Martin Scorsese’s favourite Alfred Hitchcock movie: “It’s a film that I’m obsessed with”

Posted On December 27, 2024December 27, 2024

It’s wholly unsurprising to discover that one of the greatest directors of all time is a huge fan of another one of the greatest directors of all time, even though Martin Scorsese hasn’t made a whole lot of pictures that take their cues from Alfred Hitchcock.

The ‘Master of Suspense’ thrived on genre-driven thrillers that toyed with audience expectations, placed the principal characters in high-stakes games of cat-and-mouse that carried much larger implications, and brought the viewer into the action with Hitchcock’s distinctive voyeuristic relish.

As far as potboilers go, Scorsese doesn’t have many in his back catalogue. Obviously, he’s made some of the finest and most entertaining thrillers in modern cinema through the likes of Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Departed, and Casino, to name just a few, but the closest pictures in his filmography to the accepted definition of ‘Hitchcockian’ are Cape Fear and Shutter Island.

They’re unsettling, atmospheric, tension-building exercises laced with twists and turns aplenty, and with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the art form, Scorsese didn’t have to dig too far into his memory banks to come up with inspiration for the latter. Shutter Island wasn’t a Hitchcock homage, but the director’s favourite flick from the portly auteur is constantly on his mind whether he’s looking to it for inspiration or not.

“Vertigo is probably my favourite Hitchcock film and probably one of my favourite films of all time. It’s a film that I’m obsessed with,” he told Indie London. “I saw it on its first release in VistaVision, projected in VistaVision, and the Capitol Theatre in New York. That moment when the nun comes up in the end? It’s just an extraordinary shot. But the entire film, even though I didn’t fully understand it when I was 15, it’s a film I keep revisiting.”

Scorsese first saw it as a teenager and then watched it again on the big screen two decades later, casually name-dropping that he flocked to a retrospective in Los Angeles during the 1970s with Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg in tow when the ‘New Hollywood’ era was in full swing, and the movie brats were in the midst of their hostile takeover.

“It was the only way we could see it, except on TV, cut up,” he said while making it clear he doesn’t care for the edited version that aired on the small screen. “It’s one of those ones that I live by.” If Vertigo is being played in a cinema or on television in its original form, then Scorsese will make a point of clearing his schedule so that he can see it again.

Everybody has at least one film that they’ll drop everything and watch whenever they stumble upon it, and for Scorsese, nothing tops Vertigo.

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