Hitchcock au travail

Icon Icon Opinion : 

This book is unparalleled in capturing Alfred Hitchcock’s place as the absolute master of directing! It will point amateur and aspiring filmmakers in the direction of solutions to practical problems of production, scripting and shooting. The curious will find an inexhaustible source of information on the other side of Hitchcock’s masterful films!

Author: Bill Krohn

Publishing House: Cahiers du Cinéma

Publication Date: 15 October 2009

Here is finally a book that tells, film after film, how the master of suspense worked, his quirks, his techniques, his requirements and his rigor. Hitchcock at Work sheds light for the first time on the Master of Suspense’s filming methods, from the films of his English period in the 1920s and 1930s to his best-known Hollywood period, with masterpieces such as The Wire, The Crime Was Almost Perfect, North by Northwest and Vertigo. The book is illustrated by numerous unpublished archival documents: personal notes, storyboards, budgets, memos, letters, and location scouting photographs. Bill Krohn thus offers us a totally new vision of the director, which goes far beyond the myths (sometimes maintained by Hitchcock himself!). This book reveals to the reader an artistic process in motion, constantly nourished by the contribution of his collaborators: each film is analyzed as an adventure in its own right, from the first drafts of the scripts to the work of the editor, the cinematographer or the actors. Based on unprecedented research in Hitchcock’s personal and studio archives, Hitchcock at Work invites the reader to share the secrets of one of the greatest directors of the twentieth century, whose films still frighten and delight audiences around the world. It is a veritable guide to spectacular iconography, for aspiring filmmakers as well as for fans of a man who brought the art of filmmaking to a rare degree of perfection.

Literary prize of the French Union of Film Critics 1999.