10 Movie Scenes With Hidden Tricks You Totally Missed

Based on the book of the same name, A Beautiful Mind is a touching and emotional story of mental illness and how it can affect both the sufferer and those around them. Both Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly won awards for their performances and the film itself took home the Academy Award for Best Picture.

As a drama, it didn't need much in the way of effects and so most don’t question how one of the film’s most shocking scenes came to be.

Suffering a relapse into his paranoid delusions, Crowe’s Nash accidentally leaves his infant son in a filling bathtub. As the boy’s mother rushes to his aid, we see the stomach-turning image of the child submerged in water. I hate to burst any bubbles here but funnily enough this wasn’t just a feat of great acting on the side of the child.

Director Ron Howard shot both the baby in the tub and the filled tub separately and the two were combined in the editing suite.

Seems a simple enough process but it gets all the more complicated when the shot was filmed free-hand and so the footage was never going to match up one-to-one whatever they tried. Still, the film’s editors did a marvellous job of producing something that is jaw-droppingly real looking.