"Auteurs" and Collaboration

Name-checking one of my all-time favorite movies is a sure way to get me to read your article. Teaching me something new about it and using to brilliantly distill a very important argument is icing on a particularly contentious cake.

For instance, on North by Northwest, a classic Cary Grant thriller, Hitchcock insisted on working with Ernest Lehman, a screenwriter best known for Sabrina. It was, at first glance, a peculiar choice: Sabrina was a romantic comedy, and Hitchcock had been hired to create a dark suspense movie. But Hitchcock knew what he was doing. In fact, he gave Lehman a tremendous amount of creative freedom. (Hitchcock’s only requirement was that the plot contain three elements: a case of mistaken identity, the United Nations building and a chase scene across the face of Mt. Rushmore.)

Turns out, everything truly brilliant about North by Northwest's script--the banter, the plot twists, the bottomlessly complex characters--grew not from Hitch the auteur, but from his unconventional choice of collaborators and the fertile negative spaces between the bones of his almost imperceptible outline.

(via ClickNothing)