'The Artist' Director Responds to Kim Novak Slam Over 'Vertigo' Music

Michel Hazanavicius claims his use of a portion of the score to the Hitchcock classic grew out of his "admiration and respect for movies throughout history."

2:04 PM PST 1/9/2012 by THR Staff

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Roundtable Michel Hazanavicius Portrait - P 2012

Joe Pugliese

The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius has released a statement responding to actress Kim Novak, who on Monday compared the use of some music from Vertigo in the Oscar contender to "rape."

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Here's the statement:

The Artist was made as a love letter to cinema, and grew out of my (and all of my cast and crew’s) admiration and respect for movies throughout history. It was inspired by the work of Hitchcock, Lang, Ford, Lubitsch, Murnau and Wilder. I love Bernard Herrmann and his music has been used in many different films and I’m very pleased to have it in mine. I respect Kim Novak greatly and I’m sorry to hear she disagrees.

THR's Directors Roundtable: Michel Hazanavicius

As The Hollywood Reporter reported earlier Monday, Novak, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo along with Jimmy Stewart, bought a full-page trade ad announcing, "I want to report a rape. I feel as if my body -- or, at least my body of work -- has been violated by the movie, The Artist."

She went on to say, "This film could and should have been able to stand on its own without depending upon Bernard Herrmann's score from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo to provide it more drama."

Novak called the creative decision "cheating," adding, "Shame on them!"

Reviewing the film when it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, THR critic Todd McCarthy wrote, "Hazanavicius and Bource daringly choose to explicitly employ Bernard Herrmann’s love theme from Vertigo, which is dramatically effective in its own right but is so well known that it yanks you out of one film and places you in the mind-set of another. Surely some sort of reworked equivalent would have been a better idea."