10 Stars Who ONLY Trusted Themselves To Perform Big Movie Scenes

4. James Cameron Filmed The Chopper Overpass Stunt - Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Now, this is an interesting one, because it's not simply a case of a director standing in for an actor who can't draw (sorry, Leo), or an actor wanting to do a stuntman's work.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day features one especially mind-blowing stunt in its third act, where the T-1000 (Robert Patrick) flies a helicopter underneath an overpass, its rotor blades spinning mere feet from the concrete above.

It's a stunt so fundamentally dangerous that the scheduled cameraman refused to take part in it, prompting Cameron to take matters into his own hands, getting in the back of a truck and filming the iconic sequence at his own peril.

The results, of course, are absolutely spectacular, and as much as Cameron has a reputation for being a tyrant on set, you can't really accuse of him of asking his cast and crew to do anything he himself wouldn't.

But the real hero here is the pilot, who had to pull the stunt off not once but twice to give Cameron the required camera coverage. Good grief.