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Film students and movie buffs get a treat in the documentary "Hitchcock/Truffaut," an absorbing look at one of the greatest encounters in movie history.
In 1962, the young French filmmaker François Truffaut wrote to the legendary director Alfred Hitchcock with a proposal: series of interviews, discussing each of Hitchcock's films in detail, to be collected into book form. Hitchcock agreed, and the two men talked for a week, the young filmmaker pressing his elder for details of craft and inspiration.
Kent Jones, a film historian and director of the New York Film Festival, directs this documentary, interviewing a slew of directors (including Martin Scorsese, David Fincher and Wes Anderson) about how the subsequent book became a resource for a generation of filmmakers and raised Hitchcock's reputation from entertainer to auteur.
The interviews get a little repetitive until the directors start dissecting scenes from particular Hitchcock films, especially "Vertigo" and "Psycho." The movie is a delight in these moments of keen analysis, but the book did it better.
'Hitchcock/Truffaut'
Opening Friday, Jan. 8, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas; rated PG-13 for suggestive material and violent images; 80 minutes.