10 Genius Movie Tricks You Totally Take For Granted
7. The Mirror Double Trick - Terminator 2: Judgment Day
In total fairness, you might take this trick for granted purely because it's a deleted scene and so, you might not have seen it at all.
There have certainly been more expensive deleted scenes that didn't make the final cut, but the sheer amount of time and effort that James Cameron put into Terminator 2's mirror sequence is quite something.
The scene involves Sarah (Linda Hamilton) and John Connor (Edward Furlong) removing the T-800's (Arnold Schwarzenegger) chip and changing it from read-only to write, allowing it to learn and in turn helping it become more "human."
Notably the sequence is filmed in front of a mirror as Sarah and John open up the T-800's skull to remove the chip, yet despite this the cameraman bizarrely isn't visible in the mirror's reflection.
No, Cameron didn't achieve this with state-of-the-art digital mirror replacement shots - CGI definitely wasn't there in 1991 - but mind-bogglingly staging the scene twice at once.
The back of the T-800's head close to the camera is a prop head being operated on by Linda Hamilton and Edward Furlong, and the "mirror" is actually just a window behind which Arnold Schwarzenegger is sat.
As for the "reflections" of Hamilton and Furlong? Linda Hamilton's twin sister Leslie mimicked her movements on the other side of the window, while a body double replicated Furlong's movements from behind.
It's an astonishing amount of effort for a scene that the majority of people probably didn't think twice about, if they even saw it at all.
Thankfully Cameron reinserted it into the movie with the Special Edition re-release, because my god, what a display of filmmaking ingenuity.