It’s hard to imagine anyone interested in film not being a fan of Alfred Hitchcock because he’s such a key influence on the entire history of cinema – it’s hard to escape his shadow.
You always get told how important the premiere and doing the press is, but I have suspicions.
You can’t deny reality just because you can’t explain it.
I didn’t sound anything like Capote at the screen test. It was more like Bob Dylan. In his early years. With the flu.
I do always feel very proud and flattered by being asked to be a part of American productions playing American characters.
If you ever have the good fortune to meet Tippi Hedren, she’s an amazing woman. You can’t quite believe she is the age she is.
I would absolutely like to play more leading roles. There’s no philosophy – well, the only philosophy, I suppose, is to try and do different things.
I work best when a little scared, when there’s so much more than the lines to think about.
I teach for the Book Trust, which promotes reading and writing with children.
I had to change the shape of my own voice. It was quite hard to pull off and so once I had it, I stayed in Hitchcock’s voice all day on set.
The thing about Hitchcock which is quite extraordinary for a director of that time, he had a very strong sense of his own image and publicizing himself. Just a very strong sense of himself as the character of Hitchcock.
They seem much rarer now, those auteur films that come out of a director’s imagination and are elliptical and hermetic. All those films that got me into independent cinema when I was watching it seem thin on the ground.
The prosthetics were interesting because the artist was so good that they could just put a Hitchcock mask on me, but you don’t want to do that. You’re an actor playing Hitchcock, so it’s about how much of that you’re going to do.
I think it will be, as always, interesting to compare different portrayals of Hitchcock. I’m very honored that I’m playing the same part as Anthony Hopkins.
The script for ‘Infamous’ was so poised between tragedy and comedy. It’s a dream part. One reads those scripts with a sense of melancholia. When you read a script that good I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this script is too good. They’ll never give it to me.’
I’ve got to tell you, I’ve played real characters before and people always bring up this word ‘impersonation,’ and I’m never entirely sure what it means.
I went to meet Joe Johnston, the director, and he’s charming. I’ve been very lucky. Most of the directors I’ve worked with are charming. But Joe’s a particularly charming man, and he showed me lots of designs and, rather memorably, welcomed me to the Marvel Universe.
I was a fan of Hitchcock, but more importantly than that, he is such an inscrutable man, and a very carefully inscrutable man. He apparently was blank-faced with a calm and controlled presence. I was immediately anxious and thought, ‘How am I going to get behind that?’
There’s something in the rhythm and roll of it that is connected to the way Hitchcock thinks and moves. Then there is everything he ingested – the cigar smoking and drinking that’s imprinted on his voice.
They know you’re not Alfred Hitchcock, but you need to be enough Alfred Hitchcock for them not to be bothered by it. That’s a reassuring thing.