FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT:
Your own works include a great many [literary] adaptations, but mostly they are
popular or light entertainment novels, which are so freely refashioned in your
own manner that they ultimately become a Hitchcock creation. Many of your
admirers would like to see you undertake the screen version of such a major
classic as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, for instance.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK: Well, I shall never do that, precisely because Crime and Punishment is somebody else’s achievement. There’s been a lot of talk about the way in which Hollywood directors distort literary masterpieces. I’ll have no part of that! What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema. Today I would be unable to tell you the story of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds. I read it only once, and very quickly at that. An author takes three or four years to write a fine novel; it’s his whole life. Then other people take it over completely. Craftsmen and technicians fiddle around with it and eventually someone winds up as a candidate for an Oscar, while the author is entirely forgotten. I simply can’t see that.