10 Insane Ways Directors Appeared In Their Own Movies

Most people are probably aware that the hands that draw a naked Kate Winslet in Titanic belong not to Leonardo DiCaprio but director James Cameron himself (even though Cameron is left-handed and DiCaprio right, meaning that the shots had to be flipped to their mirror image). But it's worth noting that Cameron's roles in his earlier movies have been a little more creative.

The Aliens and Terminator director is known for his control freakish desire to make sure every aspect of his enormously expensive productions match his expectations. And that means that if his sound design team don't deliver the dying monster noise that he envisions then he'll just have to make that noise himself.

Terminator 2 sound designer Gary Rydstrom has admitted that Cameron rejected his proposal of mixing the noise of dry ice and monkey screams to accompany the melting death of that movie's T-1000, with Cameron instead providing a recording of his own screeching to accompany the scene. And that wasn't even the first time that he provided the vocal sound effects for one of his monster's death scenes.

For his sequel to Scott sticking his hand in a bunch of sheep intestines for Alien, Cameron sat in the living room of his house near Pinewood Studios recording himself screeching, hissing, shrieking and squealing, a set of noises that can now be heard over the Alien Queen's death scene. Maybe if David Fincher had continued the trend with an oddball cameo as a xenomorph in Alien 3 then it wouldn't have been such a failure.