Sasha Gervasi wrote Spielberg’s The Terminal and the recent Henry’s Crime, but he’s probably best known as the director of the rock documentary, Anvil! The Story Of Anvil. However now he’s setting his directing sites on something a bit different, as the LA Times reports that he’s in talks with Montecito Pictures to script and direct a long-gestating movie about Alfred Hitchcock.
Rather than a full birth-to-death biopic, the film will focus on one chapter of the great man’s life, around the time he made Psycho. Indeed the book it’s based on is simply called ‘Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho’, by Steven Rebello. While Hitchcock is an interesting figure anyway, Psycho was a particularly important time in his life. Many felt that while he was at the height of his popularity in the late 50s, that with movies like North By Northwest and his TV show, ‘Alfred Hitchcock Present’, he was almost becoming a parody himself and that he was losing his touch.
Then he suddenly went black and while, low budget, and made a film that wasn’t quite like anything anyone had seen before, and which on the surface appeared as if the the world’s most famous director was suddenly descending into bargain basement schlock. He even used a crew largely culled from his TV show rather than his films. The movie was of course 1960’s Psycho, which redefined Hitchcock and the horror genre. It was a brave move on Hitchcock’s part, and it could make for an interesting film, especially as some have suggested the violence against a blonde woman mirrored his own secret desires, and that’s what attracted him to it.
While numerous actors have been mentioned in connection with the movie in its various incarnations over the past few years (including Anthony Hopkins), in order to try and get things back on track, Gervasi will pretty much go back to square one, rewrite the script and then hopefully find the right actors for the parts. However that may be some time away.