The strange reason Alfred Hitchcock refused to meet Steven Spielberg: “I look at him and feel like such a whore”
As two of the greatest minds in cinema history, Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg wouldn’t have been short of things to talk about were they to meet, but the ‘Master of Suspense’ had a very strange reason for refusing to come face-to-face with the newest wunderkind on the block.
Spielberg had grown up idolising Hitchcock, and they were active at the same time for a spell in the 1970s, albeit at opposite ends of their careers. The cameo-friendly auteur wasn’t opposed to the Jaws director’s work, even if it was the seminal shark attack thriller that drove an irrevocable wedge between them.
Spielberg tried to organise a meetup of the two cinematic greats but was never able to. The first came when Hitchcock was reportedly “upset by an uninvited young man hovering around the movie set” of his final feature, 1976’s Family Plot. The director behind Psycho, The Birds, and countless other classics is said to have ordered for the trespasser to be removed, not knowing the man was, in fact, Spielberg hoping to meet his cinematic hero.
Once Jaws permanently shifted the paradigm in Hollywood, reinvented the way movies were marketed and sold, and became the highest-grossing film to ever hit cinemas, Spielberg suddenly had the clout to do whatever he wanted. And yet, even his newfound status couldn’t land him a meeting with Hitchcock.
It wasn’t for a lack of trying, though, with Bruce Dern revealing that he’d personally approached the godfather of the Hollywood suspense thriller on Spielberg’s behalf, only to be shot down by Hitchcock, who even had a disparaging nickname for the hottest new director in the business.
“I said, ‘You’re his idol. He just wants to sit at your feet for five minutes and chat with you,’” Dern wrote in his memoir, Things I Said, But Probably Shouldn’t Have. Hoping to serve as the facilitator for two distinct creative visionaries to finally cross paths, his pleas fell on completely deaf ears when Hitchcock brazenly waved away the suggestion.
“Isn’t that the boy who made the fish movie?” Dern recalled being the derisive response. “I could never sit down and talk to him, because I look at him and feel like such a whore.” A strange assessment, given everything he’d accomplished and the legacy he left behind, but Hitchcock had his reasons for wanting to avoid Spielberg at all costs.
Prime among them was the fact that he’d been offered a million dollars to provide a voiceover for the Jaws theme park attraction at Universal Studios. “And I took it, and I did it,” he told Dern. “I’m such a whore. I can’t sit down and talk to the boy who did the fish movie. I couldn’t even touch his hand.”
Hitchcock felt that because he’d accepted a million-dollar payday off the back of Spielberg’s success, he couldn’t be within the orbit of the person who’d made the movie he profited from so handsomely without feeling like some sort of charlatan. A very strange reason it may be, but it was nonetheless one that robbed the Jurassic Park director of the chance to shake hands with his idol.
