The point of this would be to distil not a series of articles but an entire book which would be published simultaneously in New York (I would consider offering it, for example, to Simon and Schuster where I have some friends) and Paris (by Gallimard or Robert Laffont), then, probably later, more or less everywhere in the world. I would like you to grant me a tape-recorded interview which would take about eight days to conduct and would add up to about thirty hours of recordings. There are many directors with a love for the cinema, but what you possess is a love of celluloid itself and it is that which I would like to talk to you about. Since I have become a director myself, my admiration for you has in no way weakened on the contrary, it has grown stronger and changed in nature. Moreover, the kind of propaganda that we were responsible for in Cahiers du cinéma was excellent as far as France was concerned, but inappropriate for America because it was too intellectual. In the course of my discussions with foreign journalists and especially in New York, I have come to realize that their conception of your work is often very superficial. The latest, Jules et Jim, is currently showing in New York. I have made three films, the first of which, The Four Hundred Blows, had, I believe, a certain success in Hollywood. Subsequently, each time you visited Paris, I had the pleasure of meeting you with Odette Ferry, and for the following year you even said to me, ‘Whenever I see ice cubes in a glass of whisky I think of you.’ One year after that, you invited me to come to New York for a few days and watch the shooting of The Wrong Man, but I had to decline the invitation since, a few months after Claude Chabrol, I turned to film-making myself. You very kindly agreed to postpone the interview which was conducted that same evening at your hotel. You asked us to go and wait for you in the studio bar, and it was then that, in the excitement of having watched fifteen times in succession a ‘loop’ showing Brigitte Auber and Cary Grant in a speedboat, Chabrol and I fell into the frozen tank in the studio courtyard. A few years ago, in late 1954, when I was a film journalist, I came with my friend Claude Chabrol to interview you at the Saint-Maurice studio where you were directing the post-synchronization of To Catch a Thief. In the letter he wrote to Hitchcock earlier that year, Truffaut outlined his reasons for wanting to interview him in such depth:įirst of all, allow me to remind you who I am. In late August 1962, Francois Truffaut carried out a week of all day interviews with Alfred Hitchcock covering his life and work in cinema. HOME > FRENCH NEW WAVE INTERVIEWS > Hitchcock / Truffaut Interviews

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