10 Incredibly Sneaky Film Director Cameos You Totally Missed

2. James Cameron In Titanic

Hollywood James Cameron
Andre Penner/AP

It's one of the most famous scenes in Titanic and one of the most famous scenes in movie history, but despite its popularity, it's managed to hide an unbelievably cheeky director cameo right in plain sight.

The scene in question - which features a nervous Jack Dawson sketching a liberated Rose DeWitt Bukater - is not what it appears.

titanic drawing
Paramount

The hands you can see moving across the paper do not belong to star Leonardo DiCaprio, but director James Cameron. Cameron is a skilled drawer, and even sketched all the pictures in Jack's prized artbook just to give the character more authenticity.

But, since Cameron is left-handed and DiCaprio is right-handed, the shots had to be mirrored in post-production to make it appear the sketcher was actually DiCaprio.

So yes, James Cameron - who shot to fame with his kick-ass action movies like Aliens and Terminator 2 - actually got to sketch a naked Kate Winslet. Lucky guy.

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Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!