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Bodega Bay, California - quotes

Quotations relating to Bodega Bay.

Film Pre-Production

I think northern California always reminded Hitch of England. There was something about the weather, which was very unpredictable. It was fog and rain and then sunshine and then fog and rain again. It was a moody, strange area — both forbidding and foreboding. I believe that's what intrigued him. It had a kind of mystical quality.

We had to get all of these various pieces and put them together to make one small community out of it. We built a schoolteacher's house in Bodega, which was a few miles from Bodega Bay. But Bodega Bay just was perfect. It was an almost completely enclosed bay, and there was what is called Bodega Head, which is where the house was.

There was an old house that had gone to wrack and ruin. So we could only use sort of almost the foundation. We rebuilt the house and we added a barn, and that could be reached by road and by boat, which suited the purpose of the film perfectly.

Robert F. Boyle (2000)
keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Bodega Bay, California, The Birds (1963), location filming, and pre-production

Film Production

One of the stories that Al [Whitlock] related to me was when he showed a test one of his background paintings of Bodega Bay to Hitchcock. It was a beautiful scene of Bodega Bay in the background. Hitch thought it looked very beautiful. Without Al being there, he showed it to Peggy Robertson, his assistant. And he said, "What do you think?" And she said, "Oh, that looks like a painting." And Hitch stiffened and thought, "Oh." Then he said, "You know, of course, it's real." And she said, "Oh, I know it's real, but it's so beautiful it could be a painting." And so it was a compliment to Al's extraordinary painting skills that it fooled everybody but was still bigger than life.

Syd Dutton (2000)