10 Crazy Tricks Directors Tried To Pull On Audiences
From filmmakers to flimflammers, the directors that pranked the world.
In a sense, the whole process of movie-making is one big long con: persuading an audience that the two-hour procession of heavily edited scenes you’ve assembled out of footage shot in the wrong order actually represents a single coherent narrative.
After all, a successful con relies on the stooge’s suspension of disbelief, just like a really good story. That’s something the legendary Alfred Hitchcock understood. The master of the mean practical joke on set, Hitchcock knew that a quality trick - whether the intricate plot to a thriller or a prank played on a friend - needed to be set up like a stage illusion.
Of course, Hitch’s practical jokes were limited to the poor saps he worked with: he only ever played with the audience by inserting those infamous blink-and-you'll-miss-it directorial cameos into his movies.
Other directors, however, have taken it further, playing games with the crowd at home, using their platform as the masterminds behind the movies to elaborately prank the world...
10. Audience Participation - The Truman Show
When Peter Weir brought The Truman Show to worldwide rave reviews in 1998, he had no idea how prescient his movie was going to be - no one did. Contemporary reality television like The Real World was considered a trashy, cable television fad: Big Brother was at least a year away from being a reality.
The story of Truman Burbank, an orphan raised by a TV network in an artificial environment, whose every unsuspecting moment was broadcast to millions of fascinated viewers around the world, The Truman Show was the shape of things to come, foretelling the rise of the world’s obsession with the not-so-private lives of others.
Weir knew that his project was satire, however - and he had an idea about how to turn the tables on the cinema-going audience and confront them with their own complicity.
His plan involved taking selected theatres and placing a camera near the screen, with the audience themselves in the frame. At a specific point in the movie, the projectionist would cut to a feed coming directly from the camera, and for a moment the crowd would be confronted with themselves, staring at themselves, staring at themselves… on and on into recursive infinity.
Sadly the idea proved practically challenging and financially impractical, and Weir reluctantly set it to one side. But for a while, The Truman Show was set to be an even more groundbreaking work, cinema morphing into performance art and back again.