Terry writes...
Alfred Hitchcock was a great technician, and here are a few things he said about techniques in 1936 when looking back at his work of the previous decade.
“I played about with different techniques in those early days. I tried crazy tricks, with violent cuts, dissolves and wipes, with the room spinning round and standing on its head. It never occurred to me that I was merely wasting footage, with camera tricks, and not getting on with the film. I’ve stopped that today.”
Later in his career he remarked,
“The motion picture is not an arena for a display of technique. It is a method of telling a story, in which techniques, beauty, the virtuosity of the camera...everything, must be sacrificed or compromised, when it gets in the way of the story. I do not try to bend the plot to fit technique. I adapt technique to the plot.”
Hitchcock was a skilled sketch artist, and meticulously story-boarded each film prior to production, planning every shot and camera movement in detail. He describes his films as designed ahead of time - ‘pre-cut,’ and added, “I wish I didn’t have to shoot the picture. When I’ve gone through the script and created the piece on paper, for me the creative work is done and the rest is just a bore.”
“Why then’, someone asked, didn’t he delegate the shooting to someone else.”
“They might screw it up”
Hitchcock responded laconically.
Having just mentioned about the meticulous preparation that Hitchcock practised with his movies, and how he said that his films were “Designed Ahead Of Time”, ie, PRE- CUT, I thought I’d explain what he actually meant by that connotation.... In the days of the “StudioSystem”, when a director had finished shooting his film, the processed footage went straight to the studio’s editing department, and was edited according to the instructions from the studio heads. This meant that the director had effectively lost control of the finished film, because it could be edited in several different ways. But Alfred Hitchcock not only planned his movies meticulously, but shot them as ‘tightly’ and ‘sparingly’ as he possibly could, including his re-takes, which left the editing department with no option but to edit the film as he’d intended, thus ending up with the film he wanted. So, his films were “ Designed ahead of time...Pre-Cut.” Later on, any director who proved himself invaluable to the studio, would insist that when his contract came up for renewal, they gave him “Final Cut”, which meant that only HE could supervise the editing process. Not even the studio bosses could interfere with the post-production of the movie. Any director who gained ‘Final Cut’ would never give it up, even if they moved to another studio.
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