In 1962,
François Truffaut, a former film critic with the influential Cahiers du Cinéma and current respected filmmaker with three movies under his belt (many writers from Cahiers du Cinéma who went on to become filmmakers in the French New Wave) made a cold request to fellow filmmaker
Alfred Hitchcock, who had close to four decades of directing experience and forty feature films in his filmography, to a series of interviews to discuss his movies in detail. The choice of Hitchcock may have seemed odd on the surface due to their differing styles and the fact that Hitchcock's films were seen as popular fluff compared to Truffaut's more critically acclaimed works, but Truffaut did admire Hitchcock's as a director. The interviews, to which Hitchcock did agree, were documented in a couple of ways, ultimately with Truffaut's 1966 book "Hitchcock Truffaut" in which not only Hitchcock's filmmaking process in general is discussed, but also an in depth candid discussion of each of Hitchcock's films to date is covered. Those interviews and the book are the basis for this documentary. Other directors are interviewed, they who also discuss in further detail those issues covered in the book, and in turn talk about the influence of both Hitchcock and Truffaut on their own work.
—Huggo