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One of cinema’s most iconic moments, the farewell between Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca, wasn’t quite what it seemed. That fog-laden scene, with Humphrey Bogart’s Rick and Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa standing in front of a plane poised for takeoff, has etched itself into the DNA of film history as a powerful and timeless image. But behind the magic, a surprising truth about its production emerges, even to this day.
The Foggy Goodbye That Fooled Everyone
Casablanca, filmed during the Second World War, had to contend with the strict limitations imposed by wartime conditions. One of those restrictions was filming at an airport after dark, a challenge that would have doomed the desired final scene.
With a budget stretched thin and time constraints in full swing, the production turned to ingenuity. The “airport” was actually a carefully crafted set, created right on a Warner Bros. soundstage. However, the plane in the background wasn’t even a real aircraft but a scaled-down cardboard version.
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The filmmakers, to sell the illusion, brought in little people to act as mechanics, using forced perspective to make the plane seem enormous in comparison. And with the help of artificial fog to obscure any finer details, the trickery was complete. This clever staging became a hidden gem in the film’s rich legacy. This fact was revealed through various behind-the-scenes accounts like Casablanca – You Must Remember This… and Aljean Harmetz’s book Round Up the Usual Suspects.
Casablanca Was Just The Beginning
What’s even more fascinating is that Casablanca wasn’t alone in using such techniques. In Alien (1979), Ridley Scott tapped into a similar approach for a scene featuring the discovery of the “space jockey.” Instead of a massive prop, Scott used his sons and a friend dressed in scaled-down spacesuits to create the illusion of a gigantic set. The result was a perfectly executed forced perspective that made the ship’s cockpit and the body seem vast and imposing.
The forced perspective wasn’t just confined to Casablanca and Alien. In Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959), leprechauns were shown next to human characters by cleverly manipulating size perception. Later, in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson leaned heavily on the same visual trickery, particularly to show the diminutive size of Hobbits compared to the towering humans around them, using moving sets and split lenses to keep the illusion intact.
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