Alfred Hitchcock made a habit of appearing in his own films, it became such a distraction that the great director ensured his trade-mark profile appeared soon after the opening titles, so audiences could concentrate on the intricacies of the plot rather than play Where’s Alfie?.

Over the years, other directors have adopted the Hitchcockian cameo (M Night Shyamalan being the most irritating), or turned it into a memorable scene - Martin Scorsese’s creepy cameo as a cuckolded husband in Taxi Driver is a small film all of its own. There have also been the directors who give cameos to the film-makers who influenced or inspired their careers - Jean-Luc Goddard’s homage to the genius Sam Fuller in Pierre le Fou, where the legendary director of The Steel Helmet, Underworld USA, The Naked Kiss and Shock Corridor expounds on cinema:

“Film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. Death. In one word . . . emotion.”

Here is just a small selection of some notable cameos by directors in their own and in other director’s films.
 

Legendary director Sam Fuller appears in this party scene from Jean-Luc Goddard’s ‘Pierrot le Fou’ (1965)
 

Martin Scorsese creeps out Travis Bickle in this classic scene from ‘Taxi Driver’ (1976)
 

Jim Jarmusch doing his best Lee Marvin in Aki Kaurismäki’s ‘Leningrad Cowboys Go America’ (1989)
 

François Truffaut gets musical in Steven Spielberg’s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’
 

Wim Wender’s ‘The American Friend’ with Nicholas Ray and Sam Fuller, alongside Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz
 

Roman Polanski superbly scary performance as a knife-wielding psycho in ‘Chinatown’
 

A selection of Hitchcock’s cameos