Two Directors, One Conversation: Kent Jones on Making Hitchcock/Truffaut
Kent Jones KCRW
Kent Jones is a film critic and documentary filmmaker who directs the New York Film Festival and serves as deputy editor of Film Comment magazine. His earlier documentaries include Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (2007) and A Letter to Elia (2010). His latest, Hitchcock/Truffaut, revisits François Truffaut's legendary 1962 interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, a conversation that became a landmark in film history.
Ahead of the film's London cinema release, we spoke with Jones about why the book matters, what the original tapes reveal and what today's filmmakers can still learn from Hitchcock.
Key Insights
A Filmmaker Talking to a Filmmaker: Jones believes Truffaut succeeded where critics failed because he approached Hitchcock as a fellow director, not as a journalist.
The Warmer Hitchcock of the Tapes: The book makes Hitchcock seem cold and precise. The recordings reveal a warm, funny and spontaneous man.
Every Shot Should Count: Hitchcock's handling of space and distance shows how to make each image serve the drama rather than simply fill in information.
Directors Talking About Directing: Jones deliberately chose working filmmakers as his only interviewees, avoiding experts and former collaborators.
Masterpieces Outlast Their Critics: The book helped raise Hitchcock's reputation, but Jones argues the films themselves were always destined to endure.
Key Figures
Several people sit at the centre of the documentary, each bringing a different perspective to Hitchcock's legacy.
Alfred Hitchcock
Jones has been watching Hitchcock's films since he first read the book at around twelve, more than four decades ago. He has long since lost count of how many times he has seen Vertigo, Rear Window, Psycho, Saboteur and I Confess.
François Truffaut
Truffaut had already interviewed Hitchcock as a critic in the 1950s, alongside Claude Chabrol. By 1962 he was an acclaimed director in his own right, which changed the nature of the conversation entirely.
Helen Scott
Because Truffaut spoke no English, he relied on Helen Scott to translate every exchange. Her translations were later revised in France and, Jones suspects, translated back into English, putting the book at several removes from Hitchcock's actual words.
David Fincher and Martin Scorsese
Among the contemporary directors in the film, Fincher and Scorsese speak most about how cinema has changed since Hitchcock's era. Jones notes that Fincher faces the same accusation once aimed at Hitchcock, of neglecting actors, yet is in fact very attentive to them.
Why Truffaut Got Through
Many interviewers, André Bazin among them, tried and failed to get Hitchcock to talk seriously about his craft. Jones points to three things that set Truffaut apart.
One Director to Another
A critic interviewing a filmmaker creates one kind of dynamic; two filmmakers talking creates quite another. Truffaut's standing as a director gave the conversation a footing no critic could match.
A Project Built on Respect
Truffaut proposed to go through every one of Hitchcock's films, examining his themes and methods, to show why he was the most important filmmaker alive. That ambition clearly meant a great deal to Hitchcock.
Tapes Never Meant to Be Heard
The recordings were made only to be transcribed for the book. With no audience in mind, Hitchcock dropped the polished anecdotes he usually trotted out, such as his famous line about actors being cattle.
What the Tapes Reveal
For readers who know the book well, the audio is a revelation. The Hitchcock on the page seems distant and humourless apart from a few weak jokes, but the man on tape is warm, funny and spontaneous. The tapes also capture him returning again and again to a nagging question: whether he should have devoted more attention to character. Jones finds those moments beautiful and deeply moving.
Hitchcock's Cinematic Language
Both the book and the documentary focus on how Hitchcock used images to create meaning and emotion. Jones highlights several lessons for filmmakers today.
The Economy of Space
Hitchcock used space and distance dramatically so that no shot was wasted. In an unused part of the tapes, he advises never to use an establishing shot merely to establish, but to save it for maximum dramatic effect. The film does include his example from The Birds (1963): Tippi Hedren shrinking back on the couch as she hears the birds outside. By keeping the camera at a distance, Hitchcock lets the audience see the emptiness she is recoiling from.
The Screen, Not the Set
The broader point is that what matters is how a scene plays on screen, not how it feels during filming. Jones sees this as increasingly forgotten.
The Shift from Directors to Actors
Scorsese and Fincher discuss how the balance of power moved toward actors after the rise of the Actors Studio. Growing out of the Group Theatre of the 1930s, it was founded by Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis and Cheryl Crawford before Lee Strasberg took over, and it shaped generations of acting teachers. In a remark that didn't make the final cut, Fincher said acting can sometimes turn into "an emotional playground." Jones argues that directors need to strike a balance between performance and image.
A Language Worth Learning
Above all, Jones wants younger filmmakers to grasp that cinematic language exists at all. He sees too many films made by people with no sense of it.
Making the Documentary
Jones admits, with a laugh, that the project began simply because someone asked him. He said yes at once, drawn to the chance of making a film about filmmaking at a time when he feels the craft is often undervalued.
Directors Only
Since the source is two directors discussing directing, Jones kept that spirit by interviewing only filmmakers. He felt experts and collaborators lead to predictable results. Instead, he let Hitchcock's images make the case, with directors reflecting on those images and on the book. He made that decision early and was glad the producers backed it.
Graphics and Music
Jones dislikes flashy graphics, so he kept them minimal but had them move in rhythm with the score. He briefly considered Bernard Herrmann's music but decided it belonged to Hitchcock. After using Jonny Greenwood's film scores as temporary music, he brought in young composer Jeremiah Bornfield, who created something new with a similar drive and instrumentation.
Concision and Pace
Jones values brevity and wanted the film to suggest more than it spells out. Some viewers have said it could have been longer; he deliberately chose not to make it so. He told editor and co-producer Rachel Reichman he wanted the momentum of the cross-cut website-building sequence in The Social Network, a kind of centrifugal energy that drives the structure.
Influence in Both Directions
Truffaut and Hitchcock became close friends, and critics have long debated how much each shaped the other's work.
Truffaut After Hitchcock
Jones rejects the view that Truffaut's post-interview films were uneven imitations. He calls Fahrenheit 451 (1966) a great film whose awkwardness is part of its power, and The Soft Skin a tremendous one. Mississippi Mermaid is very good if a little unwieldy, while The Bride Wore Black may be a lesser work. Beyond that, he sees little direct influence, and a film like The Woman Next Door is quite unlike Hitchcock.
A More Troubling Artist
For Jones, Truffaut is a deeply unsettling filmmaker, more so with time. The Truffaut-versus-Godard rivalry, likened to Lennon and McCartney, made his films seem easier to digest than they were. The Wild Child, The Green Room, Two English Girls and Day for Night are richer and darker than they appeared on release.
Hitchcock's Lifelong Doubts
Hitchcock's letter wondering if he should have experimented more with character was not, Jones believes, prompted by Truffaut. That doubt had always been there. In the early 1930s Hitchcock even proposed letting playwright John Van Druten work freely with actors and a camera for a year, though Van Druten declined. Jones attributes changes in Hitchcock's late work to shifts in acting styles, which he handled better than most, certainly better than Otto Preminger. He calls Frenzy a great film and singles out the Roscoe Lee Browne hotel scene in Topaz, filmed from a telephoto vantage across the street.
A Reputation Transformed
The book clearly raised Hitchcock's standing. As Peter Bogdanovich notes in the film, it mattered that a celebrated director from another generation and culture declared Hitchcock the greatest of all. The close attention of Godard, Rivette, Rohmer and Chabrol helped too, with the book at the centre. Ultimately, though, Jones believes the films were simply too good not to outlast the judgments of their day.
Conclusion
Kent Jones's Hitchcock/Truffaut is both a tribute to a landmark book and a passionate case for cinema as a visual language. By letting directors speak about directing, and by restoring the warmth of Hitchcock's own voice, the documentary brings new life to a conversation that shaped generations of filmmakers.
As you revisit Hitchcock's films, or Truffaut's, consider how much can be said with a single, carefully placed image. Whether in the distance between Tippi Hedren and the unseen birds or in the restless energy of a modern edit, the lessons of that 1962 conversation are still waiting to be learned.
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