And of course,

Hollywood beckoned.

HITCHCOCK:
I wasn't attracted

to Hollywood as a place.

(WOMAN SPEAKING FRENCH)

HITCHCOCK:

That had no interest,

what had interest for me was

getting inside that studio.

(SPEAKING JAPAN ESE)

Hitchcock did some of his

best work in the '40s.

But in the '50s, he soared.

I have a murder on my conscience,

but it's not my murder.

NARRATOR:
And curiosity

of James Stewart,

in this story of a romance shadowed

by the terror of a horrifying secret.

Look, John, hold them.

Diamonds.

SCORSESE:
There was a spell

that was cast with those films

in the '50s and the '60s.

And it's a special

blessed time for me

because I saw them

as they came out.

NARRATOR:
Truffaut began

as a critic in the early '50s.

(INAUDIBLE)

He started at the great French

film magazine, Gamers du Unma.

For the writers at Cahiers, soon to become

the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague,

Hitchcock's greatness

as an artist was self-evident.

(JEAN-LUC GODARD

SPEAKING FRENCH)

Before they made

their own movies,

the Cahiers critics erected

a new pantheon of cinema-

The directors who were

the true artists,

the authors who wrote with

the camera, the auteurs.

(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)

(ASSAYAS SPEAKING FRENCH)

(SPEAKS FRENCH)

Being an individual artist

meant self-exposure,

pouring all of yourself into your movie,

all of your fears

and obsessions and fetishes,

just like Hitchcock did.

(MAN WHISTLING)

MAN:
All together! Pull!

(SPEAKING FRENCH)

Hitchcock often told the story of being

sent to the police station as a boy,

where he was locked up for a few

minutes as a symbolic punishment.

He said that it led to a

lifelong fear of the police.

But Truffaut

really was locked up.

He was delivered to the police

by his own father,

(SPEAKING ANGRILY IN FRENCH)

and then sent to

a juvenile detention center,

an episode he put into his

autobiographical first feature.

(TRUFFAUT SPEAKING FRENCH)

Truffaut had a fierce

attachment to freedom.

It's there

in all of his films.

And it sent him in search of another

father, a father who would liberate him.

(INAUDIBLE)

He found the great

film critic Andre' Bazin,

who virtually adopted Truffaut and

brought him to Gamers du Unma.

He found Jean Renoir,

and Roberto Rossellini.

And he found Alfred Hitchcock.

Hitchcock had freed Truffaut as an artist,

and Truffaut wanted to reciprocate

by freeing Hitchcock

from his reputation as a light entertainer.

And that's the basis on which

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