Word: hitchcocked
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...world's most famous film director may waddle a bit more slowly and his double chin may now be subdivided into a triplex, but no one, particularly an actor who strays into his corral, can doubt that there is still only one brand on a Hitchcock film...
...Hitchcock writes, films and edits a picture-on a screen some place behind his hazel eyes-long before the cameras are loaded. "I can make a film on paper," he says. "I never improvise." The grisly scene in Frenzy in which the killer wrestles with a dead body in a potato sack-almost certain to be enshrined by the Cahierists-was dictated by Hitchcock to his secretary one day at lunch, with every stomach-curdling movement laid out in exactly 118 takes...
...actual filming is almost an afterthought. The script and preparation of Frenzy, for example, took six months, and Hitchcock's always meticulous casting took another two. Shooting, by contrast, lasted only 55 days. When the cameras begin rolling, says Hitchcock, "I'd just as soon not make the picture. The creative thing is over, and you begin to compromise...
...modern films are "cinematic" enough for Hitchcock. "What do you see now?" he asks. "Photographs of people talking, which is only an extension of the theater. Or car chases, which are just movement. Pure cinema is the assembly of pieces of film that when put together create an idea in the mind of the audience. And out of that idea comes an emotion...
Greatest Enemy. With Hitchcock, in films and in life, style is everything, and not the smallest detail escapes his eye. His dress is impeccable if funereal, and his life, so serene as to seem unHitchcockian, is as well planned as his movies. He and his wife of 46 years, Alma, live in a two-bedroom house in Bel Air, Calif.; the only thing unusual about it is the large kitchen, with walk-in refrigerator and a wine cellar, which has a vast if diminishing collection. The prices of French wines today are too much even for a director who makes...