Dwarfs create forced perspective in a Hitchcock movie

I didn't know that Alfred Hitchcock was an art director before he became a movie director:

Behind the scenes of The Blackguard (1925, dir. Graham Cutts). Art direction by Alfred Hitchcock... Hitchcock either engaged [German director F.W.] Murnau in conversation, or overheard him tell others: “What you see on the set does not matter. All that matters is what you see on the screen.”

Hitchcock never missed an opportunity to quote this remark, which became a cornerstone of his own approach: The reality didn’t matter if the illusion was effective. He then emulated Murnau by hiring a slew of dwarves to stand far from the camera in The Blackguard, creating an artificial perspective for a crowd scene.

-excerpted from Patrick McGilligan’s Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light

Via Old Hollywood.

And speaking of "forced perspective," when I double-checked the term, I encountered this example:

The Potemkin Stairs in Odessa extend for 142 meters, but give the illusion of greater depth since the stairs are wider at the bottom than at the top.