How do you do?
My name is Alfred Hitchcock
and | would like to tell you about our good friends, the birds.
That's the damnedest thing | ever saw.
{Man) Birds just don't go around attacking people without reason.
Yes, they attacked the children. Attacked them.
What's the matter with all the birds?
Birds are not aggressive creatures. They bring beauty into the world.
Those gulls attacked.
- Impossible. - (Man) They came down the chimney.
All the windows are broken in Dan's bedroom.
- Why are they doing this? - (Crows Cawing)
- It's the end of the world! - Are the birds going to eat us?
Get yourselves guns and wipe them off the face of the earth.
(Woman) That would hardly be possible.
- Mitch, don't! - The five continents of the world
contain more than a hundred billion birds.
All at once, the birds were everywhere!
Why don't you all go home? Lock your doors and windows?
Did you get the doors and windows in the attic?
- What if you run out of wood? - | don't know!
When will you know? When we're all dead?
(Tyres Squealing)
{Woman Screaming)
(Woman) After my father made Psycho , which was such a big success,
he was, as usual, having his major trouble,
which was looking for a story.
Everybody expected so much, you know.
It was very hard to find stories, and he finally did find The Birds,
which was from a short story by Daphne du Maurier,
who wrote Rebecca, which was his first film in this country.
And at the time, he wasn't sure if it would make a full-length movie.
{Man) We had just finished working on North by Northwest,
and | saw Hitchcock on one of the sound stages.
He stopped me and said,
‘I have a friend, Daphne du Maurier, who has written a short novella.”
"Would you read it to see if, physically, it creates too many problems.”
| read it that night, and | was bowled over by its strength.
But | saw it a little differently - as a mood piece.
And | didn't see it as a narrative story.
I worked all night on it, and the image that came to me was Munch's Scream.
| saw that as a kind of icon for the whole thing.
{O'Connell} My father initially purchased the rights to The Birds
for his television series.
After he read of real bird attacks taking place across the country,
he felt the story had cinematic potential,
and he brought in Evan Hunter to adapt the short story.
(Man) It was a sort of apocalyptic short story.
It's about these birds inexplicably attacking this isolated
little farmhouse in Cornwall.
I read it, and | would have given my right arm to work with Hitchcock.
I then spoke to him on the phone and he said, "Come out with some ideas.”
"We're throwing away everything but the title,
and the notion of birds attacking human beings.”
"So come on out with some ideas.”
| remember Hitch showing me
a lot of newspaper articles about unexplained bird attacks
as a reminder that these things do happen,
so we weren't dealing entirely with fantasy.
So then he said,
"What do you think?
"Can we physically attack this project?”
And | said, "Well, the only thing is getting the birds into it."
In those days, we used blue screen for travelling matte backgrounds.
And in those days, the blue screen very often had a rather disturbing fringing.
I knew that if we were to shoot these small birds with fast-moving wings,
it would be just a messy blur.
The blue screen process, while it had been essentially perfected in 1958,
was still not quite to the level that Hitchcock wanted.
The best example of travelling matte work in general that Hitchcock had seen
was the sodium travelling matte shot process
that was used primarily at the Disney studio.
The sodium process was a method of combining foregrounds and backgrounds
that were photographed at different times
in an optical printer in postproduction.
At some point, you have to create a matte, or a silhouette,
that enables you to distinguish photographically
between the foreground, which is usually an actor against a screen,
and the background.
In the sodium process, the background was illuminated by yellow sodium light.
Of course, the actors in the foreground were illuminated by white light.
There were two films in a special camera, an old Technicolor camera.
One film was sensitive only to the sodium light on the backing.
The second film in the camera
was sensitive only to the white light falling on the actors.
As a result, there was absolutely no contamination of the foreground actors
by the lighting from the background.
Typical of blue screen shots of the period was a sort of blue fire
in hair and on the edges of objects.
With the sodium light,
because there was no light from the backing on the actors at any time,
the sodium system could produce a higher-quality composite
that didn't exhibit the sort of blue flare and blue halos
that were sometimes seen on blue screen composites of the day.
Disney had brought the sodium process to a high level of perfection,
and Ub Iwerks, who was the head of Disney Special Processes Department,
was hired as a consultant,
and the Disney sodium equipment was used
to create the travelling matte shots on The Birds.
And it was a wonderful matting situation.
It would even matte smoke.
It's not used now, because it was very cumbersome.
Now, remember, we're talking several years ago.
Today, many of these problems would be solved with a computer.
(O'Connell) I think The Birds was one of the hardest pictures for him to make
because it was so technical and he had to be so prepared for it.
Literally, as we know,
when he decided a movie, he would draw the whole movie.
Well, it took him a long time to draw all of this.
Because of the difficult technical problems,
we knew we were going to have to have continuity sketches.
Well, Hitchcock loved to work that way anyway.
His main thrust in all of his work was preparation.
Matter of fact, he sometimes facetiously said
he was bored with shooting the picture.
The excitement came with the ideas
that were generated in the preparatory portion
of the filmmaking process.
He liked to have it all clear in his mind
so that before he started to shoot, he saw the whole movie in his mind.
There are very few people, directors or otherwise,
that can hold this kind of a concept.
Harold Michelson was the main production illustrator on The Birds.
He did, 1 think, almost all of the illustrations.
{Man) 1 was given the script and, with Bob Boyle,
who was the production designer, we would discuss the scene.
In fact, when they went up to Bodega Bay to shoot, the whole company,
| stayed at Universal.
So in many cases, | was on my own
in interpreting the script.
And | did stuff for a few weeks, and then I got a call to come up there.
And so they sent me up there.
So evidently, what | was doing was right.
Hitchcock's method of shooting, moving in on a subject slowly
or objective/subjective way of shooting,
which I hadn't heard before.
I, of course, went along with it,
and learned an awful lot about how to make a movie.
(Man) His working on The Birds,
I mean, this was all done in preproduction,
was worked out with Albert Whitlock, the matte artist, and a crew
that went to San Francisco and sat in the dumps in San Francisco for months,
shooting birds, background birds.
And so the technical aspects of the birds were quite difficult.
(Woman) | had been modelling in New York for a long time,
uh... It was about 11 years -
and my career was sort of waning in that fashion business.
| had done a number of commercials, and at one point | had about 12 of them going.
One of them ran on the Today show every morning for about a month.
And apparently, a producer/director was watching the show
and decided to find out who the girl was, where she was and all of that.
So | received a call on Friday, 13th of October of 1961.
It was, "Are you the girl in the Sego commercial?”
It was a diet product. And | said, "Yes."
And they said, "Would you come over to Universal Studios?”
1 did, and 1 met with an executive there.
I asked, "Who is the director?” and he wouldn't tell me.
And then he asked if I would leave my photographs
and commercial film over the weekend.
So | said, "Yes, but I will have to pick them up on Monday.”
So, Monday | was introduced to a number of other executives.
Nobody would tell me who it was, who the producer/director was.
They just said, "Would you go over to MCA tomorrow morning
and meet with Herman Citren?” who was an agent there.
| went over and met with Mr Citren, and | sat down and he said,
"| suppose you're a little bit curious as to who this director is.”
| said, "Yes."
He said, "Alfred Hitchcock wants to sign you to a contract
if you will agree with the terms.” | was stunned.
| didn't know whether to laugh or cry,
or run up and down the halls, or what to do.
And he said, "If you are in agreeance to this,
we will go over to Paramount Studios and meet with him."
So, Herman Citren and | went over to meet with Hitch,
and we didn't talk about anything other than...
Oh, we talked about food, we talked about travel,
we talked about wines.
We didn't mention movies at all. Not at all
| heard that they were doing The Birds,
that Evan Hunter was working on the script,
and Hitch was working with him on it,
and | thought "That's very interesting, this is very exciting,” and all that,
but it never occurred to me that 1 would be involved in this movie at all.
I thought | would do the television shows which he did every week.
They talked about doing a screen test and they chose
three different roles for me to play in this screen test:
One from Rebecca, one from Notorious, and one from Catch a Thief.
Now, these are three entirely different women.
Hitch was my drama coach
and | would go over to the Hitchcock home
where Alma and Hitch would both go over the scenes with me,
which was fantastic.
Alma had a great deal to do with a lot of his work.
So we eventually did the screen test.
It took three days. Robert Burks was the DP on it,
and Edith Head did all of the designs of the clothes.
She did a personal wardrobe for me. It was an extraordinary time.
(Alfred Hitchcock) Remind me to tell you a story
about doughnuts and their manufacture, will you?
Oh, I've heard that!
It's a terrible story!
(Hedren) In order to do the screen test, we needed a leading man.
And Hitch flew Martin Balsam out from New York to be my leading man.
He had just come out of Psycho.
Tell me, Mr Balsam, what exactly do you have in mind?
The screen test was put together and | guess everybody saw it,
and Mr and Mrs Hitchcock invited me to dinner at Chasens.
Lou Wasserman was sitting to my left
and Alma and Hitch were to my right,
and...
he placed, Hitch placed a very, very beautifully wrapped package
from Gumps in San Francisco.
It was one of his favourite shops.
And | opened the box and there was this beautiful pin
of three birds in flight, with the seed pearls and gold.
| looked over at Hitch, and he said,
(As Hitchcock) "We want you to play Melanie in The Birds.”
Well, | started to cry.
These big tears welled up, because | didn't expect that.
| really didn't expect that.
And | looked at Hitch,
and he was a little watery, and Alma,
and even Lou Wasserman, this big movie mogul,
he had one little tear coming down here.
It was a very exciting evening. It was just incredible.
And then the whole...
All of the work really began.
(Man) 1 got this call out of the blue
from (As Hitchcock) "Mr Hitchcock” and was totally amazed.
And | came out and, being a brash young brat,
| guess | didn't show any kind of respect that | was supposed to,
and | think he kind of liked it and we got on extremely well.
And | did the wrong thing: I called him Alfred. (Laughing)
| didn't say all the right things. | remember that.
| said, "I hope the birds and things
"don't kind of totally outshadow the people.”
Of course, that's the story. They're supposed to.
So that was number one. Wrong.
But then we really talked about (As Hitchcock} "making movies”
and how | loved it, and how | was interested in his work.
| brought that up and said the right thing.
And we just got on extremely well. That was it.
We didn't get into deep discussions about the movie itself at all.
No "What do you think of the character?” None of that.
It was taken for granted that | loved it and wanted to work with him.
And | was absolutely flattered
and astonished that he wouldn't mind working with the kid... then.
(O'Connell) He hated location. Just hated it.
He says, you don't get the right lights, you've got the noise,
and you have to then come in and redub.
If ever he could get away without location, he would.
(Boyle) As a matter of fact,
when Tippi crosses the street and goes by a sign,
she goes behind it, which we used as a patch match,
and then we picked up the rest of the thing in the studio.
(Boy Wolf Whistles}
(Green) Mr Hitchcock saw Tippi in a commercial
where someone whistled at her and she looked back.
There was something about that moment when she did that
that caught his attention.
And he loved to put in little subtle jokes.
There's a scene where she's whistled at and she does turn,
a lot like that commercial.
(Boy Wolf Whistles}
Those dogs that were in his cameo in The Birds...
Oh, | mean, those dogs ate better than most people in the world.
| mean, he would go to the store and get the finest cut of meat
and have them ground it up for these dogs.
They were wonderful. (Chuckles) He would bring them to work.
They would be in his office, and he loved them dearly.
(Birds Chirping)
- | wonder if you could help me. - What?
| said, | wonder if you could help me.
Yes, what is it you're looking for, sir?
Hunter) We were just trying to find a hook, a way to get into the movie.
And on the lunch hour, while | was walking around,
I came up with the notion of a screwball comedy,
doing a couple who meet cute
and go from there into comedy until it turns to terror.
And | told him this after lunch that day, and he said, "That sounds interesting.”
So then we tried to find characters who would be mismatched,
who would strike sparks and, we hoped, comic sparks.
And it seemed to me that a society woman, first of all,
in the old screwball comedies of the '40s, was your mainstay,
that she always was a madcap society woman.
(Chirping)
Hunter) And a lawyer is the very notion of solidity and stolidity.
- There we are. - Wonderful.
(Hunter) So it seemed that a lawyer would be a good type also.
Back in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels.
What did you say?
{Hedren) We didn't actually do any pre-rehearsals.
- How did you know my name? - A little birdie told me.
| didn't meet Rod Taylor till we were, you know,
till we were really ready to film.
Just thought you might like to know what it's like
to be on the other end of a gag.
- What do you think of that? - | think you're a louse.
Immediately, we became the best of friends, Tippi Hedren and |,
and still are the best of friends, and so it was very easy.
We'd rehearse together on our own, and it was extremely easy
because we had a lovely chemistry without trying for it.
(Hedren) Hitch was not only my director,
he was my drama coach, which was fantastic.
I couldn't have had a better teacher.
He not only helped me with developing the character of Melanie Daniels,
he had me sit in on meetings with Evan Hunter;
with Robert Burks, the DP; with Bobby Boyle, the set director;
with, of course, Edith Head, who | worked very closely with
on designing not only the clothes for The Birds and Marnie,
but my own private wardrobe.
But in every phase of making that motion picture,
he was sure that | was educated in it.
- Miss, is that for Mitch Brenner? - Yes.
- He's not home. - Oh, that's alright.
{Hedren) And it was stunning. It was an amazing education that | received.
{Man) I don’t think you should leave them in the hall, do you?
- Well, where did he go? - Bodega Bay.
- He goes there every weekend. - Bodega Bay. Where's that?
Up the coast about 60 miles north of here.
(Boyle) 1 think northern California always reminded Hitch of England.
There was something about the weather,
which was very unpredictable.
It was fog and rain and then sunshine
and then fog and rain again.
It was a moody, strange area,
both forbidding and foreboding.
I believe that's what intrigued him.
It had a kind of mystical quality.
With The Birds, he shot the first part of it
actually up in Bodega Bay, on location,
and then the rest was shot here at Universal.
Boyle) We had to get all of these various pieces
and put them together to make one small community out of it.
We built a schoolteacher's house in Bodega,
which was a few miles from Bodega Bay.
But Bodega Bay just was perfect.
It was an almost completely enclosed bay,
and there was what is called Bodega Head,
which is where the house was.
There was an old house that had gone to rack and ruin
so we could only use the foundation.
We rebuilt the house and we added a barn,
and that could be reached by road
and by... boat,
which suited, uh... the purpose of the film perfectly.
(Bill Taylor) Albert Whitlock is, with Peter Ellenshaw,
probably the foremost matte artist
of the middle generation of film. It's the matte artist's job, traditionally,
to extend existing settings, uh... with painting.
(Man) One of the stories that Al related to me was when he showed a test
of one of his background paintings of Bodega Bay to Hitchcock.
It was a beautiful scene of Bodega Bay in the background.
Hitch thought it looked very beautiful.
Without Al being there, he showed it to Peggy Robertson, his assistant.
He said, "What do you think?" and she said, "Oh, that looks like a painting.”
Hitch stiffened and thought, "Oh."
Then he said, "You know, of course, it's real.”
And she said, "Oh, | know it's real, but it's so beautiful it could be a painting.”
And so it was a compliment to Al's extraordinary painting skills
that it fooled everybody but was still bigger than life.
We would run in the projection room silent movies,
quite a few of the classic silent movies.
And Mr Hitchcock always told me
that if you could follow a movie without any words
and you knew what was happening and you got the emotion
and the feeling and the suspense,
you're making a great movie.
So, a couple of times,
we wouldn't run sound on sound movies.
And then he'd bring out where the audience would be lost
or where he felt something should have happened there
to tell the audience what was happening.
In Hitchcock films,
he took the audience down this road with a camera.
The dialogue was there, but you followed that camera
and that was his great, | think, genius of making suspense movies.
(Hunter) We searched for the turning point where it would get ominous.
We recognised immediately
that the audience wasn't going to sit for two hours waiting for a bird attack.
So we very carefully measured out the lengths between the bird attacks
so that the audience would sit there. We'd throw them a crumb, so to speak.
So the first one was when the gull hits Melanie in the rowboat.
{Hedren) Hitch always felt that it was very important
for close-ups to be done under controlled lighting.
He wanted almost all of the close-ups to be done at the studio, Universal
So they had this elaborate setup.
Up in the rafters, they had a wire
that went from the rafters down to...
almost over my head.
And then they had a fake seagull which was on top of the rafters.
Now. OK. So then we have a prop man,
and he has a tube and a plunger.
And attached to that was the fake blood.
So they put the tube up through my hair,
and then Virginia Darcy, my hair dresser,
did the French roll and the whole thing, and she hairsprayed my hair.
It was almost like a wig, | mean, a real solid helmet,
except for one little lock of hair that was loose.
They let the bird go down the wire,
and Bobby Boone, who was the prop man, had the plunger ready,
and he watched the bird coming down,
and when it got to the right place, he did the plunger,
and the bird went over and the hair goes forward with the blast of air.
It was incredible. Absolutely incredible.
That's the damnedest thing | ever saw. It seemed to swoop at you deliberately.
Oh, you're bleeding too. Let's take care of that.
{Man) It's a movie about the dangers of complacency, | think is what he said.
We all take things for granted, and we take birds for granted.
What if they suddenly turned, you know? This is what would happen.
That's a theme that runs through a lot of Hitchcock's pictures -
that people take things for granted, go through their life unthinkingly.
And then something happens and they have to think.
{Man) The birds represent the eruption of chaos, of unpredictability,
and which can be taken to be everything that we don't understand
and can't control about our world,
not only the physical world but also the world inside us.
Underneath all the protective coverings that we use to get through life
and which, at the same time, seal us off from other people.
What would have happened if the seagull had not attacked Melanie at that time?
It seems very unlikely at that point
that her relationship with Mitch would have developed beyond what it is,
a sort of mutual... hostility, mutual provocation, all the time.
Each of them wants to provoke the other.
- What are you doing up here? - Didn't you see the lovebirds?
You mean you came all this way to bring me those birds?
{Bogdanovich) It's the bird that destroys all that, the gull attack.
And that happens progressively all the way through the film.
Mother, I'd like you to meet Melanie Daniels.
How do you do?
How do you do, Miss Daniels?
{O'Connell} My father cast a wonderful person like Jessica Tandy,
who was one of his favourite actresses.
He had, of course, used her husband, Hume Cronin, in many of his movies.
Working with Jessica Tandy was...
just celestial.
| mean, a consummate actress.
You know, just watching her working was just thrilling. Absolutely thrilling.
And what a beautiful person she was, not just physically
but just, you know, really considerate and fun.
{Rod Taylor) Jessica Tandy was magnificent.
She was such a lovely, lovely woman. Jessica and | got on beautifully.
She was the ultimate wonderful pro.
So gentle and sweet and wonderful and very, very talented.
Hi.
- Miss Daniels? - Yes?
Oh, they're beautiful! They're just what | wanted!
(Woman) | had actually done a couple of those Alfred Hitchcock shows,
his weekly series, but | had never met the man.
And he had seen me, | believe, in The Children's Hour.
So he requested meeting me, so | went over,
and | must have been in his office for at least an hour.
He found out that | was born in Bristol, England, and he goes, "Oh, yes.”
"That's where the best wine cellars are.”
So he proceeded to tell me the best wines to buy
and what the best wine cellar was and distributor and all of this.
And he told me how to cook a steak.
And he says, "You have to pull it out before it is fully cooked
because it will continue to cook.”
These things, of course, I've applied in later years,
but at the time, | was 11... or 12. So | had no idea.
| thought, "What odd conversation.”
But he was very nice to me. He was great.
- Miss Hayworth? - Yes.
I'm Melanie Daniels.
(Hunter) One of the ideas | brought to Hitch
was a schoolteacher coming to a town
and bird attacks start when she comes to the town to teach there.
And the provincials think she must have something to do with it.
There's an echo of that in the scene in the Tides Restaurant.
From the mother: "You're responsible for this.”
"They tell me this didn't happen before you got here.”
And the schoolteacher survived as Annie Hayworth.
Did, uh... you want to see Cathy about something?
Well, not exactly.
Are you a friend of Mitch's?
Suzanne, she decided that -
| don't know whether it was because she wanted to play Tippi's part or not,
because her character was always...
That little bit of jealousy went on because she was in love with Mitch.
So she borrowed a blonde wig
and she came out with a blonde wig on and she says, "Can't | do the role?”
She came out and played the whole day like this,
with this blonde wig on. She was very fun.
She was a good spirit and a good sense of gung ho.
She's very funny.
I had, which | hadn't expected, a surprise birthday party.
I had my 13th birthday while doing The Birds.
All of a sudden, here was this enormous cake
and everybody sang and the whole crew stopped
and Jessica gave me a wonderful sweater, which | still have someplace.
Tippi gave me lovebirds.
And Hitchcock took out a piece... a board,
and a crayon and wrote:
And then he proceeded to draw his face and signed his name.
And he handed that to me.
| mean, that's great.
And 1 still have it, and | had it framed, and so that was my present from him.
(Girl) Look! Look!
- Hey! No touching allowed. - (Squawks)
- Ohl - (Girl Shrieking)
(O'Connell) I think that was one of the most fascinating movies
to go on the set of,
because they had fake birds,
they had real birds, they had trained birds.
The funniest people were the bird wranglers
because they were bad-tempered.
They were great guys and | had drinks with them in the evening,
but you look after a bunch of seagulls
and ravens and crows and pigeons and God knows what else,
and you get very nervous.
But Ray Berwick - he was the head bird wrangler
and he was a wonderful guy. He indeed had patience.
He wasn't as bad tempered as his buddies. He knew his birds backwards.
He was like a great old cowboy with horses, you know.
He knew these silly-looking birds, and he understood them and liked them.
Working with the birds was very interesting.
| love all animals. | always have.
And it was very exciting for me to work with the birds.
Ray Berwick, who was the bird trainer,
taught flocks of birds.
He taught them six at a time. He taught them individually.
The ones that were taught individually basically could never be released
because they were taught to do very bad things.
Like, they'd be taught to divebomb somebody
or peck them or, you know, really go after people.
All these tricks were pretty horrifying and pretty exasperating.
That's why these wranglers just were going through hell as well as us.
We all had our trips to the nurses' station to get our tetanus shot.
(Gull Screeching)
Help me get the children into the house!
(Rod Taylor) With all these bird attacks,
no computer tricks, nothing like that.
These kids, they'd tie the birds to the back of their collars
and they'd be flapping and carrying on, and it was quite terrifying, really.
But how else could you do it?
And there was no CGI with birds coming into the lens.
You put meat in the lens.
Boyle) We realised that, if we were working with seagulls,
we could train them to go for food.
They're greedy animals,
and so you could put food
just behind the camera, or right on top of the camera,
and they'd fly into the lens.
{Screeching)
{0'Connell) My mother and | were visiting them up in Bodega Bay
when they were shooting the children's birthday party,
and there was a trained gull called Charlie who...
They would wire their beaks so that they wouldn't hurt anybody.
He was on long wires,
and his beak had been bound with some sort of tape,
and his claws,
so that if he actually did hit me or anything,
because | think | had seed in my hair so that he would dive down to me,
then he wouldn't hurt.
But the string broke
and he started going out to the bay.
There were very low tides at Bodega Bay,
and these sand flats stretched for miles.
And it was nothing to see one of these poor wranglers running after a seagull
that was flopping along just six feet ahead of him for miles.
And they couldn't get Charlie back in again.
And poor Charlie, with the beak wired up.
They're going, "Oh, this poor thing. What's going to happen?”
But they did. He did come in.
{Squawking)
Boyle) What we also had to be always concerned about
was the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
The SPCA was on the set a lot.
And the script girl actually started to be a great protector of these birds.
And they actually built an aviary onto the set
for birds that had been hurt or injured and she would take care of them.
- {Birds Chirping) - {Girl} Just listen to those lovebirds.
(O'Connell) When they did the scene
where all the birds come down the chimney,
they had to net the whole set.
{Rod Taylor) The inside of the house was inside yet another canvas house.
So that when all these damn birds got out,
which they would, of course, the poor wranglers could catch them.
And then the camera would poke through a hole
and they had crates in the back of the chimney
with these, like, pullout things.
And then they would pull them out and birds would swoop down.
You know, we didn't really rehearse this.
It was just because, using live animals, we wanted to take it right away.
So everything was lined up
and Ray took the little box of strawberry finches
and let them go down the chimney,
and we thought they'd be flying around and...
Well, they sat on the hearth and a few of them jumped up on the coffee table
and on the arms of the chairs, and they weren't doing anything.
We're going, "Um, OK. What do we do now?"
So we thought about it and all the different things that we could do.
Maybe using a fan would be good, you know, and then they'd fly around.
Well, so would our hair, you know? So that wasn't going to work.
And our clothes would fly and everything.
So we finally decided that we would do the scene without the birds.
So all of us are reacting to birds that aren't there.
And then the film, once it was edited, was sent over to Disney.
That's where the sodium came in.
Because we could have travelling mattes
of these sparrows, linnets, small birds.
They were shot against sodium to print into the final take.
(Birds Screeching}
Cover your faces! Cover your eyes!
(Boyle) I must say, we tried to use mechanical birds,
and we did use a few,
but mechanical birds that moved didn't work out too well.
So we finally decided to work with crows.
The reason we started with crows is, obviously, they had an intelligence
that most birds don't have. You could train a crow,
but because they were so intelligent, they were also hard to capture.
But Ray Berwick... | think Ray had done Birdman of Alcatraz,
which is only a couple of birds.
And here we were dealing with thousands.
So we finally had to go with eggs -
growing crows.
That didn't take as long as it sounds, because they were very young.
| think there are still some of the original crows flying around here.
They live a long time.
Ray Berwick, who was the main handler,
he had a crow - or a raven, | believe he was - named Buddy.
And Buddy was trained, so he was like the leader of the pack.
You could tell him when to peck your hand and do things like that.
{Hedren) There was one named Buddy, a very beautiful raven,
who | became friends with.
In fact, he was so nice, he couldn't even be in the movie.
He was so sweet. He'd come hopping into my dressing room on the set,
and he'd hop up on my dressing table, and...
He was just fun. It was just... They're so smart. They're so smart.
There was another one
that particularly had a reaction to Rod Taylor.
(Squawk)
And he want after Rod continuously.
It was kind of funny, actually.
This one raven, Archie...
There's a still of me looking terrified with a bandage on or something,
and I'm looking at this bird. That's real terror. I hated that bird!
That bird, every morning if we were on the set together,
would come over and go "Ungg!” and bite me.
And | hated him, and he hated me.
Even when we came back to the studio -
and | think that shot on the veranda was taken in the studio -
I'd walk in and say, "Is Archie working today?”
And they'd say, "I don't think so, Rod. | think we're working with seagulls.”
And out of the rafters would come Archie. (Makes Swooping Sound}
And, you know, hated me and would lie in wait for me.
And I'm sure that bird's still alive.
(Hunter) There was a scene where, the way the screenplay was written,
Melanie wakes up in the morning and we hear Lydia's voice
saying, ‘Mitch, I'm going to ride over to the Fawcett farm,
see what's happening with the chickens.” Whatever.
He's doing something in the backyard. We don't know what.
He's raking up dead birds.
Lydia goes off to the Fawcett farm
and there's a scene that's in the script that | understand Hitch shot
that is not in the movie.
It's a comic scene in keeping with their relationship throughout the film.
They start talking about, "How did this all start?”
And some bird in the hill, some rebel in the hill
is gathering other birds around him.
"You have nothing to lose but your feathers.”
“Let's rise up and become supreme,” and all that.
And they're laughing, and she says,
‘But those birds came down the chimney in rage.”
"They wanted us dead.”
And she looks at him and she says, "I'm frightened,” and he holds her.
And then she says,
"Why did you have to walk into that damned pet shop?”
And kisses him.
{Bogdanovich) I think the scene where Lydia discovers the body
is typical Hitchcock
in the sense that he shows you from a distance what's happening,
and then, when it gets to the key moment, he cuts in
and he does it in an unusual way, with kind of a triple cut - bop, bop, bop -
Where it gets closer each time, like somebody doing a triple take.
| asked him about it. He said,
"Well, that's the way you might see it: look - look - look.”
Kind of unusual, subjective use of the camera.
Dan Fawcett was played by a stunt man and the makeup was realised
with blackening out the eye sockets and a buildup above the cheekbones,
a wax build up to give it a look of being deep set.
(Michelson) That was also a matte shot.
You won't believe this, but the two eyes were painted as a matte.
The makeup man would put black where the eye was,
and then Albert would get the print
and the black part is not processed, is not developed.
And he would paint whatever he had to paint for the eyes -
leave holes or whatever it is - painted them on glass
and then put that together, and that would be the result.
(Hedren) Hitch's movies are always very suspenseful.
And one of the ways that they are so successful
is that Hitch lets the viewer in
on more than the people in the script know.
As an example, at the schoolhouse,
when Melanie comes to take Cathy out of school,
she sits down on the bench
and you see the one bird land on the jungle gym.
And then it cuts back to Melanie Daniels sitting on the bench,
nervous, and she starts smoking - | don't smoke anymore -
and then you see two more birds.
(Boyle) And then he said,
‘Now, the audience is aware that birds are coming into the schoolyard,
and the audience is also aware that we're getting closer to her.”
He said, "When we get to, finally, a big head close shot,
we'll hold on it until the audience can't stand it any more.”
(Children Singing, Faint)
{Hedren) And then you cut back again, and it's covered with birds.
The audience just gasps. You know, it's wonderful.
The crows are gathering behind her on the jungle gym,
and | have the kids singing a song.
And | asked my kids, what's a... they were about that school age -
and | said, "What's a song that you sing in school?”
and they gave me "Ristle-tee Rostle-tee".
| looked it up and it was public domain.
You know, it's an old folk tune that goes back forever.
And | used it. And | gave them 4 or 5 stanzas, whatever, of the actual song.
And | got a call, | think it was from Peggy Robertson, Hitch's assistant,
and she said, "We need more lyrics for the song.”
I said, "Why?" She said, It won't cover the scene on the jungle gym.”
So | wrote...
| don't know how many more stanzas -
enough to cover the whole bird kingdom arriving on that jungle gym.
And they used whatever they needed,
and the irony of it is that | still get royalties from ASCAP.
| had to join the American Society of Composers and...
- whatever it's called - Publishers, ASCAP,
in order to allow me to use the lyrics in the film.
And | still get royalties from ASCAP on The Birds
for the lyrics | wrote for that scene.
(Wings Flapping}
(Birds Screeching}
{Hedren) There weren't, you know, any birds in the sky.
We again were running and fighting off birds that weren't there.
So when we got back into the set at Universal,
a treadmill was brought in
and the kids and | ran on this treadmill. Boy, we had a workout!
Generally speaking, a lot of the close shots
| believe were shot on the stage, in front of the sodium screen.
(Screaming)
Boyle) What we had, we had the actual movement down the hill.
That was the background.
We had several shots: a side shot, a back shot.
You know, because you need a lot of footage with these kinds of scenes,
so that the editing could be fast and it could be exciting.
(Boyle) That was carefully choreographed.
That was illustrated almost frame by frame.
Because all of these... You couldn't wing it.
You had to know what you were doing before you started.
{Hedren) And you know, that's dangerous, to be on a treadmill.
1 fater did that on a horse in Marnie.
But the treadmills can be very dangerous.
Because if anybody falls, it could be very serious.
(Cartwright) They had these bird puppets
that would swoop down on us.
And when we were on the treadmill,
you were desperate to stay in the front of the pack.
Because if you were the one to go down, you were like a bowling pin.
And you're just... Vroom! You were off!
And they had huge mats set up on the other end.
And they kept getting faster and faster with this treadmill.
We were running like little maniacs.
| mean, down. Everybody'd be wiped out.
(Screeching)
Cathy! Cathy!
(Boyle) And then the birds were printed in.
And in some cases, it was not too difficult
because those were, for the most part, black crows.
(Hunter) Hitch would say, "Do you think we should explain it?”
And we decided that it would be science fiction
if we explained why the birds were attacking,
and that it would have a greater meaning if we never knew,
if it were kind of this unsettling thing
that these creatures we see in the park every minute
can suddenly come at our heads, you know?
If we're feeding them, they can suddenly come at us with no reason.
| got a call from Hitch saying,
"| think we need a scene where we don't explain what's happening,
but where the people involved are trying to understand what's happening,
so that we can proffer different things here.”
And this was the spur for the scene in the Tides Restaurant,
which | thought was one of the better scenes in the movie.
Are the birds going to eat us, Mommy?
Maybe we're all getting a little carried away by this.
Admittedly, a few birds did act strange, but that's no reason -
| keep telling you, this isn't a few birds.
These are gulls, crows, swifts -
| have never known birds of different species to flock together.
The concept is unimaginable. If that happened, we wouldn't have a chance.
{Hedren) One of the most interesting scenes, | think, that we did
was in the Tides Restaurant
and working with Ethel Griffies, who was in her 80s.
And yet she had all of these ornithological words
that she had to perform.
And it was stunning to hear her do this.
The crow is Corvus brachyrhynchos, and the blackbird is Euphagus cyanocephalos.
Thank you.
And then she added that wonderful little bit
where she starts to light a cigarette.
And she's holding the match
and she starts spouting off all of these bird names.
And you think, "Oh! She's going to burn her fingers!”
Which is, of course, exactly what she wanted.
But she was incredible to work with.
(Hunter) | went out there to Universal
and was on the set the day they were shooting the exterior
for the bird attack on the man at the gas station.
- Look! - (Bird Squawks)
(Squawks)
They had a guy wire that the fake bird would be on
to hit him on the head and move on.
And they had all the pyrotechnics set
for the gas to get on fire and all that.
{Hedren) George Tomasini was Hitch's editor on a number of films.
And | was able to watch a lot of the editing.
Of course, that in itself is just such a fantastic part of the film.
| mean, it really is everything. Everything.
George would assemble the piece to what he thought it should be, or close,
and then Hitch would come in and do the final editing.
And he would edit almost... He would say,
"Cut one frame out of here. Cut three frames out of this scene.”
"Cut it at the beginning, three frames.”
It was technically...
He was such a perfectionist.
Look at the gas! That man's lighting a cigar!
{Hedren) Probably one of the most indicative scenes
about George Tomasini's and Hitch's editing
was when the man throws the match down and everybody screams at him.
And the way they filmed me watching it
was in separate, almost like still photographs, the way they edited it.
It was incredibly effective.
(Boyle) Hitchcock said,
"What we need is a shot which shows everything all in one shot,
so that we reorient the audience.”
He was always thinking of the audience.
So what we had to do now was to get a high shot.
Some people call it the birds’ point-of-view,
but 1 think Hitchcock was right: he called it God's point-of-view,
because it was an objective shot,
so objective that it wouldn't be anybody's point-of-view.
The perspective of the gas station shot was laid out by Harold Michelson,
who was a master of architectural and camera perspective,
geometric perspective.
So the whole shot was laid out very carefully
for the camera position that was available.
We were on the top of the mountain,
where the Universal theme park is now.
We were up there, and we had set up
a big glass plate.
Albert Whitlock was the matte artist who was in charge of this.
And we shot from the top of this mountain
down towards the parking lot and we marked off with white paint
areas where people could run, where firemen could run.
And he proceeded to paint on the glass the black areas,
so all the stuff that went on with the fire and everything
we had to keep in certain areas.
And he painted in the whole town.
(Dutton) You have to also realise that, with a matte painting,
Al's technique was done on original negative.
That means that the original negative is preserved to the very end.
It's not developed. So it's film that's never developed.
So you only have one chance to make it right.
Not like you can go back and do it over again like we do today in the computer.
You have one chance. Two, sometimes.
Because we'd have two or three takes in reserve in the freezer.
We'd take the film out, put it back into a camera,
and add an additional exposure, which was a painting.
And if something went wrong, that was it.
(Boyle) But if we were going to shoot a high shot down,
we had to get birds underneath us.
Dutton) They went to Anacapa Island to shoot the seagull part.
And so the camera was set up on the cliff, looking down at the water.
And they would chum the birds.
Chum means you would throw food out for the seagulls.
And the seagulls would dive towards the food
and that's how he got the movement of the birds
seemingly flying down to the gas station.
So we get a down shot on birds, and then rotoscope,
that is, make a hand-painted matte,
for all these birds for each frame that they're in.
{Bill Taylor) Rotoscoping is a method of tracing
the outline of an object that you want to isolate from its background.
(Bill Taylor) The rotoscope person was Millie Weinbrenner.
And Millie, frame-for-frame, did mattes and isolated those seagulls.
(Squawking}
(Hedren) The birds had just done a massive attack.
Horses were running and cars were crashing
and | was in the phone booth.
And that's another one where we went into the sound stage to do this scene.
The phone booth, again, is a travelling matte foreground.
Sometimes, outside the windows of the phone booth, you see live action
and the other angle is a full painting by Al Whitlock
that has no action built into it, per se. It was just designed as a background.
{Hedren) They had, supposedly, shatterproof glass in there.
And the seagull comes and hits the phone booth.
They had the seagull on the wire, and it was a fake bird, of course.
And the bird comes down, hits the glass,
and the glass shattered and got all over my face.
It was pretty scary.
And we spent the afternoon taking little tiny bits of glass
away from my skin.
(Birds Squawking}
But after that, Rod Taylor comes and gets me and we go into the restaurant.
We don't even see anybody.
And then we look around and there they are, all huddled,
you know, almost into the kitchen. And silent.
And one of the characters, the mother of the two children,
looks at me, and she's crazed.
And she comes after me, accusing me of being the cause of this.
And she becomes hysterical.
They said when you got here, the whole thing started.
Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from?
And |, who have never slapped anybody in my life,
| was told, you know, in the script
that she slaps this woman.
And | said to the actress,
"Let's practise this, you know, do one of those fake things.”
She said, "No. | want you to hit me.” | said, "I can't do that.”
She said, "No, you must. You must hit me.”
"| want you to, because then the reaction will be right.”
So | really had to slap her and | could hardly handle it.
| think you're the cause of all this.
| think you're evil. Evil!
(Boyle) I'll never forget. 1... (Chuckles)
We were on the roof of the schoolhouse at Bodega,
and | had this marvellous idea; brilliant idea, was,
that if | had little magnets which | could attach to the feet of the birds,
and put the birds on the gutter, which was metal,
they couldn't fly off.
We'd have them kept there.
So we did this, and | was up on the roof.
So | went over the ridge of the roof,
and | heard Hitchcock call for action, and then, Cut.”
| went over, and all the birds had tried to fly off,
and they all fell and were hanging upside down.
| didn't try that again!
(Cartwright) A lot of those birds were cardboard cutouts
and sort of stuffed birds that were put on the wires,
and they just kept adding to them and adding to them.
And | asked him - ever the curious child, | asked him.
| said, "Well, isn't it going to look fake on camera?”
And he says, "No." Because he interspersed real birds with them.
And he says, "Your eye... It's the illusion.”
"You see movement from one, you assume they're all moving.”
And it's absolutely true. You sit there and you watch that movie,
and you could swear that they're all moving
just by interspersing live ones here and there.
I mean, he had so many things. I just kept asking questions,
and he never seemed to mind answering them either.
(Birds Shrieking}
{Rod Taylor) In the first attack on the house,
you don't see the birds, you hear them.
So we had to react to that, as any actor does
when a monster's coming and there's no monster.
We had to react to the birds in this terrifying attack on the house,
when we know that they're going to kill us.
{Hedren) In order to help us all have the same degree of emotion,
Hitch had a drummer come in.
And he started a drumroll, very, very softly,
you know, that we would, that we would hear.
And then it got louder and louder and louder.
In fact, all of us were almost saying, "Stop it, stop it,” you know,
just hearing the drumroll, which was very effective.
So, he sort of built up anxiety levels a bit, you know.
And he would just show you the blocking of where you would be
and then just took the reactions as they came.
(Birds Shrieking, Glass Shatters)
They had hammerheads with birds’ heads on them,
and they would have these, like, hand puppets,
and all sorts of things that had bird heads on them
so they could control them.
(Birds Shrieking, Pounding)
And those were heads on hammers, and they just had the prop people
standing behind, just beating the door,
so it would actually look like it was ripping through.
Otherwise, it wouldn't have looked, | think, like wood splitting.
(Shrieking, Pounding Continue)
{Hedren) When you're doing a movie, you know you're doing a movie.
It's a movie,” as Hitchcock would always say.
And people so often say, "Were you frightened
when you were doing that movie?” Well, you know what's going on.
However, there are times when you're making films
that it can become dangerous,
it can become exhausting, unexpected.
And the scene where | go up into the bedroom upstairs
is one of those scenes.
They told me, Hitch always told me for the entire filming,
that we were going to use mechanical birds for that scene.
I said, "Fine. Don't have anything to worry about.”
It was on a Monday morning that we were going to start the scene,
and Jim Brown, the assistant director, came into my dressing room on the set.
We'd known each other for a long time. And he couldn't look at me.
He looked at the floor, he looked at the walls, he looked at the ceiling.
| said, "What's the matter with you?” And he said,
"We can't use the mechanical birds. They don't work.”
And out the door he went.
And | just blanched white because | had seen the bird trainers
with their leather gauntlets up to their shoulders,
and scratches that they had from the birds.
And | walked out onto the set,
and there was never an intention of using mechanical birds.
They had a cage built around the set
so the birds wouldn't be up in the rafters for the remainder of the shoot
And there were three boxes, great big cartons, of ravens and seagulls.
And prop men, with their leather gauntlets,
hurled birds at me for five days.
I'll tell you, the... the...
The most effective were the real birds being held.
You didn't see off camera,
but there were birds being held by their legs.
| don't know. Maybe | put myself in sort of a Zen state
because it was so... it was really grisly.
| literally had to fight them off.
And they didn't attack - birds don't do that.
It was just them coming at me
that | would have to, you know, get away from.
(Whimpering}
(Boyle) Now, this was a system of fast editing
that Hitchcock had been involved with for a long time
in many other films,
but that type of editing was at its height in Psycho, in the shower scene.
(Stabbing, Screaming, Moaning}
He did the same thing in The Birds with fast cuts,
so that you had an impression of more,
almost more than was really happening.
| did all sorts of angles of his sketches.
He, Hitchcock, had them photographed.
And we sat in the screening room.
When one would come on, he'd say,
"Two feet 28 frames. Three frames.”
He would just knock them off like he was timing it in his head.
And this was amazing to me, because |'d never been involved
with that kind of knowledge before, or sense of film.
{Hedren) That Wednesday, Cary Grant came on to the set to see Hitch,
and he walked over to me and he said, (Imitating Cary Grant)
"| think you're the bravest lady I've ever met.” And | said,
"Well, | don't know if that's the word for it.” But it was pretty horrific.
By Friday they had me on the floor
because I'd just crumpled from sheer exhaustion
as the character is being hurt.
And Rita Riggs, who was my dresser, who became a wonderful designer,
she had put cloth bands around my body with little elastics,
two little elastics, sticking out everywhere.
Then we put the dress on, and with the holes in the dress,
she would pull the elastics through,
and then they would tie the foot of the bird to me, and...
Friday, | was that way all day,
and one of the birds decided to move from my shoulder up on to my...
It just jumped, and scratched me very close to my eye,
and | said, "That's enough!” And | got them all off of me.
And | just sat in the middle of the stage and cried.
| mean, | was just totally exhausted.
And everybody left, (Laughs) sort of left me there.
| don't remember the weekend,
and | don't remember driving to the studio the following Monday.
I got into my dressing room - beautiful dressing room -
and lay down on the couch,
and my makeup man, Howard Smit,
came to get me, you know, for makeup?
And he couldn't wake me.
| was just out.
| mean, just out. Just totally exhausted.
I was under doctor's care for a week, which made it very, very difficult,
because there were no other scenes to film.
It was sort of at the ending of the shoot.
Oh, poor thing!
(Cartwright) So the scene, actually, when he brings her down the stairs,
that was a double because Tippi was in the hospital from exhaustion.
So he carries this other lady down the stairs.
And then I'm sure he went back later and did insert shots of her face.
{Hedren) After that scene, you know, | was really a bloody mess.
And of course they're... the makeup people, are so good at that.
And Howard Smit had put scars all over me.
(Smit) I'll never forget, Tippi had her head back in the chair,
and | was making her up and putting all these peck marks on her
and all of the blood for the ultimate, for the bad, bad, bad one.
When | got through, she got her head up into the mirror and took a look at it.
She says, "Pardon me, Howard,” and went outside and threw up,
she was so taken aback by what she looked like.
- We've got to get her to a hospital. - We can't, Mitch.
- There's no place we can go. - There's San Francisco.
- We'd never make it. - We have to try.
(Hedren) But it was so much fun to do, you know, where you're kind of...
Everything is scary and, you know, it's fun.
It's great fun to do it.
{Rod Taylor) Opening a door when there's no door -
This was so typical of Hitch
because, uh... this is film.
This is the... the illusion of movie making.
| had to reach off camera and open a door that wasn't there.
So when | opened the door, the light came on
as if the daylight were streaming in the door.
And nobody in the world can say there wasn't a door there.
| said, "Well, aren't you going to know that there's no door there?”
And he says, "But how would | be able to see you?"
And he said that it's all done with light.
And it's true. | mean, Rod Taylor goes like this...
and he pulls it and the shadow hits,
and nobody knows there is not a door there.
And he said to me, "That's the magic of movies.”
And | mean, it's like, that was exciting. And I've never forgotten that.
Because it is. Movies are magic.
And | think that's what made Hitchcock so special.
(Wind Whistling}
(Engine Revs}
{Bogdanovich) Wasn't there something you said to me
about there was, you know, 300 trick shots? What was that?
(Hitchcock) Yes. There were 371 trick shots.
{Bogdanovich) Which would you think was the most difficult shot?
- The last shot. - The last shot?
(Hitchcock) That's 32 pieces of film.
First of all, we had a limited number of gulls allowed.
Therefore, the foreground was shot in three-panel sections,
left to right, up to the birds on the rail.
The few gulls we had were in the first third,
and we reshot it for the middle third, same gulls,
and the right-hand third, gulls again.
Then, just above the heads of the crows
was a long, slender middle section
where the gulls were spread again.
Then the car going down the driveway,
the car only, with the birds each side of it
was another piece of film.
Then there was the sky, and that was another piece of film.
Boyle) That was done mostly with Al Whitlock's painting.
It was a moody shot. It was also a very important shot,
because there really wasn't any ending to the movie.
It had to be the sort of ending that led you to believe
there may be something going on again, you know, or beyond the film.
So that it was, in a sense,
the last shot was a sort of penultimate moment,
not a climax, but the time before the climax,
which | think is sometimes very satisfactory as part of an art form.
Hitchcock, of course, was always looking for a promotion to do,
you know, that would bring public awareness to what he was doing.
Very publicity minded.
So he decided that, in order to get a little more publicity,
he would have us swear
that we would never tell the ending of the movie
until it was ready to come out into the theatres.
It was kind of amusing, too, because at the point where we did that,
he didn't really know what the ending was going to be.
In fact, one night we all sat around and talked about...
he talked about different endings to the movie.
It was fascinating listening to him.
All the different versions of what it could be.
(Hitchcock) | toyed with the idea at one time of lap-dissolving.
They're in the car and they look,
and there's the Golden Gate Bridge, covered in birds.
{Bogdanovich, Laughing) That's marvellous!
(Hitchcock) Covered! Now, San Francisco: Oh, my God!
{Bogdanovich) And that would be the end? That's beautiful.
(Hitchcock) Yes, that's a belly laugh.
That was a surprise for me, when | saw the end of the film
at the Museum of Modern Art, at this special invitational opening.
| was really enormously surprised.
| was surprised when some scenes were not in the film,
but when | saw the ending, | was shocked
because the way | had the film end,
they come out of the house and they get in the car
and they start driving away from the house.
And we see them coming through town, now,
and we the see the havoc that has been wreaked in the town,
so it becomes not just a personal thing that's directed against Melanie,
that wherever she is, the birds are attacking.
We now see that this is a universal thing,
where we see disaster all through the town.
We see an overturned school bus.
We see a farmer with a shotgun, lying across a front porch.
We see windows shattered all over town. Dead birds on the road.
Police patrol cars, uh... in flames.
It's almost as if a war has been waged against the town by the birds.
Michelson) We did it physically. We started messing up the place.
I think the prop man went to some butcher place or something,
and got a whole bunch of chickens, dead chickens,
and we laid them all over the road.
We had a lot of ketchup, and we would dip rags in the ketchup
and throw them against a building, and get a lot of blood.
We had a lot of this mess which the car was going to drive through
and head down towards San Francisco.
(Hunter) And they come to a roadblock in the road covered with birds
and they manage to get through that, they creep along through that,
and they start gradually accelerating the car
and moving away, and the birds... (Imitates Birds In Flight)
all go up in the air and come at the car.
And now they're going out of town on that same winding road,
and the birds, now, are coming on a straight line for the car.
And the birds descend on the car.
And the convertible was also set up at the very beginning of the film.
It's a convertible with a canvas top.
And now the birds... (imitates Birds} land on the top of the car,
and they're in the car, and we see... (Imitates Birds)
the top starting to shred, and... (Imitates Strong Gust)
It goes back suddenly and all the birds are hovering over the car.
And we go back and we see that the road, now, is...
The curves are ending, and he hits the gas, and... (Imitates Engine)
The car goes ahead and the birds fall back.
We see the birds falling back. And they're in the clear.
And that was the end of the movie.
Certainly the car chase survived
to whatever draft was in the production script.
And it was gone, and, uh...
| think... | don't know what happened.
| know that... | know for sure
that that sequence would have taken them a month to shoot.
Overhead shots, special effects with the birds over,
the roof getting... well, the roof was easy, but all the rest...
Cutting away from the winding road to helicopter shots...
All this stuff would have been just impossible to shoot. Just impossible.
And | think maybe he figured he had the same effect
by showing the birds having taken over the screen
and, by association, the world.
(Birds Shrieking}
We had a long discussion about music and a score.
Using a score, you know?
And | felt that it would really make the movie almost unbearable
if we had music in it, you know, underscoring the terror
and adding to the screaming of the birds.
| think the audience would have jumped out of their seats.
And he said no, he felt it would be more effective the other way.
It would appear that Hitchcock first became interested in using electronic sounds
in place of a score for The Birds in April of 1962,
when he received a letter from a man in Germany named Remi Gassmann.
Gassmann was the co-designer of something called the studio tratonium.
This was a device created by another man,
I believe his name was Dr Frederick Trautwein.
And it basically was the forerunner of many modern keyboard instruments,
in that it was able to take sounds, commonplace, ordinary sounds,
and by playing the keyboard, or playing the instrument,
you could manipulate the sounds.
Gassmann contacted Hitchcock
and alerted him to the fact that there was this creation.
It had been used by the New York City Ballet,
and it would allow Hitchcock to manipulate sounds
in a way that could be very musical in effect.
This was intriguing to Hitchcock,
and he brought it to Bernard Herrmann's attention.
One might think that Bernard Herrmann would be angry
that he would not be writing music for the film,
but Herrmann was intrigued by this invention
and its application on The Birds .
So Hitchcock and Herrmann travelled together in 1962 to West Berlin
to meet Remi Gassmann
and to explore the possibility of using the studio tratonium in the film.
It was a very happy trip,
and later Herrmann regarded it as one of the most pleasant times
that he ever spent with Alfred Hitchcock. They got along very well,
and they were both very impressed by the results of this machine.
So from that point on, Herrmann became basically an advisor on the film,
a consultant, to work with both Hitchcock and Remi Gassmann
and decide where they wanted to use this effect
in the place of where they would have used a conventional score.
(Screaming)
Throughout The Birds, during the various attack sequences,
sound plays a very important part.
(Children Screaming, Birds Shrieking}
The sequence that probably employed the most subjective use of sound
is the attack on the Brenner house.
First, of course, the characters are inside, just waiting.
And very gradually, you begin to hear the sounds,
the various sounds, from the fluttering to the chirping
and then the cawing, until, of course, it turned into a full-blown attack.
(Birds Shrieking)
Hitchcock, wherever possible, eliminated dialogue from his films,
and the attack on the Brenner house is a sequence
that could virtually be a silent movie with the exception of the fact
that he uses the bird sounds so brilliantly and dramatically,
so that you have these bursts of sound
with visual shocks, like the darkness that they're engulfed in.
(Shrieking Continues)
(Wings Fluttering)
Throughout The Birds,
Alfred Hitchcock experiments very interestingly with silence.
There is the sequence in which Tippi Hedren is attacked in the attic.
Hitchcock said that he wanted to create a silent murder.
In the shower sequence in Psycho,
he originally wanted to just have the sound of the water running
and Janet Leigh's screams and the sounds of the knife.
They ultimately decided music would be more effective.
But in The Birds,
Hitchcock creates a very sinister sound of flapping bird wings
and creates one of the most intense sequences of violence,
but without any music.
(Wings Flapping}
(Wind Whistling)
Hitchcock wanted to communicate the sense
that the birds were thinking at the end of the movie
when everybody is leaving the Brenner house.
They created this tremendously unsettling effect
that is very quiet but does give these creatures
much more of a personality of a far more sinister quality.
(Screeches}
Secondly, he creates
a, uh... a kind of almost final note
by increasing the sound of those birds under the final shot,
and it's very ambiguous
as to whether they're on the verge of another major attack,
or if this is just a sort of, you know, almost psychological effect.
So this very experimental technique that they used
did turn out to be very successful,
and Hitchcock and Herrmann were both very pleased with the result.
(Shrieking, Cawing}
(Cartwright) Because birds are so common,
| mean, you see them all the time,
you think of them as basically being your friends.
But after doing The Birds, you did start looking at birds a lot differently.
I've never seen so many crows on our front yard. (Laughing)
| never knew there were that many of them until after doing this movie.
You started looking at them a lot differently.
{Rod Taylor) | was overwhelmed. | thought it was wonderful.
Not necessarily with me, not at all, but with the st-
| was captivated by the story. You know, | just lost me altogether.
But | thought it was just a magnificent piece of film genius.
And he took from every technical facet of our industry to make it work.
| was thrilled about it.
| was totally amazed about it.
Of course, there was a master who was directing.
And it is a kind of judgment day film.
It also basically says
that it's all going to go back to mother Earth. She will prevail.
It's the end of the world!
(O'Connell) When | first saw the movie, I loved the movie.
1 still do. It's still one of... It's one of my favourites to watch.
It scared me when | saw it, and I'd been on the set
and | knew all the different things. But it was a great movie.
1 think it's one of his best.
{Wind Whistling, Birds Cawing, Screeching)
(Children) # | asked my wife to wash the floor
# Ristle-tee, rostle-tee Now, now, now
# She gave me my hat and she showed me the door
# Ristle-tee, rostle-tee Hey donnie-dostle-tee
# Knickety-knackety, rustical quality
# Now, now, now
# | married my wife in the month of June
# Ristle-tee, rostle-tee Now, now, now
# | brought her home by the light of the moon °
# Ristle-tee, rostle-tee Hey donnie-dostle-tee °
# Knickety-knackety, rustical quality
# Willow-tee, wallow-tee Now, now, now °
# She combed her hair but once a year
# Ristle-tee, rostle-tee Hey donnie-dostle-tee
# Knickety-knackety, rustical quality
# Willow-tee, wallow-tee Now, now, now #