Alfred Hitchcock Quotes

British filmmaker (1899–1980)

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Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English film director and producer, closely associated with the suspense thriller genre. He is a well-known man and an award-winning director. He directed and produced three of the American Film Institute Top 100 Films, Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960), and North by Northwest (1959), two psychological thrillers and a suspense film. Additionally, Vertigo was rated as the best film of all time in the 2012 British Film Institute Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Pen Names: Hitchcock

Birth Name: Alfred Joseph Hitchcock

Alternative Names: Sir Alfred Hitchcock • Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock • The Master of Suspense • Master of Suspense • Alfred J. Hitchcock • Sir Alfred J. Hitchcock

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Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.

[T]he director passed off the phrase as one of his "Machiavellian quips," not to be taken seriously. "Let us say, rather, that actors are a necessary evil," he cautioned, with a straight face. "As a matter of fact, I couldn't work if I weren't on friendly terms with them; I'll bend over backward every time. Besides, I get into each picture I make, if only for a couple of seconds—so I'm probably a frustrated actor at heart myself."

ლოგიკა მოსაწყენია

The Birds could be the most terrifying motion picture I have ever made.

There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.

Content, I am not interested in that at all. I don't give a damn what the film is about. I am more interested in how to handle the material so as to create an emotion in the audience. I find too many people are interested in the content. If you were painting a still life of some apples on a plate, it's like you'd be worrying whether the apples were sweet or sour. Who cares?

We do not recommend suicide as a way of life.

Once the screenplay is finished, I'd just as soon not make the film at all ... I have a strongly visual mind. I visualise a picture right down to the final cuts. I write all this out in the greatest detail in the script, and then I don't look at the script while I'm shooting. I know it off by heart, just as an orchestra conductor needs not look at the score ... When you finish the script, the film is perfect. But in shooting it you lose perhaps 40 percent of your original conception

I'm a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.

If you can't do it naturally, then fake it.

Love those wrongdoers, they need it more than you.

It still goes. But Pat is the nicest cattle I've ever seen.

Weren't you ever booed at by your mother?!

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.