Everyone knows that most Hitchcock films are stone cold classics, many of which are among
the craziest, scariest, and darkest movies out there.
But maybe that's not surprising, considering the man was pretty crazy, scary, and dark
himself.
Here are a few of the strangest things to have happened on the sets of Hitchcock's movies.
Even among Hitchcock's many classic films, The Birds has got to be one of the most famous.
But it was only in 2016 that leading lady Tippi Hedren's memoir gave the public a look
into just what went on behind the scenes.
For her, she wrote, making the movie was nothing short of a nightmare.
The Birds was Hedren's first movie job, and she'd been offered it after Hitchcock had
seen her in a commercial where she didn't even have a single line.
She made an impression, though, and he ordered Universal to find her so he could offer her
a contract…along with a pin made from gold and pearls, showing a pair of birds in flight.
Which seems a little creepy, sure, but that's not the half of it.
"He'd be standing off talking to people, carrying on a conversation, and staring at me."
According to Hedren, it wasn't long after shooting started that Hitchcock came to the
conclusion she was losing weight.
So, he did what any other obsessed fanboy would do: he sent her a basket of bread with
a note that read: "Eat me."
If that weren't enough, Hedren said that his hugging and touching got to the point where
she finally approached his wife, Alma, and asked her to make it all stop.
According to Hedren, Alma just walked away.
After The Birds, Hedren was cast as the title character in Marnie.
She says that things only got worse from there, with Hitchcock regularly grabbing her, telling
her about his dreams in which she professed her undying love for him, and his promise
to ruin her if she rejected him.
She wrote:
"It was sexual, it was perverse, and it was ugly, and I couldn't have been more shocked
or repulsed."
Writing about how she felt after shooting Marnie, Hedren wrote:
"My soul needed to get away."
Today, you can watch pretty much any movie safe in the knowledge that any animals shown
on-screen would have been humanely treated behind the scenes.
Sadly, that's not always the case, and it certainly wasn't the case in the '60s, either.
Heck, back then they didn't even treat the humans right.
By the time they were ready to film that iconic scene in the attic during production on The
Birds, Tippi Hedren had already made it perfectly clear what she thought of Hitchcock's obsession
with her.
According to Hedren, that week-long shoot was one of the most traumatic experiences
she ever had.
Originally, it didn't seem like anything out of the ordinary, and she'd been told that
they were going to use mechanical birds for the scene.
But that was a lie.
Hedren wrote:
"Everybody lied to me, and on the Monday morning, as we were going to start the scene, the assistant
director came in and looked at the floor and the walls and the ceiling, then blurted out:
'The mechanical birds don't work, so we have to use real ones,' and then he ran out."
When she got on set, she realized there apparently hadn't been any intention of using mechanical
birds whatsoever, and that the entire attic was rigged so bird handlers could stand safely
off-camera and spend the next week throwing actual gulls, pigeons, and ravens at her.
At one point, they tied a raven to her leg, and the understandably freaked-out bird clawed
her face in a frantic attempt to get away.
The ordeal only ended when the bruised and bloody Hedren collapsed, after which she was
taken into a doctor's care.
Of her experiences with the director, Hedren wrote:
"I got over Hitchcock a long time ago because I wasn't going to allow my life to be ruined
because of it.
It was like I was in a mental prison, but now it has no effect on me.
I did what I had to do to deal with it."
Decades after its 1959 release, North by Northwest is still hailed as one of the best spy films
of all time.
"What possessed you to come blundering in here like this?
Could it be an overbearing interest in art?"
"Yes, the art of survival."
It's also notable for being the very first film shot on location at the United Nations
building in New York City.
Kind of.
It's probably not surprising that filming a movie at the UN wasn't entirely approved
of at the time.
But if there's one thing to know about Hitchcock, it's that he's not the type to let little
things like rules and regulations get in the way of bringing his vision to the screen.
Even though filming the UN building was strictly off-limits, Hitchcock set up a hidden camera
to get around UN security and the NYPD, in order to film a shot of Cary Grant heading
into the building.
Filming inside the UN was right out of the question, of course, and getting a shot set
up inside would have been impossible even with a hidden camera.
In the end, the interior shots were done on a set, but it was a pretty authentic set for
one crucial reason.
Hitchcock might not have been able to film the UN lobby, but he was able to put on his
tourist disguise, recruit a photographer, and wander through the lobby taking pictures
as though he were on vacation.
The UN wasn't the only iconic set in North by Northwest, and it wasn't the only one that
had Hitchcock scrapping with government officials, either.
The movie is also famous for its scenes on Mount Rushmore, but getting the permissions
needed to film there meant going head-to-head with the U.S. Department of the Interior.
According to Hitchcock himself:
"In North by Northwest, during the scene on Mount Rushmore, I wanted Cary Grant to hide
in Lincoln's nostril and then have a fit of sneezing.
The Parks Commission of the Department of the Interior was rather upset at this thought.
I argued until one of their number asked me how I would like it if they had Lincoln play
the scene in Cary Grant's nose.
I saw their point at once."
He had liked the idea so much that the original title for the film had been The Man in Lincoln's
Nose, and even though he gave up on that as the ending to the film, he was still hampered
by the Park Service's insistence that filming actors running along the presidents' heads
would be disrespectful.
Finally, they agreed to allow filming to take place there, as long as the utmost respect
was to be shown to the monument itself.
Hitchcock agreed and the permits were signed, presumably while the director had his fingers
crossed behind his back.
While only three scenes were actually filmed on site and the rest were filmed on a Hollywood
recreation of the iconic monument, the fake Mount Rushmore was so believable that the
Park Service got all worked up anyway.
And it didn't help that press from MGM had suggested that there was no fake version in
the first place.
They took the issue all the way to the Senate, but the movie was released before it could
be stopped by the government.
In the end, while the Park Service didn't manage to stop the release of the movie, they
did force Hitchcock to remove a line in the credits saying they had approved the whole
thing.
One thing that can definitely be said for Hitchcock is that he was an absolute stickler
for the little details, but nothing quite matched what he put his crew through in order
to recreate a Vermont autumn for The Trouble With Harry.
The idea was to film on location in a series of small towns in Vermont.
But, as anyone who's been to New England knows, the weather there can be unpredictable and
autumn doesn't last for long.
The weather became unworkable long before filming wrapped on The Trouble With Harry,
so Hitchcock made a decision.
By the time filming had come to an end, around half the movie had been shot on a California
soundstage.
In order to keep the look and feel of New England, however, the crew collected bags
and bags of autumn leaves in Vermont, sent them to California, and glued them to the
trees on their studio set.
Just remember that the next time you think your job is monotonous.
In 1935, Madeleine Carroll and Robert Donat starred in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, considered
to be the film that propelled the director to stardom.
He was already 18 movies into his career at that point, however, and that was enough for
him to already have propelled his own behavior from merely "quirky" into downright bizarre.
There's a long list of strange behaviours performed by Hitchcock on the set of that
movie.
Whenever he finished a cup of tea, for example, he'd toss it over his shoulder and smash the
cup on the ground.
He also reportedly called his stars "Mr. Doughnut" and "the Birmingham tart," rather than referring
to them by their actual names.
The first day Donat and Carroll were on set at the same time, he produced the handcuffs
that would be keeping them side-by-side for a good part of the film.
Slapping the cuffs on them, he went on to pretend that he'd misplaced the key.
"There are twenty million women in this island and I've got to be chained to you."
There are a few different versions of how that particular story ended.
According to Donat, he and Carroll got along too well for Hitchcock to be amused by their
suffering, and the director claimed he had "found" the key after an hour or so.
Other accounts have the gag dragging on for many hours, with everyone involved getting
more and more annoyed with the whole thing.
Except, of course, for Hitchcock himself, who would later remark:
"We had a lot of fun making The 39 Steps."
Ask anyone to name the most iconic scenes in movie history, and the shower scene from
Psycho is guaranteed to be among them.
In fact, it's so iconic it's even been given a nickname: 78/52, in reference to the 78
setups and 52 cuts that were required to film the scene.
But the gruelling shooting schedule was actually one of the least strange things about the
making of that unforgettable scene.
Apparently, Hitchcock wanted to get the sound effects for the stabbing 100 percent correct,
so he sent the prop guy for a watermelon.
Since the prop guy had been around long enough to know where this was going, he brought back
a bunch of different melons, and "auditions" were held to see which one made the best sound
when it was stabbed.
Hitchcock closed his eyes, melons were stabbed, and he eventually decided not on a watermelon
after all, but a casaba.
And thus, a killing was born.
Growing up as the child of someone famous has to be pretty weird, but growing up the
child of Alfred Hitchcock?
That's another story entirely.
In 1951, Alfred's daughter Patricia Hitchcock made an appearance in Strangers on a Train,
and she definitely didn't get any special treatment from her father while on set.
Part of the set was a giant Ferris wheel and, as luck would have it, Patricia hated heights.
So Hitchcock promised her $100 if she would go for a ride, and she did.
Unfortunately, the idea of his cherished daughter being helpless on a Ferris wheel was apparently
irresistible to the director, so he waited until she was at the very top, cut the lights
and the power, and left her there for an hour.
And he didn't even give her the hundred dollars after.
The Guardian's interview with Pat Hitchcock many years later suggests that she hadn't
been terrified in the least at the time, and that she was actually kinda used to things
like that happening.
That said, even though she claimed that she wasn't scared by the trick, she also said
that the question of whether or not his "pranks" had ever made her cry was:
"...the strangest thing I've been asked.
I don't delve into myself over much."
And that's life in the Hitchcock household.
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