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The actual filming is almost an afterthought. The script and preparation of Frenzy, for example, took six months, and Hitchcock's always meticulous casting took another two. Shooting, by contrast, lasted only 55 days. When the cameras begin rolling, says Hitchcock, "I'd just as soon not make the picture. The creative thing is over, and you begin to compromise."
Few modern films are "cinematic" enough for Hitchcock. "What do you see now?" he asks. "Photographs of people talking, which is only an extension of the theater. Or car chases, which are just movement. Pure cinema is the assembly of pieces of film that when put together create an idea in the mind of the audience. And out of that idea comes an emotion."
Greatest Enemy. With Hitchcock, in films and in life, style is everything, and not the smallest detail escapes his eye. His dress is impeccable if funereal, and his life, so serene as to seem unHitchcockian, is as well planned as his movies. He and his wife of 46 years, Alma, live in a two-bedroom house in Bel Air, Calif.; the only thing unusual about it is the large kitchen, with walk-in refrigerator and a wine cellar, which has a vast if diminishing collection. The prices of French wines today are too much even for a director who makes on the order of $500,000 a film.
Rarely do he and Alma entertain, and just as rarely do they allow themselves to be entertained. Bedtime, in fact, is a spartan 9 o'clock; he gets up at 7, and when he is between pictures is usually in his office at Universal Studios in Los Angeles by 10, poring over scripts, stories and reports of juicy murders in the London papers.
"Nobody," Hitchcock claims, "has a sense of humor any more," and he has quit playing practical jokes on his friends. But he relishes them in retrospect. Once, he remembers, he served a dinner in which everything on the table, from meat to butter, was dyed blue. Another time he put place cards of non-guests behind each plate, so that no one was sure that he was in fact invited. Now, fortunately perhaps for everyone, he confines his rather special sense of humor to the screen.