Quotes about Alfred Hitchcock

11 Sourced Quotes

Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.

Hitchcock was a character. In one particularly scary scene I had to sneak down a dark corridor. When I got to the end there was Mr. Hitchcock, sticking out his tongue and flapping his hands in the back of his ears. I didn't dare laugh, because the cameras were turning. But he certainly eliminated any tension I felt.

Well, I think you just have to be prepared to be weirder and weirder. I follow the example of Robyn Hitchcock who, I think, has created a career out of this world he has constructed. It's very much his world, and he continually builds upon it. I think he's received criticism in the past along the lines of, Oh, here's another Robyn Hitchcock record about flesh and fish, and things like that, but in fact if you really look at the songs, they're just the building blocks for this very complex, very vibrant, and very real world that exists within his songwriting. So I look to him for inspiration.

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

[Alfred Hitchcock] thought of himself as looking like Cary Grant. That's tough, to think of yourself one way and look another.

Hitchcock said a movie should play the audience like a piano. Death Race played me like a drum. It is an assault on all senses, including common. Walking out, I had the impression I had just seen the video game and was still waiting for the movie.

Hitchcock was more careful about how the birds were treated than he was about me. I was just there to be pecked.

On the filming of The Birds

In the vast majority of movies, everything is done for the audience. We are cued to laugh or cry, be frightened or relieved; Hitchcock called the movies a machine for causing emotions in the audience. Bresson (and Ozu) take a different approach. They regard, and ask us to regard along with them, and to arrive at conclusions about their characters that are our own. This is the cinema of empathy.

Today, Psycho still holds up extraordinarily well (another reason why a remake seems pointless). With the exception of Halloween, no latter-day horror/thriller has been capable of generating as many goosebumps. The black-and-white photography is perfect for the film's tone and mood — the starkness of color would have blurred the nightmarish quality. The painstaking care with which [director Alfred] Hitchcock composed every scene is evident in the quality of the final product.

James Berardinelli

The World Trade center was an example of what was wrong with American architecture, and it stayed that way for twenty-five years until that Friday afternoon in February when the bomb went off and the buildings became a great symbol of America, like the Statue of Liberty at the end of Hitchcock's Saboteur. My whole attitude toward the World Trade Center changed overnight.

I suppose more than anything else I'd like to be an old man with a good face, like Hitchcock or Picasso. They know that life is not just a popularity contest.