“It was meant to be,” Hollywood legend Kim Novak (star of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Billy Wilder’s Kiss Me Stupid) says of the circumstances that led Swiss-American documentary maker, Alexandre O. Philippe, to her doorstep.
Kim Novak’s Vertigo (sold by Dogwoof and premiering in Venice) was clearly cathartic for its subject. Talking utterly candidly about her life and career gave Novak a new “appreciation of myself” (as she puts it). She discusses everything from her bipolarity to her troubled relationship with her father, from her experiences under the tyrannical and manipulative Columbia Studios boss Harry Cohn to her love of animals and why she quit Hollywood. The film was made through Gull House Films Production in association with Medianoche Productions and The Ebersole Hughes Company.
“Most people don’t know who Kim Novak is,” Philippe says of a film which shows its subject in a new and often surprising light. “She has been a mystery for a very long time. You never want to strip away completely that mystery….but with the film I think you get a real sense of who the person is.”
Philippe thinks audiences will be surprised by Novak’s openness and generosity of spirit. “She reveals aspects of herself she has never revealed before. There is an incredible amount of vulnerability. That’s all credit to her. She took a massive leap of faith.”
The project came together remarkably quickly. “Initially, I had approached [Novak] for a different project I am working on, about the final sequence of Vertigo,” Philippe remembers. “It was actually her long-time manager Sue Cameron who said she had seen a couple of my films and told me she had been looking for someone to make a proper film about Kim for decades – and she said I think you’re the guy.”
Cameron (an exec producer on the documentary) arranged for Philippe to meet with Novak. “We very quickly bonded,” the director remembers that first afternoon with Novak at her remote home in rural Oregon. It helped that he had admired her movies since he was a kid. When he was growing up in Switzerland, his family had a room with exactly the same dark, patterned wallpaper that features in a key scene in Vertigo – and he had never forgotten the image of Novak in that film in her striking black and green satin dress.
At the time, the prolific director had just finished Chain Reaction (his movie about the cultural impact of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that screened in Venice last year) and was supposed to be taking time off before starting work on a new project. Instead, he plunged straight into the Novak film. Two weeks after meeting her, he was already shooting. “I have never had a film come together like this. I think the immediacy of it was what really made it work.”
It turned out Novak was prepared to share everything. She had lost some of her possessions in a series of fires but still had a treasure trove including letters, cuttings and old costumes. She happily allowed Philippe to rummage through her most intimate personal archives. Although very curious about his approach to telling her story on screen, she also made sure to give him the creative freedom he needed.
“One of the things that was really helpful was that I showed her how to record voice memos in her iPhone. I really liked the idea that her phone would become a confessional – that she would be able to share some of her more private memories and pressing things she wanted to communicate without necessarily having to have me in the room.”
Once she had the hang of the technology, Novak began to send Philippe voice mails on a daily basis. The film opens with one voice message in which the star, now 92, confides it’s not easy getting old. Her age, though, doesn’t hold her back.
You might expect Philippe to feel a little like the William Holden character, startled and over-awed by the ageing but still imperious movie star played by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard – but that wasn’t the case at all. “She’s extremely vibrant, she is full of life. She is funny, she is witty, she’s kind, she is just wonderful,” the director speaks in reverential fashion about his subject.
The documentary is packed with clips. Predictably, Vertigo features prominently but we also see Novak in other celebrated features like Pal Joey, Jeanne Eagels and Picnic.
But, no, Philippe didn’t need to license these. Thanks to his many previous documentaries on films from Psycho to Alien, he is an expert on fair use.
“There’s a right way to do it…and we work with the best attorneys in the business,” the director says of law firm Donaldson Callif Perez, as well as Larry Waks at Sterlington. “It’s a very rigorous process but I have been doing it for a long time.”
Novak will be on the Lido and at other major festivals where the film is expected to surface. She is now set to attract a new generation if fans thanks to Colman Domingo’s planned new biopic Scandalous! about her “forbidden” relationship with Sammy Davis Jr. and in which Novak will be played by Hollywood “It girl,” Sydney Sweeney.
The star will also be back on screen in another of Philippe’s new projects, The Fall, which he describes as “an obsessive focus on a single shot” in Vertigo when James Stewart’s character sees Novak plummeting off the tower.
As for Kim Novak’s Vertigo, he explains that it’s about “the spirals in her life” and that the Hitchcock classic is really only one part of the complex and interweaving story he is telling. “It’s this idea that her life has been spiralling in very interesting ways and her life is coming full circle in a really emotional way.”
Philippe hopes his documentary will turn viewers on to some of Novak’s less familiar pictures. “She is incredibly versatile; The thing that has been so much fun for me has been really digging up her filmography and watching all these different films,” the director explains why he thinks Novak is still so underrated. Vertigo is the acknowledged classic in her filmography but he rhapsodises about movies like Strangers When We Meet and The Legend Of Lylah Clare. “She’s also a great comedic actress, really funny, really touching, really vulnerable and really dramatic.”
Novak quit Hollywood at the height of her fame. She has re-invented herself as an artist. Philippe describes her paintings, which are exhibited at the Butler Institute of Art, as “extraordinary…very Hitchcockian in her approach, in the way she hides things. It can take you a long time to work out what is going on in her paintings. They’re kind of like riddles….very crafty, playful and mysterious – very like her. ”
Philippe made a movie about her and she has responded by using him as her subject. “In fact, she has just finished two portraits of me! She asked me how I want them framed and so I am going to have to go and pick them up at some point in Oregon.”
Even in her 90s, Novak remains the same independent, free spirit that she has always been. “Most of the time, she is by herself. She has an electric car and will drive herself to town to get some groceries. She does her own shopping, she rides a horse, she has her gym, she exercises and she paints…she has a very solitary life but seems to do really well,” the director says of a Golden Age movie actress who has outlived almost all her peers and who now looks set to be discovered all over again.
