In an interview on Making Movies

Your last title is Hitchcock.  It’s a book-length conversation between two legendary directors—Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut.  Can you tell me what you’ve drawn from this book?

Wow, so much.  I got the book from Sean Gullette, the star of Pi, many years ago, and I proceeded to read that copy until it literally fell apart.  I still haven’t replaced it.  I have it duct-taped together. 

It’s an amazing guide to Hitchcock’s thought process.  Truffaut, being a fantastic filmmaker himself, was able to ask really profound, informed questions that really got to the heart of filmmaking.  Truffaut got Hitchcock to reveal a lot of the different techniques that he used to put together his monumental body of work. 

Truffaut was a founder of the French New Wave.  Does that movement influence you?

Absolutely. The return to the basics of filmmaking, the connection to the edit, the use of handheld camera, and the attention to realism all influenced what I did in The Wrestler and Black Swan.

In Black Swan, you may have created the most frightening avian imagery since Hitchcock’s The Birds.  Did you draw on Hitchcock consciously?

Of course I know The Birds.  In fact, one of my mentors in film school was Robert Boyle, who was a production designer on that movie.  And I looked at the film a lot.  The visual effects are incredible.  But that was dealing with an external avian threat, and in Black Swan there is an internal one.

That brings me to my last question. Hitchcock often left the line between what his characters experienced and what they imagined quite hazy.  Is that what you intended to do in Black Swan?

Right.  Well I think when you’re doing a descent into madness, where the character is doubting his or her sanity, it’s going to leave a lot of room for ambiguity.  Because I think [Natalie Portman’s character’s] whole movement into insanity is ambiguous to the character herself — until she finally seizes on it and takes the reins. It was very intentional that the audience could be as unsure as she was, when strange things seemed to happen.  There needed to be doubt on that journey.

Interview by Eve Gerber