The Illusionist: An Interview with Writer/Director Neil Burger
By Lee Lederer, DC Film Society Member
Following a screening and Q&A at the E Street Cinema for Film Society members of his new film The Illusionist writer/director Neil Burger was interviewed August 4 at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Georgetown.
Lee Lederer: In your first film Interview with the Assassin, about the man who claims to have shot Kennedy from the grassy knoll, you sort of leave it up to the audience to decide whether or not he might be telling the truth. And in The Illusionist again, to some extent, you leave it up to the audience to determine whether what the Chief Inspector concludes is true or not, and also whether or not the magician possesses supernatural powers or is just very clever. As the writer and director of the film, did you have in your own mind the answer to those questions and whether you did or not, how did that affect the way you went about making the film?
Neil Burger: Yes, I think I have to have the answer to that question when I make the movie in both cases, whether the man in Interview with the Assassin is telling the truth, or whether Eisenheim really possesses powers or not, and that very much informed how I am going to make the movie, and which way I am going to tip the balance of this question, this thematic question. On the other hand, I try to walk a very fine line in both movies between what’s true and what’s fiction, or what’s truth and what’s a trick. That’s important to me just to kind of explore those issues of truth and illusion, and really the unexplainable, and how you navigate in a world where truth becomes this subjective concept, where you can never quite nail down the truth to a certainty.
LL: But you won’t tell us what you concluded?
NB: (laughing) No, I wouldn’t tell you, no it’s a secret.
LL: You seem to like to opt for open endings, which not only encourages but requires the audience to participate. Is that part of your filmmaking philosophy?
NB: It is. Some people would think open endings would be frustrating, but I don’t think in my two movies they are. I think actually they are provocative, and that in a way they help bring the film experience out of the theater with the audience. Because I think in both movies people come out of the movies talking about it, and discussing it, and debating and arguing over them, which I think keeps those issues and themes alive in their mind. It becomes then a true exploration of the subject matter.
LL: I ask that question because when Americans see a film with a mystery they tend to like to have it all neatly wrapped up at the end. Do you think your approach is more European than American in this regard?
NB: I think it is more European but I think that American audiences get it too. It depends on how you do it. If you just leave it open and don’t answer the question, well then that’s either badly done or annoying. But I think in this case, it’s left open but it definitely leans toward one particular solution but it doesn’t nail shut or shut out the other options or other possibilities.
LL: Could this film have been made about an American magician in an American setting, or--and I know this is based on a short story which takes place in Vienna in 1900--was the European context essential to the film in your view?
NB: Well when I was adapting it I actually considered should I be updating it, should I be transferring it to the United States to make it more accessible somehow. But somehow the issues involved--issues of power--needed to be in a European setting because at that time power could become something very personal for somebody who was in the Royal Family. And it was just a time of upheaval in a certain way, yet Crown Prince Leopold has a very personal stake in power which is very different than the kind of power issues that would happen here. And also I wanted the movie to inhabit the realm of dream and mystery. The film is true to its time but it’s not about that time. It’s trying to take place in some sort of other world, using the details and informed by the history, but not particularly about the history. And I wanted a sort of exoticism which seems to work better in that kind of setting.
LL: In your film Interview with the Assassin, you raise the issue of what is truth and what is not, and in The Illusionist the similar question of what is truth and what is illusion. Do you see a relevance in this issue beyond the film which goes into our daily lives, to quote the slogan on the posters for The Illusionist that “nothing is what it seems”?
NB: Yes, I think there are two things of relevance. On the political side, there’s a relevance of how do you live in a world where truth becomes something that is subjective, where everybody has their own version of the truth, where there’s not an objective factual sense of truth. And certainly you can apply that today to what’s happening in Iraq and how we got into Iraq. I am certainly wanting and willing to believe the President when it comes down to issues of war, that they were telling the truth. And everything sort of becomes something different. Or if you think of the O.J. Simpson trial or something like that where everybody has their own version of reality and willing to believe their version of the truth and just how they wanted to see it. So I think it is very much an issue of today. But then there’s a spiritual level to it as well, this issue of how you deal with the unexplainable and the incomprehensible, and with something that you can actually never quite get the answer to--which is the mystery of existence, why we’re all here, and that’s a different sort of take on it than in Interview with the Assassin, hopefully a kind of expansion of the idea in this movie, of the more spiritual side of this.
LL: At one moment in the film when Eisenheim is at the police station, he talks to the crowd assembled below and says to them everything they saw was a trick, an illusion, and that his only purpose was to entertain them. Do you as a filmmaker see your role mainly to entertain the audience or are there other purposes as well?
NB: First of all, what you said is also just essentially another form of misdirection. Eisenheim is under no obligation to tell the truth. And as a filmmaker, I am under no obligation to tell the truth necessarily. Film is an artifice. It’s art in the way it traffics in deceit to a certain degree, creating these fictions. On the other hand, I actually, as a filmmaker, do really feel the obligation to be honest. Honest emotionally and honest in how you deal with people and with the subject matter. That's my first obligation. And it seems often the best way to explore the themes one is interested in is to create an entertainment, or not so much an entertainment as create a new experience for the audience. And somehow there’s hopefully an energy in that experience that resonates with the ideas behind the movie.
LL: Eisenheim is tricking us, people in the audience, and you, as a filmmaker, are also tricking us, leading us to draw conclusions which later finally might not be true. Do you see the filmmaker as something of a magician, comparing yourself to Eisenheim, to what he’s doing?
NB: Eisenheim in a way is more than just a magician, he’s the figure of the artist. So in that sense I do identify with him. And certainly as a magician, as I said before in answer to your other question, there is a sense of creating an artificial situation or creating an experience that seduces the audience, and in effect by that seduction misdirects them so before they realize it, somehow the truth has emerged. As an analogy to that, the magician misdirects you, showing you something over here in one hand so that they can make the trick, the solution, the truth, if you will, of the trick appear over here in the other hand.
LL: There’s the tense rivalry between the Crown Prince and Eisenheim, and the passionate love affair between Sophie and Eisenheim, but it seems to me the absolute crucial bonding, where each one has to have a profound understanding of the other, is between the Chief Inspector and Eisenheim. How did you go about obtaining that result?
NB: You’re right, that is the key relationship in the film and the one that excites me the most in a way. The movie is a kind of cat and mouse game between the two of them, a battle of wits. And the way I approached it was that Eisenheim sort of embodies the spiritual and I had to make sure that the Inspector embodies something more material, almost corporeal. He’s a police detective and he’s interested in getting the answers, to exposing secrets. He’s a smart guy and he thinks he has the answers to everything. But he never quite nailed down what Eisenheim is doing. And yet he kind of respects Eisenheim for that. There’s actually a real mutual respect. They come from similar backgrounds, lower class backgrounds, and they’re both trying to make their way in this world where there’s some freedom for them to make their way, but then there’s a real ceiling as to what they can do and accomplish, really be in their lives. And I don’t think they ever forget that.
LL: In that regard, I like the line early in the film when the Chief Inspector talking about the Royalty tells Eisenheim “There’s no trick they haven’t seen.”
NB: (laughing) That’s right.
LL: While your first film has some seasoned actors in it, it was a low budget independent film while The Illusionist is relatively lavish. It was filmed in Prague and features two prominent actors, Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti. What was it like to take on a project of this scope and did it change your approach to filmmaking?
NB: Well, it’s very different from Interview with the Assassin but, no, because I had written it, and I wrote it to direct it, I kind of knew how I would do it all the way along. Also I had a long career doing TV commercials which are relatively high budget and where you are working in all sorts of different situations. So I felt like I was ready for it. But dealing with those actors, and dealing with a kind of a more emotional story also, you kind of want to get into the eyes of these characters and of these actors. What’s incredible about what they do is obviously how they transform themselves and make themselves really inhabit these characters. But also what they give of just their own humanity, and to get in there and capture Paul Giamatti’s eyes and Edward Norton’s eyes, you get everything, or you get so much more from them. Amazing.
LL: I know from the short story on which the film is based, “Eisenheim the Illusionist” by Steven Millhauser, you had to create the characters of the Crown Prince and Sophie, and greatly expand the character of the Chief Inspector. Were these changes already in your first draft of the screenplay or did it take time to evolve?
NB: No, that’s the way I structured it. Before I even started writing, I was attacking how am I going to adapt this beautiful short story. It was not quite a movie, or it would be like a really experimental movie. How I am going to make this into what is going to be a two hour movie? So those were those the key changes I had to make and creating that love triangle.
LL: During your Washington visit, you have been answering questions from journalists and audience members. Is there any question you would like to have been asked but haven’t or something you particularly wanted to say about your film?
NB: Well, I have occasionally mentioned it but never really been asked about it, but to me the role of the magician is to remind us of the mystery of existence and to inspire awe and wonder at that mystery, and that’s why I think magicians are important. It’s not really their role, but I think that’s why with a magic trick, it’s like actually there’s something more to it. There’s that feeling you get when you see a powerful magic trick, that sort of hair raising sense that nothing is what it seems, or perhaps there’s some other kind of powers. You know it’s not true and you know there must be some method to it, but that momentary feeling of being slightly rattled, I think that feeling is related to the feeling that we get when we look up at the stars at night and think what’s on the other side of that? Where do we come from, how are we here, where are we going, those fundamental existential sort of questions.
The Illusionist opens in the DC area on August 18.
Little Miss Sunshine: Q&A with Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
By Annette Graham, DC Film Society Member
A preview screening of Little Miss Sunshine was held at the AFI Silver Theater on July 10 with both directors taking questions from the audience after the film. The AFI's Murray Horwitz moderated.
Murray Horwitz: How did two people direct a movie? Did you fight? [The directors, Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton are married and have three children].
Valerie Faris: It's more boring than that.
Jonathan Dayton: Most of the time we agree. If we disagree, the one who feels strongest about it wins out.
VF: We are a family, as long as we like each other. It's a family thing to do.
JD: Many of our arguments happened at home. We have to explain it to the kids that we are working. [The kids are 10 year old twins and a 13 year old.]
MH: This is your first narrative film. After you were finished, was there anytime when you said, "See, I told you. I was right?"
VF: We see the things we agreed on: "Aren't we glad we did that." We had so much time to plan and talk about it.
JD: We felt like Richard who waited to fulfill his dream but kept getting squashed.
MH: You've done music videos, commercials and documentaries. What affected Little Miss Sunshine?
VF: We found people who we had worked with before and, having that communication established, made the film more streamlined.
JD: From documentaries nothing is more troubling and affirming than the truth. You try to replicate that in a performance. We didn't try to go for a comedy. But we didn't chase a joke; that would be a hollow experience.
VF: We hired people more talented than us. Casting great actors made our job easier.
MH: As Jonathan Winters said, "Tell the truth and people will laugh."
MH: It's a real ensemble cast, hard to find these days. For the casting, did you get all your first choices?
VF: We did get our first choices. It was financed with a producer who had been trying to get the film made through a studio and finally decided to use his own money.
MH: That would be Marc Turtletaub.
VF: Everyone loved the script. They were an amazing group of people. We rehearsed for a week to establish them as a family.
JD: You can kill your actors by talking too much.
MH: That's a cliche of child actors--tell them once and let them go.
JD: Abigail is a veteran. She has done ten films, more than us. Our biggest job was to select the people. But then you free them up to go beyond your ambition. We created competition between Frank and Richard.
VF: It's important in an ensemble. You try to let them act together, instead of just reading their lines for a few minutes.
JD: Every actor hit their stride immediately. As in the dinner table scene, people have to listen to each other, not just talk. Abigail was a good listener.
VF: We saw her on the Leno show. She was listening, unaware of the audience--unusual for a kid of that age.
MH: Did you shoot in sequence?
JD: We shot 90% in sequence. We had a good Art Director.
VF: We had a sense of how each person saw their character. Rehearsals were most important.
MH: Greg Kinnear has been a Siamese Twin, a Bob Crane sex maniac and a disabled war vet. How did he approach his role?
JD: He was the first actor we thought of. What was great about Greg was that he took on the role completely. He wanted to like his character. He's a father. Originally Olive (Abigail) was his stepdaughter. He came to us and said it would be better if she was his birth daughter. He thought this was important for the diner scene when he tries to persaude her not to eat ice cream.
VF: It would have been easy to play his character as a joke. But he approached it differently; he believed in finding character.
MH: That dinner table scene could be an item for a time capsule at the Smithsonian--this is how an American family dinner is. You know that everyone is fully fleshed; it's a credit to the writing.
VF: We read a lot of scripts. In so many the characters aren't real; sometimes they're only there to serve a scene or a transition. We felt the characters in Little Miss Sunshine were true to life. When I read Dwayne's line, "I hate everyone" I thought, I have to make this movie.
JD: All the characters have aspirations. They were all giving people. Good writing with amazing performances.
VF: We all loved the script.
MH: The screenwriter is Michael Arndt, from the DC area.
JD: The script originally took place in Maryland and they drove to Florida. It was important to us to shoot it where there was a real pageant scene. Those were real pageant girls.
MH: Tell the truth and shoot it as a comedy. Reportedly while working in the Marx Brothers films, Margaret Dumont thought it was straight. I loved what Bill Forsyth said when asked how do you edit for laughter. "It's not a comedy until someone laughs.
JD: A film has two lives. We watched it in the editing room. It was in Sundance with a big audience. The audience clapped at the end of the dance--people couldn't hear the silence.
Question: Did you do this to show the audience what pageants for kids are like?
VF: When we first heard of it we didn't want to do anything with beauty pageants. It was important for us to be as neutral as possible with the pageant. We met the girls and mothers. It's shocking for most people. We didn't want to show the girls crying.
JD: It's not about the beauty pageant.
VF: When we met with the pageant families we explained it as taking your mutt to a dog show. Olive's character loved it. It was her dream to be on stage. She is new to it also. Her cousins got her into it; maybe she was the runner up because they felt sorry for her.
JD: We didn't need to editorialize. We thought of shooting it in Canada. But you can't fake that. We didn't direct them. We couldn't have--the hair, the makeup. Those girls have been doing those moves snce they were six months old. There's that great scene when the girl drops her smile and then puts it back. We thought that was just great--we couldn't have asked for that.
Little Miss Sunshine opens on August 4.
The Slapsticon 2006 Film Festival
By Annette Graham, DC Film Society Member
The fourth Slapsticon Film Festival (2006) was held in Arlington's Spectrum Theater July 20-23, 2006. And it's getting better each year--better organized and better run with practice and better access to rare films with many more 35mm prints this year. The Spectrum was a movie house many years ago but with the projection equipment long gone, the organizers must bring in 16mm and 35mm projectors, not an easy task. The festival's focus is on early comedy films, both silent and sound, mostly one- and two-reelers but with a few features. The comedy stars include some of the now-obscure such as Harry Langdon, Charley Chase, John Bunny and Lloyd Hamilton as well as the still-familiar--such as Stan Laurel, Harold Lloyd, Will Rogers, and Buster Keaton. More than 100 films were shown; there were special programs of Syd Chaplin films, Mabel Normand films, a morning of politically incorrect cartoons, and film tributes to Bob Hope and Ernie Kovacs. And the more obscure the better we like them. (Thankfully, there has never been an appearance by the Three Stooges!)
Piano accompaniment for the silents was provided by Dr. Phillip C. Carli and Ben Model, both of whom have many years of experience. And they worked like dogs--comedy is more difficult to play for than drama, not to mention it's often fast moving--a greater feat than you might think since they probably didn't get to preview many of the films first. One would alternate with the other, almost like a relay as they switched on and off the piano bench.
Some of the discoveries: I finally got to see Wallace Beery as "Sweedie"--Beery doing one of his more than a dozen female impersonations--of course he was lots thinner back then; the always wonderful Max Davidson in Prudence, Harold Lloyd's Welcome Danger, Syd Chaplin in The Missing Link and Glen Tryon in White Sheep which later became the basis for Harold Lloyd's Kid Brother. Three outstanding films with animals were also audience favorites: The Missing Link with an incredible chimp, Buster's Bust Up with an equally talented dog, and The Battling Kangaroo with, as you might expect, kangaroos.
So are these films still funny after all these years? The film that got the most howls from the audience was from 1905 and couldn't have been more than three minutes long. So--yes, indeed--and they need to be seen on a big screen with an audience. The organizers, presenters, projectionists and accompanists are all archivists, authors, collectors and/or experts in their field and really care about giving us the best prints and best projection. Much of the audience is from out of town. But we don't have to travel anywhere; it's in our backyard and deserves our support. I hope to see more DCFSers next year!
