Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds Was Even More Chaotic Behind the Scenes: Read an Exclusive Excerpt

With a new adaptation of The Birds winging its way toward the small screen, let's take a look back at Alfred Hitchcock's avian horror classic. 

The 1963 film enjoys the spotlight across two chapters in Tony Lee Moral's latest tome devoted to the trailblazing master of suspense and terror—A Century of Hitchcock: The Man, the Myths, the Legacy (now on sale from University Press of Kentucky)

"I’ve been able to go into detail with stories after discovering the real drama behind The Birds which I didn’t include in my previous book on the making of the film," Moral exclusively told SYFY Wire. "With the sheer logistical chaos of working with thousands of live birds, the production was often as unpredictable as the film itself. The popular narrative is that The Birds was a triumph of Hitchcock’s mastery of control. But the archival record, and Hitchcock’s admission that he couldn’t sleep during filming, suggest that he was struggling to maintain control while production problems mounted around him."

“It’s interesting that The Birds has often been cited as first nature strikes back/disaster movie, foreshadowing movies such as Jaws or The Swarm," he continued. "Long before Jaws became famous for its troubled production, The Birds was already demonstrating how some of cinema’s greatest thrillers emerge from behind-the-scenes disputes, improvisation and a little bit of chaos."

SYFY has an exclusive excerpt, which details how memories of the climactic attic attack sequence near the end of the movie became muddled over the years. Moral described these conflicting recollections as "the Rashomon Effect," referencing the 1950 Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon, in which characters offer up incongruent accounts of past events.

"While Tippi Hedren remembers a very tense and arduous shoot when everyone lied to her," Moral said, "crew members recall strict safety protocols were in place, and a representative of the American Humane Association was on set all the time."

Read exclusive excerpt on The Birds from new Alfred Hitchcock book

Hedren’s own words

Tippi Hedren’s memories of filming the attic scene shifted over the years. In 1963, when the film was first released, she told reporters, "At first they told me they were going to use mechanical birds. But at the last minute they told me, kind of apologetically, that they’d have to use real birds. Since I’d never made a movie before, it didn’t make much difference to me." In a 1984 interview, Hedren remarked, "That scene was probably why he chose an unknown to do it. I was always under the impression that we’d use mechanical birds for that scene. It wasn’t until the morning I was told by the Assistant Director Jim Brown, that the mechanical birds didn’t work and we were going to use live ones. I had seen the trainers with thick leather gauntlets up to here, and a few scars and bites and scratches they had received." A cage was built over the set to keep the birds under control, and "inside the cage were five prop men with very large cartons, and the cartons were filled with ravens, crows and gulls. And the prop men ... hurled [the birds] at me for five days. At the beginning it was alright. It was exhausting, and not just physically but emotionally."

Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963)

Photo: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images

What actually happened

For years, Hedren repeatedly claimed, "Everybody lied to me" about the attic scene. But Virginia Darcy refuted that statement: "Nobody lied to her," she said. "We were all looking out for her. And even the bird man, he would throw birds at the side or at the camera so it looks like they are getting right at her. Some of them did get near her, and that’s when I said it’s too much." Between takes, Darcy would give Hedren a banana smoothie and massage her shoulders to calm her down. According to Marco Lopez, "He was trying to make her the next leading lady, like he did with Vera Miles. But I never saw any tension on the set. Tippi was a real trooper and tolerated a lot of stuff. I never saw that she was resentful or had any hard feelings about it." On Friday afternoon, after five days of continuous filming, one of the birds tied to Hedren’s shoulder jumped and got close to her eye. "The only injury I had was when I was down on the floor, and before they put the dress on, they . . . tied the birds to me." She "got a scratch" from a bird that was "way too close to my eye," Hedren said. "It was harrowing at times, but I wasn’t ... badly hurt or anything like that. It was called acting," she said in an interview in 2009.

"She was in bed for three days—kaput," Hitchcock told François Truffaut. Donald Spoto exaggerated her convalescence in his 2008 book Spellbound by Beauty, stating that Hedren was in bed for ten days. According to Spoto, the doctor asked, "Are you trying to kill her?" The three days’ rest were confirmed in correspondence after the film was released. Many fans were anxious to know if Hedren had really been hurt, and secretary Suzanne Gauthier responded to fan mail and audience queries. "Miss Hedren was not injured in the shooting of the picture, however she had to take a three-day rest after working so strenuously during that sequence," Gauthier wrote in May 1963. Another letter stated, "Miss Hedren was not injured during production but the strain of playing her role, particularly when the birds attack in the attic, caused her to have a three day stretch just to rest. However as I say she was not injured."

Moral, Tony Lee. A Century of Hitchcock: The Man, the Myths, the Legacy. pp. 97-98, 100-101. © 2026 The University Press of Kentucky. Used by permission.