KIM NOVAK IN KIM NOVAK'S VERTIGO
ALEXANDRE O. PHILIPPE: KIM NOVAK'S VERTIGO (2025)
A rare interview with 92-year-old Kim Novak slides into streaming release
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SOURCE: The text below is largely indebted to the Melbourne Internatonal Film Festival.]
Swiss director Alexandre O. Philippe's interviews with the subject of Kim Novak's Vertigo were shot around 2024 and early 2025 at her remote ranch in rural Oregon. Philippe began working with Novak after initially reaching out for a different project about the final sequence of Vertigo. That first conversation quickly evolved into filming this intimate portrait over roughly a nine-month period leading up to the documentary's world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September 2025.
In studio-era Golden Age Hollywood, Kim Novak fought to craft her own identity. In this affectionate documentary portrait, she elegantly redefines her legacy.
People have rarely given Kim Novak the credit she deserves. She has been dismissed as a generic 1950s studio blonde; her slippery performance in 1958 psychological thriller Vertigo is too often attributed only to director Alfred Hitchcock’s genius; and her long, fiercely private retirement is treated as the wreckage of Hollywood misogyny. All the while, however, Novak has been her own auteur. She fought Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn to keep her own surname, and went on strike for better pay. Now 93, she recalls Vertigo as a satisfyingly metatextual collaboration, reframing her life’s dizzying, spiralling narratives as "a big, beautiful circle."
In the prolific Alexandre O. Philippe, Novak finds an avid, erudite listener. His documentaries on cinema craft are frequently valentines to individual films: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , Alien (2019) and Psycho (7017). Here, as in his William Shatner portrait You Can Call Me Bill (2023), Philippe illuminates a complex person rather than worshipping a star. Kim Novak’s Vertigo celebrates an unforgettable movie through its subject’s refreshingly candid musings on the tensions between authenticity and mystique.
“Warmly conversational … a vanishingly rare first-hand window into the joys, terrors and vagaries of Hollywood’s golden age.” – Variety
A Hollywood Reporter article explains from her manager/confidante details of Kim Novak's leaving Hollywood - and the making of this doc. She was looking for excuses to leave. The landslide wreckage of her Bel Air home was a good one, but the last straw was her favorite pickle becoming unavailable.
Kim Novak's Vertigo, 128 mins., premiered Sept. 2025 out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, and was included in other festivals such as SIFF and Beldocs in 2026). It has streaming relase on the Kino Film Collection Oct. 1, 2026, home media DVD release October 13.