Sarah Snook’s The Birds is in development at HBO, with a story about a mother protecting her daughter as deadly bird attacks become entangled with a crime. The project draws on Daphne du Maurier’s novella, the same story that inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film, and brings the title back more than 60 years after Tippi Hedren endured 5 days of live birds being thrown at her for that movie.
Snook will star as Myra Massey, who returns to her hometown amid a bitter custody fight and quietly investigates a childhood friend’s suspicious disappearance. A killer and threats against Myra compound the danger.
HBO hasn’t ordered the limited series yet.
Snook’s also an executive producer. Tom Spezialy, whose credits include The Leftovers and Watchmen, wrote the pilot, and David Heyman’s Heyday Television is producing the Universal Global Television project. Heyday’s Sue Gibbs said the inspiration comes from Daphne du Maurier’s novella, with nature turning against people at its center.
For Hedren, filming the original’s attic attack meant enduring real birds for roughly 1 minute of finished film. In her 2016 memoir, she recalled being told, “The mechanical birds aren’t working, so we’re going to have to use live ones.”
She wrote that handlers “began hurling those live birds at me. It was brutal and ugly and relentless.” On the final day, a bird “pecked me too close to my eye.” She said, “I’m done,” and described “sobbing from sheer exhaustion.”
Hedren also described Hitchcock threatening her livelihood after she rejected him. In a 2017 interview, she recalled, “he said that he’d ruin my career. And I just said, hey, do what you have to do.” In 2016, she said, “He kept paying me my salary for two years… It was just mean and brutal.”
Her daughter, Melanie Griffith, said, “It was just sort of swept under the rug.” Hedren’s granddaughter Dakota Johnson said in 2021: “Hitchcock ruined her career because she didn’t want to sleep with him, and he terrorized her. He was never held accountable.”
