The Production Unfolds

Being an ultra-low budget film, Night of the Starlings principal photography was shot in 17 days. The director started filming ideas and taking stills 8 years before that, not knowing if the film would ever be made. There are over 100 shots in the film done outside of the 17-day principal photography window, shot on 5 different cameras over years.

This is the oldest shot in the film, captured over 10 years ago, by the film’s editor, Michele Gisser. Betsy had the costume she hoped to use for the film someday, and then indeed did use! This is Betsy, floating in a bog of the Rio Grande. She put the veil over her face, knowing she would not be playing the character in the film.

This shot was done months after principal photography, as more shots were needed to build to the climax of the film. Again, Betsy donned the nightgown, and Michele shot Betsy on a winter day, the bare trees creating shadows defining dead woods. Day for night coloring gives it an eerie, supernatural look.

Michele shot this vulture against a stark blue sky, creating a perfect green screen for colorist and post artist Brad Stoddard to drop in the ominous clouds and silhouette the bird.

We had no shots of starlings! So Betsy shot this at her back yard bird feeder. And even got good sound with just the camera mic.

At a lake shore, Betsy came across a bird strangled in fishing line. As it swayed in the wind, she was hit with the imagery of man’s dangerous wastefulness of the use of plastic. She snapped a photo.

Opening Shot
Inspiration

Years later, while in post-production for Night of the Starlings, she thought of a beautiful bird, dead of unknown causes, which she had stored in her freezer. On a stormy day, she went down to the river and hung the bird in a found piece orange fishing line. She did the chilling 12 second, opening shot on her cell phone.

(Betsy habitually picks up and properly discards plastic garbage strewn in Nature. Fishing line takes up to 600 hundred years to decompose.)

Homages to Classic Directors

The bird theme celebrated in The Birds cannot be missed throughout Night of the Starlings, especially in the title sequence.

Betsy was so enamored with a scene from the 1943 classic Jane Eyre (featuring a very young Elizabeth Taylor!) that she mimicked shots and did a spin on the dialogue for the scene where she delivers the primary message of her film. Through a ghost!

A shadowy figure of a woman holding a baby, surrounded by swirling ghostly shapes and dark forest silhouettes.

The ghost town, the desert landscapes sparsely populated with outlaws, Native Americans, and Hispanics, featuring a lone hero bent on justice and survival, make “The Western” one of the themes of Night of the Starlings. And who defined “The Western” so iconically? Sergio Leone! Most famous for eye ECU’s and hip level shots of “The Duel.”

The villain in Polanski’s Chinatown, a greedy, rich white man that would sell out the world as well as abuse his own daughter, inspired Night of the Starlings villain: The Stranger.

Mr. Hitchcock almost always does a cameo in his films. Since Betsy did not want to ask anyone to play the film’s most despicable role: a mother who betrays her own daughter, she chose this as her cameo.

A lifelong lover of cinema, writer/director Betsy Burke studied directors who spoke directly to her soul: Roman Polanski, David Lean, Robert Wise, Alfred Hitchcock, Guillermo del Toro, Robert Stevenson, Sergio Leone, &c. She studied their films and stole what appealed to her most.

“It’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them to.”
– Jean-Luc Godard

The subtle significance of the old photograph at the end of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion haunted Betsy until she deciphered its meaning.

Like To Kill a Mockingbird, Night of the Starlings begins as a nostalgic story of mischievous kids’ summer. But ominous characters and dangerous situations brew.