I was just wondering if you ...
Question: I was just wondering if you knew why the birds attacked Bodega Bay in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. And also, were those real birds, or what?
Answer: The Daphne du Maurier story on which The Birds (1963) is very loosely based is a Cold War allegory in which the attacking birds are a metaphor for life out of balance, knocked off kilter by human hubris, self-centeredness and belligerence. Alfred Hitchcock's screenwriter Evan Hunter, who relocated the story from England to California and made the protagonist a shallow socialite (Tippi Hedren) rather than a wounded World War II veteran, opted not to explain the attack at all, though various characters voice opinions ranging from pop science to sheer panicky superstition. The birds themselves were a mix of real birds trained by Ray Berwick, together with papier-mâché models and mechanical birds. In the scene in which the crows attack the schoolchildren, hand puppets were used for the close-ups.
