Movies are handmade, and just like any other art form, sometimes the seams that hold movies together become visible to the audience. For movie fans, these moments are very exciting. Catching a glimpse behind the scenes is an exhilarating experience. My favorite kind of “movie mistake” is the kind that is hiding in plain sight... but the casual viewer missed it upon first viewing. Or perhaps even the second viewing, or even the third.
I’m particularly obsessed with moments that reveal the craft and artistry of the magic trick of a shot that slightly shatters the illusion of cinema. These revealing moments have been in movies since the dawn of cinema, and are everywhere (if you know exactly where to look).
One of my favorite films of all time also has one of the funniest revealing mistakes I've seen. Edward Zwick's "Glory" (1989) takes place during the American Civil War, and this scene has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reminder of the film's very modern production:
Because the audiences' eyes are firmly fixed on Morgan Freeman's character in the center of frame, very few will ever pick up the little kid with the extremely modern wristwatch that enters frame on far screen right. Sometimes the on-set teams that work with featured extras—as well as the costume department that dress the extras—will occasionally miss a modern piece of jewelry on an actor.
Here's a fun one from Martin Scorsese's masterpiece "Goodfellas" (1990), in one of the closing shots of a nail-bitingly tense scene where Karen nearly walks into a (potential) ambush:
The period-appropriate "movie" license plate dramatically dangles then completely falls off the car in the middle of the take, revealing the actual 1990-era license plate of the car used for the scene. This is an accidental and hilarious glimpse into the extremely specialized and detailed hard work that goes into making a Hollywood period piece (this portion of the film takes place in 1980), where every license plate of every car in the movie needed period-appropriate plates.
The finale of James Cameron's epic "Aliens" (1986) features the android Bishop (Lance Henriksen) getting severed in half, but still functioning enough to save Newt (Carrie Henn) from getting sucked into the vacuum of space. The action-packed scene features an absolutely wonderful accidental reveal of how the cut-in-half android was accomplished on the set:
"Aliens" (1986)
The amazing makeup effects applied to Henriksen's body covers the bottom half of his body which is hidden through a hole in the set. But in order to get that little bit of extra athletic stretch to grab Newt, Henriksen popped his body out of the hole a little too far, revealing the classic stage trick. However, I'd gather that 99% of the audience has never noticed this little reveal of stagecraft since our eyes are fixed on Newt on screen right, sliding toward the airlock, and not on the ground contact of Bishop's half-body, which had already been firmly established in the scene.
Avoiding reflections of the crew appearing to camera is a constant struggle for filmmakers. In Steven Spielberg's first masterpiece "Duel" (1971), David (Dennis Weaver) gets into a phone booth to make a call, with the front glass face of the booth aimed directly at the camera, and if the audience's gaze drifted off of Weaver's face, they could catch a glimpse of the crew:
"Duel" (1971)
In the reflection, we see a few crew members on screen left, the camera itself, and director Spielberg on the right (he's the one shuffling left and right, who lowers his head in the middle of the take). Again, like all the examples I'm providing in this article, hardly anyone would ever notice these moments. When a viewer catches these brief moments, the illusion of the movie is briefly broken, but for fans of the filmmaking process, it's a joyful reminder of the overall magic trick. The most intimate movie scene with only two characters in a desolate, isolated environment actually was created by dozens and dozens of crew members standing slightly out of frame.
Look for another accidental 'crew caught on camera' moment in the reflection in a car window in the 'leave the gun, take the cannoli' scene from "The Godfather" (1972), one that very few people ever notice.
Here's a super quick revealing mistake from "The Dark Knight" (2008) that is a true "you'll never see this in real time" moment:
Although "The Dark Knight" example gives the audience a much clearer look at the camera operator, the focus puller(?) and the camera itself reflected in the interrogation room’s mirrors, the shot is a lot harder to see the crew members and equipment in real time due to the chaotic and energetic camera movement, as opposed to the locked off nature of the "Duel" example.
"The Abyss" (1989)
Amazingly, many folks who watch that clip from the dramatic drowning sequence cannot consciously see the bit of filmmaking that literally blocks the actors in an intimate moment. This is my favorite example of a movie's incredible emotional power — the scene is so dramatic and intense that most viewers cannot consciously see a giant cloth wiping away water from the lens of the camera in the middle of a shot.
Incidentally, some of these revealing mistakes are being erased from cinema history due to overzealous restoration projects — the process of “cleaning up” a film for newer formats like Blu-ray and 4K — which is deeply wrong. This is a much bigger topic on which I have very strong thoughts and the hottest of takes. Just look at what modern restorations have done to two of these revealing mistakes from "Goodfellas" and "Aliens":
Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history. Cinema is worse off when over-aggressive restorations alter the action within the frame. To me, this is equivalent to swapping out an actor's performance with a different take, or changing the music score during an action sequence, or replacing a puppet creature with a computer graphics version of the same creature decades after release. Movies are a moment in time. But I digress.
Like I said at the start, movies are handmade, and that's true even in today's landscape where digital visual effects are a prominent part of filmmaking. In the same way that physical crews use physical tools to build sets, construct costumes and craft props, visual effects artists use digital tools to craft an image. And with the hand-made nature of any art form, the lack of clinical accuracy lends to its charm and sometimes offers an accidental peek behind the scenes of how the art was constructed.
Every few years, a "Star Wars" revealing mistake bubbles up on the internet, one from the Mustafar sequence from Episode III, "Revenge of the Sith" (2005). But the bizarre moment in the single shot was not as easily explainable as the examples I've shown above.
Being in the privileged position of currently working at Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects company that made the visual effects for the movie (and having worked on that movie [and that sequence!]), I took it upon myself to try and solve the mystery.
Please enjoy the story, written by Ian Kintzle, of how I investigated the mystery of the "Force Ghost" in "Revenge of the Sith", as it originally appeared in the Star Wars Celebration Program for Japan 2025.
THE FORCE GHOST IN THE MACHINE
By Ian Kintzle
April 2025, for Star Wars Celebration Japan
It was spring 2005, and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM)— George Lucas’ dream factory—had just completed two years of work on one of its most ambitious projects yet: "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith". A massive undertaking, "Sith" required a herculean effort from hundreds of artists and technicians at ILM, crafting 367 computer- generated models, hundreds of 3D and 2D environments, 47 practical miniature setups, and 13,000,000 renders and composites across 2,151 effects shots.
Out of all of the effects sequences in the picture, perhaps none was more challenging than the operatic duel between Darth Vader (Hayden Christensen) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) on the volcanic planet of Mustafar. The battle starts within the Klegger Corp Mining Facility situated high on the rocky banks of a vast lava river, and progresses through the facility onto a heat-collection arm stretching over a fast- moving river of boiling magma, and then onto a pair of lava skiffs and panning droids. The battle finally ends on a bank with Vader severely burned and maimed.
For the Mustafar sequence, ILM’s team of compositors, led by Compositing Supervisor Pat Tubach and Sequence Supervisor Michael Conte, were faced with the daunting challenge of seamlessly blending all of these live-action plates, computer-generated imagery, and miniature effects, into one cohesive sequence. But with so many individual elements, mistakes happen, and in the case of Revenge of the Sith, a peculiar anomaly slipped through the cracks at precisely 1 hour, 59 minutes, and 2 seconds into the film.
The internet, ever vigilant, began to take notice of this curious artifact around 2015 – a blink-and-you’ll-miss- it moment of a ghostly-robed figure with dark hair that appears behind Anakin Skywalker for only a frame or two just as he leaps from the panning droid to meet Obi-Wan on the lava skiff. The strange figure sparked countless theories and speculation. Was it a “Force ghost”? An easter egg from a mischievous ILM artist?
Todd Vaziri, a seasoned veteran at ILM who also worked on the film as a compositor, was intrigued by the mystery. “Just before the release of The Force Awakens, I started to see this ‘easter egg’ bubble up on social media from time to time of what appears to be a Force ghost on Mustafar,” Vaziri says. “The discourse would really get going. Somebody would spot the artifact and go, ‘What the heck was this?’ And another would say, ‘What do you mean? I don’t see anything.’ And only when you step through the scene, frame-by-frame, do you see what looks like a ghostly face behind Anakin in the shot where he jumps up from the panning droid to continue the lightsaber duel on the lava skiff. And honestly, in-motion, nobody can spot this.”
Getting to the bottom of the mystery would prove difficult. ILM works on dozens of motion pictures and television shows per year, and as older projects are moved offline into their archives, the steps to bring them back to the servers are involved. Revenge of the Sith was no exception. It would require scavenging through terabytes of unaltered greenscreen photography that hasn’t been touched in years. So Vaziri put it behind him – for a time. But in 2024 when the discourse regarding the “Force ghost” roared alive again on social media, Vaziri decided that enough was enough. But in order to locate the anomaly, he would need to spelunk into the film’s digital archives at ILM which had since gone dark.
“I think it took 24 hours to unearth the footage and put it back on our servers. I was so excited, my heart was pounding out of my chest. No one had seen the original greenscreen footage for nearly twenty years,” Vaziri says. “The problem was I didn’t remember exactly what these plates looked like, both because it wasn’t my shot, and it was two decades prior. So I dug, and I dug, and finally I found the plate photography. I couldn’t believe it. There on set was a man—likely a stunt rigger—wearing not a robe, but a peculiar shirt that resembled one, standing behind Hayden, manually puppeteering the greenscreen lava skiff that he and Ewan were fighting on. His face and the “Force ghost” matched up frame-for-frame.” During this excavation process, Vaziri was also able to uncover a variety of in-progress versions of the shot composited with very basic layering. In those early takes, the robed man was not present. This meant one thing: the compositor had done some articulates to remove the mystery man, but the green screen extraction wasn’t quite done yet.
“We have to do frame-by-frame tweaking by hand, which means creating new garbage mattes in order to paint details into the motion- blurred edges,” Vaziri explains. “At some point during the process of refining the edges of the green screen extraction—which required new garbage mattes—the stunt rigger’s head was inadvertently revealed again in that paint process—but because you can’t see it unless you are stepping through it frame-by-frame— it was deemed finished by the artist, by the compositing supervisor, by the visual effects supervisor, by the editors, and by George Lucas himself. Nobody that was part of this process ever caught that and that’s how it made it in the movie. But in a way, I think it’s really wonderful. Plenty of my shots have mistakes in them, and as the saying goes: perfect is the enemy of good. We want our shots to be as perfect as they can be, but we can’t hit everything. In the last 20 years, we have evolved what we call the “Final Check” process, which is our way of scrutinizing shots before they leave ILM. An extra step of quality control, if you will. The bottom line is that we put human hands on every single one of the thousands of shots that you see in Star Wars. This world is handmade, and little things like this become part of ILM history.”
detail of the original greenscreen footage
the final shot as it appears in the film
So there you have it, readers. Another Star Wars mystery solved. In this case it wasn’t a Force ghost, but a stunt rigger who slipped into the shot during the compositing process, providing a wonderful look at the technical seams and handmade nature of the world of visual effects. Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith is streaming now on Disney+.
