After resurrecting a dead franchise with Batman Begins you might expect Christopher Nolan to want a break. But the British director is already on to his next project, The Prestige, a story of two warring magicians (played by Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman) in Victorian England. With a supporting cast that includes Michael Caine, David Bowie and now Scarlett Johansson this is quickly becoming one of the must-see movies for 2006. In an exclusive chat, Nolan revealed details of the project, which is going to be a, erm, well, we’ll let him explain.
“I know you hear this from everybody, but it’s genuinely hard to categorise, which is what I love about it,” he says. “If it were contemporary I think you would probably call it a thriller. It has a lot of different elements going on. It verges on elements of the supernatural; it deals with a lot of real life history and so forth. But really it’s the story of a great rivalry. So there isn’t one good guy and one bad guy. Hugh and Christian represent very different aspects of what a magician would do to be successful when they were the biggest stars of stage and pre-screen. So there’s a lot of ambition in both of them but they’re also approaching how they do what they do very differently. Although you can’t really call that a genre. It’s a sort of noiry-thrillery-based-period-type-thing”.
It’s a project that the director has been wrestling with for several years. “It was brought to me by a producer called Valerie Dean about six years ago,” states Nolan. “She just handed me the book and said I think you’ll really respond to it and I did but I didn’t know what the hell to do with it. So I got my brother involved and over the last five years really we’ve figured out how to do it”.
Despite the magical element don’t expect this to be Harry Potter with grown ups. This is a drama rather than an effects movie. “It’s definitely not a big effects movie. It’s much smaller than Batman. Compared to Batman it’s tiny. I think it has a lot of exciting things in it, but it’s much more contained, it’s much more claustrophobic”.
And now with the majority of the cast in place, shooting is just a short way off, which despite the London setting will take place largely in America. “We start shooting in January, “ says Nolan, “we’re a few weeks away. We’re doing a lot of it on stages – a lot of it is interiors – so we’re shooting most of it in LA and Colarado”.