Among the many action movie franchises that Hollywood churns out these days, the Now You See Me series may be the most accessible. These breezy, lighthearted romps feature a set of globe-trotting magicians known as the Four Horsemen who use their stage tricks to pull off daring heists. Despite their inherent silliness, the movies are polished and well-acted affairs, thanks to charismatic turns by Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fischer, Dave Franco, Morgan Freeman, and others who crop up along the way. Ultimately, these brisk spectacles inject stage trickery with the imaginative thrill of superpowers.
The third entry, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, expands the repertoire with a new generation of performers (Dominic Sessa, Arianna Greenblatt, Justice Smith) as they join forces with the Horsemen in an effort to lift a precious diamond from a greedy executive involved in a money-laundering scheme. There’s plenty of misdirection in store, but once again, much of the movie’s appeal comes from how much fun the cast seems to be having with the material. That includes Eisenberg, whose first performance following his Oscar-nominated undertaking as writer-director of last year’s acclaimed A Real Pain proves that he hasn’t abandoned escapism for good.
Eisenberg is a thoughtful creative and longtime friend (he visited the Playhouse over the summer for a special screening of Zombieland), so I called him up to get a little more insight into his relationship to the Now You See Me franchise as it continues to dazzle audiences.
How has your relationship to magic evolved since you first got involved with this franchise?
When I was doing the first movie, I became obsessed with magic both as an audience member and performer. It’s taken on a different feeling for me now because I’m very heavily associated with these movies, so people now kind of assume I’m a great magician and that I could do a trick for them at a moment’s notice. I can’t. I’m not a great magician. So now people associate me with magic more than I associate myself with it. But this movie is celebrating something that’s so specific about cleverness, teamwork, preparation, and practice. The more I know about magic, the more I like the movies, because I see that the movies are celebrating these virtuous qualities.
Magic has always been associated with the movies going back to its earliest days, when Georges Melies – a magician himself – was making silent films with special effects like A Trip to the Moon in 1902. As a filmmaker yourself, what has working with magic taught you about storytelling as a whole?
That’s such a nice question. One of the main elements of this new movie that makes it stand out against the others was trying to do as much practical magic as possible. So it required us to replicate the way magic was done on camera 100 years ago – you’re rehearsing where the illusions are in camera, where the hand movements are, how they’re angled a certain way for the benefit of the camera rather than putting everything in later on the computer. Even though this is kind of a flashy Hollywood movie, we are working with older elements, like Buster Keaton-style sets. There’s a room in this movie called the Ames room, which is an optical illusion of a set. All of these amazing scenes take place in this room where we take advantage of the optical illusion of the set the way you would’ve done it 100 years ago.
Are there any Easter eggs or small details people should look out for in the movie?
We worked really hard as a cast to try to do as much practical magic as possible, which meant that instead of just going to set and flicking your wrist and a card appearing, we were working on that wrist flick for weeks and weeks every day. You’d spend your lunch break with the magician teachers going over the wrist flick or the diamond reveal, as we call it. I hope that when people watch the movie, they look for the seams, because we were really trying hard to make it a seamless sleight-of-hand illusion.
What’s a magic trick that you can do now?
I spent months trying to learn the snap change for the first movie. It looks easy and fast, but it’s incredibly difficult. It’s not natural to create a trick that looks seamless and quick and effortless. I did one in this movie as well. Since I don’t like watching my own movies, I only know what I’ve seen in the trailer, but there’s like a diamond reveal when I’m talking to the villain Veronica I say, “Diamonds are forever,” and that was a move. I practiced that diamond reveal every day for weeks. I was being sent home on the weekends with the replica diamond so I could just practice that reveal over and over. I give Ruben Fleischer, who directed this movie, a lot of credit for really trying to push us as a cast to not take the easy way out – but actually to practice, practice, practice and perform as much as possible.
While this is the third entry in a successful franchise, you don’t need to know a lot about the characters or the mythology to follow it. Why do you think these stories resonate with audiences?
To me, the movie is just like a magic trick. It’s very complex well planned, but the net effect is just as fun. It’s trying to create a sense of amazement. I now know the effort it takes to create one small illusion. There are so many things happening simultaneously to create an instant illusion, and that’s what this movie is, too. I mean, the amount of effort put into these movies from the screenwriting stage to the set design – they’re consulting the world’s greatest magicians. The movie plays tricks on you even with the performances. Characters that might seem sincere on first glance can be duplicitous on the second, so the movie is this fun, thrilling ride. That’s the special way these movies are conceived and it parallels their themes.
You’ve been performing weekly in a one-man show you wrote called The Ziegfeld Files and have spent much of your career in theater. How does acting onstage compare to what a magician does in front of a crowd?
I’ve been waiting 13 years for somebody to ask this question. I did play right before I went down south to New Orleans to do the first Now You See Me. I had gone from writing and performing in my first play straight into production. It was an absolutely mind-boggling shift. So as an actor in a play, the contract with the audience is that you’re just performing a character. We’re doing the same thing every night for three months. As an audience member, you enter into this relationship with the play, knowing everything that went into it and and knowing how it’s done. If you don’t know how something was done, wait until afterwards, and the actor will of course tell you. When you perform a magic trick, your audience immediately wants to know how it was done, but it’s a different social contract. You’re not supposed to tell the audience how it’s done, you’re supposed to kind of leave them in a state of amazement and childlike wonder that this illusion could possibly exist.
How did that affect you?
I was incredibly uncomfortable with it. When people asked me how it was done, I would immediately tell them, because I just felt so guilty keeping a secret from them. It seemed somehow like an insincere relationship with the audience, because it was in opposition to how I felt as an actor doing a play. So it was a very uncomfortable transition. However, I discovered that even though a lot of people ask how it was done, they don’t actually want to know. Oftentimes, when I would tell people, they would be disappointed because it wasn’t as magical as they expected. It was actually just a practical series of steps. So it was a big learning curve for me to try to get over the guilt of not telling people how it was done.
I suppose that’s why some magicians are slimy people.
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