I’ve been reading Hitchcock by Truffaut (which you can actually LISTEN TO here) recently and I just can’t get enough of it. Soon I’ll be done with it and I’m dreading it. There’s a goldmine of great stuff in there, but onething I like particularly is the way Hitchcock seems concerned with what the audience will like or won’t like. There are plenty of filmmakers who are concerned with this idea, of course, but many of them simply pander. As in, if the audience likes ‘Die Hard’, let’s make our movie as much like ‘Die Hard’ as we can.

With Hitchcock, he was inventing new ways to speak to an audience, but the whole time he’s governed by what he believes they will or will not accept. His goal was to entertain, not to be considered a cinematic genius.

Since I’ve been putting together this scene and making shotlists and whatnot, I’ve been trying to think of it as if it had no dialogue. Hitchcock has plenty of great thoughts on silent film, too, and how sound sort of made movies dumb once it was introduced.

Just a great book. I wish I was reading it right now.