On July 14, 1966, Alfred Hitchcock's 50th film, Torn Curtain, had its World Premier in Boston, Massachusetts. Hitchcock attended that premiere and, on the afternoon of the same day, he came to Harvard to receive an honorary membership in the Harvard Dramatic Club. These quotes come from a short question-answer period held at the award presentation, and from an exclusive interview held afterward at 4 p.m. in the Radcliffe Graduate Center.

HITCHCOCK: Well, all detail in the literature of the camera applies to most situations. It is how you use the intimacy and detail. In Potemkin, of course, you have the permabulator going down the steps, and the incident is repeated several times at several angles -- you remember that. Well, I think it's a matter of using the language of the camera which is so flexible and free. The beauty of the camera is that you can photograph anything you want and make and comment you want.

20th Century Art

Unfortunately, you see, most of the films we see today are what I term, "photographs of people talking." They aren't true pieces of cinema. Film was the newest part of the 20th century, and what is it really -- imagery and montage, pieces of film put together to create ideas.

Now so many things are photographed objectively, and yet we have the power from the use of montage to get into a person's mind by the use of the visual. I suppose a really cinematic form would be a picture like Rear Window. Now strangely enough, people think that motion pictures are galloping horses and automobiles and that kind of thing, which they're not. If you use your camera and montage correctly, you can have a scene in a telephone booth.

Now in Rear Window, here is a man in one position for the whole picture. He never moves. Yet you have a close-up of Mr. Stewart. He looks, and you cut to what he sees, and you cut back to his reaction. And by the use of visual means you create ideas in his mind. And to show you how flexible the medium is, let us assume that you have a close-up of Mr. Stewart. He looks, and we cut to a woman nursing a baby. Cut back to Mr. Stewart. He smiles. Now what is Mr. Stewart? He's a benign gentlemen. Take away the middle piece of film, have both the close-ups -- the look and the response -- and insert a shot of a girl in a bikini. He looks, girl in bikini, he smiles. Now he's a dirty old man. So there you see, I've tried to put into a nutshell what true cinema is.

Actually, I make a film entirely on paper. Not "write it" but "make it" on paper. I never experiment on the set, I never improvise. I improvise in the office seven or eight months before the shooting. I have the whole film in mind shot for shot, complete.

When you go into the casting, there's the first compromise. It comes because the leading people are stars, and not really characters but personalities. The original concept goes by the wayside. You're lucky if you get 75 per cent of the original concept on the screen.

QUESTION: Then, do you work with a set designer and cameraman in much the same way that you work with a screenwriter?

HITCHCOCK: Yes. The set designer comes in very early, because during the course of the writing I want certain things researched. Because if it won't work out then I don't put it in the script. In other words, I get the designer involved in the making as well. So really it's the writer, me, and the designer, all working together in the preparatory planning.

QUESTION: Then, does the cameraman in your films have any creative role?

HITCHCOCK: No. He doesn't. The Hollywood cameraman really doesn't.

QUESTION: In that case, would one attribute any differences in camera style between Torn Curtain and the earlier films photographed by Robert Burks to you, and not to the difference in cameramen?

HITCHCOCK: Me.

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