10 Movie Scenes That Totally Tricked Your Brain
3. The "Mirror" Scene Is Actually Clever Use Of Doubles - Terminator 2: Judgment Day
As Star Wars: A New Hope proved, mirrors can be an invaluable tool in elegantly tricking audiences' brains into believing an illusion, but James Cameron took that to a whole new level in his technological landmark Terminator 2.
The film's Director's Cut features inarguably one of the greatest "deleted scenes" of all time, where John (Edward Furlong) and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) reset the T-800's (Arnold Schwarzenegger) CPU from read-only to read-write, allowing it to become a learning computer.
The sequence takes place in front of a mirror, with Cameron even panning directly across the mirror yet somehow not capturing the film crew in the shot.
This was actually achieved through masterful use of doubles: the mirror isn't actually a mirror at all but another part of the set.
Linda Hamilton's twin sister Leslie doubles as Sarah on the other side of the mirror, while the T-800 in the foreground is a prop whose face we never see, while Schwarzenegger is actually sat in the "mirror" section.
The trickiness of course lies in perfectly syncing up the movements of both sides, especially with a moving camera where shifting planes of movement can make it far easier for viewers to notice the seams.
And yet, the end result is so meticulously executed that most audiences would simply assume the mirror was another of the film's many brilliant, complex visual effects.
Instead, it was pulled off completely practically, and because it's so damn convincing you probably never even thought about the invisible camera crew the first time you saw it.