Even though it was adapted from someone else’s book, “The Prestige” just feels like a Christopher Nolan story, and it’s hard to think of any other filmmaker tackling it. That’s the mark of a great director and a well-executed adaptation, though — watching a movie and not being able to picture it in the hands of anyone else. So it might come as a twist worthy of his own movies that he actually wasn’t the first director in mind to adapt Christopher Priest’s novel.
As Priest told France-based film culture outlet Skript, both Sam Mendes and Christopher Nolan were being considered to adapt “The Prestige.” Priest and Mendes spoke literally the same day that “American Beauty” was announced to have been nominated for seven Academy Awards — including a Best Director nod for Mendes himself, which he eventually won — so Priest felt privileged to have such a talented filmmaker fresh off a highly decorated film interested in doing a movie based on his book.
When Nolan and his wife/producing partner Emma Thomas got word that Priest was considering Mendes instead of him, Priest was contacted and asked to hold off until a motorcycle arrived at his house with a VHS copy of Nolan’s film “Following.” It got there, Priest watched it, and he decided to go with Nolan instead.
“The Prestige” mostly takes place in Victorian England, with a few jaunts to Colorado for the Nikola Tesla scenes. While things obviously had to be decorated in such a way to mirror the time period, what is perhaps most impressive is that the whole of the movie was actually filmed on location in Los Angeles. In fact, everything was done in existing locations and already-built sound stages, with one exception.
Although “The Prestige” has many elements of a period piece, Christopher Nolan has frequently dismissed attempts to characterize the movie as such. That’s partly because the negative connotations so frequently associated with period pieces — that they’re often too long, too slow, and take too long to make. On that last point, Nolan didn’t want to spend as long making the movie as is the case for a lot of big, epic Hollywood period pieces — after all, he had an all-time classic superhero movie sequel starring a certain caped crusader battling a certain mentally unstable clown to get to work on.
Speaking of Tesla, “The Prestige” definitely treats the inventor and engineer with a great deal of reverence, suggesting he was capable of producing legitimate magic — though through the use of science, of course. While the machine he built for Angier for the Transported Man illusion is the most impressive feat he accomplishes during the film, one of the earliest ways Tesla’s brilliance is displayed is by way of being able to illuminate light bulbs via an electrical field in the air rather than needing to directly connect them to anything. In other words, he was already figuring out how to power things wirelessly at a time when even wired electricity was still a relatively new and novel concept.
This content was originally published here.
