Hitchcock - Nev Pierce

have given me the most affection, appreciation and encouragement
and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor,
the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter
Pat and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in
a domestic kitchen. And their names are Alma Reville.”
On the lawn
outside a faux-Tudor house in Los
Angeles, April 2012, Hitchcock and Reville are trimming roses
and trading barbs. In prosthetics and with a fat suit to match the
director’s famous shape, Anthony Hopkins stares at Helen Mirren
as his screen wife. “Leave me alone,” he says, expertly echoing the
director’s distinctive tone. “Hopeless man,” she sighs back. Cut.
“Very nice,” says director Sacha Gervasi, approaching the
pair. “Maybe even a bit more pruning.”
“Very nice?” says Mirren. Gervasi smiles, placating: “Delectable!”
Mirren doesn’t look like Mrs. Hitchcock, but she certainly
has the necessary force. Friend, wife, collaborator, conspirator,
Reville may sit in Hitchcock’s iconic shadow, but the films
wouldn’t be the same without her.
“I didn’t know how important she was to the making of his
movies,” says Mirren. “And how deeply she’d been involved in
his career right from the very, very beginning... I had no idea,
and I learned in being offered the film and then doing a bit of
research. It was an artistic partnership and, as is so often the
case, the other partner is the wife or the woman that gets written
out of history, and that happened with Alma. I liked the idea
of reinstating Alma into the history of Hitchcock’s world.”
This, then, is the heart of the film: their marriage. Though it
grew from Stephen Rebello’s brilliant non-fiction book, Alfred
Hitchcock And The Making Of Psycho, it is less about Psycho
than it is about psyches — what excites these great souls. Gervasi,
a genial 46 year-old Englishman who seems far too relaxed to be
directing his first feature, made the excellent documentary Anvil:
The Story Of Anvil, focusing on the seemingly no-hope trek of
a long-running metal band whose two founding members bicker
and break up as they try to hit the big time. When he pitched
for the Hitchcock job — up against several other directors,
including Oscar-winners — his take was surprising but simple:
“It’s the same movie! Both movies are love stories about elderly
couples who drive each other completely fucking insane and
yet who need each other more than anyone or anything else in
the world — who cannot stand the idea of being without one
another.” It helped that everyone loved Anvil. When Gervasi
met Anthony Hopkins, “The first thing he said to me was, ‘Me
and my wife have seen Anvil three times!’ You can’t buy that.”
Hopkins is having fun. On set, whether acting with Mirren,
Scarlett Johansson — as Psycho’s shower star Janet Leigh — or,
at one point, a raven, he’s smiling. Johansson greets him, before
their scene, with a hug. “Lovely to see you!” he says. “You, too!
And there’s so much of you to love,” she says, referring to his fake
belly. Perhaps it comes with having nothing left to prove, but the
Oscar-winning knight appears totally at ease. The scene sees Leigh
drive Hitch to his front door, with Hopkins dropping in and
out of character as if by a simple switch. Between takes, he and
Johansson share sweets. Gervasi pops up by the car window with
a grin. “You’re going to have a fucking sugar rush in this scene!”
James D’Arcy — who plays Psycho star Anthony Perkins (a
performance Mirren calls “amazing”) — confirms the impression
of Hopkins as a man now very much at ease with himself.
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“He would sit around between takes — he was in heavy prosthetics
and a massive fat suit every day — and the extras would talk to him
and ask advice about what they should do in terms of pursuing
a career in acting, and he would really gaily chat with them.”
It’s not necessarily the impression you would have of the star
of The Silence Of The Lambs; Empire expected him to be a little,
well, intimidating. “Like you, I was a bit sort of...” D’Arcy trails
off. “You see him in The Bounty, you see him go off on one —
he’s obviously got it in him. But that’s not the guy I met at all.”
It’s only in post-production that you discover Hopkins was
not quite as laid-back as all that, revealing his real feelings on
playing one of the few filmmaking knights as famous as himself:
“It scared the hell out of me!”
After years in
development, the production
process was startlingly quick — less than seven months. Behind
the jovial appearances on set, both director and star suffered the
same insecurities that beset us all. “We used to joke to each other
about paranoia and insecurity,” says Hopkins. “But Sacha said,
‘If we didn’t have insecurity we wouldn’t be able to do anything!’
If you didn’t have insecurity you’d be flat as a pancake. He said,
‘I wake up every morning terrified.’ I said, ‘Do you? So do I!’
What I liked about him is he conquers his insecurities and just
comes on like gangbusters — tremendous enthusiasm. And
enthusiasm has become such an unfashionable thing these
days. You’ve got to be cool, you know, all that shit.”
• Jessica Biel, Scarlett
Johansson and James
D’Arcy as Vera Miles,
Janet Leigh and
Anthony Perkins.
“Playing Hitchcock scared
the hell out of me.” anthony hopkins
• Anthony Hopkins
addresses the audience
as the legendary director.
Hopkins has never really been cool, save perhaps for the fava
beans and chianti episode. He’s just been there: a screen fixture
for 40 years. We take him for granted, perhaps, abetted by his own
unpretentious take on acting: “Just do it.” Still, behind the unfussy
image is a man who’s studied Stanislavski’s Method, who prepares
meticulously, reading the script more than 200 times to capture
the lines, then reading further around the subject when necessary.
“When you’re playing someone, it’s mostly fiction,” he says. “But
I read a pretty copious biography of him, by a man named Donald
Spoto, a kind of warts-and-all look at Hitchcock. The insecurities,
I could understand! He was never nominated for an Oscar. Never,
according to one or two biographers, taken really seriously by
Hollywood, because he was a popular director and therefore he
didn’t merit much respect. Isn’t that the peculiar underbelly of, not
just Hollywood, but anywhere? If you get too successful you can’t
be taken seriously — you must be a bit of a fraud. And that’s what
bothered Hitchcock. He was a true artist: a really great director.”
The pair met once, shortly after Hitchcock was knighted (not
long before his death): a brief hello in a restaurant, introduced by
their shared rep. “My agent said, ‘Hello, Sir Alfred.’ He said ‘Hello,
George, and how are you?’ This smile on this very big man.”
Rebello, whose book inspired the film and who was involved as
a consultant, thinks Sir Alfred would have appreciated the film.
“I think the real Hitchcock might find this fun and amusing,”
he says. “It was startling to see Anthony Hopkins as Hitch for >
• Helen Mirren as
Hitchcock’s widely
overlooked spouse
and collaborator
Alma Reville.
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• Hopkins’ Hitchcock
wants to “feel
freedom again”.
• D’Arcy brings on the
creepy as Perkins.
• Driving Mr. Crazy:
Hopkins and Johansson
take a jaunt.
ACTOR DIRECTORS
A
Hitch isn’t the only iconic helmer
immortalised by one of the “cattle”…
Johnny Depp as Ed Wood (Ed Wood, 1994)
Rake-thin Depp doesn’t much resemble the
heavy-set Wood, and looks a lot better in
angora than Wood did in Glen Or Glenda, and
this impressionist biopic focuses on Wood’s
career before the slide into alcoholism, porn
and destitution that came after Plan 9 From Outer Space. Stanley Tucci as Stanley Kubrick
(The Life And Death Of Peter Sellers, 2004)
Tucci’s ‘concerned bystander’ contrasts with
a more scurrilous Kubrick portrayal in
Stranger’s Kiss — with Peter Coyote in
a film à clef about Killer’s Kiss — and the
Stanley’s Girlfriend episode of Trapped Ashes, with Tygh Runyan.
Ian McKellen as James Whale
(Gods And Monsters, 1998)
McKellen is perfect casting as the gay,
self-inventing Englishman who directed
Frankenstein and then reclined in the
California sun until a mysterious death
in his swimming pool at the age of 67.
John Malkovich as F. W. Murnau
(Shadow Of The Vampire, 2000)
Nosferatu director Murnau is presented as
a mad engineer willing to sacrifice his cast to
a real bloodsucker (Willem Dafoe) for screen
immortality. Arguably, the real Murnau —
a gay fighter ace in World War I, who changed his name from
Friedrich Plumpe — was stranger than Malkovich’s reading.
the first time. I’d been around the real man and I can only
imagine what it would have been like for someone who knew
Mr. Hitchcock intimately.”
Reports vary on how Hitchcock was at the end of his life.
Rebello was the last person to interview the director, a few
months before his death in 1980. He found him “hysterically
gossipy and vicious and funny and erudite”. Hopkins says when
they met he seemed “ill, flustered”.
“According to one biographer he ended up with very little
in his life,” says Hopkins. “Troubled. Remote. A lot of people
found him charming to be with and easy to work with and some
found him cruel. But he was just a human being, that’s all.”
Insecurity and risk and the desire to feel free fuelled Psycho,
it seems — at least as this take on film history has it.
“It’s a story about people wanting to feel,” says Gervasi.
“Hitchcock says to his wife early in the script, ‘Remember when
we were young and we used to have to find ways of doing things?
I want to feel that freedom again.’ It’s about wanting to feel
freedom, wanting to feel free. Who doesn’t? There’s no-one in
my life who doesn’t, in some way, feel trapped and is trying to get
out from under something: it could be drugs, it could be living
in a certain house, it could be a family, it could be an oppressive
friend. That desire to break free, I think, is a very universal one.”
For Hitchcock, Psycho was a vindication: he could deliver films
as shocking and powerful as any of the younger directors touted
to replace him. But it was also the beginning of the end. He never
made a film as good, or as commercially successful, again. Rebello’s
book suggests he was thrilled but also confounded by Psycho’s
success: he couldn’t figure out quite why it was such a smash.
Hitchcock, the film, is fun, a little frothy, but underneath it
is about what makes creative people tick — the motivations, the
worries. If you stop obsessing, perhaps you won’t be any good.
Hopkins still frets, but knows when to let go. “My wife said to
me, ‘In the end, what does any of it mean? You lie awake at night...
everyone feels like that! You just have to breeze on through life.
Get over it and move on.’ Some people are crippled by that. If
we can make some sort of life force out of it, I think it’s good.”
The actor has yet to see the finished film. “I guess I will,” he
says. “I’m not good at watching movies — period. I don’t sweat
over them. If they work, they work. That’s fine. I can’t let that
perfectionist creep get into my brain. Regret. Life’s too short.
As Hitchcock said about Psycho, ‘It’s only a movie!’”
nev@empiremagazine.com
Hitchcock is out on February 8 and will be reviewed in a future issue.
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