If you haven’t come across Francois Truffaut’s interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, you can be forgiven for not reading them. I’ve been aware of them for a while, but only recently invested in a copy of the big fat book that contains the interviews, and features the name of both directors blazing down the cover. I’m less than half way through the book, a weighty collection from Simon and Schuster, and I’m already wishing I’d read it a decade ago.

At the time of the interviews, Truffaut’s purpose was to give Hitchcock’s work the credibility he thought it deserved. This isn’t the sort of misstep that the French made in celebrating Jerry Lewis or Johnny Hallyday. Rather, it’s the appropriate response from a master filmmaker who recognises the genius of another.

Which begs the question of why Hitchcock’s brilliance is so easily overlooked. The key is that he did things in plain sight, his mastery of visual storytelling so refined that audiences had no idea of the sophistication of the choices the director made in bringing his films to life.

How did Hitchcock develop such flair? Part of the answer lies in the fact that he decided early in life that he would work in film, and did exactly that. He wrote a screenplay to find out how it was done, and it secured him employment writing titles for silent movies.

That experience showed him the same raw material could be handled as comedy or drama according to the success of what happened during filming. Initial intentions mattered nothing to the reality of what was actually shot, and if the footage looked funny then damnit that’s what the film would become, with the titles emphasising humour.

Immersion in silent cinema also taught Hitch how to convey everything about a story with images alone. It formed the foundation of his style, using sound to contrast with image and not merely repeat the same message. Time and again in his films, simple dialogue scenes are alive because the camera’s point of view reveals aspects of character not unveiled by obvious chatter. Add to that an appreciation of visual metaphor and montage learned from the likes of Eisenstein, and you’ve got in Hitchcock an all-rounder who could use pictures to tell any story he wanted.

It was Hitch’s choices of material that made him unpopular with the highbrow set. Attracted by thrillers that allowed audiences to experience strong emotions as they empathised with innocent heroes whose lives were in jeapordy, Hitchcock’s populism precluded him from being favoured by reviewers more in tune with literary source material. As such, Hitch was sneered at by people who had no idea what he could do with pictures, since the content of those pictures so often involved guns and chase scenes.

The book is a delight to read, two fascinating men talking about an artform they love. I’ll be interested to see what the two of them have to say about Hitch’s biggest successes, and his less appealing films: I recently saw and was repelled by Frenzy, finding it hard to imagine how it came from the same man that brought us Rear Window. A more sophisticated response may be that I allowed the technical flair of the latter to blind me to its ugly aspects, and that these are more apparent in the artless Frenzy. No matter: those kind of paradoxes bedevil every artist I’m interested in, and with a batting average as striking as Hitchcock’s, a few faltering steps late on can be forgiven.

If you get a book token this Christmas, then you really can’t invest £15 more sensibly than in Hitchcock, by Truffaut. It really is a remarkable piece of work, that’ll give you insight into the craft of film that’s as valid now as it was when the book was constructed in August 1962, at which point Hitchcock was also editing The Birds: his 48th film. Regardless of what you think you might know about Hitchcock at this point, ask yourself if you’re so clued up about the processes of filmmaking that you can’t learn something from a man who made 53.