Alexandre O. Philippe

Alexandre O. Philippe is a Swiss film director whose films include the documentaries Doc of the Dead, The People vs. George Lucas, and 78/52. Philippe is Creative Director and co-owner of Denver-based Cinema Vertige and his most recent commissioned work for the City of Denver garnered four Heartland Emmy Awards.

Career
Phillippe received a MFA in Dramatic Writing from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He has directed several narrative and documentary shorts, including Left, the Spot and Inside, which screened at over 70 international film festivals, and won several awards. Left was the first film to have been recorded, edited and mixed at 192 kHz/24-bit for Dolby’s process of lossless encoding in TrueHD 5.1 surround sound technology, and was honoured by the Akira Kurosawa Foundation in Japan. The People vs. George Lucas was his third feature documentary, after Chick Flick (about Mike the Headless Chicken) and Earthlings, an examination of the Klingon language phenomenon. He was also Second Unit Director on Dirk Simon’s When the Dragon Swallowed the Sun ), which premiered at the 2010 Santa Barbara International Film Festival, won three Movie Maverick Awards.

Phillippe's 2017 documentary 78/52 deconstructs the infamous shower scene from director Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Film critic Owen Gleiberman of Variety remarked "Directed by Alexandre O. Philippe, who made the elegant and searching Doc of the Dead, 78/52 centers on an up-close analysis of the shower scene that’s at once delirious and definitive; the movie is also a cinematic meditation that features a wealth of terrific anecdotes about the creation of Hitchcock’s masterpiece." The documentary features interviews with actors Elijah Wood and Jamie Lee Curtis (daughter of star Janet Leigh), Osgood Perkins (son of Anthony Perkins), directors Peter Bogdanovich, Guillermo del Toro, Eli Roth, Karyn Kusama, film editors Walter Murch, Chris Innis, Bob Murawski, and Marli Renfro (body double for Janet Leigh). The title refers to the number of set ups in the scene and the number of cuts, each one dissected and analyzed by film historians and enthusiasts. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times reviewed the film, expressing that it is "obsessive but accessible, the deepest dive imaginable into one of the most celebrated scenes in movie history, the documentary 78/52 looks at a brief three minutes of cinema the way it's never been looked at before."

Film

 * 2003: Chick Flick: The Miracle Mike Story (Documentary)
 * 2004: Earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water (Documentary)
 * 2006: Left (Short)
 * 2008:  The Spot (Documentary short)
 * 2009: Inside (Short)
 * 2010: The People vs. George Lucas (Documentary)
 * 2011: The Right to Breathe (Documentary short)
 * 2012: The Life and Times of Paul the Psychic Octopus (Documentary)
 * 2014: Doc of the Dead (Documentary)
 * 2017: 78/52 (Documentary) - Distributed by IFC
 * 2019: Memory: The Origins of Alien (Documentary)
 * 2020: Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist (Documentary)
 * 2021: The Taking
 * 2022: Lynch/Oz (Documentary)
 * 2023: William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill (Documentary)