10 More Bizarre Ways Directors Tricked Audiences

If you thought that Ridley Scott using children as stand-ins for adults in Alien was bold, it's got nothing on Casablanca, which almost 40 years earlier dared to toy with scale during its single most iconic and important scene.

At the very end of the movie, when Rick (Humphrey Bogart) makes Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) board the plane to Lisbon, there's an extremely impressive magic trick going on in plain sight.

While the scene appears to have been shot at an actual airport, that's not quite the case. It was instead filmed on a soundstage, with the plane in the background being a mere cardboard facade due to space limitations inside the studio.

And so, to sell the scale of the plane as being further away from Rick and Ilsa than it actually was, director Michael Curtiz hired a group of little people to portray the flight engineers tending to the plane.

Had regular-sized folk played the roles, the artifice of the plane's true size would've been given away with hilarious, immediate ease.