10 Movie Scenes You Never Knew Used Body Doubles

Mathieu Kassovitz's masterful 1996 drama La Haine features a brilliantly baffling "How the hell did they do that?" shot, when protagonist Vinz (Vincent Cassel) re-enacts the iconic "You talking to me?" scene from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.

Cassel performs the scene in front of a mirror, with the camera capturing both the back of his head in the foreground and his reflected face in the mirror without the camera itself ever being visible - a literal physical impossibility.

Watching the scene, we know there's some sort of trick, but rather than waste a chunk of the film's miniscule budget on a complicated optical effect, Kassovitz instead hired a double of Cassel to stand in the foreground, while Cassel himself performed as his reflection, with the "mirror" simply being a window like any other.

Though a seemingly simple technique, nailing it with this level of exactitude is incredibly difficult - just look at how rough Zack Snyder's attempt was in Sucker Punch, where the doubles are distractingly out of sync with their "reflections" numerous times.