Where to watch The Birds (1963)

Trivia & production notes

• The film was inspired by a real incident on August 18, 1961, when seabirds attacked the California coastal town of Capitola, dive-bombing homes and crashing into cars.
• Evan Hunter organized his screenplay by individual shots rather than scenes, a structural choice that ultimately did not affect the final film.
• Hitchcock deliberately cut approximately the last 10 pages of Hunter's screenplay to create a more ambiguous ending, though he was eventually forced to include a title card before release.
• Hitchcock envisioned the film beginning with screwball comedy elements before transitioning into stark terror, a strategy designed to maximize suspense since audiences already knew birds would attack.
• The production spent over $200,000 on mechanical birds despite most of the birds seen in the film being real animals.
• Ray Berwick trained and caught many of the live birds used in production himself, including ravens that were labeled as crows and gulls sourced from a San Francisco garbage dump.
• Ub Iwerks at Walt Disney Studios used the sodium vapor process to create the bird attack special effects, a technique superior to blue screen for handling the birds' rapid wing flapping.
• The attic scene required Linwood Dunn to produce a rough cut before Hitchcock departed for Berlin in December 1962.
• The crow attack sequence took six weeks to complete, with two teams working 11 hours daily to achieve the correct size ratio between birds and children through framing and zoom techniques.
• The film contained 370 effects shots total, with the final shot being a composite of 32 separate elements.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article The Birds (film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.