Tippi Hedren’s Ordeal Filming ‘The Birds’ Climactic Attic Scene Delivered a Classic Hitchcock Suspense Scene
In The Birds, director Alfred Hitchcock deliberately mimicked the claustrophobic shower murder scene in Psycho, when Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) is trapped in an attic bedroom while dozens of birds attack her from every direction.
Like the infamous shower murder scene, Hitchcock shot the attic bedroom scene from different angles in montage, little snippets of film cut together to show the frenzy of the attack. The thrusts from the birds and their beaks are similar to the knife thrusts from the unseen killer in the shower scene.
Melanie almost succumbs to the attack, but Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) manages to push through the door and drag her out to safety.
Hitchcock had been quoted as wanting local school teacher Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleschette) to be the victim, but screenwriter Evan Hunter said that the supporting character was never considered for the important scene. Hayworth, however, would die on the front steps of her house from another bird attack.
Even 60 years on, the attic attack scene is quite terrifying and realistic. That’s because Hitchcock used real birds.
Accusations of abuse often overshadows the technical merit of the attic bedroom scene. But the on-set abuse reveals the character of the man in setting up Hedren to spend five days fending off an attack from real birds.
Hitchcock, according to Hedren, developed a “crazed obsession” with her and subjected her to cruel barbs and sexual innuendo. She felt trapped by the director, who launched her film career with The Birds. After Marnie, her second film with Hitchcock, she wanted to leave his control. She recalled, “He said, ‘If you leave, I’ll ruin your career.’ And he did.” Despite her success in The Birds and Marnie, she played only supporting roles, and mostly bit parts ever since.
Image: Universal Pictures via MovieStillsDB.com
Hitchcock’s cruelty, it seems, extended to filming the climactic ‘attic bedroom scene’. He never told Hedren of his plan to use real birds, maintaining throughout the shoot that he would use mechanical birds, ensuring the actress’ safety.
But when the day arrived to shoot the ‘attic bedroom scene’, assistant director James H. Brown told her that “the mechanical birds aren’t working, so we’re going to have to use live ones.”
Hedren recalled stepping onto the set that fateful day:
“I walked out on to the set and there was never any 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.”
Inside the cage were four containers of seagulls and ravens. Standing next to them were bird trainers wearing leather gloves up to their elbows for protection. Hedren had no protection of any kind. Up to that moment, she witnessed trainers scratched by claw and beak. (12 crew members had already been hospitalized with scratches and bites).
“[The bird trainers] hurled birds at me for five days. By Friday they had me on the floor because I just crumpled from sheer exhaustion as the character’s being hurt. And Rita Riggs, who was my dresser [and] 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.”
Hitchcock would yell, “Cut”. And then the crew would come in an apply more makeup to Hedren and tear her dress a little bit more to mimic the birds tearing at Melanie’s clothes. And then filming would commence.
“They would tie the foot of the bird to me,” Hedren continued. “And you know the Friday, I was that way all day and one of the birds decided to move from my shoulder up to my — it just jumped and scratched me very close to my eye. And I said, ‘That’s it. That’s it.’ And I got them all off of me and I just sat in the middle of the stage and cried. I was just totally exhausted. And everybody left. They sort of left me there.”
After the weekend, still exhausted from the five day ordeal, Hedren returned to the set but fell into a deep sleep that even her makeup man Howard Smith couldn’t wake her from.
She was placed under a doctor’s care for a week. “Hitchcock said, ‘She can’t rest for a week, we have nobody else to film,’” Hedren recalled. “And the doctor said, ‘What are you trying to do? Kill her?’”
Screenwriter Evan Hunter recalled seeing the trauma inflicted on Hedren in the raw, unedited footage. “You could see in the dailies that she was being attacked. She was visibly crumbling under the assault of the birds…She wasn’t acting, she was reacting.”
Hitchcock sabotaged Hedren’s career when he refused to let her out of her contract after she finished Marnie. Following the release of Marnie, she waited another three years to be cast in a supporting role in Charlie Chaplin’s A Countess From Hong Kong (1967).
While she continued playing bit parts or leading roles in forgettable film and TV shows, Hedren remains iconic as one of Hitchcock’s blondes.
Hedren is the mother of actress Melanie Griffith and grandmother of Dakota Johnson, who played Anastasia Steele in the Fifty Shades trilogy.
