The Prestige

[modage]

trailer footage on Entertainment Tonight on YouTube...

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

[modage]

i think this looks great.  and i'm surprised he was able to get it done so quickly after BB. 

[SiliasRuby]

"Abracadabra", I did a little giggle when he said that. Stiill looks good.

[MacGuffin]

[last days of gerry the elephant]

That Light+Bold type is getting so lame.

But the movie does look great.

[matt35mm]

As face posters go, I think that one's pretty well done.

[Pwaybloe]

I was thinking the same thing.  Hooray for marketing!

[MacGuffin]

'The Prestige': They're men of mystery
Source: Los Angeles Times



Much fun could be made of "The Prestige" as a sort of superhero showdown, cape versus claws, Batman versus Wolverine ... but that would be beneath us.

Although "The Prestige" does star Christian Bale ("Batman Begins") and Hugh Jackman ("X-Men"), neither will be found in tights or spikes in this film about rival magicians set in London of the early 1900s. The movie does, however, reunite the 32-year-old Bale with his "Batman" director, Christopher Nolan ("Memento").

"He is very solid," says Bale of the director. "He is kind of like the Egyptian pyramids — well-made and flush. You can't get a card between any of the bricks. I can't get anything past him, even the smallest detail to deal with my character."

It was during the production of "Batman" that the idea of Bale in "The Prestige," which opens Oct. 20, came up. "But it really didn't register with me properly until I read it after 'Batman,' " Bale says of the film, adapted by Nolan and his brother Jonathan from the 1995 Christopher Priest novel.

After completing two other films — "Harsh Times" and "Rescue Dawn" — Bale was looking to do something special and found the "Prestige" script to be "remarkable" and "enigmatic." And just as Nolan's acclaimed "Memento" demanded more than one viewing because of its unusual reverse story structure, Bale feels audiences will be compelled to check out "Prestige" more than once.

"I think it's very much its own creature," he says, "but absolutely something where you can appreciate it even more on the second viewing."

Bale describes his character of Alfred Borden, a young magician who comes up with the perfect illusion, to be a man of mystery. "He relies upon secrets and illusions," he says. "Not just in his work but in his every bone. He is somebody who lives for what he does."

So has the British actor hung up his Bat Wings for good? Not at all. He has two films lined up first, including James Mangold's remake of the western classic "3:10 to Yuma," and then Bale and Nolan will collaborate next year on "The Dark Knight."

It was Nolan's commitment to the second feature that lured Bale back to the cave. "I wouldn't have wanted to do a 'Batman' that was going down the old road," he says. "I would not have wanted to be involved in that at all."

[MacGuffin]

New Trailer here.

[modage]

that was like an awful re-edit of the old trailer with terrible narration.  but this will still rule hard.

[polkablues]

that was like an awful re-edit of the old trailer with terrible narration.  but this will still rule hard.

Seriously.  Awful, awful trailer.  But this movie will make The Illusionist wet its pants in shame.

[MacGuffin]

The Prestige Edit Bay Visit
Presto! We visit Christopher Nolan during the sound editing process and hear his thoughts on this magical film.
Source: IGN.FilmForce

Turns out the art of creating "staged" magic is not that different from creating "movie" magic. Both—when done well—are captivating and wonder-making, both require a suspension of disbelief, both trick audiences in delicious ways, both require a sharp intellect and sleight of hand... and if it all works out in the end, onlookers are more than happy to be taken on the ride. It's no surprise, then, that the world of magic tricks meshes well with the world of film, and moviegoers will soon get the chance to see them come together in glorious fashion when director Christopher Nolan's (Batman Begins) The Prestige—starring Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine and Scarlett Johansson—hits theaters around the world.

Recently, we were let behind the curtain to watch a magician at work on his tricks. More specifically, we were invited to sit in on a sound mixing session where Nolan and his adept crew of technicians addressed every part of the film's aural experience. All of the sounds and music had been laid in and synched to the picture, so the process was one of fine-tuning.

The scene being worked on is from the very beginning of the film, and most of it is recognizable from the trailer. As various preparations are made, Michael Caine speaks in voice over, introducing the three segments of a magic act. As he does, we are introduced to the characters—Hugh Jackman playing a masterful magician in the midst of an elaborate vanishing act, with an enormous Tesla coil crackling behind him; Christian Bale as his assistant (and rival?); and Michael Caine as the stately mentor.

Although the clip is less than a couple of minutes, we watch for nearly an hour as the crew takes pass after pass at the audio, making minor but affecting changes: from a swell of music as a character turns toward the camera to a jolt of thunder that transitions one scene to another.

Sitting in a large theater with the biggest mixing board known to man (think a Stones concert times 10) and four technicians at computers, Nolan directs the details, often isolating sounds that can scarcely be heard in the background—all to make sure they give the audience the exact effect he's after.

Whole conversations about which speaker to put a specific sound in come up during the process. At one point, a thunder effect is nixed for being "too spacey, too Star Wars-y." Things are tried, retried and discarded. And in the end, the mix is more emotional. Better.

After the lengthy editing session, the entire crew moves from behind their stations and into the theater seating located at the front of the room. Here, they watch as their creation plays out in context. We watch the first 15 minutes of the film with them and, just as our interest is piqued, the lights come up and we're ushered out of the room.

But the fun is far from over. The director agrees to answer a few questions about the making of the film—sharing his insight not only on the sound editing, but on the entire production.

The Prestige is based on a novel by Christopher Priest, and Nolan notes that the film version is merely "a loose adaptation." Although he had not read the book after beginning production, he states, "My opinion of the book is that it's very exciting [with] many, many ideas; many more than you could get into a screenplay. The challenge was trying to distill the essence of what we thought would be most interesting out of it. ... We had to throw away a lot of different ideas, a lot of different possibilities from the book in order to make it work as a film. In that sense, it's a pretty free adaptation, pretty loose, but I like to think it captures the essence."

Commenting on Christopher Priest's take on the film, Nolan says, "I think he liked the screenplay. We got his blessing early on."

The film is the director's first period piece, which he sees as a double-edged sword. "It can almost be easier, because it's a specific thing, and that's the trap of it, really," he says. "I think period films come off a bit stiff, a bit structured. We tried to be a little looser with the way we made the film."

To keep the authenticity of the period and the setting, the production traveled to Colorado, where much of the drama takes place. "We didn't build sets," Nolan says. "We tried to shoot in real places, just dress them as we needed them to be. There's an artificiality that creeps in when you build a set. ... We tried to restrict ourselves, have everything we did feel a little more spontaneous."

One of the more challenging elements to the storytelling, Nolan contends, is the revelation of twists; fooling the audience in the same way a stage magician must fool his. "People watch so many movies and are so sensitized to the grammar of films and language of films that any deviation from the norm, any slight alteration in the balance of how you do things is immediately noticed by the audience. It sets off alarm bells for people looking at things in a particular way, so it's been a pretty fascinating process of trying to figure out exactly the right emphasis in terms of story and at what point we want people to know more than the character onscreen and at what points in the story we want the audience to be behind the characters. It's a fine line between intriguing people and frustrating them."

Another difficulty in bringing the story to screen is preserving the "magic" of magic. A director with the ability to cut at any moment and manipulate cameras and effects is different from a magician standing on a stage attempting to fool his audience. "That was a challenge," Nolan admits. "That was the reason why—when we went around pitching the idea to several studios—they all said, 'Magic doesn't work on film. You can't do it.' We said, 'No one's ever tried.' The thing we wanted to do in this film that I think solves that problem to an extent is we don't attempt to present magic tricks—stage tricks—in the film as being in any way impressive. We're not expecting a cinema audience to react the way a live audience would to a magic trick. What we're actually doing is we're exploring the world of magicians and how they do things and actually show how something's going to be done.

"We're using the construction of the narrative itself to reproduce the effect of a magic trick or set of magic tricks. That's why the film—as you see in the beginning—sort of outlines the grammatical, structural idea of how a magic trick works, and we apply that to the way that the film tells its story. So there isn't really any point in our film where you show a magic trick—a stage trick—and have the audience be impressed by that. It's more of the creating of a cinematic world that makes the audience feel that they're engaged in the same process."

From our short glimpse at the magic Nolan is weaving, we're intrigued to see more of the story unfold. Stay tuned to IGN for much more as the movie nears release.

[MacGuffin]

Exclusive : Nolan talks The Prestige
Source: Moviehole

"Every great magic trick consists of three acts. The first act is called 'The Pledge': the magician shows you something ordinary; but, of course, it probably isn't. The second act is called 'The Turn': the magician makes this ordinary something do something extraordinary. Now you are looking for the secret, but you won't find it. That's why there is a third act called 'The Prestige': it's the part with the twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance and you see something shocking you've never seen before."

These words, pronounced with solemn conviction by British actor Michael Caine, introduce Christopher Nolan's new movie: "The Prestige." Set in turn-of-the-century England, the film follows the battle for supremacy between two magicians: Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Borden (Christian Bale). In a world where magicians are the most popular and grand of public entertainments, where love is entangled with betrayal, tragedy forever links the two rivals, and nothing seems to get in the way of their mutual obsession. "In an era before television and radio, just at the very beginning of cinema, magicians were very much larger figures in the entertainment world than they are now," says co-writer/director Nolan. "They were the rock stars of their day. Magic still exists today, and always will, but it was much bigger then. It took to the popular culture's consciousness and imagination, and for that reason the stakes of the story become much higher than if it were set in the contemporary world, because of the element of fame, fortune and professional rivalry between magicians. It was also a time of massive technological change, and the story deals with the birth of the modern scientific era in the postindustrial revolution. So, it was a pretty extraordinary era, actually, in terms of intellectual adventure and scientific experimentation. All of these things that also drew me to the novel made it the ideal time to be addressing the issue of magic versus science."

The story revolves around this conflict, where the lines that delimit reality and fiction, scientific or supernatural, are not clear. As the filmmaker behind the acclaimed films "Memento" and "Batman Begins" explains: "The film has elements of what I suppose could be considered supernatural, but it is more about the relationship between new science and magic. When scientific discoveries are new, and the film takes place soon after the birth of electricity, for example, there are a lot of new and exciting things going on in the world of science at the time that would be seen as supernatural, but are not really. So, it is also perhaps about science fiction, about the science of tomorrow, in a way."

Working with the science of today is Christopher Nolan, who we met in the sound editing room of "The Prestige", meticulously revising and trying to enhance each frame of his film: "We have had a lot of fun making it, but I think the actual process we are doing now, which is the sound mixing, is generally one of the most fun parts of filmmaking for me, because basically you have made the film at this point and what we are now doing is simply trying to improve it. So, it is quite an enjoyable process, polishing what you have done." A delicate and fundamental process, that shows how closely involved Nolan is with his movies from beginning to end, from the writing to the last stages of postproduction. One wonders if it is hard to finally let go of the film: "It is a little bit hard, but you know when you have reached the point where you are just fiddling with the film and not improving it. You know when it happens and at that point you are finished with it, though a film isn't really finished until the audience sees it, because you don't make them for yourself."

Based on Christopher Priest's book, Nolan's film is a "pretty free and loose adaptation of a tremendously exciting book that had many ideas, more than you can get into a screenplay," he describes. "The challenge really was to try to keep the essence of what we thought were the most interesting elements of a large book, with a lot going on. I think Priest liked the screenplay, and we got his blessing, but he understood that we had to take some liberties in order to make it work as a film."

"The Prestige" reunites Christopher Nolan with Christian Bale and Michael Caine, both of whom he directed in "Batman Begins". "Christian and Michael came in quite late in the day," admits Nolan. "Originally we were going to make this film before 'Batman Begins', with a different cast, and then realized that we didn't have enough time to do it justice, so we put it off. Christian found out about it and read the script, called me up and said he was interested in playing the magician Alfred Borden, which seemed exactly right. In the case of Michael Caine, his character feels like it was written for him; but the truth is that it wasn't, rather years before I met him. But it fits him like a glove."

Nolan, on the contrary, had never worked with Hugh Jackman before: "Hugh came on board before Christian, actually. He just seemed to embody exactly the balance we needed between having that sense of integrity of the classic leading man and this great authentic stage showmanship that the magician Rupert Angier has to have. As opposed to Christian's character, he has a wonderful understanding of the interaction between performer and live audience, which Hugh actually has. And he also has great depths as an actor that I think hadn't really been explored."

In the case of music icon David Bowie, who had a song in "Memento", the British filmmaker took it upon himself to convince his admired musician/actor to accept a small but key role – that of scientist / electrical pioneer Nikolai Tesla. "He was the only guy I ever had in mind to play Tesla," says Nolan. "His function is small, but very important, and he really has an extraordinarily charismatic and noticeable presence. I wanted someone who wasn't a movie star. So, I flew out to New York to meet him and told him that he had to do it, that I didn't have anyone else in mind who could play his role the way I saw it, and he responded immediately. David is pretty clear on what he does and doesn't want to do."

"The Prestige" delves into the mysteries of illusion, a field that has fascinated him throughout his life. "What is interesting is that once you understand more about how tricks are constructed, and how the methods work, you will go see magicians and be able to figure out a certain amount of what they do," says the director. "But what that means is that it is even more impressive when they actually do something you can't figure out, because you are baffled. There is real joy to being fooled in that way, when you think you know how things are done. It is actually more fun."

[MacGuffin]