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did exhaustive planning for each shoot, and tended to give camera operators rough sketches for each planned shot on the day of shooting.† “But he never nails you down to those sketches,” Burks told an interviewer. “If, after discussion, Hitch finds that we can achieve better results in another way, he has no hesitancy in rewriting the action or dialogue.”

Jack Cardiff was a director and Oscar-winning cinematographer who shot Under Capricorn, arguably the most complex of all Hitchcock’s filming assignments. Cardiff was struck by Hitchcock’s certainty about the images he wanted, and his faith in the technicians’ ability to get them. “He hardly ever saw the rushes of the day’s work,” recalled Cardiff. “The editor would keep him closely informed, but Hitch knew exactly what he was getting on the screen. From the moment he had drawn pictures of the camera set-ups, he had it all firmly in his mind.” That someone of Cardiff’s talent, skill, and experience was impressed by Hitchcock’s ability to visualize is telling. Clearly, he had a rare gift. However, Cardiff’s description of Hitchcock’s behavior during shooting also suggests that Hitchcock made something of a performance of his reputation as the all-seeing genius with an editing suite in his head, and who found filming a terrible bore. “He had his back to the actors,” said Cardiff of Hitchcock during one of Under Capricorn’s lengthy takes, “aimlessly looking down at the floor, and at the end, when he had said ‘Cut,’ he made only one comment to my camera operator Paul Beeson: ‘How was that for you, Paul?’ On Paul’s nod, he would signal his acceptance of the whole reel.” There’s a quiet ostentation in the inactivity described here, the decision to look away from the very thing he should have been looking at; it’s tempting to believe that on Hitchcock’s set the act of directing—of being Alfred Hitchcock—was itself part of the spectacle.

It coheres with the broader image that grew around Hitchcock from the mid-1940s: a great man who was defined by his unique ability to see what ordinary people cannot. In his reminiscences, his talent for seeing a film unfold in his head made itself obvious before he’d even begun directing his own films. When working as art director on Woman to Woman in 1923, he built the set of the entrance to a Park Lane mansion with nothing at the top of the stairs, much to the consternation of Graham Cutts when he arrived to direct the day’s filming. “They were expecting to do the conventional shot from the door looking up the stairs,” remembered Hitchcock, “with the balcony and the hostess at the top, and the people going up. I said, ‘No. You take the shot from the top of the stairs, looking down.’ ” He then explained to his superior that as the scene belonged to the hostess, the action should be seen from her perspective. “I was, in a way, a small martinet. I said, ‘this is where the shot is to be done,’ and the director was helpless.” The common or garden-variety movie director’s lack of visual imagination was a subject Hitchcock spoke on from the very beginning of his career, and he never let up. “Not enough people have a visual sense,” he moaned in 1976. “They cannot project. See, I don’t even look through the camera; I can visualize it on the screen.”

Indeed, he consistently professed a total lack of interest in other directors’ work. In their many off-the-record conversations about films and the film industry, Peter Bogdanovich can’t remember Hitchcock talking about any other filmmakers, with the exception of Orson Welles “because he knew I was doing an interview book with Orson, so he asked questions . . . just a few.” Despite his suggestions to the contrary, Hitchcock was assiduous in keeping up with the latest cinema. His appointment books reveal that he made viewing films part of his weekly work schedule. This was especially the case once he signed for Universal in the early 1960s and set up his own suite of offices at the studio. A PhD thesis could be written about the movies that made it onto Hitchcock’s viewing schedule at the Universal projection rooms. Woodstock, A Clockwork Orange, Marat/Sade, The Wild Angels, The Pink Panther, The Graduate, Rosemary’s Baby, What’s Up, Doc? were among the many English-language films watched soon after release, along with dozens of films by leading foreign directors. It was after watching Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up that he felt inspired to push into bold new territory in the late sixties. “These Italian directors are a century ahead of me in terms of technique!”

Such admissions were not intended for public consumption. In interviews, the grand old man of cinema was more likely to speak of his work by way of metaphor, likening himself to architects, composers, writers, and especially painters. Cézanne was one name Hitchcock invoked on a couple of occasions, as was his favorite artist, Paul Klee, because of what Hitchcock thought was their similar use of color. “I’m not self-indulgent where content is concerned. I’m only self-indulgent about treatment,” he said in 1972. “I’d compare myself to an abstract painter.” Story was what he had writers for; the real essence of Hitchcock, the field in which the auteur made his mark, was, he suggested, his inimitable eye. In that same conversation, his interlocutor attempted to tease out Hitchcock’s opinions on his peers. Of Ingmar Bergman, Hitchcock offered nothing more than “he has indicated on one occasion that he learned a lot from Hitchcock” in terms of his visual approach, and pointed out that the same was true of Truffaut. Of Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, he said that the Italian’s masterpiece of neorealism was “very good,” but that his own films did more with the form.

In fairness to Hitchcock, he would not be the first or the last artist disinclined to discuss his contemporaries’ work. But the fact that he chose to explain his style by placing it

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