Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds sounds like the production from hell, especially for Tippi Hedren.
The Big Picture 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.
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.
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.
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.
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