The Making of Hitchcock's The Birds

Moral Tony Lee, Tony Lee Moral

• Publisher: Kamera Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781842439548
• eBook ISBN: 9781842439555
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

Published to coincide with the film's 50th anniversary in 2013, the first book-length treatment on the production of this modernist masterpiece

 

Featuring new interviews with stars Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, and Veronica Cartwright, as well as sketches and storyboards from Hitchcock's A-list technical team, Robert Boyle, Albert Whitlock, and Harold Michelson, the book charts every aspect of the film's production all set against the tumultuous backdrop of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and JFK's presidency. Using unpublished material from the Alfred Hitchcock Collection, Evan Hunter's files, Peggy Robertson's papers, and Robert Boyle's artwork, this is the ultimate guide to Hitchcock's most ambitious film. This book analyzes the film's modernist underpinnings, from art director Robert Boyle's initial sketches influenced by Munch's The Scream, to the groundbreaking electronic score by pioneering German composers Remi Gassmann and Oskar Sala. There is also a time line detailing the film's production to its release at MOMA in New York, and the 1963 Cannes Film Festival.

ON THE SOUND STAGE

‘Hitch was always in complete and affable control of any and all problems that came up’ – Evan Hunter

As soon as the cast and crew arrived back in LA from location, they set straight to work with the studio filming. Work began at Revue Studios on Monday 2 April and lasted until Tuesday 10 July 1962, a total of 15 weeks. Hitchcock sent flowers to Tippi, Jessica and Veronica’s dressing rooms, and, to Rod and Tippi, he gave a box of Vendome liquors. Veronica remembers how kind Hitchcock was to her throughout the filming. ‘He was really terrific to me and every afternoon at 4.30pm I would bring him a cup of tea in a china cup, and Peggy Robertson would make it. And he would have me sit there next to him while he drank his tea.’

Hitchcock would also tell dirty jokes on the set, everyone would laugh, and Veronica would go along with it. ‘I didn’t know what they meant at that age, but I laughed, too.’ He would often break the cast and crew for tea and tell stories. ‘He liked to hold court,’ said Tippi. ‘He would hold court on the set, sometimes we would hear the same stories over and over, but we all listened and laughed because of the way he told them and what a special storyteller he was.’1

Many cast and crew members often recalled how quiet and disciplined everything was on a Hitchcock set. As Albert Whitlock affirmed, ‘That’s what he was trying to do, create an atmosphere, so you were circumspect in your dress and circumspect in your behaviour. That’s what he wanted, he wanted discipline.’2

There were few people that Hitchcock feared at the studio, but Albert noted that Hitch took an intense dislike to Jim Pratt, the studio manager at Universal. From 1946 to 1952, Jim Pratt had been head of feature productions there, but left to work for Disney Pictures. Pratt returned to Universal in 1962 to work as an executive production manager, at the time when The Birds was being filmed. He controlled the budget and Hitchcock tended to fear people who had power.

THE SPARROW ATTACK

For much of April 1962, the interiors of the Brenner house were filmed, including all the scenes involving Jessica Tandy, as the actress was only contracted until the beginning of May. The sparrow attack was one of the first of the several large-scale bird attacks to be filmed inside the studio, culminating in the attic attack on Melanie. The scene drew upon real-life events and inspiration in La Jolla, California in 1960 when swifts suddenly came racing down chimneys to the bewilderment of homeowners.

For the scene to be authentic, 1,500 small birds were needed to rush down the chimney. ‘The birds in this scene are supposed to be [swifts],’ remembered bird trainer Beth Dannaldson in a 1962 interview. ‘Actually they are a mix of sparrows, finches, buntings and other varieties. Most of these species are imported birds.’3

The sparrows had been caught locally by Bud Cardos, but the finches were bought through suppliers from the Philippines and the buntings came from India. Jim and Beth were on hand during filming to protect the birds and see that they had good working conditions, plenty of air and water, and that they didn’t work too hard when they got tired. Also on the set was Paul Ridge, a representative of the American Humane Association. Birds, especially small ones, tend to get very nervous when faced with stressful conditions and too much excitement can give them a heart attack, so it was very important for the bird handlers to keep them calm.

When Melanie sees the first sparrow come out of the fireplace, the bird handlers put a little rubber band around its wings so it couldn’t jump and fly away. To prevent the small birds from escaping, the living room of the Brenner house was enclosed by polyethylene walls, enabling light to still penetrate and illuminate the set. The camera lens was poked through a small aperture in the cellophane, so that the birds couldn’t fly though the hole. Once the actors had slipped through the cellophane curtain, it was promptly sealed behind them. The birds were then placed in opaque cages, which rested atop the prop chimney. On cue, the bird handlers opened the trapdoors in the cages, and, spotting the light below, the birds would fly down the chimney, and into the cellophane bubbled set. The birds then swooped up but were contained by the plastic ceiling above. Air hoses handled by grips prevented the birds from roosting and kept them on the move.

‘After we dumped all the birds out of the fireplace, it took a while, a good hour to recapture all the birds,’ remembers handler Bud Cardos. ‘There were special trapdoors fitted around the fireplace. We did about three dumps a day, that’s all we could do to re-rig the shots. When the birds came down they all came out and flew in a thousand different directions. You couldn’t see off the set because they were flying around.’

The purpose of the cellophane envelope was to contain the birds in the room and prevent them flying off into the catwalks. ‘That is the obvious one, of course,’ remarked AD Jim Brown. ‘About 100 escaped but the bird people recaptured 70.’ Many of the birds flew up to the rafters and couldn’t be caught. As there was no food on top of the stage, birdseed was sprinkled around on the set floor, in the hope of snaring the birds when they came down to feed. Some of the escapees were never caught and, after The Birds was finished filming, some birds would still cheep in the rafters and cause sound problems for later movies.

Veronica Cartwright remembers the sparrow attack in the living room as one of the most vivid and challenging scenes to film. ‘1,500 birds were brought in and came down the chimney. We were filming inside a big plastic bubble, and the birds came down and then they would go up, and then they’d hit the plastic ceiling and they would drop and land on the floor. We learned not to step but sort of shuffle and I remember Jessica accidentally treading on a bird and being beside herself.’

This scene also provided Veronica with an important lesson for projecting her emotions on camera. ‘When I was doing The Birds I discovered that you can’t really sit there and say, “Oh, my dog died at this age and so now I’ve got to be emotional,”’ says Veronica. ‘That can only work so many times. I discovered on that movie, if you watched the other people, and listened to what was happening, then you were able to come up with the emotion because you had immersed yourself in it. I just had to look at Jessica Tandy who was totally freaked out. So The Birds was the movie that led me to that kind of thinking.’

‘Jessica Tandy was a pro, she put up with lots of difficulties, especially when we put the wig with mechanical birds on her,’ says Virginia Darcy. Despite the challenges of working with their avian co-stars, the actors quickly learned to adapt. ‘I got used to the birds rather quickly,’ said Jessica, ‘simply by looking upon them as other actors. Although, I must say, I was beginning to wonder in some of those scenes towards the end. I’ve never had another actor bite me before.’ It was a difficult and vexing scene for the actors, and for Hitchcock, yet he remained impressively calm during filming. Director Peter Bogdanovich, who would later interview Hitchcock for the MOMA retrospective, was in LA during the spring of 1962 and an observer on the set: ‘The whole area had been netted in with plastic sheets so the little birds couldn’t get off the actual room-set. The actors – Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren, Jessica Tandy, and 12-year-old Veronica Cartwright – were, of course, to react in terror to this invasion. The bird wranglers essentially poured the birds down the chimney chute and into the fireplace but, although the actors ran about in proper fright, the small birds seemed more terrified themselves than threatening. Rather than attacking, they flew around trying to find a way out. Hitchcock, extraordinarily calm and cheerful, called out “Cut!” and told the actors to “slip out” of the set so the wranglers could begin the arduous and time-consuming task of trying to recapture all the birds for another take.’4

According to Peter, Hitchcock was in complete and affable control of any and all problems, including the technical ones that came up. Storyboard artist Harold Michelson also remembered filming the sparrow invasion and that, ‘Hitchcock’s greatest fear was that people would laugh at that scene. He was quite worried that, when the women went screaming and stuff like that, people would laugh.’5 By 12 April, the scene was completed with the principals, but the sparrow attack was still to be enhanced through optical effects as well as the sodium vapour travelling mattes that Bob Boyle was investigating, which would quadruple print the birds over the actors.

The scene immediately following the sparrow attack gave Hitchcock the chance to show one of his best examples of subjective treatment. Less technical than the bird invasion, it was an opportunity for him to improvise while he was filming, a radical departure from his carefully controlled preplanning and storyboarding. Lydia is picking up the broken pieces of china from the living-room floor and Hitchcock’s camera photographs the actress Jessica Tandy going around the room, in various positions, ending with her straightening the picture.

Hitchcock keeps his camera on Melanie to show her watching the older woman. ‘The reverse cuts of the girl whose POV it is have to build in a very subtle way, going here, going here and going there,’ Hitchcock said. ‘This is her increasing concern for the mother.’ Melanie, like the audience, can see that Lydia is cracking up under the strain of the bird attacks and Hitchcock keeps the mood by following Melanie in close-up across the living-room floor as she suggests to Mitch that she should stay the night.

‘Even when she crosses to the young man and says, “I think I’d better stay the night,” I take her in the biggest close-up even though I’m walking her, because I think her concern and her interest must maintain the same size on the screen,’ Hitchcock explained in an interview. ‘If you go back, I feel her concern has dropped as well. So, to me, emotionally, the size of the image is very important, especially when you are using that image to identify itself with the audience. She represents the audience there – look the mother is getting unbalanced – and she represents the general way I handle these things.’6 All the while, Hitchcock was carefully coaxing a performance from his novice actress.

‘I believe that one should, at all cost, try and use that face in the visual as much as possible. Well, you take, for example, the work that I gave to Tippi Hedren in The Birds,’ Hitchcock explained. ‘Her face was used entirely to register impressions… She didn’t say a word until she spoke. But she was taking all that in. Visually.’7

Hitchcock found himself in an anxious and emotional state halfway through filming The Birds, as he began to improvise on the set, which was unusual for him. ‘I ran into some emotional problems,’ he confided to François Truffaut. ‘I had trouble, you know, this is being, this should be written with discretion. I had trouble with the leading man. I was pouring myself into the girl. I was doing Svengali, you know. Because it needed so much. I taught her every expression – never a wasted one, you see… because I was so emotionally upset in the middle of this picture it seemed to do something, it sharpened my mind.’8

THE FAWCETT FARM

On Monday 16 and Tuesday 17 April, the interior scenes of Dan Fawcett’s farmhouse were filmed, with Hitchcock directing Jessica Tandy in one of the film’s most powerful and horrifying sequences. Lydia goes to call on neighbour Dan Fawcett to find out why his chickens aren’t eating, in an effort to determine if there’s some kind of bird plague goin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• DAPHNE DU MAURIER'S THE BIRDS
• WRITING THE BIRDS
• THE CAST AND CREW
• PRE-PRODUCTION
• ON LOCATION IN BODEGA BAY
• ON THE SOUND STAGE
• ELECTRONIC SOUND
• POSTPRODUCTION AND EDITING
• THE BIRDS IS COMING!
• AFTERWORD
• Timeline of Events
• Production Credits
• Select Bibliography
• Plates
• Copyright