Kent Jones & Noah Baumbach | Hitchcock/Truffaut Q&A

Director Kent Jones joined fellow filmmaker Noah Baumbach on stage to discuss his new documentary, 'Hitchcock/Truffaut.'

French filmmaker Francois Truffaut developed the politique des auteurs—a now-ubiquitous claim that certain filmmakers have distinct styles and themes that run through all of their films. In 1962, he found an ideal test case in world-famous Hollywood Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock, in order to free him from his reputation as a maker of light entertainment and cement him as a bonafide artist. Over the course of eight days, Truffaut conducted a series of interviews with the man, later published as a single volume in 1967, which followed Hitchcock’s whole career up to that point, and elicited unprecedentedly candid and precise discussions of his films. Humbling himself as a student to Hitchcock’s trenchant musings on the definition of suspense and the role of the director, Truffaut’s book validated the idea of Hollywood movies as worthy of serious discussion, and became a bible for an international array of world-class auteurs. Featuring extended testimonials from David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, James Gray, Olivier Assayas, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and others, Hitchcock/Truffaut is a lively tribute to a defining work of modern film culture.