Hitchcock's Voice in a Box: Serge Toubiana on Truffaut and the Legendary Tapes
Serge Toubiana From Wild Filmmaker
For more than four decades, Serge Toubiana has stood at the heart of French film culture. He co-edited Cahiers du cinémaalongside Serge Daney from 1973 to 1981, then led the magazine as editor until 1991. From 2003 to 2015 he served as director of the Cinémathèque Française. He also co-wrote Truffaut: A Biography and co-directed the documentary François Truffaut: Stolen Portraits.
With the documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut heading to cinemas, newwavefilm.com sat down with Toubiana, who co-wrote its screenplay, to talk about the film and his friendship with François Truffaut. Our thanks go to the French Institute in London for arranging the conversation; its Ciné Lumière regularly screens French New Wave films.
Key Insights
A Dialogue Between Two Cinemas: Toubiana sees the 1962 Hitchcock–Truffaut conversations as a meeting of French auteur theory and Hollywood craft. A 30-year-old critic-turned-director set out to prove that a popular entertainer was a true master.
A Mission to Convince America: Truffaut launched the project after a 1960 trip to New York, where he was dismayed to find American critics dismissing Hitchcock as merely a "master of suspense."
Practical, Not Philosophical: Hitchcock resisted abstract discussion of his work. He opened up gradually over the week, and the conversation peaked when he spoke about Psycho.
The Power of Pure Cinema: For Toubiana, Hitchcock's enduring lesson is telling stories through image and sound rather than dialogue, a lesson rooted in silent film.
Criticism Still Matters: Critics can change how a director is seen, as the shifting reputation of Clint Eastwood shows. But they must also resist calling every young filmmaker an auteur too soon.
Influential Figures
Several key figures shape Toubiana's story, each playing a part in how Hitchcock came to be seen as an artist.
Alfred Hitchcock
In 1962 Hitchcock was a famous Hollywood showman who had never won an Oscar and was rarely treated as an auteur. Working within the studio system, he had learned to stay guarded and practical. Toubiana describes him as an inventor of cinematic form, in the same league as Eisenstein.
François Truffaut
Truffaut began as a young, aggressive and gifted critic at Cahiers du cinéma. By 1962 he had made three features, including Shoot the Piano Player and Jules et Jim. His lifelong obsession was uncovering the secret of cinema, which he believed lay in silent film.
André Bazin
The founding spirit of Cahiers, Bazin was at first unconvinced that Hitchcock was a great director. That changed in 1954, when he interviewed Hitchcock on the set of To Catch a Thief in the south of France and came away persuaded.
Serge Daney
Toubiana's mentor and co-editor, Daney took charge of Cahiers after its Maoist period. Together the two men steered the magazine back toward cinema, a process that took about five years.
The Story Behind Hitchcock/Truffaut
Toubiana's connection to the documentary goes back more than twenty years, to a box he opened in Truffaut's old office.
Discovering the Lost Tapes (1992)
While researching Stolen Portraits with co-director Michel Pascal, Toubiana was searching the archives at Les Films du Carrosse, Truffaut's production company. Inside a large box he found a stack of reel-to-reel tapes. When they played one on a Nagra, Hitchcock's voice filled the room. These were the original recordings from August 1962 in Hitchcock's bungalow at Universal Studios, with Truffaut speaking French, Hitchcock answering in English and Helen Scott translating between them.
Bringing the Voices to Radio (1999)
Only a short extract made it into Stolen Portraits. Then, for Hitchcock's centenary, Toubiana persuaded Madeleine Morgenstern, Truffaut's former wife, who ran Les Films du Carrosse, to do more with the material. With his old Cahiers colleague Nicolas Saada, he presented twenty-five half-hour episodes on France Culture. The series was a hit with cinephiles, yet it used only about half of the fifty hours of recordings.
Making the Documentary
The film began with French producer Olivier Mille and American filmmaker Gail Levin, who died suddenly during development. Toubiana suggested co-producing with Charles Cohen of Cohen Media, who brought in director Kent Jones, a longtime friend from Toubiana's Cahiers days and a filmmaker close to Martin Scorsese.
Inside the Dialogue
Toubiana first read the book as a young man in its original 1966 French edition, Le Cinéma selon Alfred Hitchcock, and calls it central to his education in cinema.
The Battle for Hitchcock
In the 1950s, championing Hitchcock was a fight even inside Cahiers. Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer and Godard believed in him, while Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and especially Pierre Kast saw only an entertainer. Truffaut, just 22, organized a special Hitchcock issue that Toubiana likens to a putsch. Script supervisor Sylvette Baudrot, working on To Catch a Thief, translated Bazin's on-set interview, letters she recently donated to the Cinémathèque. The young critics won in France, but in 1960 Truffaut found American critics still unconvinced. That prompted his famously heartfelt letter to Hitchcock proposing the book.
The Birds and Jules et Jim
Truffaut prepared like a director preparing a shoot, catching up on films in Brussels and arriving with some five hundred questions. Hitchcock was editing The Birds and appears to have shown Truffaut early scenes, since the tapes open with that film. Truffaut seems to have screened Jules et Jim in return. Hitchcock, a Catholic, was shocked by its cremation scene, while fire was a recurring theme for Truffaut. That exchange never made it into the book.
Psycho: The Turning Point
At first Hitchcock was reserved and steered clear of Truffaut's theoretical ideas. As the week went on he relaxed, and the high point came with Psycho. Hitchcock spoke with pride about controlling the audience through pure cinema in a low-budget film, with every shot cut precisely to the frame and the music. For Toubiana, this is the real Hitchcock explaining his method.
Desire and Restraint
Both men had childhood experiences of being locked up, yet they were opposites: Truffaut was a seducer, while Hitchcock longed to be one. Toubiana agrees with Truffaut's theory that Hitchcock transformed his physical self-consciousness into the charged sensuality of his films. That tension between desire and restriction is captured in Truffaut's observation that Hitchcock filmed love scenes like murders and murders like love scenes.
Hitchcock's Lasting Influence
The documentary features many contemporary directors, few of whom make films that look obviously Hitchcockian. Toubiana explains why the book still speaks to them.
The Idea of Pure Cinema
Hitchcock complained that too many films were simply people talking, closer to theatre than cinema. Toubiana feels the same about much of today's dialogue-driven filmmaking, which neglects mise en scène, the art of showing through image and sound. He singles out Martin Scorsese and David Fincher as the documentary's most illuminating voices on this point.
Lessons from the Silent Era
The Cahiers critics admired Hitchcock's English films as much as his Hollywood work, recognizing his mastery long before the 1940s. Hitchcock credited silent cinema, along with Fritz Lang and the German Expressionists, with teaching him to tell stories in pictures.
Why Film Criticism Still Matters
Toubiana believes critics can still change how a filmmaker is seen. Clint Eastwood's early work as a director drew harsh reviews because he was regarded as just a popular actor from the Sergio Leone and Don Siegel films. One of the first to praise him was a young Olivier Assayas, around the time of Honkytonk Man (1982). Today Eastwood is respected as one of America's finest directors.
The Tyranny of Auteurs
Toubiana also warns against the opposite mistake: labelling every promising young director an auteur. In his view, that title is earned over a long body of work.
Knowing Truffaut
Toubiana's relationship with Truffaut began awkwardly but grew into one of the most important of his life.
A First Meeting (1975)
At the time, Truffaut was angry with Cahiers over its Maoist turn. Toubiana urged Daney to reach out, and the two wrote him a joint letter. Truffaut received them at his office near the Champs-Élysées, shy but with a piercing gaze. He told them they should return the magazine to cinema, as Bazin had intended, and offered his support while staying neutral. The pair rode the Métro home in silence, but the meeting set the course for the magazine's renewal.
The 1980 Interview
Toubiana later persuaded Truffaut to give Cahiers a major interview, recorded over a full day at Toubiana's home. Truffaut used it to answer Godard's attacks, and it marked a new relationship between the director and the magazine. Afterwards the two lunched twice a year. Truffaut came to trust him and called him the most civilized critic at Cahiers. Loving both Truffaut and Godard was difficult in those politically charged years; even Daney preferred Godard.
Inside the Archives
Truffaut's death at just 52 left Toubiana deeply shaken, as he was the first of the New Wave directors to die. Madeleine Morgenstern opened the archives at Les Films du Carrosse, where every film had its dossier, alongside files on Chaplin, Bresson, Renoir, Hitchcock, Rivette, Rohmer, Godard and more. Toubiana compares it to The Green Room, a sanctuary holding a whole life. What fascinated him was how carefully Truffaut had built his career, from fierce young critic to Les Mistons and The 400 Blows. That curiosity led to Stolen Portraits, the biography and a 2014 Cinémathèque exhibition, later shown in Fribourg, Switzerland. New finds, including letters from Ray Bradbury, Jean Cocteau, Rossellini and Renoir, are now going to the Cinémathèque.
Conclusion
Serge Toubiana's story is a reminder of how much of film history depends on people who care enough to look in the right box. His discovery of the Hitchcock–Truffaut tapes, and his decades of work at Cahiers du cinéma and the Cinémathèque Française, have kept one of cinema's great conversations alive for new generations.
As you watch Hitchcock/Truffaut, consider how a young French critic's determination to prove a point reshaped the way the world sees a Hollywood master. Whether through the image-driven storytelling Hitchcock championed or the passionate criticism Truffaut embodied, their dialogue continues to shape how we watch, make and think about films today.
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