The Horrific True Story Behind the Making of Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Birds'

The Big Picture

• The making of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds was almost as terrifying as the movie itself, with mechanical birds looking fake and real birds attacking the cast and crew.
• Over 25,000 live birds were used during filming, but it was difficult to catch them, as crows and ravens outsmarted the crew and many birds carried lice.
• Tippi Hedren, the star of the film, was subjected to Alfred Hitchcock's relentless harassment, with him reciting dirty limericks and even assaulting her in his limo.

In an oeuvre filled with classics, 1963's The Birds is one of Alfred Hitchcock's most famous and beloved, and its influence can be seen throughout the last 60 years of horror filmmaking. And yet, from the hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted on phony-looking mechanical birds to real birds attacking the cast and crew to Alfred Hitchcock's allegedly incessant harassment of star Tippi Hedren, the making of The Birds was almost as terrifying as the movie itself.

The Birds was adapted from Daphne du Maurier's short story of the same name, and as Hitchcock's follow-up to Psycho, it had to be bloodcurdling. Hitchcock enlisted author Evan Hunter to write the screenplay, giving him free rein to write what he envisioned without worrying about the technical consideration of how things would actually be staged and shot. As it would turn out, the technical problems would be significant.

The Birds

A wealthy San Francisco socialite pursues a potential boyfriend to a small Northern California town that slowly takes a turn for the bizarre when birds of all kinds suddenly begin to attack people.

Did Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Birds' Use Real Birds When Filming?

The initial plan for the scenes of bird attacks was to use artificial birds with motorized wings, and the studio sank over $200,000 (over $2 million in today's money) into building them. But after testing, it became clear that the mechanical birds looked completely fake on screen, so the plan had to be scrapped. Instead, animal trainer Ray Berwick was now tasked with catching thousands of live, wild gulls, crows, ravens, sparrows, and finches for the scenes, which came with its own set of complications. Crows and ravens are highly intelligent, and Berwick and his crew were never able to catch more than one or two from a flock before the rest would catch on and start keeping a lookout for the abductors. In desperation, the studio advertised a bounty of $10 per bird to professional trappers nationwide, but this, too, proved fruitless. Finally, Berwick located a massive rookery of tens of thousands of birds in Arizona, where he and his crew — wearing all black clothes and face paint — were able to sneak up on the sleeping crows at night and catch them using nets. In total, over 25,000 live birds were used during filming.

Once captured, of course, these wild animals weren't always inclined to cooperate with their handlers. As Berwick told Cinefantastique in 1980, people on set quickly learned to fear the birds' vicious attacks, especially the gulls'. "We had about 12 or 13 crew members in the hospital in one day from bites and scratches," he said. "The seagulls would deliberately go for your eyes. I got bitten in the eye region at least three times, and Tippi got a pretty nasty gash when one of the birds hit her right above the eye."

The Birds Were Drugged and Spread Lice Amongst the Crew

Co-star Rod Taylor claimed in a 1998 interview with Hello Magazine that the trainers fed the gulls wheat mixed with whiskey to make them more docile. "The only reason those birds stayed still was because they were drunk!" he exclaimed. "They couldn't get away with it now." The crew indeed admitted to tranquilizing the gulls perched on top of the house in the final scene and tying them in place to ensure they didn't take off, but this resulted in the birds frequently falling off the roof and being left dangling by the legs, forcing stagehands to climb the sides of the house to retrieve and reposition them. To make matters even worse, many of the birds carried lice, and it wasn't long before the parasites spread to cast and crew members.

And inevitably, some of the birds escaped, both outside and in the sound stage. Associate editor Bud Hoffman claimed that a large flock of crows made a home in a tree on the grounds of Hitchcock's residence at Universal and began constantly defecating on the director's car. They proved immune to every attempt to remove them, eventually forcing the maintenance crew to cut off the tree's branches to convince the crows to roost elsewhere.

What Happened Between Alfred Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren During 'The Birds'?

The birds weren't the only hazards for Tippi Hedren on set. While rocky relationships between directors and actors are nothing new, according to Hedren, Alfred Hitchcock's nonstop harassment left her, in her own words, "in a mental prison." Hitchcock signed Hedren to a seven-year contract after seeing her in only a single TV commercial. At the time a successful model in New York, Hedren initially had no interest in acting, but as a divorced mother of a young daughter, she couldn't pass up the steady income the contract promised. After a screen test, Hitchcock cast Hedren as the lead in The Birds.

Working with the master of suspense every day, Hedren soon noticed a pattern in his behavior. "Every time I'd be laughing and talking with a male member of the cast or crew, my next exchange with Hitchcock would be icy and a bit petulant," she wrote in her 2016 memoir. The director made it a point of reciting dirty limericks to Hedren or giving her particularly sharp and pointed criticism when they were alone, and he began to stare at her "relentlessly" on set, to the point that the rest of the cast and crew took notice. Fellow cast member Suzanne Pleshette even felt the need to reassure newcomer Hedren that most of Hollywood weren't like Hitchcock.

The Classic Film That Alfred Hitchcock Called "Almost Perfect"

Game recognized game, even back in 1924.

Hedren said the director's on-set harassment rose to what she called an "obsession": driving past her house, having her followed, and having her handwriting analyzed. And finally, it escalated to actual assault. Alone together in his limo one evening after filming, she claims that he threw himself on top of her and tried to kiss her just as they were pulling up to her hotel. According to her own account of the incident in her memoir, she screamed at him to stop, pushed him off, and jumped out of the car.

Tippi Hendren Wondered if Hitchcock Was Trying To Punish Her

The day after Hitchcock's alleged assault was the filming of the scene in which Hedren's character Melanie is trapped inside a phone booth while dozens of birds fling themselves at the glass, trying to attack her. The glass was supposed to be shatterproof, but after the third mechanical bird hit it at high velocity, it exploded into tiny fragments, and Hedren's makeup artist spent hours tweezing tiny bits of glass from her face. Hedren doesn't accuse Hitchcock of sabotaging her intentionally, but in her writing over fifty years later, she still wondered if she "was being punished for rejecting him."

Yet even this wasn't the most difficult part of the shoot for Hedren. In the climax of the film, Melanie enters an attic bedroom alone to find it full of birds, which immediately descend on her in a fury. Hedren had been told that mechanical birds would be used for this scene, but she arrived on set for the first day of shooting it to discover that this was untrue. A cage had been built around the bedroom door because they were, in fact, using live birds for the attack.

Tippi Hedren Went Through Hell for 'The Birds'

Over the next week, handlers wearing elbow-length protective gauntlets literally hurled live birds at her for eight hours straight. The birds had been trained to peck her and, since they'd so recently been caught from the wild, needed no encouragement to do so. "It was brutal and ugly and relentless," she recalls in her memoir. Cary Grant, who was visiting the set one day that week, reportedly told her, "You're the bravest woman I've ever seen."

On day five of filming the bedroom scene, the birds were actually tied to her clothes, pecking her mercilessly as her character lay helpless on the floor. By the afternoon Hedren was physically and emotionally drained, and when one bird pecked her face dangerously close to her eye, she writes, "I finally snapped." She cried out, "I'm done," and sat on the floor, sobbing and exhausted, as the birds were untied. That evening, Hedren saw a doctor who ordered a week of rest. Although Hitchcock attempted to refuse her the time off, arguing they had no one else to film, the doctor insisted. She spent the entire week either sleeping or half-conscious but returned to set the following Monday with her head held high, determined to finish the film.

Considering the myriad of obstacles that arose before and during filming, it's something of a miracle that The Birds got made at all. And though we shouldn't overlook its director's problematic history, we also can't deny the impact it has had on modern cinema, with filmmakers as disparate as John Carpenter, Guillermo del Toro, and Eli Rothall citing it as an influence. Ultimately, The Birds and its creation are a fascinating study in the challenges of making movies and the dedication required of every member of the cast and crew to see a piece of art through from inception to completion.

The Birds is available to rent on Prime Video.

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