10 Insane Ways Directors Appeared In Their Own Movies

The director cameo is a time-honoured Hollywood tradition. And it's easy to see why. Everyone watching a movie harbours a yearning to be up there on screen, immortalised in celluloid, even the person behind the camera.

Of course, not every director wants to hand themselves the kind of showy roles in which the likes of Tarantino or Shyamalan like to appear. Especially those that have the same acting talents as (but a little more self-awareness than) Tarantino or Shyamalan!

That's not a problem, though, when you're the one calling the shots. You can sneak yourself in anywhere. It doesn't matter how odd or esoteric, how much effort it requires, if you're the director then you can bag yourself a role in any way that you want. And some of those ways are pretty odd.

There's plenty of times that a director will go that weird extra mile to hide themselves within their own project. Not for them the face in the crowd or voice on the end of the phone. No, in these ten examples, filmmakers really pushed the boat out on concealing themselves in their own movies. And talking of boats, let's kick off there...

Undoubtedly the greatest icon of the sly director cameo was Alfred Hitchcock. Years before audiences delighted in spotting every single Stan Lee in all the different Marvel movies, Hitch was showing up in his own works, waiting for a train or missing a bus (seriously, there's a hell of a lot of these Hitchcock cameos that are based around public transport).

The Master of Suspense found it a little tougher to find a spot for himself as a background artist, however, in Lifeboat, given that the entire movie takes place with a small cast of sunken ship survivors on board the titular boat.

Having toyed with the idea of appearing as a floating corpse drifting by the boat, Hitchcock settled on a more creative cameo.

Just before the half hour mark, Hitch can be seen in an advert on the back of a newspaper, playing the role of the "Before" and "After" photos selling the fictional Reduco Obesity Slayer. "Director Alfred Hitchcock says: In just Four Months I lost 23 pounds due to the splendid new Reduco System!" reads the advert's blurb, confirming that Hitchcock exists as an individual within his own fictional universe.

Reduco made a repeat cameo four years later in Rope, another of the director's single location dramas, on a neon sign with Hitchcock's instantly recognisable silhouette, seen through the apartment window.

This kind of self-aware meta cameo and repeating use of a fictional brand may seem almost normal for a director today, but back in the 1940s this was some playfully egotistical oddball stuff.