My lockdown was spent at my family home by the sea in Devon, England. The coast, anywhere in the world, offers a chance to add an extra layer of narrative to stories and we were determined, as a team, to find a project that could exploit not only my knowledge of the area, but also utilise our many contacts. It was important to regard an unusually long stint in one location as an opportunity for new content and not as a threat. There was a default position to try to be positive and energised every day – there was no alternative and, as restrictions eased, our focus intensified. I am sure that many will identify with these emotions. I always want to attack.

We don’t need to be in the Serengeti to get creative – indeed, quite the opposite – it is when playing at home that creativity is needed. Places such as East Africa and Alaska offer such special moments that a lack of visual preconceptions can go unpunished, but not, perhaps, so much in your own backyard.

The prompt for our project in Devon came – as it so often does – from the movies. In this case it was Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 masterclass in slow-burn terror: The Birds. The film, which turned seagulls into the most terrifying villains in horror history, was shot on location in Bodega Bay, seventy miles north of San Francisco. The landscape is not dissimilar to South Devon and both communities rely heavily on tourism and the fishing industry.

The movie was also based on Daphne du Maurier’s novella The Birds, which was first published in her 1952 short-story collection, The Apple Tree. The protagonist of the novella is a farmhand living in Cornwall in the South West of England – close to our home. After watching the film again, and then learning this piece of trivia, I knew we had to try and recreate it. After all, there is no shortage of big and aggressive seagulls here.

Hitchcock was not made for the modern world, he was, by all accounts, a bully and his behaviour towards screen debutant Tippi Hedren, on the set of the movie, is now some- what notorious. In her book, Tippi: A Memoir, published in 2016, Hedren alleges that the director made sexual approaches to her and regarded her as his personal property.

But when she refused the director’s sexual advances, he threatened to destroy her career. “When he told me that he would ruin me, I just told him to do what he had to do”, recalls Hedren.

The debate on his behaviour is contested by those on the film set and we will perhaps never know, but what is undeniable, is that Sir Alfred Hitchcock is one of the most influential and extensively studied film-makers in the history of cinema. ‘The Master of Suspense’, directed over fifty feature films in a career spanning six decades. His films garnered a total of 46 Oscar nominations and six wins. We can be prompted by his work without implicitly condoning his behaviour.

There is a famous scene in The Birds, when Hedren – alone in a tiny boat – is first attacked by a seagull. That was the moment I wanted to recreate. The special effects in the movie are now somewhat mocked, but for 1963, he did one hell of a job in creating terror. Like Spielberg with Jaws a dozen years later, his limited post-production toolkit did not detract from his creation. Jaws famously made fifty times its cost of production, whilst The Birds only made four, but they are both classics of the screen and they do unequivocally stand the test of time.

For our recreation, I wanted as expansive and layered a narrative as possible. Why be lame? There is a lighthouse 18 miles out to sea from our home, called Eddystone. It was first built in 1698, over 70 years before people first settled in San Francisco and I rather liked that. Over and above that, it offered a special backdrop if it were to come off. It was a long shot – the English Channel is not friendly and getting a tiny wooden boat out there would be challenging, even before dropping our very own Tippi Hedren into it.

The last piece of the jigsaw was getting the seagulls. I want to thank Ian Perks – the ‘Godfather’ of the trawling fleet in the busiest fishing port in England, Brixham – for arranging the trawlers to gut their fish on location rather than back at base.

At about 6.10pm on a glorious mid-June evening it all came off. The benign weather made the feared English Channel a millpond, the birds came and Bella di Lorenzo, in her tiny rowing boat, was a fearless superstar.