In 1927, at the dawn of his career, Alfred Hitchcock made a bold prediction. Movies, he wrote in the London Evening News, "are [a director's] babies just as much as an author's novel is the offspring of his imagination. And that seems to make it all the more certain that when moving pictures are really artistic they will be created entirely by one man." Hitchcock never managed to make his prediction come true literally; he never made a movie all by himself, a camera in one hand and a boom mic in the other. But over the course of his long career, he did consistently take sole credit for the tenor and quality of his productions. He told interviewers that he was intimately involved in each step of the creative process, from script-writing to camera placement. He even famously minimized the contributions of his actors, who, he advised, "should be treated like cattle."