My Name is Alfred Hitchcock

“With its singular design and two-hour runtime, this isn’t aimed at casual moviegoers. But for film buffs and Hitchcock fans, it’s a refreshing, essential alternative to the usual fodder.” – Empire Magazine

2022 marks the hundred-year anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s first feature. A century on, Hitchcock remains one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. But how does his vast body of work and legacy hold up in today’s society?

Mark Cousins, the award-winning filmmaker behind The Story of Film: An Odyssey , The Eyes of Orson Welles, and The Story of Film: A New Generation , tackles this question and looks at the auteur with a new and radical approach: through the use of his own voice. As Hitchcock rewatches his films, we are taken on an odyssey through his vast career – his vivid silent films, the legendary films of the 1950s and 60s and his later works – in playful and revealing ways.

DIRECTORS’ STATEMENT
In 2021 my producer John Archer tells me that 2022 will be the hundredth anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s first film, Number 13 . He asks if I could make a film on Hitch. Though I once made a movie about Orson Welles, I usually avoid the big cinema beasts. They’re well covered and I prefer to explore less well known territory. But the films of Alfred Hitchcock seem inexhaustible for me. And I immediately have an idea of how to do it. What if it’s a film in the first person? Hitchcock himself speaks, but not using archive footage or old interviews. What if I write a new, long monologue to be voiced by someone who can sound like Alfred? Like an Alan Bennett monologue. The idea excites me because it will allow me as a filmmaker to be very direct, to play with voice.

To be sure that there are new things to say about Hitchcock, and since it’s lockdown, I decide to watch all the films in chronological order. At the same time I’ll read some of the many books analyzing his techniques and obsessions, as well as his daughter Patricia’s book, Tippi Hedren’s and others. To direct my viewing, I choose some less expected themes to look for: loneliness, fulfillment, height, etc. I begin to watch and am immediately scribbling pages of notes. When you watch with fulfillment in mind, for example, The Lodger and The Lady Vanishes become subtly different. Earlier silent films start to feel like pre-echoes of Vertigo . I watch hours of interviews with Hitch and get to know his voice, his cadences. More pages of notes. My notebooks fill. A few months later, I’m ready to write. I take scissors to my notebooks, cutting them up into lines and paragraphs. I end up with about a thousand bits of paper. I then gather these into themes and use them to structure my writing. I got lost in the writing for several weeks. And then the script’s done and editor Timo Langer and I start to cut, initially using my own voice to stand in for Hitchcock.

When we’re finished, the film runs two hours. Producer John and Exec Producer Clara Glynn watch it and we agree that we have a mosaic of some sort, a playful weave. But who will do the Hitchcock voice? I asked my friend Simon Callow for suggestions. He says “the best ear in the business is Alistair McGowan”. We contacted his agent. Eventually I receive an audio file message on my phone. It’s Alistair reading the first 5 mins of the script. And he is Hitch. I record him in a small studio in Shrewsbury and – though I’ve worked with Jane Fonda, Tilda Swinton and many of the best in the business – I am struck by the precision and inventiveness of his talent. We replace my voice with his and the film is more alive.

The movie is finished. In the opening credits I say “Written and narrated by Alfred Hitchcock”. This is not true of course – and in the end credits we tell the audience who really did the voice – but we want to create the illusion that Alfred Hitchcock finally decided, from beyond the grave, to take us on a guide through his remarkable body of work, one of the great image systems of the 20th Century, a labyrinth of pleasure and desire.

From our 21st century, Hitchcock’s Saboteur looks like a road movie, a landscape portrait of America and a lovely essay in tolerance. The tenderness in The Farmer’ s Wife seems to echo the director’s long, close relationship with his wife Alma. The 39 Steps feels like a film of hyperlinks. The moral seriousness of The Wrong Man and Rope is as clear as ever and makes them look central to Hitchcock’s cinema, and the loneliness in Psycho , I Confess and Rear Window sings out. Watched in sequence, you see the filmmaker search. Not just for stories but for fulfillment, audacity and form.

This search makes his films feel of today. For a man so interested in timing, his work is timeless.

– Mark Cousins