Why didn’t Alfred Hitchcock watch his own films?
There are many actors who avoid watching their own movies. Javier Bardem, Andrew Garfield, and Reese Witherspoon are just a few examples, but there is a surprisingly large number of A-listers who simply cannot bring themselves to watch their own performances.
The usual reason is that they don’t want to become overly self-conscious of their acting and lose the focus they need to be in the moment while they’re working. It’s a logical reaction but one that seems only applicable to performers.
And yet, there is at least one director who said he could never watch his own movies. Alfred Hitchcock is known for making movies that pioneered the suspense genre. His influence is so vast that it can be seen in nearly every blockbuster. With movies like The 39 Steps, Vertigo, North By Northwest, and Psycho, he found new ways to escalate tension in a way that has been making audiences sweat for decades.
While other directors watch Hitchcock’s work obsessively to glean any pieces of inspiration they can find, the director himself was less eager to watch his movies. In fact, he claimed that he never watched them at all.
So, why didn’t Alfred Hitchcock watch his movies?
In a 1963 interview, the ‘Master of Suspense’ revealed the surprising fact after the interviewer commented that, given the nature of his films, he must not be easily frightened. “On the contrary,” he said, “I am the most fearful and cowardly man you’ll ever meet. Every night I lock myself into my room as if there were a madman on the other side of the door, waiting to slit my throat.”
The director then went on to list some of his particularly unusual fears, including eggs (the yolks, obviously), Sundays, and, apparently, his own movies. “I never go to see them,” he said. “I don’t know how people can bear to watch my movies.”
When the interviewer pointed out that this statement was “rather illogical, Mr. Hitchcock,” the director embarked on a tangent about how his movies themselves are illogical. “But what is logic?” he mused. “There’s nothing more stupid than logic […] Not one of my movies is based on logic. They are based on suspense, not logic. Give me a bomb, and Descartes can boil his head.”
Although Hitchcock’s movies are tame in comparison to today’s modern slasher movies, it is fair to assume that a man who was terrified of eggs and the most leisurely day of the week might find them tough to handle. A reasonable follow-up question would be, “If you’re terrified of everything, why pioneer the art of making people scared?” While we may never know the answer, other creators of the horror genre have had answers to this question.
Stephen King has said that fear leads him in the right direction as a writer and is a reassuring force that lets him know his story is working. So perhaps Hitchcock was drawing on his own fears when he made his movies but just couldn’t bring himself to see it all come together.
