Interview: Talking About Hitchcock, Showers, And Melons with 78/52 Director Alexandre O. Philippe

Editor, News; Toronto, Canada (@Mack_SAnarchy)
I met 78/52 director Alexander Philippe at the rooftop bar at our hotel in Puebla the night before the opening ceremony of Morbido. As festivals go if you do not know who someone is you ask if they have a movie in the festival. Moving among the group we came upon Alexander. He said he was attending the festival to present his Pyscho Shower Scene documentary during the work in progress session.

"Waitwaitwaitwaitwaitwait. YOU'RE the guy directing 78/52??? I saw some of that in Montreal back in July. I HAVE to talk to you!"

We sat down a couple days later and we chatted about this upcoming doc. We also finished up our conversation with the exciting new project developing on the grounds of the infamous Stanley Hotel, a museum and film centre focused solely on horror films. 

Let’s start at the beginning shall we? Where did the idea for 78/52 come from? I presume that it obviously came from a love for Hitchcock. How does it break down from Hitchcock to a specific scene? How do we get to that one scene?

For me the path really started when I was about ten years old. I have been really obsessed with Hitchcock since. I remember when I was ten to twelve years old, since my friends weren't I had to turn to my parents and their friends. I would host these weekly events at home and show Hitchcock movies on VHS. I would have a little speech and then have a little Q&A after. It was really the origins of that.

Then you fast forward to years later, of course, I have been doing Hitchcock workshops for a while now at film festivals and literary events. So I have always been fascinated by him as a craftsman and someone who thinks very, very actively about everything that he does in order to trigger very specific reaction from the audience. And that to me is art with a capital A. It bugs me that in his lifetime he hasn't gotten his due, the respect truly that he should have gotten, that he never won an Oscar in his lifetime is absurd. We all know he is one of the greatest if not the greatest of all time.

So his movies have always been movies that I would go back to. To look at and study. Vertigo is my favorite movie of all time, it is just an absolute masterpiece. The more that I study his craft the more I want to learn about it and the more I start deconstructing his movies.

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