Three years after terrifying cinema audience with Psycho, in 1963 Alfred Hitchcock returned with The Birds and terrified audiences all over again.
The movie (the third of Hitchcock’s films to be based on a tale by English author Daphne du Maurier) tells the story of a small town on the California coast whose population suddenly become the victims of random, gruesome, and entirely unexplained attacks by the wild birds in the area.
The Birds starred Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, and Tippi Hedren, a former model and Glamour magazine cover star, that was making her big-screen debut. Just because this was Hedren’s first film, however, did not mean that the notoriously difficult and demanding Hitchcock was going to make the shoot any easier for her, and reportedly the pair clashed repeatedly during filming.
The uncomfortable relationship between Hedren and Hitchcock came to head during a memorable and terrifying scene in which Hedren’s character, Melanie, unwittingly ventures into an attic and is attacked by a previously unseen flock of birds. The scene is shocking to watch but was even more brutal to film: Despite lasting only a couple of minutes on screen, it took a week to film, during which Hedren was subjected to having live gulls thrown forcibly at her face from behind the camera to ensure as realistic a reaction as possible on screen.
Eventually, the constant torment proved too much to bear, and when a gull tore a gash in Hedren’s eyelid, she collapsed on set. On doctor’s orders, production was shut down for a week to allow her to recover.
It’s perhaps understandable that Cary Grant—a good friend of Hitchcock’s, having made four films together—later called Hedren the bravest lady he’d ever met after he paid a visit to the set.