10 More Bizarre Ways Directors Tricked Audiences
A sneaky CGI trick was key to selling Tom Cruise hanging off the side of a plane.
What is cinema if not a grand, mega-budget act of tricking the audience, of making them suspend their disbelief and simply accept the reality with which they're presented on-screen?
When the full immersive effect kicks in, there's nothing better, and while there are many typical tricks filmmakers employ to get viewers' defenses down, sometimes they have to think way outside the box to make it happen.
And that's absolutely what happened with these 10 movies, each of which saw the directors finding left-field, deeply strange, and yet weirdly ingenious - for the most part, anyway - ways to trick the audience into accepting their cinematic reality.
Following up our prior article on the subject, these tricks range from on-screen sleights of hand to jaw-dropping visual manipulations, incredible tinkerings with sound, and... especially creative use of chocolate syrup.
Filmmaking is above all else the art of problem solving, and these filmmakers all proved they had the nous to come up with mesmerisingly creative solutions to the issues they fought with on set.
The lesson here? Never believe anything you see in a movie, because there's a strong chance it's part of an elaborate magic trick...
10. Children In Spacesuits Made The Space Jockey Look Bigger - Alien
One of the easiest ways to cheat scale in a movie? Use children.
That's precisely what Ridley Scott did in the original Alien when he wanted to convey the awe-inspiring scale of the Space Jockey discovered by the crew of the Nostromo.
Rather than build a large model comparable to the movie's adult cast, Scott had his two young sons and also the son of cinematographer Derek Vanlint work as stand-ins wearing smaller spacesuits, as was surely both the cheaper and easier option.
And you'd certainly never guess it from the end result - the sense of scale is manipulated quite perfectly with smart use of camera perspective, in turn leaving audiences mesmerised by the Space Jockey's gigantic skeleton.
Fun fact: the suits were extremely hot to wear, enough that the children almost collapsed from wearing them for hours a day on set. As a result, oxygen systems were subsequently fitted into the suits to help them breathe.