The Illusionist (2006)
Interview with Neil Burger
Neil Burger
Neil Burger is the writer and director of The Illusionist starring Edward Norton, Paul Giamatti and Jessica Biel. His screenplay is based on "Eisenheim the Illusionist" by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Steven Millhauser. Although he started his film career in the 80ies already it's only his second feature film after the mockumentary Interview with the Assassin. Burgers period piece was selected for the Opening Night of the Zurich Film Festival in 2006. It was for this occasion that he came to Switzerland and where OutNow.CH met him in a hotel room only hours before the red carpet premiere.
» Das Interview in deutscher Sprache.
OutNow.CH (ON): How did you come across Steve Millhouser's short story "Eisenheim - The Illusionist"?
Neil Burger in Zurich
Neil Burger (NB): In 1990 or 1991. Just about when it was published. I don't remember why but I first read it then. It's a very cinematic story. I knew it would make a great movie. But I was in no position of making it into a film 16 years ago.
ON: What fascinated you in particular about the story?
NB: It has this sense of coming face to face with something unexplainable and how that can change your perceptions. It's a very true story, rooted in it's time but it also has that uncanny sense that nothing is what it seems.
ON: Did you have to change the story in order to make it into a motion picture?
NB: I made quite a few of them. It's a very short story. Only about 20 pages. And although it's very cinematic and beautiful it doesn't have the structure of a feature film. I invented the characters of Sophie and the crown prince. The reason I did this was because the story ends with Eisenheim arrested for "blurring the distinction between art and reality". It's a very cool idea but not really enough to hang the emotional climax of a movie on. I wanted to keep that idea but also make it grander and more operatic.
ON: There's a difference between movie magic an the magic on a stage. Did Edward Norton do some of his tricks by himself?
On set with Norton and Giamatti
NB: The difficulty of doing magic in film is that cinema is already magic and everybody knows how the tricks are done. Audiences are smart and savvy about digital effects and editing techniques. Because of that I based all the magic tricks in the film on real magic tricks of the time. And I tried to do as much of the magic as they would have done it at the time. So all the small tricks Edward Norton or the boy are doing are real. They learned how to do it. But we tried to do the illusions how they would have done it or we built it somehow up on stage "in camera" and not with CGI. We were mostly sucessful with that. But sometimes for budget or time reasons we couldn't do everything like we intended. For instance the orange tree is only half mecanical - the rest is CGI.
ON: For a lot of the actors it was their first experience within a period piece. How did the cope with it?
NB: They liked it. Talking to Edward, Paul and Jessica they liked wrapping themselves in these costumes. Certainly Paul and Edward are actors that usually work from the inside out but in this case it really helped them to be like clad in this heavy woollen clothes. Jessica felt the same way. She was wearing a corsett the whole time which is no joke to wear.
ON: How was it for your to shoot in Europe?
NB: We shot in Prague, which is a very beautiful city and a very good stand in for Vienna. Everywhere you look you are essentially in the 19th century. That was helpful for the actors and me. Athough it was a lot of hard work making it look right. Everything you put the camera on has to be redone and made to look old. But it was beautiful.
ON: The movie has an interesting look. You used a method called "autochrome".
Burger directing
NB: When I was writing it I knew that I wanted an almost handcranked quality to it, like an old silent film such as Nosferatu was done. Those films have such an eerie quality to it. Not just because it is about a vampire - there's something unnerving about the look of it. We wanted the movie to have this tone aswell. Therefore I used this old cinematic vocabulary of vigneting, of irising and flickering. The same with the colours. The movie is set in 19th-century-Vienna. We wanted to be true to that, but also that it inhabits that realm of dream and mystery. "Autochrome" is the early colourphotographic process. These early photos all look different because it is such an unstable process. But there are some incredibly beautiful ones which I based the look of the movie on.
ON: What does it mean for you that the film is shown at the Zurich Film Festival?
NB: I like it. I was exited to have it be the opening night film. It is an honour. Zurich is a great city. And also it being a new festival. It's exiting to be part of something growing as it is taking shape. And I have never been to Zurich before.
