Christopher Nolan on Set of The Prestige
Interview: Christopher Nolan
“The real paradox, which is the paradox of magic, but this is to me what's interesting about the subject, is that much as the audience wants to know the secret, the secret ultimately will be disappointing,” said Nolan. “That's the nature of magic. And that's, to me, the key thing which I'm trying to do in the film.”
Does that mean when we get to the end, the final twist in The Prestige, we’ll ultimately be let down too? “I think that depends very much on how you view it. And people watch films very differently. And some people very much enjoy the reveals at the end of the film. Other people prefer one over the other, or understand one more than the other. There's no unifying response which was always the intention. This kind of film I think is fun to make.”
The title comes from the third act of a magic trick, where the ultimate surprise blindsides the audience. Nolan set up the film to begin with the pledge and the turn as well. “Basically, the idea was always really to address to magic from the point of view of not trying to show magic in the film and impress people with stage magic, because that can't work on film. People are aware of camera trickery and all the rest. The idea was always to create a marriage of that function according to the principles of a magic trick, or a set of magic tricks. And that involved conforming to this three act structure.”
Set in turn of the century England, Nolan set The Prestige apart from your average period piece. “I really wanted to avoid the sort of alienation factor with period films, this barrier that often exists because of the formality or the sort of starch quality of period films. And a lot of that is in the cinematography and the style in which the film is shot. A lot of it is also the performances. And a lot of what actors do, and we talked, Christian and I and everybody, we talked about this in rehearsals, a lot of actors' ideas of how Victorians behaved is simply having watched other actors who simply watched other actors doing this kind of process of compounding artifice in a way. We don't have much usable film, or recording of people of that era, where there is film recording it's not spontaneous, it's not casual, it's not real life, it's performance. And so we decided to take the approach of just treating it as a contemporary story.”
Stay tuned for updates.
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