Daily Inspiration Quote by Philip Kaufman

Kaufman is doing two things at once here: staking a lineage and justifying a mood. By calling his move “a little homage,” he signals deference to Hitchcock without surrendering authorship. Homage is a safe, even flattering word in film culture, but it’s also a quiet permission slip to borrow technique - to quote a master’s grammar so the audience feels a familiar unease before they can name it.

The key phrase is “that sort of creepy atmosphere.” Kaufman isn’t talking about plot mechanics so much as the texture of suspicion: the way Hitchcock made cities feel haunted by desire, and desire feel like a surveillance system. “Vertigo” becomes shorthand for a whole emotional technology: obsession framed as romance, romance revealed as manipulation, the camera complicit in both. When Kaufman invokes “a woman and the psychological twists,” he’s nodding to Hitchcock’s most controversial engine - the male gaze turning a woman into a project, then a mystery, then a wound. He says it almost casually (“and so forth”), which is telling: these are familiar tropes, but they still work because the discomfort is the point.

“Shot right here in The City” matters, too. San Francisco isn’t just a backdrop; it’s a built-in vertigo machine - hills, fog, sudden drop-offs, postcard beauty hiding blank pockets of menace. Kaufman’s subtext is pragmatic and cultural: if you want psychological destabilization, borrow the cinematic memory of a place that already carries it. The audience arrives pre-suggested, primed by an earlier film’s ghosts.