Photo credit: Courtesy Cohen Media Group
Directed by Mark Cousins, My Name is Alfred Hitchcock re-examines the vast filmography and legacy of one of the 20th century’s greatest filmmakers, Alfred Hitchcock, through a new lens: the auteur’s own voice.
A century after the debut of Alfred Hitchcock’s first feature, he 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 world?
Mark Cousins, the award-winning filmmaker 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.
In the opening credits Mark says “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.
Mark Cousins
The narrator is actually Alistair McGowan, a British impressionist, actor and stand-up comedian who made his name in the 1990s on television programs like “Spitting Image.” He went on to have his own impressions show on BBC One: ‘The Big Impression’ (1999-2004).
His narration captures Hitchcock’s iconic tone so perfectly that it’s almost eerie; you can’t help but feel transported to his world. The subtle nuances and delivery are so authentic, it’s as if the master himself is narrating. If I hadn’t watched the credits I would have truly thought is was indeed Hitchcock.
Alistair McGowan
Q: I’m very curious about his early life because he was a rather physically unattractive man and yet welded so much power. Tell me a little bit how he developed from growing up in a lay person’s family into this really powerful man. What drove him?
A: Well, he’s English. He comes from outside of London. His family was interesting. He was aware about his own body, but he was really, I would say, a visual thinker. So he goes to Germany, he works with all these great German filmmakers and he comes to understand that his brain – he might not be the most beautiful person in the world physically – but his brain was super good around visual storytelling and that was his launching pad I think. He was curious the way he described some of those moments, like he preferred to show somebody alone as opposed to in a crowd. And I must say it is much more haunting seeing a person by themself as opposed to in the crowd. He was a genius in what he did. How did he come to his techniques? He seems to me that he based them all on personal experiences, but I could be wrong. He was very interested in loneliness. You think of Janet Leigh in the first section of Psycho. You think of Carrie Grant in North by Northwest. Loneliness was a big thing for him, and I think it’s one of the appealing qualities of his movies are those of us who are also loners. We love this cinema, I think, because it’s about somebody heading out in the world slightly scared and being alone. Beyond that, I think he was always balancing his sense of being a member of society, marrying Alma, being part of a community with a sort of more secret life of solitude. And I think we could see that in his films.
Q: Tell me something about his relationship with his wife, because a friend of mine, Larry Leamer, wrote a bestselling book on Hitchcock called The Blondes which is being made into a film for Netflix and it’s all about Hitchcock and his fascination with the blondes. In your flick, he seemed to have a really good relationship with his wife, but yet previous to seeing that, I don’t know, I got the impression that he was sort of a womanizer. I don’t know whether he would’ve been accused of sexual abuse today, but he seemed to be was very aggressive. What about with his favorite women like Grace Kelly and all his other blondes?
A: Not with Grace, with Tippi Hedren. It’s awful what he did to Tippi, right? (hmm, we don’t know what he did to Tippi). There’s no excusing, no anything like that. But when he died, when Hitchcock died, the tabloid press, the more Muck reading press, they went looking for other examples of him treating women badly, and they didn’t find anything. I was friends with Janet Leigh, who loved him. Grace Kelly loved him. And then if you look at his collaborations with female writers and producers, much more than a lot of other filmmakers in America at the same time and they didn’t work with women, he did. So we just need to be evidence-based, I think Janet about this where we say he did this terrible, terrible thing with Tippi, but there’s no evidence that it was that. On the contrary, I think there’s no evidence that he did the same thing to other people. And I think if you want me to go a little bit further than that, I’ll say that I think the reason why he treated her so appallingly was not even about sexuality. He felt that he owned her. She was a model and he felt that he shaped her and transformed her and owned her. And as we know, a lot of power that men express over women is literally about power.
Q: Which is a little sick, which is why I asked you the question because I mean, during his time we didn’t have all the social media and didn’t have the digital files and so forth. So I was just curious whether you had found anything in his background that would reinforce his relationship with Tippi. I know that he went to Monaco to get Grace Kelly to be in his film.
A: And they had a very sophisticated relationship. So I would think that after he made so many movies that were successful, that the film studios at a certain point would sort of stop trying to tell him what to do. But it seems to me they always had other suggestions for what he was doing, and he didn’t pay any attention, and things came out quite well. So how did he get around that? Did he get around not behaving well with the studio that wanted to inject their own impressions of what he was doing? I think that’s a good question because I think that fashion changed and Hitchcock’s imagination was formed in the thirties, forties, and fifties, and then the sixties came and there were new types of sexualities and new types of filmmaking. And so he tried to keep up to date, but at a certain point when you’re getting older, you can’t keep updating your own imagination. And I think that’s what happened. And so his later films look old school in comparison to some of the other stuff.
Q: What’s your favorite Hitchcock? Mark asked me.
A: Well, I think that I like Rear Window a lot and To Catch a Thief, but I think the ones that are so vivid in my mind are the ones that are horrible like Psycho. I mean, who can forget that scene with Janet Leigh and who can ever forget The Birds? I mean, those were scary. Sort of like watching Jaws. I’ve never got in the ocean since I’ve seen Jaws.
Mark: That’s a good comparison. Like Psycho was the jaws of its day. It transformed the sense of fear for the audience. So it’s a good comparison.
Q: And I kind of duck whenever there’s a whole flock of birds flying over my terrace. The other thing that I liked about Hitchcock is you always knew that somewhere in his movie, he’s there somewhere there in the grass or in the fields or hanging from some window. That’s fun. Was he in every single one of his movies”
A: Not everyone, but most of them. He would have been very interested in branding in the era of TikTok, I think he would’ve loved all this. So he wanted to use his celebrity to get people to go to his films, and people would think, oh, how do we spot Hitchcock? So yeah, once that became a thing, he was always in the films. Not all of them, but most of them.
Mark: I think Hitchcock would’ve liked this (movie) because Hitchcock was a very playful man and he wanted to F with people’s expectations.
“My Name is Alfred Hitchcock” opens in Washington, DC on Friday, October 25th at the AFI Silver Theatre
