But I think the more salient point is he wanted to do the right thing. He was saying, “I’m a filmmaker, this is what filmmaking is, this is the guy who’s at the cornerstone of what we do.” You can also say he was a very ambitious young man, he wanted to do a definitive book on someone. It also did precisely what Truffaut had hoped: helped relieve Hitchcock of his burdensome reputation as a lowly mainstream entertainer, and elevate him to the ranks of cinematic auteurs.īroadly speaking, what effect did the project have on both directors’ careers? I would say very broadly, that it signified Truffaut as a guy who really cared about correcting film history-and getting it right, and getting people excited about Hitchcock and by extension about cinema at its core. Hitchcock/Truffaut, published in 1966, comprised a title-by-title analysis of the older director’s inimitable technique, alongside illustrative freeze-frame montages. Their conversation, presided over by a translator and documented by the photographer Philippe Halsman, ate up 27 hours of tape, which Truffaut eventually transcribed and assembled into a book. Truffaut, your letter brought tears to my eyes,” Hitch wrote back, and soon thereafter Truffaut flew to Hollywood, where he spent eight days holed up in a conference room at Universal Studios interrogating the master of suspense about his craft. “Everyone would recognize that Alfred Hitchcock is the world’s greatest director,” Truffaut wrote. Truffaut got in touch to propose an in-depth series of interviews on the topic of Hitchcock’s oeuvre. In 1962, the 30-year-old French New Wave director François Truffaut, whose Jules and Jim and The 400 Blows had recently garnered him international acclaim, wrote a letter to one of his filmic heroes, the 63-year-old British director Alfred Hitchcock.

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