My Name is Mark Cousins

by Helen Barlow

Northern Irish filmmaker Mark Cousins, who is based in Edinburgh, is incredibly productive, now making three documentaries each year. He is best known for 2011’s 15-hour The Story of Film and sometimes focuses on single subjects as he did with 2017’s The Eyes of Orson Welles and 2021’s The Storms of Jeremy Thomas.

I spoke to the 58-year-old for My Name is Alfred Hitchcock, when it screened at the Dinard British Film Festival in Brittany, France. The film now makes its Australian premiere at the Cunard British Film Festival in November. It all started when Cousins watched all of Hitchcock’s 53 films, in order, during lockdown.

What did you discover about his films?

“We all felt a bit of solitude during lockdown when we were locked in our apartments, and I started to notice the loneliness in his films. Janet Leigh is extremely lonely in Psycho and a lot of his characters are very lonely, like Cary Grant in North by Northwest. I also noticed themes of fulfillment. There’s a silent film he made called The Farmer’s Wife and it’s about a guy who’s been bereaved and he’s looking for a wife. He finally realises that the woman that he loves is living in the house with him. So, these quite human themes in Hitchcock jumped out. There are a lot of people who think Hitchcock was a sort of chilly, suspense person. But I think there’s quite a lot of human warmth in there.”

Your film is told by Hitchcock, using your words. Where did you find the actor who voices him?

“I asked the great actor, Simon Callow, who could play Hitchcock and he said the best ear, not the best voice, in the business is Alistair McGowan. I knew his work because he was an impersonator on British TV, so we sent him a bit of the script and heard nothing. Then my phone rang, and it was like Hitchcock talking to me. And I just thought, ‘Okay, we’ve found him’.”

Hitchcock worked with a lot of famous actresses, including Ingrid Bergman, Janet Leigh, Kim Novak and Tippi Hedren, who wrote about his treatment of her in her memoir.

“He treated Tippi appallingly.”

So, he was better with other women?

“I knew Janet Leigh well and I knew Teresa Wright (Shadow of a Doubt). They both loved him. Ingrid Bergman loved him. You know, he was drinking buddies with Carole Lombard. I think he had non-sexual friendships with women. The problem with Tippi is that because he took her from advertising and made her a star, he felt he owned her. I think there was a kind of Svengali syndrome. A lot of these things are about power as much as anything else. But there’s no evidence that he treated other women badly. In fact, he had loads of female collaborators, writers, producers, etc. If you look at other male directors in the Hollywood studio system, they worked with women less than Hitch, and they were less likely to be friends with them. In her book, Tippi talks about going to Hitch’s funeral and buying flowers. She says he was the greatest teacher she ever had. But he did behave very badly with her on two occasions, once in a taxi cab and once in a studio.”

Was it groping?

“She doesn’t describe it in detail, but it’s probably that, yes.”

Would Hitchcock have survived the current post #MeToo environment?

“Yes, I think so. Hitchcock was in many ways an English gentleman, with good manners and he was well dressed. Jeremy Thomas acknowledges that a lot of human beings have dark imaginations, and it’s okay as long as it’s kept in the realm of the imagination. You know, David Cronenberg’s a lovely, gentle, bourgeois man, but look at his films!”

It’s a good contemporary comparison.

“Hitchcock understood the dream life. When you think of his films, in the ‘50s he didn’t try to make films about rock and rollers, in the ‘60s he didn’t try to make films about The Beatles and in the ‘70s he didn’t try to make films about the hippies. He wasn’t interested in the zeitgeist. He was trying to say something more universal than that. You might be Grace Kelly with a cocktail on the Riviera, but you’re just a step away from chaos. You’re staying in a lovely hotel, but something awful could happen this afternoon. I think that’s his theme in a way and that’s why the films haven’t dated very much, because they weren’t trying to capture the moment.”

They had a sense of style that is timeless.

“Look at the way that Tippi’s dressed in The Birds, look at the way that Kim’s dressed in Vertigo – they still look so cool. Look at Cary Grant’s suits in North by Northwest, it’s still so elegant. So, there’s a kind of classicism there, which means that the films are still available.”

He really lucked out with a lot of his actors and Cary Grant was just remarkable.

“Hitch really believed in male beauty as well as female beauty, which was quite sophisticated, because some of the directors of that time were only focused on the women.”

He didn’t shy away from ambiguous sexuality in his films.

“One of his silent films has lesbianism in it and Strangers on a Train and Rope are both clearly quite gay films. There’s a modernity about Hitchcock, because he worked in Weimar Germany of the 1920s, where I think he was liberated by that artistic, political and sexual environment. That’s why there’s no prudery in his films.”

Cary Grant was bisexual.

“Yes, yes. You know, many of the great movie stars were bisexual, from Dietrich to Garbo to James Dean.”

I wonder if hiding his sexuality added a bit of repression to Grant’s acting?

“I don’t know, but it certainly added to his sense of being beautiful on screen. Cary really cared about how he looked, his hair and his clothes, so he had a sense of presentation. If you compare him to somebody like Robert Mitchum, for example, Mitchum was a very handsome man when he was young as well. But Mitchum had no sense of his visual self when Cary really did. Cary knew what he should look like, how he should be lit and shot – and I think that’s a very Hollywood thing.”

So, Cary Grant embraced the glamour.

“But being a movie star and being glamorised by the system forced you to look at yourself as an outsider. And Cary Grant was really good at that. I think more than Ingrid Bergman, who sort of shied away from that glamour and that’s why she moved to Italy and made very realistic pictures with less makeup and less fancy clothes.”

In the film, you note how Hitchcock was a visual thinker.

“He was fantastic at removing the words and saying, ‘let’s do this visually’. He started in silent cinema and that helped. He was an intertitles writer, so he wrote those words in between, and they had to be as minimal as possible. It helped that he worked in Weimar Germany, which was the most visual film culture in the ‘20s. So, he was a proper visual thinker. Think of a film like The Birds, for example. When Tippi is just sitting smoking and one bird arrives and then another and not a single word. I bet at one point there was dialogue and that Hitchcock would have said, ‘No, we don’t need it. Just let her sit and smoke’. The colour of her dress and the colour of the sky also matter. He wanted no black in the image except for the birds. Even his film with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, Torn Curtain, that people don’t like, I think it’s the colour that makes a difference, the colour of her dress, the colour of his eyes. On top of everything, Hitchcock was one of the great colourists in the movies.”

In the film you mention how he was influenced by Cubist art.

“If you look at the shower scene in Psycho, that’s like a Picasso jar painting, cut and splintered. That’s the most extreme example. But often, in Hitchcock films, the camera’s moving in unusual positions to show different angles of something. If you look at the house in North by Northwest, it’s super modernist, it’s very Frank Lloyd Wright. Hitchcock was really interested in modern art. I was friends with Sean Connery, and I remember saying to him that the picture behind him in Marnie is Paul Cezanne’s painting of his wife, and Connery said it was because Hitchcock loved art.”

Has he influenced contemporary cinema?

“I think so. The Mission Impossible films are pure Hitchcock. The first one that Brian de Palma did was pure Notorious; it was like a remake. And this last one with the dangling train, is pure Hitchcock. The fact that they’ve got handcuffs is straight out of The 39 Steps. And then Parasite, the Bong Joon-ho film that won the Oscar, is Hitchcockian as are John Woo’s films – but more in the overall mood than a specific thing. The last John Wick film is so Hitchcockian in its use of colour and the chase sequences, all that kinetic energy. It must be influenced by The 39 Steps too. Hitchcock is still living and breathing in popular cinema, because he was a popular artist.”

What is your favourite Hitchcock film?

“I love all the famous films, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho etc. But the one that I particularly love is Saboteur. When he went to America, he made some quite English films like Rebecca. And then he made this super American film, Saboteur, which is a road movie and you can see him falling in love with the big expanses of the American landscape. Hitchcock was politically liberal and you can see that in this film. We see Siamese twins, we see a bearded woman, we see people who are non-mainstream types, so the film really celebrates difference. I think in today’s political climate in particular, Saboteur really pops.”