I can't stop talking about Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. I'm still terrified by it, perhaps because Hitchcock wisely avoided providing any explanation for the avian attacks on Bodega Bay. It came after right after his success of Psycho, so he was given his biggest budget yet, $3.3 million. The starring actors made $800 a day. I'm still fascinated by how it was made, especially because star Tippi Hedren continues to hold forth on the horrors of working with Hitchcock:
In one horrific sequence, the filmmaker withholds from Hedren that real birds, not mechanical ones, will be used in a scene in which she'll be attacked at close quarters. Then he subjects her to five days of shooting, take after take, leaving her injured and distraught. A physician FORCED Hitchcock to suspend production for a week to allow Hedren to recover. "Hitch said we had to keep filming," the actress recalled. "The doctor said, `What are you trying to do, kill her?'"
Near the end of the film, when Mitch carries Melanie down the stairs, it is actually Tippi Hedren's stand-in. Hedren was in the hospital recovering from exhaustion, bruising, and lacerations after a week of shooting the scene where she is trapped in the upstairs room with the birds. The birds were attached to her clothes by long nylon threads so they could not get away.
I'm not sure how much thought Hitchcock gave to the safety of his actors and actresses in this movie. To attract the trained birds, the actors often had ground meat or anchovies smeared on their hands. They were told the birds were all going to be mechanical when they agreed to shoot the film, but that was not the case. The only scene when he did use mechanical birds was the scene where children were running from the birds. But even then, only some were mechanical, a couple were real. And the children, were running on treadmills, with footage of the Bay in the background, so they couldn't actually run away from them if they tried.
Perhaps this is why The Birds is so horrifying. It's real. It really happened. Yes, the birds were trained, but the cuts and scrapes and fear, the eyes.... were all real. Hitchcock had to have it that way. He couldn't get the same terror out of the actors if the birds had been mechanical. They didn't know. Not until it actually happened.
I hope you enjoyed reading this blog as much as I enjoyed writing it.
