Christopher Nolan Director Of The Prestige Interview

10-03-2007 14:19

How challenging is it to have a movie with no conventional hero or villain?

I think it’s very liberating in terms of the story to not have to subscribe to the notion of having an obvious hero and an obvious villain. The difficulty is maintaining the interest of the audience because by definition you are making the characters somewhat less sympathetic by both of them being the good guy and the bad guy. But we followed the tenet that you don’t necessarily have to like somebody to be interested in what they are doing and I think there are times in which both these men do unlikable things but through the performances of both actors, you care about what is happening because they are flawed but very real people.

Did you deliberately try not to give audiences all the answers?

What I really wanted to do was create a film that would very much depend on the audience’s involvement and the way in which the viewer watches the film and I think it will become a very different film on DVD because certainly one of the big dividing lines with audiences is what people were picking up as the film flowed past. On DVD, I think you’ll get more people tempted to stop it mid-progress and go back and have a look at something again, so once again the audience response will be greatly modified by the medium itself and it is a film in which the viewer really plays a part because of the way in which they choose to view events greatly affects what kind of story it is for them.

Do you think people who saw it in a theatre will get more out of it on DVD?

The film is very dense in its narrative so there are definitely a lot of things that will make a lot more sense the second time around. With a film that is essentially constructed as a magic trick, as this film is, and therefore plays all sorts of tricks to the audience, it was very important to me to play those tricks in a fair manner. By that I mean that if you go back and look at the film a second time you will say, ‘I should have realized that’! There are plenty of clues and plenty of explanations for things as we go but in the emphasis of the story telling, we try to misdirect people in the same way a magician does so they don’t realize the exact nature of what they’re being shown the first time around.

Did you think of Michael Caine’s character as the conscience of the film?

I think he’s very much both the intellectual and emotional conscience of the film. He’s the warmth of the film and to a certain extent the moral judge of what’s going on - and there is nobody as good as Sir Michael Caine at playing those characters!

What did you do to convince David Bowie to play Teslar?

It was very cool to get Bowie to play Teslar and the way I did it was really just giving him the strongest argument that any director can give any cast-member, which is that he was the only person I could possibly imagine playing that part, and I couldn’t do it without him. Usually when you say that, you are lying through your teeth because you’ve got someone else in mind, but for once it was great to be really telling the truth because he seemed so perfect for it and I couldn’t get the idea out of my head until he said yes!

What kind of responses have you had from audiences?

It’s a lot of fun to make a film that has a life after its first viewing. It’s fun to realize that people have gone back and seen it more than once and are waiting to buy it on DVD and it’s taking on a life of its own; that’s really the most rewarding thing for a filmmaker.

Do people like to figure it out?

The funny thing that happened when we were testing the film was that people were wrong about what they understood and when. They genuinely misremember what they think they’ve seen! One example was a character in the film that prompted someone to say, I realized something about this character because he never speaks’, but then you tell them, ‘he does speak - but somewhere else in the film someone only says that about!’ So even what they think they saw or heard was not what they saw or heard but misdirected by us, which makes it all the more important for them to go back now and figure out how much they really knew the first time around!

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