The Actual Process Behind Making Twins Schwarzenegger Devito The Unlikely Bromance That Conquered Hollywood
The movie Twins came out in 1988. It paired Arnold Schwarzenegger with Danny DeVito as brothers separated at birth. The central creative problem was making their height difference believable while keeping the comedic tone grounded enough that audiences would buy the premise. Director Ivan Reitman solved this through a combination of forced perspective, strategic camera placement, and editing choices that most casual viewers never notice but are critical to the whole thing working. The core technique used throughout production was camera angle manipulation. When Schwarzenegger and DeVito shared a frame, the camera was almost always positioned low, looking slightly upward. This shortened DeVito's apparent height while elongating Schwarzenegger's. In wider shots where they walked side by side, crew members would mark floor positions to ensure DeVito stood on spots that kept the perspective ratio consistent. The production designer also controlled set pieces — door frames, staircases, furniture — to either accommodate or subtly hide the height differential depending on the scene's needs. I worked on a low-budget project that required a similar dynamic between two actors of vastly different proportions. The first week we shot, we relied entirely on forced perspective and it fell apart completely. What we didn't account for is that depth of field becomes your enemy when you're manipulating perspective this aggressively. Once we started opening up the aperture for those two-shots, DeVito-style framing just didn't hold. The workaround was switching to prime lenses at f/4 or tighter and keeping the camera as close to the subjects as the lens allowed. This compressed the space between them optically and made the perspective trick actually function instead of looking like a cheap camera angle gimmick.
The second major technique was pure costume and stunt doubling discipline. DeVito's character Julia was written as the shorter, scrappier half of the pair, and the wardrobe department ensured he wore shoes with modest lifts throughout filming. Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, sometimes had his shoe soles adjusted downward or wore flats to minimize the gap further in specific shots. It sounds trivial but getting these details inconsistent across takes is how you accidentally break the illusion during rough cut screening. There is a counter-intuitive point here that most film students miss. You might think forcing perspective means keeping the camera extremely close to DeVito to exaggerate the size difference. Actually, the opposite is true in many scenes. Pulling the camera back three or four feet and using a slightly longer focal length (85mm or 100mm) flattens the image plane and makes the height disparity look more natural rather than cartoonish. The comedy in Twins works because the audience semi-believes these two could be biological relatives. Overdoing the perspective trick undercuts that entirely and shifts the tone into outright farce. Another practical consideration is blocking and movement choreography. When the characters move toward or away from each other on screen, the forced perspective effect shifts in real time. I've seen productions that nail the static two-shot but then drop the ball on blocking, allowing the actors to cross paths in ways that visually contradict the established perspective. The fix is rehearsing every entrance and exit with a storyboard or a simple walk-through using stand-ins before rolling camera. Spend ten minutes on that and you save hours of pick-up shots and VFX fixes later.
There are scenarios where these techniques completely fail. If you need a wide establishing shot showing both characters full-body in the same frame without any cutting, forced perspective alone won't carry it unless you have extraordinary set control. In those cases, the production has to either use a green screen backdrop or accept that the shot will rely on editing between individual frames. I ran into this exact issue on a project where we needed a single take in a narrow hallway and there was simply no way to arrange the camera at the required low angle. We ended up stitching two separate plates together in post, which is far more work than properly staging the shot in-camera but far cheaper than building a soundstage extension. The bromance element itself wasn't something you could camera-trick into existence. Schwarzenegger and DeVito had genuine chemistry from day one, which Reitman recognized and leaned into. The script by John Hughes gave them scenes where the physical comedy stemmed from their contrasting sizes rather than trying to hide it. That's the actual secret most people reduce to a single headline. The visual effects were competent and necessary but unglamorous. The real reason Twins held together was that neither actor punched down at the other's physicality. They played it straight, let the audience laugh at the situation, and never winked at the camera about how ridiculous the premise was. If you're trying to replicate anything close to this approach on a tight budget, prioritize the lens and camera position work over anything else. A $200 shoe lift is useless if your lens choice blows the perspective apart. Start with an 85mm prime, keep your aperture around f/5.6, position the camera at hip height or lower, and block your actors so they never cross paths in a way that breaks the established spatial relationship. Test everything on a monitor before committing to a take. That's the whole process distilled down without the Hollywood packaging.
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