Given the genre we were working in I saw it as sensible to research the most widely known Thriller director - Alfred Hitchcock. By researching not only the man but also his revolutionary techniques, we may be able to draw tried and tested methods improving the overall quality of our film.
Perhaps one of the most famous film directors of all time, Alfred Hitchcock was an English filmmaker who revolutionised many techniques used in the thriller genre. Nicknamed the Master of Suspense, it was films such as Vertigo (1958), Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963) which forged Hitchcock's long-lasting reputation.
Hitchcock attributed many of the techniques used in the aforementioned films as being down to his early career in Silent Film industry. The limitations of the silent form led filmmakers to develop a visual language to enable them to say with images what they could not using dialogue or sound - indeed Hitchcock felt that the arrival of sound in 1927 meant that something was lost to cinema. However, Hitchcock's visual storytelling flair was already in place. Throughout his career, Hitchcock continued to believe in cinema as a visual medium. For him, dialogue and sound should remain secondary to the image in telling the story - the popularised shower scene in Psycho exemplifying this.
Hitchcock was noted for his ability to engage the audience - knowing exactly how to build suspense and when and how to terrify them. He used basic storylines but turned them into classic through his extraordinary techniques - getting into the minds of the audience, framing for emotion, roaming cameras, less importance placed on dialogue, point-of-view editing, montages of close ups in quick succesion, characters that break away from cliches, humour, two things happening at once, suspense, surprise and twists.
"His flair was for narrative, cruelly withholding crucial information (from his characters and from us) and engaging the emotions of the audience like no one else." (Daily Telegraph)
