He didn’t say that. Se his IMDB bio.
And, he didn’t say that an actor is a person who can do nothing well. He said that an actor is a person who can “do nothing” well.
Anything with Cary!!! and of course the Birds
- Psycho, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, * and * The Man Who Knew Too Much * (original and remake).
Has anybody noticed that, in * Rear Window, * the entire film is shot so as to show only what Jimmy Stewart can see from his window and in his room?
Also, was Hitchcock one of only two directors to have done a remake of one of his own films ( * The Man Who Knew Too Much * ? Demille did a sound and color remake of his 1923 silent film * The Ten Commandments *, but I can’t recall any other directors who ever got a chance to do one of his earlier films over.
I visit my mom once a month, and for quite some time I’ve been taking videos of Hitchcock flims for us to watch. We’ve discovered that we have a taste for murder. 
Right-o. One of the most difficult things in the world is looking natural in front of a camera.
The Birds is weird. I never found it scary, just a bit odd.
God, you can say that again. There’s sometimes this “moment” just when we roll and the 1st A.D. yells “Action”. The actor will somehow lock it in, it’s fascinating to see. Tim Roth did it on a movie I shot in 1995. He was out of accent, and playing a character who is very slightly brain damaged.
He would just kind of…settle into it when we rolled. But, I do have an outtake somewhere in footage I was given to use to cut a reel, of him blowing a line, and just falling right out of it and laughing as he mugged to my camera.
Sometimes they are so immersed, that you’re really unsure if they are “in” the moment all day long, on and off camera or not. It’s usually a subtle internal thing, and always fascinates me. Since I used to spend a LOT of time very close up to these people, I’d have ample time to look at their faces when rolling, and when not rolling.
( Sorry for the hijack)
Cartooniverse
Had a chance to rethink this recently, when I saw Billy Wilder’s dark masterpiece, Ace in the Hole. This is a film with a dark center and comedic trappings; The Birds is a film with a comedic center and dark trappings (or flappings). Here’s why I see The Birds as a comedy: at the end of the film, everything that happened leads to just one thing: Tippi Hedren gets a man. That’s the central thrust of the plot. For me, the overarching image of The Birds is not the black flappings, but Tippi’s sideways smirk as she stalks Rod Taylor; everything else is MacGuffiny suspense, to keep you adrenalized while you worship the courtship. Family Plot: sunny heart, dark trappings: the entire thrust of the movie was the cute love relationship between Barbar whatshername and Bruce Dern. Rear Window: ditto Jimmy and Grace; comedy with dark trappings. Rope, OTOH, and Vertigo, to name just two, are darker, though the central relationship in Vertigo is Jimmy and Barbara Bel Geddes, and that ends sadly . . . or does it? do we ever find out?
Anyway, I think that’s why Rope and Vertigo are not my faves, though they are many people’s. I think Hitchcock was at his best when he was slipping a comic love story in under the suspenseful cover.
Cartooniverse, I like Frenzy too, but I still think The Birds is Hitchcock’s most honest, in that it’s his most no-holds-barred hysterical: I think he lets his demon run more freely in The Birds than anything else he’s ever done, though I might rank Frenzy second. YMMV
Most but definitely not entire–the moment when we break free of the apartment POV is thematically critical to the film.
By the way, LPc, given your name, is there, by chance, another film you like more than Window from 1954?
Um perhaps it was Kim Novak Jimmy Stewart was romancing in Vertigo?
That was not the point. He didn’t really love Judy Barton, or the character of Madelein Elster. The true love in his life, that he didn’t return, was from Midge.
(Midge played by Barbara BelGeddes; thanks Ilsa)
Tippi gets her man, all right. Then’s she’s brutally assaulted, turned into a vegetable, and allowed to live–for the moment–only on a whim that might be reversed at any moment. Oops, so much for true love conquering all obstacles.
The Birds is indeed a comedy … in the same way that Night of the Living Dead is a comedy. The joke is on humanity for thinking they control their own fates.
Now, I’m confused; is ‘comedy’ being used in its two different (classical and current) meanings?
But ‘Rope’, hands down. You have to know whats going on with the filming; the first time I saw it I didn’t, and was distracted, but did not know by what.
When I knew what was being done, the distraction disappeared, and I appreciated just how civilized and macabre the movie was.
What fascinates me is that I do not remember a single line of dialogue from the movie.
Oh, I do.
Couldn’t resist. I loved Rope, it was the perfect Film School teaching tool. It was pretty damned unnerving as a piece of drama as well, IIRC.