As Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” celebrates its 60th anniversary this month, actress Veronica Cartwright shares a surprising secret about one of the film’s most famous scenes.
Sixty years ago, Alfred Hitchcock terrified the world with feathers, beaks, and talons, unleashing his terrifying birds on Hollywood. Inspired by a Daphne du Maurier short story and a real-life strange event, this iconic horror film depicted the violent and mysterious bird attacks on the residents of San Francisco.
To commemorate the milestone of this essential film, actress Veronica Cartwright, who played Cathy, Tippi Hedren’s younger sister, has shared her memories of the shoot in a book by Patrick Loubatière, dedicated to the 110 actresses who played a significant role in Hitchcock’s career.
In the book’s preface, written by Cartwright herself, she opens up about her encounter with the master of suspense and her conversations with him, including discussions about the special effects used on the set to give the famous birds that sense of mass and menace.
The renowned actress, now 74 years old (who also appeared in “Alien” and “The Right Stuff”), revisited one of the film’s most iconic sequences: the one where Tippi Hedren sits on a public bench behind a children’s playground in a schoolyard.
As the voices of schoolchildren echo in the distance, the young woman smokes a cigarette, and a crow casually lands on the metal structure, soon joined by a second, then a third bird. When Melanie turns around a few seconds later, the construction is completely covered with birds, causing a genuine feeling of surprise and anxiety in both the protagonist and the audience.
However, as Veronica Cartwright reveals in Patrick Loubatière’s book’s preface, Hitchcock used a straightforward trick to create this shot, trusting in the magic of cinema to deceive his audience:
“The birds in the chicken-wire schoolyard weren’t all real,” the actress recalls.
“Some of them were cardboard cutouts. So, I asked [Hitchcock], ‘Won’t people notice?’ He replied, ‘When the eyes follow a movement, they imagine everything is alive.’ Well, even today, when I watch that scene and think I’ve spotted a fake bird, it suddenly starts to move.”
So, the next time you watch that famous scene, know that several fake birds are hidden among the real crows. Explore Patrick Loubatière’s book in full to learn more about Hitchcock’s career and his actresses.