Even Alfred Hitchcock Was Scared To Make 1 Film Despite All His Best Work Being Adapted From Novels
Although filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock didn’t win the Academy Award for Best Director despite receiving five nominations, he left behind a legacy that cannot be beaten for several decades to come. Known as the Master of Suspense, he helmed more than 50 feature films in his career spanning six decades. To this day, his movies continue to be studied due to his masterful filmmaking.
Adapting novels and short stories into movies is nothing new in the Hollywood entertainment industry. Alfred Hitchcock was no exception to this as he has also contributed in adapting some of the best literary works into movies. So, it comes as a surprise that even someone as bold and daring as him did not attempt to make a movie on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Reason for Not Making a Movie Based on Crime and Punishment
Alfred Hitchcock’s fans or even just cinephiles who love thrillers would know that some of the director’s best movies, for instance, Rebecca, Strangers on a Train, and To Catch a Thief, are adapted from novels. This would make one wonder if there was ever something that the director could not do. You would be surprised to know that the director himself admitted his defeat when he was asked if he could ever do justice to a cinematic adaptation of Crime and Punishment, which is regarded as one of the best works of world literature.
During his famous book-length interview with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock revealed why he would never make a movie on that book saying (via The Guardian):
“Well, in Dostoevsky’s novel there are many, many words and all of them have a function. [..] to really convey that in cinematic terms, substituting the language of the camera for the written word, one would have to make a six to ten-hour film. Otherwise, it won’t be any good.”
Considering the Vertigo director’s logic on this, perhaps making a series on Crime and Punishment would be the smart thing to do. Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to be able to do that so all we can do is hope that someone with the same level of expertise in thrillers makes an attempt at making it.
Alfred Hitchcock on His Approach Towards Making Literary Adaptations
There is an abundance of literary adaptations in the world of cinema, just as there is a scarcity of good ones because doing justice to such movies takes a lot of hard work, effort and precision. In today’s world that is moving on to the next thing without a second’s thought, it is a little difficult to achieve that. Alfred Hitchcock, however, did it for years and evidently, excelled at it.
On being asked his approach towards literary adaptations, Hitchcock said:
“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.”
Although the director’s approach might not sound conventional, it cannot be denied that he did a much better job at making these literary adaptations than most modern filmmakers.
