All About The Birds
导演: Laurent Bouzereau
出演: Tippi Hedren, Patricia Hitchcock 等
其他: 80分, 2000年

Alfred Hitchcock
How do you do. My name is Alfred Hitchcock… and I would like to tell you about our good friends, the birds

Patricia Hitchcock
After my father made “Psycho”, which was such a big success, he was, as usual, having his major trouble, which was looking for a story. ‘’Everybody expected so much, you know. It was very hard to find stories, and he finally did find “The Birds”, which was from a short story by Daphne Du Maurier, who wrote “Rebecca”, which was his first film in this country. And at the time, he wasn’t sure if it would make a full-length movie.

Robert Boyle
We had just finished working on “North by Northwest”, and I saw Hitchcock on one of the soundstages. He stopped me and said, “I have a friend, Daphne Du Maurier, who has written a short novella.” He said, “Would you read it and see if, physically, it creates too many problems.” And I read it that night, and I was bowled over by its strength. But I saw it a little differently – I saw it as a mood piece. And I didn’t see it as a narrative story. I spent the rest of the night—worked all night on it – and the image that came to me was Munch’s Scream. I saw that as a kind of icon for the whole thing.

Patricia Hitchcock
My father had initially purchased the rights to “The Birds” for his television series. After he read of real bird attacks taking place across the country, he felt the story had cinematic potential, and he brought in Evan Hunter to adapt the short story.

Evan Hunter
It was a sort of apocalyptic short story. It’s about these birds inexplicably attacking this isolated little farmhouse in Cornwall. I read it, and I would’ve given my right arm to work with Alfred Hitchcock. I then spoke to him on the phone and he said, “Come on out with some ideas. We’re throwing away everything but the title and the notion of birds attacking human beings. So come on out with some ideas.” I remember Hitch showing me a lot of newspaper articles about unexplained bird attacks as a reminder that these things do happen, so we weren’t dealing entirely with fantasy.

Robert Boyle
So then he said, “What do you think can we physically attack this project?” And I said, “Well, the only thing is getting the birds into it.” In those days, we were using blue screen for travelling matte backgrounds. And in those days, the blue screen very often had a rather disturbing fringing. And I knew that if we were to shoot these small birds with fast-moving wings that it would be just a messy blur.

Bill Taylor
The blue screen process, while it had been essentially perfected in 1958, was still not quite to the level that Hitchcock wanted. And the best examples of travelling matte work in general that Hitchcock had seen was the sodium travelling matte shot process that was used primarily at the Disney studio.
The sodium process was a method of combining foregrounds and backgrounds that were photographed at different times in an optical printer in post production. At some point, you have to create a matte, or a silhouette, that enables you to distinguish photographically between the foreground, which is usually an actor against a screen, and the background. In the sodium process, the background was illuminated by yellow sodium light. Of course, the actors in the foreground were illuminated by white light. There were two films in a special camera, an old Technicolor camera. One film was sensitive only to the sodium light on the backing. The second film in the camera was sensitive only to the white light falling on the actors. As a result, there was absolutely no contamination of the foreground actors by the lighting from the background.
Typical of blue screen shots of the period was a sort of blue fire in hair and on the edges of objects. And the sodium light, because there literally was no light from the backing on the actors at any time, the sodium system could produce a higher-quality composite that didn’t exhibit the sort of blue flare and blue halos that were sometimes seen on blue screen composites of the day. Disney had brought the sodium process to a high level of perfection, and Ub lwerks, who was the head of the Disney special processes department, was hired as a consultant, and the Disney sodium equipment was used to create the travelling matte shots on The Birds.

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