Find out where the classic film The Birds was filmed and explore the beautiful locations used in the movie.
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Location
The film was shot on location in Santa Cruz, California.
History
The Birds is a 1963 American horror-thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on the 1952 story of the same name by Daphne du Maurier. It focuses on a series of sudden and unexplained violent bird attacks on the people of Bodega Bay, California over the course of a few days.
The film stars Tippi Hedren as Melanie Daniels, a socialite who arrives in town on a whim to meet lawyer Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), only to find herself caught up in his search for a lost love interest, Cathy Brent (Suzanne Pleshette). The supporting cast features Jessica Tandy, Veronica Cartwright, Charles McGraw and Cathy Fulmer.
Hitchcock’s team photographed live birds in captivity and incorporated numerous innovative techniques to Achieve greater realism. Although originally panned by some critics, The Birds is now widely considered one of Hitchcock’s greatest films and was ranked number 63 on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies list.
Architecture
The exteriors for the film The Birds were filmed in Bodega Bay, California, United States. The film’s producer, Alfred Hitchcock, discovered the location while on a road trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
Filming
The film was shot in 1965 on location in New York City, Boston, Cape Cod, and Miami.
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Cast
The film stars Tippi Hedren as a socialite who becomes the Obsessive object of a wealthy and unstable widowed businessman, played by Rod Taylor. Hedren’s character, Melanie Daniels, is driving through the rural San Francisco bay area when she encounters Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in a pet shop. He recognizes her from a newspaper photograph as the daughter of a wealthy San Francisco socialite.
Brenner purchases two love birds for his sister’s eleventh birthday, despite the shop owner’s warning that they are very expensive and difficult to care for. Melanie sets out to San Francisco to return the birds to Brenner, but he has already left for Bodega Bay. There, she meets his mother Lydia (Jessica Tandy), younger sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright), and housekeeper Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette).
Reception
Although The Birds received mixed reviews from critics, it was a commercial success and became one of Hitchcock’s most popular films. It won an Academy Award for Special Effects and was nominated for two other Oscars. In 2008, The Birds was selected by the American Film Institute as one of the ten greatest motion pictures of all time.
Awards
The Birds is a 1963 American horror-thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on the 1952 story of the same name by Daphne du Maurier. It stars Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor and features Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette and Veronica Cartwright. The screenplay is by Evan Hunter, who was also credited as “Ed McBain”, a pseudonym used by Hunter for some of his fiction.
The film centers on a small California town which is inexplicably besieged by homicidal birds. Filming took place entirely in Bodega Bay, California. It is notable for its use of sparse dialogue and pervasive suspense, leading to 94% of the film having no spoken dialogue at all. Also unique for a Hitchcock film, it features no music score (aside from the song “Fly Little White Dove” sung near the end of the film).
The Birds won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and was nominated for two additional Academy Awards. It was voted as #96 in Rotten Tomatoes’ 100 Greatest Films Of All Time in 2018 and ranked #40 among AFI’s 100 Years…100 Thrills. In 2016, The Birds was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in their National Film Registry.’
Trivia
The Birds is a 1963 American horror-thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on the 1952 story “The Birds” by Daphne du Maurier. It focuses on a series of sudden and unexplained violent bird attacks on the people of Bodega Bay, California over the course of a few days. The film stars Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren.
Although popularly considered as one of Hitchcock’s best films (and ranked 14th in Sight & Sound’s poll of critics in 2002), The Birds was not without its detractors, who found its plot simplistic and some of its acting unconvincing, particularly that of Hedren. Film critic Pauline Kael called it Hitchcock’s “silliest” movie.
Soundtrack
The film’s score was composed by Bernard Herrmann, and its soundtrack album was released by Columbia Records on September 16, 1963. Herrmann was brought in after Victor Saville, the film’s original producer, was fired and Hitchcock took over production duties himself. The score is regarded as one of Herrmann’s finest, and Hitchcock considered it so pivotal to the film that he asked theater owners not to start the film until the orchestra had finished playing the entire score. Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto wrote that “the music is as important to the film as any of the actors”.
Related Works
The film The Birds was directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1963. It was based on a novella of the same name by Daphne du Maurier. The film tells the story of a small town in California that is besieged by a flock of aggressive birds.
The movie was filmed in Bodega Bay, California. The town of Bodega Bay was used as the stand-in for the fictional town of Santa Cruz, where the film is set. Bodega Bay is located about 60 miles north of San Francisco.
The film’s iconic scene, in which a group of birds attack a schoolgirl, was filmed at the considerately named Bodega Head, a promontory near the town of Bodega Bay.
