The singular Swiss-American film-maker Alexandre O Philippe is renowned for his fond, meticulous dissections of cinema, documentaries that probe the cultural impact, themes and construction of influential films and figures.
The People vs George Lucas explores the conflicted relationship between George Lucas and Star Wars fans. Doc of the Dead traces the evolution of zombie cinema and its shifting social meanings. Lynch/Oz investigates connections between The Wizard of Oz and the work of David Lynch.
Philippe is equally adept at sitting down with Hollywood legends to talk about their lives and careers, having profiled William Shatner, William Friedkin and, now, Kim Novak.
“There are a lot of connecting points between them,” Phillippe says. “They’re all very spiritual. They care deeply about humanity and the planet. They’re mystics, in a certain sense, but different kinds of mystics. If I boil it down to their essence, Friedkin is stone, Shatner is wood or trees, and Kim Novak is water in a world of fire. That’s how I see them.”
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The ongoing collaboration between Philippe and Novak – they have recently wrapped a second documentary – began almost by accident. Philippe initially wanted to speak to Novak, one of the last surviving stars of Hollywood’s golden age, for a separate project about Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 classic.
The response shifted everything: Sue Cameron, Novak’s agent, agreed to the interview but added that she had long been searching for the right film-maker to tell Novak’s story: “I think you’re the guy. Would you talk to her?”
Within two weeks Philippe was at Novak’s home; they spent an afternoon together that extended into dinner. As he recalls, “by the end of the day … there was already a bond”, with Novak asking simply, “When do we start?”
Two weeks later they were filming, Philippe says. “She has such warmth, curiosity and kindness. When you think of Kim Novak as an icon, you don’t know what to expect. But she’s all of that.”
In Vertigo, the most indelible – and creepy – moment arrives when Judy, whom Novak plays with uncanny poise, is restyled by Jimmy Stewart’s tortured detective to resemble Madeleine, the dead woman he once loved. Everyone can remember her strange, slow walk when Judy, in the same elegant grey suit that Madeleine wore, enters the room, trance like, her hair in a classic Hitchcock blond updo.
![Alexandre O Philippe: 'One day I was driving and a voice memo [from Kim Novak] came in. I had to pull over. I was completely floored.' Photograph: Loic Venance/AFP/Getty](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/HM5VKG5LKV6VFDCWS4DHRRMZAE.jpg?auth=3613853168a340f5b8990395cd7c8f4406aaa019592f3deea27f51fac4eecb75&width=800&height=532)
More than 60 years later, the 93-year-old star – the lively subject of Kim Novak’s Vertigo, as Philippe’s study came to be titled – digs out the garment from her attic, recalling her discomfort wearing Edith Head’s masterpiece of a costume. The stiff fabric was constricting; its colour was chosen to make Novak look ghostly, washed pale under platinum hair, as she emerged from the fog.
Yet it’s a thrilling reunion. “It’s part of me,” she says in Phillippe’s film as she strokes the suit she once found dowdy. “That’s the good thing about getting old: you can look back and everything is beautiful, because it’s life.”
“We were set up for something more than just a B-roll moment, but I didn’t expect the outpouring of emotion we witnessed,” Phillippe says. “I was just hoping we were capturing it properly. Internally, I was thinking, this is film history unfolding before our eyes. It was a moment.”
Born Marilyn Novak, in Chicago, to Czech immigrant parents – a railway-dispatcher father and a factory-worker mother – Novak grew up in a tough neighbourhood where she was routinely singled out for being different. In Phillippe’s film she reveals that her mother tried to abort her with knitting needles and later attempted to smother her, to spare her the hardships of the Great Depression. Her father kept the miscarried foetus of Kim’s brother in a jar in the garage.
Watching a scene unfold, she starts embodying that character again. She looks younger. It was a weird moment. I realised: oh my gosh, she’s being possessed by the character again, 65 years later
— Alexandre O Philippe
“After principal photography I told Kim to keep communicating by recording voice memos on her phone – anything she wanted to share, anything we missed, anything deeper,” Phillippe says. “She started sending me voice memos almost daily. One day I was driving and a voice memo came in. I played it, and it was the whole story about her dad and her mum. I had to pull over. I was completely floored.
“I immediately called Sue, Kim’s manager, and said, ‘Kim just left me this extraordinary voice memo. I think this is how I want to open the film.’ It pulls the rug from under the audience. You think you know what you’re about to watch. And you get this.”
The young Novak found early refuge in art, studying at the Art Institute of Chicago while supporting herself through modelling, a sideline that led, almost by chance, to discovery in Los Angeles and a contract with Columbia Pictures in 1954.
What followed was a familiar but bruising Hollywood metamorphosis: Harry Cohn, the studio’s head, insisted she change her name – 20th Century-Fox already had a Marilyn – and subjected her to a regime of physical and cosmetic alteration, from weight loss to capped teeth and bleached hair.
Cohn later demanded an end to her secret romance with the black star Sammy Davis jnr.
Novak did manage, with much insistence, to hang on to her surname.
She would later reflect on the industry’s urge to dismantle and reconstruct its actresses, recalling how they would “hire you because they thought you had something special, and then the first thing they’d do is try to give you a new face”, assembling idealised features from other stars until “it wasn’t even you any more”.
That tension between image and identity would define both her screen persona and her role in Vertigo, her most famous, where she recognised something of her own experience in a woman moulded to male desire.
[ Vertigo: From box-office flop to ‘greatest film of all time’Opens in new window ]
During one affecting sequence, as Philippe shows her clips from Vertigo on his laptop, it almost feels as if we’re watching a third entity join Vertigo’s Judy-Madeleine nexus.
“When she’s talking about Madeleine she starts becoming really sensuous about how it made her feel to be Madeleine,” the film-maker says. “Watching a scene unfold, she starts embodying that character again. She looks younger. It was a weird moment. I realised: oh my gosh, she’s being possessed by the character again, 65 years later. When she says that Madeleine never really left her, well, there’s the evidence.”
Novak’s breakthrough had arrived in 1955 with Picnic, which earned her a Golden Globe, followed by acclaimed turns opposite Frank Sinatra in The Man with the Golden Arm and Pal Joey; the latter scored her a hit with her rendition of My Funny Valentine.
She explored noir in Pushover, and romance in Phffft, before making daring choices late in her career, such as her roles in the films Of Human Bondage and The Legend of Lylah Clare.
Then, at the height of her powers, she retired from Hollywood to Big Sur, on California’s central coast, where she became a painter, and later to Oregon, where she met and married Robert Malloy, an equine veterinarian, in 1976. They rescued animals together until he died, in 2020.
If “golden age” Hollywood dictated how its actresses should look, move and behave, Novak’s performances carried, she suggests, a subtle edge of defiance, an insistence on not being entirely possessed.
But the erosion of self was wearying. And the misogyny that allowed Cohn to call her a “fat Polack” hasn’t gone away. In 2014 Donald Trump, among others, criticised Novak’s appearance following her return to the Academy Awards, tweeting that the then 81-year-old star should “sue her plastic surgeon” and that she was “hard to watch”.
A wounded Novak, who suffers from bipolar disorder, initially refused to leave her home following the barbs, before bouncing back with a Facebook post: “I will no longer hold myself back from speaking out against bullies. We can’t let people get away with affecting our lives.”
“Every time we talked about her leaving Hollywood, there were nuances,” Philippe says. “So the film took on a spiral structure: four acts, each ending with ‘I left Hollywood because …’ but each time slightly different.
“I don’t make documentaries to provide neat answers. I’m more interested in mysteries. Kim wanted to remain a mystery. We shed light on aspects, but the truth is more complicated.”
Hitchcock has often been criticised for his treatment of leading ladies, most infamously Tippi Hedren, who, having rejected his advances during the making of The Birds, was forced to perform a harrowing attic scene with real birds over several days.
[ From the archive: Tippi Hedren says Alfred Hitchcock sexually assaulted herOpens in new window ]
Novak holds the director in the highest regard, however, and considers him a respectful film-making partner – a relief for Philippe, a Hitchcock superfan, whose previous films include 78/52, a postmortem of the shower scene from Psycho.
Hitchcock’s ghost is thanked in the closing credits for being “undeniably present during the making of this movie”. That is no exaggeration. Phillippe and Novak, who continue to text and talk every day, have subsequently collaborated on Beyond the Fall, an investigation of Vertigo’s final shot. In the course of Phillippe’s research, he and Novak held a seance to ask for Hitchcock’s input.
“I won’t spoil it, but something extraordinary happened,” the director says. “Whether you believe in it or not, it’s fascinating. It’ll make quite a scene. We already know that Hitchcock continues to surprise us. How does she fall in Vertigo? That’s his greatest mystery. The film explores this through different directors’ perspectives. All these years later he’s still playing with us from beyond the grave.”
Kim Novak’s Vertigo is in cinemas from Friday, April 3rd
