Anthony Hopkins: Hitchcock.Anthony Hopkins ‘Hitchcock’ poster: ‘Psycho’ style
The Hitchcock poster above shares a few elements with the Psycho 1960 poster, such as the splitting of the image into various fragments featuring the film’s actors. And in Sacha Gervasi’s Hitchcock, about the behind-the-scenes goings-on during the making of Psycho, the actors are Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock, Helen Mirren as Hitchcock’s wife and longtime collaborator Alma Reville, Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh, Jessica Biel as Vera Miles, Danny Huston as screenwriter Whitfield Cook, Toni Collette as Hitchcock personal assistant Peggy Robertson, and James D’Arcy as Anthony Perkins. (Hitchcock poster: Fox Searchlight.)
The Hitchcock poster was initially found at EW.com, where we learn that Fox Searchlight and Gervasi have been selling Hitchcock as a “love story” – between Alfred and Alma, that is.
The couple were married in 1926 and remained together until his death in 1980. Alma died two years later. Some people believe that long marriages equal happiness, trust, love, and rock-solid character. Some people also believe in the Tooth Fairy.
Anyhow, according to John Russell Taylor’s biography Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock was a virgin when he married Alma Reville, who had edited/collaborated on his first few British films. Taylor’s book describes the couple’s relation in mostly idyllic terms, though reality apparently was much more complex.
Tippi Hedren & Alfred Hitchcock
Tippi Hedren, Hitchcock’s The Birds and Marnie star, has recently had her say on the director’s obsession with her. Hedren claims that Hitchcock sexually harassed her and all but destroyed her film career by preventing the actress, under contract to him, from finding work elsewhere. Hedren’s story became the basis of the BBC production The Girl, featuring Toby Jones as Hitchcock and Sienna Miller as Hedren.
Alma Reville, by the way, looked nothing like Eva Marie Saint, Madeleine Carroll, Grace Kelly, Joan Barry, Joan Fontaine, Kim Novak, Ingrid Bergman, Vera Miles, Janet Leigh, Tippi Hedren, or any of the other Hitchcock heroines – and those ranged from Anny Ondra to Tallulah Bankhead. Reville looked nothing like Helen Mirren, either.
Hitchcock 2012 release date
Based on Stephen Rebello’s 1990 book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Hitchcock was adapted by John J. McLaughlin. The film, initially to have been a 2013 release, will premiere at Los Angeles’ AFI FEST on Nov. 1. It opens in select North American theaters on Nov. 23.
Hitchcock Scarlett Johansson as Psycho Janet Leigh.‘Hitchcock’ trailer: Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren deliver Oscar-baiting Performances
“All of us harbor dark recesses of violence and horror,” Anthony Hopkins’ Alfred Hitchcock tells a bunch of reporters in the official Hitchcock trailer. “I’m just a man hiding in the corner with a camera. Watching.” (Please scroll down to check out the Hitchcock trailer in HD. Photo: Hitchcock Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh in Psycho.)
The Man with a Camera made the relatively low-budget horror classic Psycho in 1960, watching a big knife find its way into just about every body part of the film’s hygiene-conscious antiheroine. A somewhat surprising box office hit that earned four Academy Award nominations, including one for Janet Leigh as Best Supporting Actress and another for Hitchcock himself, Psycho remains one of cinema’s iconic works.
‘Hitchcock’ as another ‘Gods and Monsters’?
Hitchcock revolves around the making of Psycho, though, obviously, the Sacha Gervasi-directed movie will feel nothing like the horror classic. Instead, expect something along the lines of the fairy-taleish Gods and Monsters, which had Ian McKellen as a fictionalized (Frankenstein director) James Whale and Brendan Fraser as his acolyte.
Gods and Monsters earned both McKellen and Lynn Redgrave, as Whale’s maid, Oscar nods. Don’t be too surprised if Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren, who plays editor Alma Reville Hitchcock, to be shortlisted for next year’s Oscars as well. Not that either Hopkins or Mirren actually looks much like Hitchcock and Reville; those are larger-than-life performances, and Academy members usually love them.
In fact, two of Anthony Hopkins’ four Oscar nods were for his impersonating real-life characters: Richard Nixon in the aptly titled Nixon (1995) and John Quincy Adams in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997). Helen Mirren, for her part, won a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen, and was nominated for two other real-life-inspired roles: Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George (1994) and Sofya Tolstoy in The Last Station (2009).
A curiosity: “Doris Day should do it [the film version of Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho] as a musical,” Alma Reville tells her husband in the Hitchcock trailer. Perhaps Day overheard that conversation, as in 1960 she had her own “horror” flick, the successful thriller Midnight Lace. Not a musical, though.
Also in the Hitchcock cast are Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh and Jessica Biel as Vera Miles.
Hitchcock Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh in Psycho photo: Fox Searchlight.