Hitchcock/Truffaut (2015)

(On TV, September 2019) After watching Hitchcock/Truffaut and seeing a few of François Truffaut’s best-known movies, I think I’ve got a new name for the old “what celebrities, dead or alive, would you like to have over for a dinner party?”: I really would have liked to talk filmmaking with Truffaut. One fascinating footnote in his biography is the way he idolized Hitchcock as a young man, all the way to interviewing the English director at length in order to write a book about him. The book was published in 1966, but Hitchcock/Truffaut describes the five days Truffaut spent with Hitchcock in order to tell us how those interviews came to be, and how they influenced both filmmakers. The meeting between the two (indeed, their friendship that would last until Hitchcock’s death) is the stuff that is almost too true for cinephiles, and this documentary really illustrates it well. Using photos, movie clips, interview footage, highlighted documents and audio recordings of the interviews, the film explains how the two filmmakers met, the insights that Truffaut got from Hitchcock about his films and the growing rapport between the two. I don’t expect most audiences to make much of the film, especially if they’re not already fans of either one of the directors. There’s some awkward sound editing in the final product—silences and cuts probably reflecting the original, but feeling disruptive to the flow of the film. It naturally spends more time on some of Hitchcock’s best-known films, specifically Vertigo (which I should re-watch at some point) and Psycho. Still, the appeal here is seeing two titans of cinema (even though Truffaut was still a rookie director at the time) have the kind of high-level chat only possible between two people fluent in cinematic language. It’s quite inspiring, oddly likable and makes Truffaut looking incredibly likable as a star-struck fanboy until the interview begins and he’s back in his film-critic persona with unlimited access to a major director.