SFL: Michael, your character, Cutter, seems like the heart and soul of the movie. How did you approach the role, because you actually changed your usual voice?
MC: He had a London accent because he was from London, but in those days there was always fog, and I remember when I was younger you had that cold fog and everyone had deep gruff voices, down here. In Liverpool they had all the chemical fumes so everyone spoke through their nose, like The Beatles. It’s true, that’s where they got their accent from, otherwise you wouldn’t talk like that. Cutter, for me, basically is us. He is us in the middle of all these lunatics. If the director is a clever one, like ours, he uses a character like Cutter, so the minute he wants to make you jump, or put you in jeopardy, he does that to me and to you amidst all this. It’s a similar role, it’s not the same part, as I play in Batman as the butler, always asking, “What’s going on?” The audience is asking what’s going on, there’s a guy dressed in a bat suit. I’m sort of the audience’s representative on the film. I just made that up.
SFL: Even though you changed your voice, whenever you’re on screen you can really hear what you are saying, you can hear every word. Do you think there are too many young actors today who are not enunciating and projecting?
MC: Yes! I’ve been on movies where, not on this one, I could literally not hear the other actor and what he was saying. Very often they would say, “But this is the way I do things”. You talk to people and you don’t know what they’re saying. “I can only get it like this, but I’ll post-sync it afterwards, louder.” So you wind up looking at this guy and you’re waiting for his lips to stop, and if he’s doing a pause you just start to talk when his lips move again. It’s very awkward. My wife is always telling me to keep my voice down in restaurants because I do have a voice like a foghorn, but soundmen do like me. They can hear me.
SFL: Is it down to training?
MC: What happens is, you get the old guys like me that started in the theatre and I was in the theatre for nine years. The first day you go in, if you have a soft voice, the producer in the theatre said, “The people at the back have paid to hear what you are saying. Project it.” It’s not a case of shouting, but projecting and gradually bringing it up without shouting at all. And the soundman goes, “Oh jeez!”
SFL: What about Christian’s accent did you help with that, because it sounds really convincing?
MC: Christian had a marvellous Cockney accent and I had nothing to do with it. It was a complete surprise on the first day when we did our first scene together, because I’d already worked with Christian as Batman, and suddenly he’s got this Cockney accent. And it was a brilliant Cockney accent, really great. I couldn’t fault it at all.
SFL: To your ear, was it proper East End Cockney, or more south of the river?
MC: Sarf London, as they always say in the papers, S-A-R-F, Sarf London. That’s where he came from.
SFL: A lot of your current roles seem to be archetypal mentors, do you see yourself in a similar role for the young actors in the acting community?
MC: No. I don’t see myself in the acting community at all. I don’t mix with a lot of actors, that’s not because I don’t like them. I live in Surrey and there’s not a lot of actors down there. Leatherhead is very sparsely populated with movie stars, I can assure you. I don’t see myself as anything. I wonder around getting on with my life, and I have this whole image in the paper, which I like, and I think, “That’s me”, and my wife says, “No, that’s not you at all”. So I said, “I’m an icon. It says so in the paper.” “OK, now take the rubbish out.” It’s like that, my life is quite dull.
HJ: We weren’t allowed to look him in the eye on set.
MC: I don’t have other actors look at me. I’m not having any of that. Not when you’re an icon.
SFL: Hugh, your character is more showman than magician, and feels very comfortable on stage. You, yourself, have been known to tread the boards on the odd occasion. Was that something you could relate to in Angier? Are you familiar with this world at all?
HJ: I’m not familiar with the world of magic at all. I went to Vegas and met a number of magicians and it was fascinating to me, but I won’t bore you with all the stories now. In terms of being on stage in a way, and I’m speaking on behalf of Christian in a way, the roles seemed fairly tailor-made to us. They weren’t though, the script is as we received it. For my part I have to say that Angier is a very good magician, but he is not the world’s best magician, in terms of the craft of magic, but he is a great showman, so ultimately, who is the better magician? I think the audience decide that he knew how to sell a trick. I have done a lot of stage and I do feel quite at home on the stage, and that is where my background is from. If I can be honest about my film career it has taken me a few years to feel as at home on a film set as I did previously on stage.
SFL: Was part of the fun of the movie finding out how some of these great illusions were done? And were you concerned about how far you went in showing how they were done?
HJ: I have to say I was fascinated, and there is a lot of material there about how tricks are done and you can pretty much find out how any trick is done these days and it really spoils magic for you. It comes like, there’s the plant, OK the mirrors, as Cutter, Michael’s character, says in the movie, “You don’t really want to know.” It’s very tempting, and if you have it there to see, you’d probably have a look at it but it does ultimately spoil it for you. In reading a little bit about this world, I think what was fascinating to me was how far magicians would go to plot the trick. In the world of our film, magicians were the rock stars of their day. It was probably the golden age of magic. It was a great time to set this movie. Magic has changed a lot now but Houdini would, before the show, literally cut himself open and put picks and locks inside his flesh and sew himself up so he could, if he wanted to, dig inside his skin and pick out a pick or lock, or regurgitate things. The character in the movie, Chow Ling Su, was very closely based on a character who pretended to be Chinese his whole life. There’s amazing things that people did in order to plot the trick, that is fascinating to me. When you find out how tricks are done it slightly, or very dramatically, spoils the magic.
SFL: Since moviemaking is all about illusion and make believe and you don’t want us to see the tricks, what is the difference between an actor or movie director and a magician.
MC: One of the things in movies that is similar to magicians is, or should be, is that magicians never tell you their tricks. I never look at all those things on DVDs where they show you how they blew up the volcano and things, because I don’t want to know. We want there to be the magic. If I was in charge of the movies I wouldn’t let them put any of those reveals or tricks on the DVDs. I did make a video that had a few tricks to help actors.
HJ: Having met a number of magicians in preparing for this role I realised that the huge difference, for me, is it is a solitary profession. Even if you think of Penn and Teller, who have a double act, they are very different in their styles and comedicly worked out how it works for each other but most magicians pretty much mortgage their youth to work in front of a mirror learning sleight of hand because it takes years of practice. An actor, or a film actor, can’t do it on his own. They are pretty much depending on each other for the illusion to work, which is something I like, but the magicians are absolutely fascinating. Very briefly, I will bore you with one story. Chris encouraged me, and I went to see David Copperfield, not only for his show but for the after-show. He took us from Vegas, from the show at the casino, in a car to his place. We went to this deserted outskirts-of-Vegas street, to this sex shop. We get out of the car and I’m with my wife at the time – David, me and my wife at this sex shop. He pulls out his keys. He opens up the sex shop and we walk in, and I think, “I don’t know what Chris has got us in for here.” He goes, “Push in the nipple on the mannequin over there”. I’m like, all right. It’s 12.30 at night. I push the nipple and whoosh, these doors open and we enter into this museum, the size of four football fields, of magic memorabilia and he continued to do a one and a half hour show for us till about two o’clock in the morning. Anyway, that’s my little David Copperfield story.
SFL: There’s a line in the movie that says, “Obsession is a young man’s game”. Do you believe that, working in films?
MC: Obsession is a young man’s game and my only excuse is I never grew old. I see myself as 38, but you don’t notice. I work like that. I’m fortunately in the luxurious position of only working when I really, really, really want to. Because I don’t like getting up early in the morning, doing pages of dialogue, learning all that stuff. I work with offers that I can’t refuse. Christopher, of course, I can’t refuse. I’m doing the next Batman picture. Otherwise I regard myself as retired, but I have to become obsessed about what is offered to me. I don’t just go to work to go to work to make money. You don’t make any money anymore, when you get to may age, the stars get it all. That’s a lie.
SFL: What was your favourite part of the film to make? Was it the reveal or the prestige?
MC: My favourite part was, for my character, was a little sequence where I had a big box and a lawyer and there’s a line I say in it, “It’s not magic, it’s done by a wizard. It’s real” That for me was a very important part in the movie, where I’m beginning to believe that it’s not tricks any more. It’s really happening. That was a great moment for me.
HJ: It was one of those films, for me, that has so many favourite moments. First of all, working with Chris was an absolute treat, and just the actors, to work with them on a film. I’d have been happy it had traversed five films but in one film I get to work with such an amazing cast. It was an atmosphere on set that, of films I’ve done, was one of the most creative and easy, in terms of the actual process of acting in a film, one of the easiest. I really enjoyed the entire thing.
SFL: You all seem like a big family. Is it because you’ve all worked with each other on different projects?
MC: It’s like a family, without the rows. We’re all very close friends and always pleased to see each other at any time. Off set, of course, I look everyone in the eye.
HJ: I don’t want to overstate it but in terms of movies I’ve done, the atmosphere on set was very easy, very creative, low key and for a film that is ultimately very complicated, with obviously a lot of thought and preparation gone into it, the filming of it seemed to run very smoothly. Every Wednesday was kids’ day, it was like a daycare centre on set. All of us had kids. Chris has got like 14 kids, or he’s working on it. It was a very relaxed and fun, and God bless him, very rarely went over time. It was a real pleasure.
SFL: So Hugh, did you pick up any tricks you can use to entertain at your kids’ parties in the future?
HJ: You know, I started off as a clown at kids’ parties, about 15 years ago, and I retired when a six-year old got up in the middle of a party and said, “Mummy, this clown is really crap”. Word for word. That’s a really bad thing for a clown to hear, especially as the parents have ultimately only hired you to babysit. So I hadn’t done anything so finely, I thought, this is great we have Ricky Jay and Michael Webber and I’m going to walk out here with at least a half hour routine, this is going to be fantastic. Then you find out the byline of their business is, on a need to know basis. So literally they would teach us what we needed for the film. Both Christian and I came out really underdone on tricks. We had a couple, but I tested the very first trick I had to do, I had a little flower and I had to make it disappear and reappear in my hand, and I was working on it for a while and I tested it on my son the night before filming, he was five at the time. He said, “Daddy, it’s in your other hand.” That didn’t bode well for filming and it’s been cut, ultimately. I was nervous, I’ve never been so nervous acting, my hands were shaking. I thought, this is no good. I said to Chris, “You saw the dailies for the trick, how did it look?” because he had assured me on the day it was fine, and he said, “Not spectacular”.
SFL: Finally, I’m sure it’s been mentioned before but it’s the ultimate comic book geek’s dream, Wolverine versus Batman, in this intense rivalry. Is that something you ever took on board or did you just put it to the back of your mind? Was there quite a lot of teasing on set about that?
HJ: Christian and I did just recently make a commitment to each other that when our careers are in the toilet in 15 years time, we’d go out on tour with our pot bellies and tights, with the WWF and wrestle. We actually spent more time talking about our little baby girls, as we have daughters of much the same age. That was more of the fascination. We fought at lunchtimes, but that was about it.