Forty-seven years later, Grimonprez has used these interviews to style his film Double Take. Except in Double Take, Hitchcock doesn’t meet Truffaut. He meets himself.

“If you meet your double, you should kill him. Or he will kill you. Two of you is one too many. By the end of the script, one of you must die.” When Hitchcock says these words, the notion of “script” might seem simple. But as this shrewd and absorbing movie progresses, the idea of scripts becomes much more complex.

Grimonprez, born in Roeselare and educated in Ghent and New York, is a complicated character himself. You ask him what you think is a simple question about media representation, and you find yourself embroiled in an in-depth conversation about 1950s political constructs and corporate conspiracies. Fifteen minutes later, you quietly ask yourself: did he answer my question?

But it doesn’t matter because he’s certainly said something useful. Like this, for instance: “ ‘If you see your double, you should kill him’ is such a Belgian thing,” he says. “You’re Flemish, but you’re not Dutch, or you're Walloon, but you’re not French. You speak a dialect, but you have to learn proper Dutch in school. So you’re always distanced. There’s no Belgian language; it’s a subtitled country. Ironically, that ends up being your asset. The Belgian identity is all about being displaced.”

Grimonprez is a filmmaker and curator, as well as a teacher of New Media at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Double Take picks up themes of his first two films – Dial H-I-S-TO- R-Y, about terrorists and the media, and Looking for Alfred, about the casting of Hitchcock doubles.

Double identities and screen representations are at the heart of Double Take, which has won numerous prizes at festivals, including at Sundance and Berlin. Grimonprez mixes footage of Hitchcock, commentary by a famous Hitchcock double, scenes from The Birds, and commercials and political news footage from the 1950s and 1960s to weave a deceptively simple connection between illusion and reality.

By taking footage out of context (not to mention showing it four decades later), the director makes explicit ludicrous displays of political theatrics. The famous 1959 “Kitchen Debates” between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, for instance, with its location in an exhibition of labour-saving modern appliances, comes off like a comedy routine at best, corporate control of the White House at worst. It’s an act – a double – of real Cold War negotiations that must be interpreted by viewers in much the same way a film like The Birds must be interpreted. “The Kitchen Debate mirrors what was going on in society, which is an interesting method that Hitchcock always used,” says Grimonprez.

Possibly even more amusing than Nixon trying to charm Khrushchev (and Khrushchev not really having any of it) are the Folgers coffee commercials from the 1960s, in which women’s ultimate goal is to make the perfect cup of coffee. Their marriages, it seems, depend on it. “The world is so abundant with fictions and images that we grow up with,” says Grimonprez. “The innermost desires that we project into society – we’ve seen them already on TV. It’s how we make up our reality. We don’t question commercials, but if you look at them from 20 years ago, you see how we have been infected with those codes.”

In the middle of it all, a 1962 Hitchcock meets his double – himself from 1980. According to his own rules, only one can survive.

Double Take opens at Arenberg Cinema in Brussels on 13 January, in Ghent in February and in Leuven, Ostend and Kortrijk in March

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