Evan Hunter

Well, I wasn't so much worried about how the birds would perform because I figured that was his job, not mine, directing the birds.

But if we stuck to the original premise of these two people in the cottage who, in the story, as I recall, spoke to each other mainly in grunts and long pauses, there would be a lot of lapsed time on the screen.

The climax was the scene that survived, the only scene that survived the story, where the finches come down the chimney into the cottage.

I think he had other reasons for not wanting to keep it the way it was.

He liked to deal, in all of his movies, he dealt with more sophisticated people who were intelligent and...

quick speaking and almost glib.

And he didn't have that opportunity with these characters.

So in a sense, our reactions were the same in that respect.

But he also did not want to shoot ever again in England, he told me.

He never wanted to go back to England and shoot there.

So he wanted to transfer the entire story to the United States someplace.

And we chose the San Francisco location because, or he chose it actually,

because he had had luck with, I guess it was The Trouble with Harry or Suspicion or one of them that was shot up there in Petaluma in the chicken country up around San Francisco.

And he looked upon omens and...

little superstitious things.

Like he had great luck with Rebecca, which is why he bought the birds, you know, and he had had luck shooting around the San Francisco area, so he wanted to go back to shoot there.

Yeah, that idea came later.

We went with several notions of... I remember one of my ideas was to come out and have her a schoolteacher, the new school mom in this little town, Bodega Bay, and an inbred hostility from the natives against the newcomer, the big city girl from San Francisco.

And this was one of the ideas that was shot down.

She survived, of course, as Annie in the...