Scotland on Screen: Mark Cousins on My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock

Discovery is usually guaranteed in a Mark Cousins joint. You walk out of epic essay films like The Story of Film: An Odyssey and Women Make Film with a brain swirling with images from movies you want to see, many of which you won’t have heard of previously. He’s spent his career shining a torch into corners of cinema that haven’t been given enough light, so it’s a surprise to see that the subject of his latest film is probably the most famous director of all time: Alfred Hitchcock. 

It turns out Cousins was surprised too. “I try to go off-piste a bit in film stuff, you know? But my producer, John Archer, said, ‘It's 100 years since the first Hitch film [the lost Number 13 from 1922], do you wanna do something?’” Initially, Cousins wasn’t interested. “Everything's been said,” he thought. But themes started to pop into his head that hadn’t been explored, ideas like loneliness and fulfilment. He took Archer’s bait. “I said to John, OK, I'll watch [Hitchcock’s] films in order from the very start, and if I feel myself scribbling ideas, that means that I can maybe do a film.” 

A Hitchcock binge is no mean feat, given he directed over 50 movies, but this was during lockdown and Cousins had time on his hands. He ended up scribbling down lots of ideas, but one was key to looking at this great director anew: Hitchcock would narrate the film. “Doing it in the first person was the first thing I thought of,” he says. “We'll have him talk!” It’s a wonderful premise – it's as if the maestro behind Psycho and Rear Window has decided to deliver a PowerPoint presentation on his own career from beyond the grave. 

My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock opens with a blatant fib: “Written and voiced by Alfred Hitchcock.” It’s not the only fabrication, Cousins reveals. “People have been saying to me after screenings, 'Where did Hitchcock say all that stuff?' He said none of that stuff; it's all made up. But it's all close to things that he said or felt.” The trick to writing the script was trying to get inside Hitchcock’s head. “If you try to write from someone else's point of view in the first person, you do have a slight shudder; it allows you to create a real intimacy.” Cousins says he felt a bit like Alan Bennett. “Those monologues, they're just perfect. Bennett takes one woman, or occasionally a man, and has them tell their whole life story. My film tries to do that for Hitch.”

My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock. Credit: Dogwoof

With Cousins set on a first-person Hitchcock narration, the bothersome fact that Hitchcock died in 1980 meant he had to put his thinking cap on. “We didn't consider the AI route. That was available to us, but we didn't really want to do that, you know? It had to be an actor.” Estimable actors like Toby Jones and Anthony Hopkins have played the director in the past, but in those examples (respectively The Girl and Hitchcock, both from 2012) it was makeup and lighting doing most of the heavy lifting. With a voiceover, there’s no place to hide. 

Cousins turned to his friend, the actor Simon Callow, for advice. “I asked Simon who could play Hitchcock and he said, ‘The best ear in the business is Alistair McGowan.’” This beanpole comedian will be extremely well-known to any reader who had half an eye on British TV in the late-90s and early-00s, where he’d often be found impersonating sports stars, celebrities and politicians (David Beckham, Tony Blair and Michael Parkinson are among his spot-on repertoire). 

“We asked him to do it,” recalls Cousins, “but we didn't hear for ages. And then my phone pinged and it was a voice message... and it was Hitchcock. He sounded exactly like him. I didn't need to say, ‘Oh, could you dial up the London a little bit’ or anything; he had it, I think, pretty perfect.”

Cousins is right. McGowan has the Master of Suspense down pat, from his laboured breathing to his snorty giggle to his rumbling belly laughs at his own mischief. “It was amazing to see Alistair pull the phlegm up into his throat and then kind of drop his jaw,” Cousins says of McGowan’s performance. “To see that physical process was fascinating. He's got a unique bit of wiring between his ear, his brain, his throat and his mouth; it's quite extraordinary. He should leave his body to medical science, in my opinion.”

In many ways, Cousins and Hitchcock aren’t obvious bedfellows. As filmmakers, their style and temperament couldn’t be more different. “My films are certainly not thrillers,” Cousins confirms. “They're cut quite slowly; often my films try to reduce your heartbeat, not increase it.” Both directors are interested in looking, though. Cousins even has a film called The Story of Looking, and it would be the perfect title for a Hitchcock biography. “Yes, we’re both interested in voyeuristic things,” Cousins agrees. “Visual encounters with the world are something overwhelming for both of us. Hitchcock and I would overlap in that area strongly.”

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Filmography (selected): The March On Rome (2022), My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock (2022), The Story of Film: A New Generation (2021), The Story of Looking (2021), The Storms of Jeremy Thomas (2021), Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema (2019), The Eyes of Orson Welles (2017), Stockholm, My Love (2016), Atomic, Living in Dread and Promise (2015), I am Belfast (2015), A Story of Children and Film (2013), Here be Dragons (2013), What is this Film Called Love? (2012), The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011), The First Movie (2009), The New Ten Commandments (2008)

t: @markcousinsfilm