10 More Movies You Didn't Know Recycled Footage From Other Films
6. The Limey Repurposed Young Terence Stamp Scenes From Poor Cow
Steven Soderbergh's terrific 1999 neo-noir The Limey was produced for a fairly svelte $10 million, and when it came to assembling flashbacks to the earlier life of Terence Stamp's protagonist Wilson, the ever-creative Soderbergh devised an ingenious way to do it on the cheap.
Rather than assemble a shoot with a younger actor who resembles Stamp, Soderbergh simply dug deep into Stamp's earlier film career for footage he could use.
He settled upon Poor Cow, the 1967 feature debut of the legendary filmmaker Ken Loach, where Stamp portrays Dave, a criminal who is sent to prison following a botched robbery.
Clips of Dave romancing the film's protagonist, Joy (Carol White), and her subsequently visiting him in prison, are used to depict Wilson's younger life with his dead daughter's mother and his own stint in the slammer, lent context by Stamp's added voiceover.
It's a clever trick, because while it certainly looks like we're watching a young Stamp in those flashbacks, the footage being three decades old at the time, and from a movie many viewers won't have seen, makes it easy to just accept what we're seeing as a young Wilson.