Cinema had been his escape from an unhappy childhood, and he'd made his name as a merciless film critic in André Bazin's Cahiers du cinema. Half Hitchcock's age, Truffaut had only made three films in 1962, but was already a leading light of the revolutionary nouvelle vague. Not to Truffaut, however, who had been in awe of Hitchcock from the start. His career was about to enter a slow decline, and the idea of his being given retrospectives and lauded as a cinematic genius would have seemed absurd.

Though it's difficult for us to imagine at this remove, Hitchcock was viewed as a studio hack by most commentators, especially in Britain and America, where he was dismissed as a jobbing director who made venal crime films with no artistic merit whatsoever. Psycho had been given a very mixed reception by critics, who moaned about its B-movie nastiness. But beneath this veneer of consistent success, the cracks were beginning to show.

He had terrified move-goers with his daring horror film Psycho, and had just completed his 40th feature film, The Birds. In 1962, Hitchcock was 63, and had become a household name in America thanks to his television work, and a virtual franchise unto himself. It's a must for film-lovers, and sheds new light on the meeting of two very different creative minds. The book has now inspired a very enjoyable documentary, which plays this afternoon in Dublin's Light House as part of the Audi Dublin International Film Festival, and will be released at the IFI on March 4.ĭirected by Kent Jones, Hitchcock/Truffaut uses archive footage and learned contributions from the likes of Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, David Fincher and Paul Schrader to assess the making of the book and its impact.

The result of those interviews was a remarkable 1966 illustrated book called Hitchcock/Truffaut that would help rescue Hitch's reputation and become a kind of film-making bible to a whole new generation of auteurs.

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