傳奇魔術師大衛考柏菲解析魔術電影，《出神入化》瞬間移動沒在唬爛！David Copperfield Breaks Down Magic Scenes｜經典電影大解密｜GQ Taiwan

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- One of Robert-Houdin's great inventions
is the light and heavy chest.
It was a chest that a kid could lift quite easily,
but a strong man, when he tried to lift it,
couldn't lift it.
In "The Illusionist", they took that idea, that same idea.
I'm gonna reveal the method of the light and heavy chest.
Hey GQ, it's David Copperfield. This is "The Breakdown".
[static]
[upbeat music]
- [David] First up, "Now You See Me".
- [Announcer] It's 11:50 PM here in Vegas,
that's 8:50 AM in Paris.
Your bank opens in less than 10 minutes.
1...2...
- 3.
- A number of years ago,
a screenwriter named Ed Reichardt came to my show,
and we did the show in-the-round,
which was very unusual, hasn't been done before.
And we did an illusion, also quite unique,
where we would vanish, me and a spector,
to vanish from the theater,
and reappear in location in Hawaii.
It was pretty amazing and groundbreaking.
And it's what inspired the whole, "Now You See Me" series.
- I liked that little French guy. Where'd he go?
[horns honking]
[apprehensive music]
- Wait, there he is. [applause]
- Teleporting around the world wasn't ever done
in the magic show.
And they saw this opportunity to use it in a movie.
The magic wasn't just card tricks or whatever.
It was something that could be done
as a whole basis of real drama.
- Inside of your helmet, you should feel a button.
Don't press it just yet.
Now that's button activates an air duct
that connects Paris to Las Vegas.
Okay, good, now you can press it.
- All right, now Ettian, hold on tight.
You might feel a bit of a vacuum.
[apprehensive music]
[loud fan]
[slow music]
- In our version, I brought the rain back with me,
into the theater-in-the-round.
In this version, probably a little bit more cool
for the audience, the money comes back to the theater.
You know, it's about credibility.
When I did this illusion,
and people thought it was ridiculous,
nobody's gonna believe it, people said it couldn't be done,
not credible at all.
And we spent three years interviewing audience members,
changing bits, little by little,
to make it a credible thing.
And finally, we got it so the people
in the audiences were crying.
So when Ed Reichardt saw that in the show,
he saw a pretty good version of our things,
so it could be credible, it was something that you could do.
The cast were incredible in this film,
because they really are committed to it.
And they did all the steps that we did,
that we found we had to do to make it a credible thing.
Having proof, having a kind of relationship
between the monitor in the theater,
and yeah, I think it worked.
Our version happened over the heads of the audience.
It was surrounded in a circular theater.
I wanted, you know, people beneath the illusion itself.
They had, in-the-round, and I guess because
they didn't have people below,
they had the piece collapse up.
So it was kind of avoiding the trapdoor idea.
To me, magic isn't about making something disappear.
It's about really having the audience
feel emotionally attached to it.
This is an example of that,
because this was about characters
that you care about, these people-
I mean, these actors are amazing.
Also the people in the audience who were involved with this,
were people that you get to know and care about,
or have some kind of stakes in the matter.
So it's not about the illusion,
it's about the illusion plus caring
about why it's happening.
"The Prestige".
- Because making something disappear isn't enough.
You have to bring it back.
That's why every magic trick has a third act,
the hardest part, the part we call "the prestige".
[bangs on glass]
- I love the poetry that Chris and his brother
put into this movie.
We don't use words in magic,
like, "The prestige", or all the things he did,
but I think it's kind of nice gravitas that he added.
Many people say there's seven pieces of magic,
seven effects, and it's 100% not true.
I'm with my amazing staff,
inventing new technology all the time.
And I think in this case, with Christopher Nolan,
and his brother did, with all the electric currents,
the Tesla coil effects, he created a new language,
in that way, that doesn't exist
in any magic show in history.
So I think he had the same kind of instinct
as I do in my show now.
You know, I'm doing magic with dinosaurs,
and spaceships, and aliens, and time travel,
nothing that you could find in a magic book.
Most magicians, you know, unfortunately kind of do things
that have been done before.
But a lot of the really great people
who are trying to progress the art form, in the past,
and also today, are trying to change the language
and move things in a new way.
You know, they say in there that if you vanish something,
you have to bring it back.
In that case, the bird was vanished,
and they had to make for the child,
the fear of something bad happening to the bird, go away.
I don't believe it's important
to bring things back, necessarily.
I vanished an airplane once, and I didn't bring it back.
And it was viral before viral existed.
And it's because I didn't bring it back,
it was kind of unsatisfied.
The audience is going, "What happened to it?"
If I brought it back, it would have closed the circle.
I don't agree with that idea that you have to bring it back.
"Now You See Me 2".
[foreign language]
[intense music]
[foreign language]
[foreign language]
[upbeat music]
- My Executive Producer, Chris Kenner,
started a whole trend of juggling cards
in a beautiful way, and it was called "cardistry".
This sequence is based on that entire idea.
Andrei Jikh, who took that idea
and took it to another level,
helped design the sequence, which is pretty interesting.
All these moves are based on real moves,
real things you can do.
Everything you're seeing here really could be done.
It would be kind of hard to do it all in that sequence,
but they're all possible to do.
They helped a little bit, with a little bit
of the camera technique to get it to work
perfectly each time, but all very risky moves
that could actually be really happening.
This whole throwing of cards started a whole trend,
YouTube videos of people trying to do hard throwing,
where they land in specific spots.
We did 200 takes to get this one shot.
In movies, you know, we all do many, many takes
of scenes as actors.
In this case, this is a lot of things put together.
John Chu, who is a wonderful director of this film,
his background is in dance,
and choreographing beautiful sequences.
So the combination of cardistry and John Chu's direction,
comes together quite nicely here.
This is very advanced sleight of hand.
To make that all work in a real world situation,
it would be very risky to do.
I was once held up at gunpoint,
and I stupidly did, what in magic, called,
the pocket dodge.
I showed my pockets empty,
even though my passports were really in the pocket.
That's a real world situation I did.
But in fact, I think in retrospect,
is pretty, pretty stupid to do.
And here they're on a movie set, so it's okay.
All these little details are based on real things.
And that's what's really rewarding for me.
All the sleight-of-hand moments are really based
on real palming, back palming, sleeve manipulation,
techniques of elastic, all that's real stuff, you know?
And they put it into a kind of a nice sequence, I think.
[tense music]
My friend, Levent Cimkentli, vanishes a jumbo card
on stage with that exact method.
On the back of the card is a pattern of his jacket,
and he just vanishes it.
And it really looks great.
And then as a gag,
he kind of reveals it and shows what happens.
So it's okay for me to say the story,
but it's a really great thing, and it does work.
There's a magnet in the jacket and sticks to it.
And when my friend does it,
the card vanishes, and it looks fantastic.
And then it's really magnetized to his coat.
The famous magicians of the past used to scale cards
into the audience, take cards with their picture on it,
and throw them in the audience,
and hit certain marks in the theater.
Amazingly, it was a great skill.
And this is taking that to another level,
it's using it for real purpose.
They would skip cards off the ground, like a rock in a lake.
And all this is based on that.
[playful music]
[foreign language]
- Hey [whistles]. My eyes are up here, man.
How do you like it?
- There's also a pickpocket technique,
where you're managing people to move a certain way.
You can pick their pocket here, you can touch 'em there,
they're gonna look this way, you can steal their watch.
It's that kind of technique, all combined in this piece.
"The Illusionist".
- Might I borrow a handkerchief from someone?
You, madam.
Thank you.
[audience chatters]
Thank you.
- Using audiences' personal artifacts
has always been part of magic.
Even the street performer would use things
from the audience.
I think it makes the audience feel they're part of it,
and involved, also makes it more impossible,
when you're using one of their objects.
In the real version of this, it was a ring
and a handkerchief that would vanish and reappear.
- Time.
From the moment we enter this life,
we are in the flow of it.
We measure it, and we mark it.
We cannot defy it.
We cannot even speed it up or slow it down.
- They did something really nice here.
In magic, you know, there's manipulation of all kinds,
cigarette manipulation, which is a no-go right now.
But that was a thing, you know,
manipulation of coins, and cards, and billiard balls.
Billiard balls who appear between your fingers, all that.
And I think in "The Illusionists", they did something
kind of cool to make the oranges small enough
to do actual billiard ball moves.
I think that was a really good idea.
When the orange goes up, or goes in slow-motion,
we can do that.
They did it with special effects,
but as long as it can be done,
it has a lot of credibility for me.
Ed Norton's character really was a wonderful magician,
a lot of skill.
I know Ed Norton worked very, very hard in his technique.
One of the illusions he did was the orange tree,
which is based on something I have, actually,
I have the original one created by Robert-Houdin,
in the 1840s.
It was the big rage of the time.
Real oranges would appear, they'd be tossed out
into the audience, and they were real oranges.
People would freak out.
In this movie, it's done in a very, very high level.
It didn't work quite like that in reality.
And the original Houdin version,
the leaves would already be there.
And the oranges and the orange blossoms would grow slowly.
But this was starting from the very beginning,
where it's kind of a combination of a growing orange tree,
and a blooming orange tree.
It really combined two different effects,
which are all legit to make it happen.
Robert-Houdin was a clockmaker and an automaton-maker.
So basically the orange tree was an automaton;
mechanical leaves reveal oranges, like an automaton,
the flowers would appear.
And automaton-like butterflies would allow the butterflies
to fly from behind the bush,
and reveal the handkerchief and ring.
- I don't I see it.
- One of the Robert-Houdin's great inventions
is the light and heavy chest.
It was a chest that a kid could lift quite easily,
but a strong man, when he tried to lift it,
couldn't lift it.
That illusion, in the story goes,
it stopped a war in France.
We're dealing with a group called the "Marabouts".
The French sent in their most powerful wizard,
Robert-Houdin, showed the French magic was stronger
than this faction that was gonna go to war with the French.
So this one box, this one illusion helped solve a war,
as the story goes.
In "The Illusionist", they took that idea, that same idea.
I'm gonna reveal the method of the light and heavy chest.
Back then, people didn't know about electromagnetism.
Turning power on and off to make a box electromagnetically
stick to the ground was a whole new thing.
And in this case, they're kind of replicating
that same idea.
Make it stand up straight like that
wouldn't work quite with that technique,
but they combine that to make this
kind of a credible challenge.
And I think it works pretty well.
"The Great Magician".
[playful music]
[dog whines]
[playful music]
[crowd gasps]
Pretty cool stuff. I really enjoy the sleight of hand.
I think he could have...
Just done this little origami thing and left it like it is.
Okay, I've never seen that before.
I love that idea.
I'm a new dog lover, so this is kind of cool.
And that could work, you know?
It wouldn't look exactly like that,
but that really could work.
[playful music]
[crowd gasps in amazement]
[applauds]
- Do me, do me next!
[gasps] Oh, it's gorgeous.
- Me now, I'm the first wife,
I want something better than them.
[gasps]
- [Crowd] Ooh!
[happily cheers]
This technique is really nice.
His movement is very beautiful, all the magic isn't real,
all of it's- a lot of it's not really happening,
but it's kind of- it kind of could.
It follows that rule that, you know, if it could be done,
could you do that?
And the answer is, yes, you could make that happen.
And besides, these women are very happy.
This is kind of like street magic in a elegant setting,
let's put it that way.
[apprehensive music]
[everyone gasps]
[applause]
What I like about it is they didn't just take
the easy way out, like, like "Bewitched",
which I love, by the way, where they would just blank out,
thing would just disappear, boom!
They took the time to do technique where it was credible.
Maybe it did happen.
Maybe the sleight-of-hand could have existed.
So they went the extra mile to make that happen.
This is a real effect that my friend,
Channing Pollock, did a version of this.
It looks a little bit different,
but the production of a glass is normally a wine glass
filled with wine, but he does it.
You know, we're...
It's about jewelry for the women.
- As you all know, a magician is nothing
without his props. - That's funny,
he says, "The magician is nothing without props,"
well, he just did a whole bunch of sleight-of-hand.
So that makes no sense at all.
- [Male Speaker] Take it.
[slow piano music]
- Vanishing bullets would be sleight-of-hand,
couldn't work exactly like this, but it could work for sure.
They are replicating all sleight-of-hand.
The confetti couldn't come from the gun,
obviously, it was a borrowed gun.
So it would have to come from somewhere else,
I mean, his person, and you could do it.
It's pretty risky, pointing a gun at some mustached dude.
There's nothing in here that couldn't be done.
It wouldn't look exactly the same.
But my favorite thing is the dog bone, for sure.
I think that feels really new.
"The Incredible Burt Wonderstone".
[tenacious music]
[audience gasps]
[audience cheers]
[audience gasps and cheers]
In "Burt Wonderstone", our team created a sequence
for the movie that the actors could feel really proud
to do, because there's no cuts,
nothing changes, and they worked really hard,
and we got the take.
Everyone's really happy.
So this piece you can watch over and over again,
you can slow-motion it, you can look at every frame.
And from right here, there's no cuts, covers himself up.
Watch the other hand.
It's not gonna cut away.
Focus on that hand for a second.
Keep your eye on that hand, he gets covered.
Puts his head underneath the thing, hand's still showing.
See his form still there, no cuts.
All brightly-lit, the background's brightly lit,
there's no darkness, there's no black area behind.
You see everything around it.
One shot, that's a big crane, techno-crane shot,
that can show that.
One of the joys is to put magic in a film
that could really happen,
and really does happen for real, in-camera.
[audience cheers]
"Arrested Development".
- Once there was a yacht.
[upbeat music]
Now, there is not.
[audience cheers]
- I used to dance a lot in my show, with the fluffy shirts,
[chuckles]
and gigantic movements, and large objects.
We actually made a boat appear in the Bermuda Triangle.
He makes it vanish, in this case, with a little bit dancing.
Definitely, I think I'm to blame for this.
I wish I could do the split, though, that was pretty good.
There was a book when I was a kid,
written by Al Jaffee, called "The Mad Book of Magic".
And it was all these, you know,
how to put your finger over here in two sections?
Well, you'd cut your finger off.
That was the method for it.
It was just crazy methods that would really inflict
major pain on yourself to make it happen.
It's all a very big parody.
This is an example of that, Will Arnett is great.
And he does spectacular magic.
His method was kind of like the Al Jaffee
"Book of Magic", where the method
destroys the family's boat.
- Michael, a magician never reveals his- I sunk it.
I sunk the yacht.
At least I think I sunk it.
I mean, I blew it up and I don't see it anywhere.
- It's a method. Probably could have worked.
And finally, "Houdini".
- This was the big time, the stunt that would finally
put me over the top.
[intense music]
[chuckles]
Let me try it.
- [Jim] Now?
Boss, you just performed three shows, you're beat.
Tomorrow, I'll get the boys, we'll set it up.
- Right now.
[intense music]
- [Jim] All right.
- When you ever do something for the first time,
you're always gonna really have planned
what your escape route is, how to get out of the situation.
So Adrien Brody went to Tannen's Magic Camp.
He loved magic as a kid, and really studied it.
So it was kind of fitting that he got this part.
Besides, he's just kind of a genius actor.
[muffled sounds in water]
- [Bess] Something's wrong.
- [Jim] Whoa, whoa, pull him up!
- [Bess] Hurry up, get him out!
[intense music]
- [Bess] Hurry up!
- It's stuck!
- [Jim] Hey!
[screams] Pull him up!
- Harry Houdini discovered that escaping from things
really captivated audience's interest.
You know, you start out with handcuffs,
and kind of up the game, straight jacket escape,
underwater escapes.
He found that it had a connection with people,
people got that.
And the idea of having near-death as your adversary,
was one that people could really understand and relate to.
I've done a lot of escapes, from an imploding building,
I did a water tank escape,
I got hurt in the water tank escape.
There is danger to it.
In Houdini's day, everything happened behind a curtain,
except for a straight jacket escape,
which you could show people,
everything else was hidden behind things.
And in those days, you can get away with that.
People would sit patiently for an hour,
watching a red curtain,
and not knowing what's happening behind.
Today, they'd walk out, you know?
But in those days, you could do that.
This sequence is about a water torture cell, which we have,
Houdini's actual Water Torture Cell,
right here in this museum.
So that's all very legit, you know?
But when this is done, normally,
once you're submerged in the tank,
you'd be hidden from view.
The audience would not see the process of escaping.
And in today's world, you have to see the process.
Luckily in movies, you get to see the process.
And this is a failure situation.
Which never happened to Houdini, glass never broke.
They never had to break the glass to get Houdini out.
All the historians will tell you that that happened
in the Tony Curtis movie, in this movie,
but it never took place.
There's another way to get out, way easier way to get out.
If you had to be in this trouble,
they just hoist them out of there.
Historically not accurate, but it looks pretty good.
Thank you so much for watching all those clips with me.
I hope you learned something. Till next time.