Hitchcock

"Darren Aronofsky: Wow, so much. I got the book from Sean Gullette, the star of Pi, many years ago, and I proceeded to read that copy until it literally fell apart. I still haven’t replaced it. I have it duct-taped together. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s an amazing guide to Hitchcock’s thought process. Truffaut, being a fantastic filmmaker himself, was able to ask really profound, informed questions that really got to the heart of filmmaking. Truffaut got Hitchcock to reveal a lot of the different techniques that he used to put together his monumental body of work. Darren Aronofsky: Absolutely. The return to the basics of filmmaking, the connection to the edit, the use of handheld camera, and the attention to realism all influenced what I did in The Wrestler and Black Swan . Darren Aronofsky: Of course I know The Birds. In fact, one of my mentors in film school was Robert Boyle, who was a production designer on that movie. And I looked at the film a lot. The visual effects are incredible. But that was dealing with an external avian threat, and in Black Swan there is an internal one. Darren Aronofsky: Right. Well I think when you’re doing a descent into madness, where the character is doubting his or her sanity, it’s going to leave a lot of room for ambiguity. Because I think Natalie Portman’s character’s whole movement into insanity is ambiguous to the character herself — until she finally seizes on it and takes the reins. It was very intentional that the audience could be as unsure as she was, when strange things seemed to happen. There needed to be doubt on that journey."

"Yes, Hitchcock is a great artist, but he hides his art behind these thrillers. It’s like a gut punch when you see something like Psycho for the first time. I remember watching that when I was about 12 and just walking about the house feeling completely torn apart and not knowing what the hell I had just seen. So hearing Truffaut, who is another one of my favourite directors, talking to Hitchcock and having this conversation where they reassess his career for the first time and start to talk about his career in terms of art rather than just entertainment, is fascinating. It is one of the best books on film ever written."