Twenty-five years ago, my boss took me into her office and said. “I need you to storyline the next month of EastEnders”. The existing Story Editor had just resigned, and there was simply no one else around to do it.
It was very flattering, but as I explained – I didn’t have the faintest idea how to do it.
“Take this,” she said – and handed me a book called Hitchcock/Truffaut. “That’s all you need.”
She was right, and that’s how my career in storytelling began.
Francois Truffaut himself explained the book’s genesis:
“I asked Monsieur Hitchcock to give me an interview of fifty hours and to reveal all his secrets. The result was a book. Actually, it was like a cookbook, full of recipes for making films.”
Every recipe is a masterclass in itself, and to this day the book – a series of interviews between the two giant directors – remains the single best book ever written about the art of storytelling. In 2010 Hitchcock/Truffaut tied for second place in Sight & Sound’s poll of the greatest books on film, beaten only by David Thompson’s equally indispensable Biographical Dictionary of Film. While that is a fantastic hymn to the experience of watching films, Truffaut’s book is a masterclass in how to construct them.
The book is packed with brilliant advice – here are five of the best pointers Hitchcock offers:
- “The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture”
Hitchcock understood that the antagonist is everything. They define your protagonist, they provide you with key emotional stakes, and if the audience doesn’t wish to destroy them then your story isn’t working as well as it could. - “In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call ‘photographs of people talking.’ When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.”
Story isn’t dialogue. Story is action. Dialogue is icing. - “There is no terror in the bang. Only in the anticipation of it”
Story, Hitchcock understood, is entirely about the control of suspense. There is a question, and there is an answer, and the writer’ s job is to manipulate the audience’s motions as one seeks to connect to the other. - “Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.”
All story telling is about the manipulation of emotion. He went on to talk about arguably his greatest achievement – Psycho. “Psycho had a very interesting construction and that game with the audience was fascinating. I was directing the viewers. You might say I was playing them, like an organ.” That’s what a great storyteller does. - “Every image tells a story.”
The central character – and villain in Shadow of a Doubt is played by Joseph Cotten. When he arrives in the small town which is the setting of the film, the train belches black smoke – the sulphurous fumes of the devil.
You see something very similar in the famous scene from The Godfather II when Michael confronts Fredo – the brother who betrayed him. For the entire scene Michael’s head is always above water, while Fredo’s is always submerged below.
