Updated May 13, 2024 at 4:00 p.m.*
As the 77th Cannes Film Festival kicks off this week, we take a look back at Cannes history, with a little help from the photographic archives of INA, France’s public audiovisual institute.
The festival is no stranger to publicity stunts, but it was sir Alfred Hitchcock himself, who sparked it all with this 1963 “release”…
“They’re nothing to me, birds”
The 16th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in 1963 opened with a prestigious showing, outside official competition, of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Hitchcock was the guest of honor at the festival that year, with the director already considered a bigger star than his own star actors and actresses.
To promote the release of The Birds, Hitchcock and American actress Tippi Hedren, who starred in the film, released a flock of pigeons into the crowd of reporters and fans waiting nearby. Several hundred pigeons were gathered from coops along the Cote d’Azur region in southern France.
They’re good to eat for dinner.
The day before the release of the pigeons, Hitchcock played with the photographers and journalists, responding in humorous and broken French to questions about suspense, his style and black humor. French reporter, journalist and film historian François Chalais asked Hitchcock, “What do you think of birds?”
Hitchcock responded simply, “They’re nothing to me, birds. They’re good to eat for dinner.”
Cannes Festival – The Birds | ©INA/OneShot
Legacy and controversy
The Birds has been selected for preservation by the United States Library of Congress, and was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” in 2016. The same year, Tippi Hedren spoke out about how Hitchcock allegedly sexually assaulted her during the filming of The Birds and Marnie.
Hedren said in her autobiography, Tippi: A Memoir, that Hitchcock ordered other cast members not to socialize with her or touch her, and that one day Hitchcock summoned her to his office: “He suddenly grabbed me and put his hands on me. It was sexual, it was perverse and it was ugly.”
Hedren says Hitchcock threatened to ruin her career by talking disparagingly of her to others and refusing to allow her to work with other directors.
*First published May 14, 2019, this article was updated May 14, 2024 with background material on Hitchcock and the release of The Birds in Cannes.
