Thread by @DannyDrinksWine

In honour of Sir Alfred Hitchcock's 125th birthday, here is a short thread of,

Filmmakers praising Alfred Hitchcock- A Thread: 🧵

(1/17)

"If you want to study film or actually make films, you don’t need to go to film school; you just need to watch Hitchcock’s movies. The entire vocabulary of cinema is embodied in his work."

--- William Friedkin

(2/17)

"I learned from Hitchcock a lot; his technical standard is enormous."

--- Ingmar Bergman

(3/17)

"Alfred Hitchcock's English works are better than the American pictures, the very early ones, like 'The 39 Steps' (1935). Oh, my God, what a masterpiece. Those pictures had a little foreign charm, because we didn’t know the actors very well."

--- Orson Welles

(4/17)

"In Hitchcock's movies, mysteries, one sometimes finds slight inconsequences in the story. But, I think, it would be also a right opinion that movies should only be enjoyable."

--- Akira Kurosawa

(5/17)

"Hitchcock could work with so precise a script; not only every word, but every gesture was preplanned. He saw the film in his head before he made it."

--- Federico Fellini

(6/17)

"Hitchcock, the filmmaker who is the most accessible to all audiences on account of the simplicity and clarity of his work, is also the one who excels in filming the most subtle relationships between human beings."

--- François Truffaut

(7/17)

Steven Spielberg: (8/17)

"Interviewer: Hitchcock is funny because he had a pulp sensibility but a very polished look.

SPIELBERG: Yes, he does, very much so. But Hitchcock also storyboards everything, and everything is done by the numbers in the order that he places them. He paints by numbers. Hitchcock’s most brilliant work is done privately, with the sketch artist, and so I think he spends the greatest amount of creative energy on the planning stages, and then when he goes to make a movie, he sticks very closely with the battle plan.

And so his movies are, for me anyway, like perfect, premeditated murders. And he’s wicked. Hitchcock films have a wicked, deadly glint in the eye, and that’s the pollen that Hitchcock has left behind. But at the same time, his films are very different, one from the next. Lifeboat is much different from North by Northwest. North by Northwest is much more of a Hollywood genre movie, whereas Lifeboat is like a stage play."

"When I was nine, I watched Hitchcock's ‘Psycho’ (1960) & ‘The Wages of Fear’ (1953) by Clouzot. I wanted to become someone behind the camera, ever since then."

--- Bong Joon-ho

(9/17)

"Film is one of the only art forms where you can give the audience the same visual information the character has. I learned it from Hitchcock."

--- Brian De Palma

(10/17)

"I saw a lot of Hitchcock when I was a kid; there were very few people who were that specifically true to their ideas and proclivities. So he was and is a very interesting filmmaker. His movies are so mainstream and so personal at the same time."

--- David Fincher

(11/17)

Jean-Luc Godard: (12/17)

"Throughout his entire career, Hitchcock has never used an unnecessary shot. Even the most anodyne of them invariably serve the plot, which they enrich rather as the 'touch' beloved of the Impressionists enriched their paintings. They acquire their particular meaning only when seen in the context of the whole."

Peter Bogdanovich: (13/17)

"Hitchcock has that ability to really manipulate an audience. It’s just like making people laugh. But I get more satisfaction out of suspense, because it’s harder to do. People will laugh at a lot of things: look at all the TV shows. To make somebody really nervous is very difficult.

People say, “Oh, Hitchcock. The Master of Suspense. Big deal.” Well, wait a minute. That’s not so easy to do. Film is the most emotional medium in the world. That’s why this whole literary approach, publishing scripts and so on, is so ridiculous. Film affects you. It has nothing to do with anything else. If you’re able to stop and think about a movie, which you can’t do if it’s done well, then it’s after all “just a movie.” Something has to happen; it must come into your eyes and affect you."

Billy Wilder: (14/17)

"I am all over the place—every category of pictures I have made, good, bad, or indifferent. I could not make, like Hitchcock did, one Hitchcock picture after another. But he was very smart, because the husband says to the wife and kids, “Hey, there’s a new Hitchcock picture—that means there’s gonna be suspense, it’s gonna be rah-rah-rah, there’s gonna be one corpse, or more corpses, and then a super-solution. Let’s go to that!” He did that very well."

"Every step is important. It depends on what kind of director you are. If you are Hitchcock, it does not matter because he was clear about what he wanted when he shot. That’s why no one knew how to edit his films—only he could do it."

--- Wong Kar-wai

(15/17)

"I am passionate about Hitchcock. I think he is one of the greatest directors in history, especially for his way of storytelling."

--- Dario Argento

(16/17)

"You can recognize Alfred Hitchcock’s style the way you can recognize Bach, you know. He probably is the Bach of filmmakers! To me, Hitchcock wrote the textbook on suspense cinema."

--- George A. Romero

(17/17)

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