Quotes About Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock was right when he said that actors are basically like cattle. Directors just look at us and yell 'Move!'

I love Fincher, as he has a great atmosphere and intensity. Also, I grew up watching Hitchcock movies, and there was something elegant in the way he plays with you and plays with the character and tricks you.

I was in New York. Hitchcock was in California. He rang me to make a report on his progress and said, I'm having trouble. I've just sacked my second screenwriter.

I also think the relationship I have with my audience is a lot more complex than what Hitchcock seemed to want his to be - although I think he had more going on under the surface as well.

So I think it is common knowledge that Hitchcock had fantasies or whatever you want to call them about his leading ladies.

One of the main reasons I am so drawn to Hitchcock is that he planned his shots way in advance on story-boards, which he designed like classic paintings (he was an art connoisseur). It's why he found shooting on set boring - because he had already composed the film in his head.

Hitchcock's got a very interesting voice; it's a very controlled, measured rhythm that's quite slow and, in that sense, also felt quite controlling in its pace. He retained something from his childhood, that London sound, as well as adopting some of the L.A. sounds... All of this helps you create the character.

I can remember soundtracks that you just can't separate from the film - It's just so intertwined, so important. Like the Hitchcock ones where they kind of inform each other and become this larger thing as a result.

Hitchcock loved long convoluted shots that contained a lot of tracking and camera moves.

Guys like Spielberg and Zemeckis and really anybody who is a storyteller-filmmaker today has studied Hitchcock and the way he visually tells a story. He was the master of suspense, certainly, but visually you would get a lot of information from what he would do with the camera and what he would allow you to see as the story was unfolding.

It's been noted that one of the keys to Alfred Hitchcock's success as a filmmaker was that he didn't draw characters as much as he drew character types; this is how he normalized the cinematic experience.

I met with Hitchcock when I was a very, very young actress just starting out and he was making 'Frenzy' in London and I was sent along to meet with him. He was very, very unimpressed with me and I have to say, I was rather unimpressed with him - but only because I was an arrogant, ignorant young actress.

When I started watching movies, I saw a lot of Hitchcock films. When I was 10, I saw 'North by Northwest' and movies like that.

Hitch was interested in what I had to offer, like one of my background ideas for Norman's upbringing.

Right now my career is totally schizophrenic, because when an American production like Hitchcock Presents asks to see my work I would never dream of showing them my independent films.

With Hitchcock, you work with a script, and you stick to it.

I kind of look at my modeling career and the Hitchcock years as stepping stones to what I'm doing now.

Hitchcock had a very strange mind.

I use every single thing that Alfred Hitchcock taught me in my acting career... I am very grateful for the education he gave me in making motion pictures.

So I think it is common knowledge that Hitchcock had fantasies or whatever you want to call them about his leading ladies.

Working with Chaplin was very amusing and strange. His films are so funny, but working with him, I found him to be a very serious man. Whereas the films of Hitchcock are macabre, he could be a very funny man to work with, always telling jokes and holding court. Of course, when I worked with Charlie he was getting older.

Hitchcock had a charm about him. He was very funny at times. He was incredibly brilliant in his field of suspense.

The great thing for me is how Hitchcock uses guilt so well. He implicates the spectator in the character's field, and you really feel it, and there's incredible relief when it comes out right - if it does come out right.

Even Hitchcock liked to think of himself as a puppeteer who was manipulating the strings of his audience and making them jump. He liked to think he had that kind of control.