In January 2006, just a few days after filming on The Prestige got underway, The Illusionist premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Burger’s movie also had a lengthy production history: In 1989, author Steven Millhauser published “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” a short story about a magician in Vienna whose controversial, potentially blasphemous stage work draws the attention of the authorities. By the early 2000s, Millhauser’s tale had found its way to Burger, the writer-director of the acclaimed faux-documentary Interview with the Assassin.
Like Nolan, Burger saw a connection between magic and filmmaking. “Movies are misdirections in general,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “You tell the tale; that’s the misdirection. And hopefully, what comes out of it, the end of the trick… what emerges are these larger ideas.”
It would take a few years for Burger to transform Millhauser’s short story into The Illusionist. The film stars Edward Norton as Eisenheim, who stuns Viennese audiences by resurrecting his dead childhood love, Duchess Sophie von Teschen (Jessica Biel). Eisenheim is pursued by Chief Inspector Walter Uhl, played by Paul Giamatti, an investigator and amateur magician whom the actor inhabits with vigor. The officer’s pursuit of the magician—coupled together with Eisenheim’s passion for his lost love—causes a scandal that will bring down Austria and Hungary’s cruel Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell). As Brett asks: “What if a man was so horny and good at magic tricks, he destroyed the geopolitical stability of an entire country?”
Though The Prestige and The Illusionist take place around the same time, and on the same continent, their respective filmmakers depicted the era in very different ways. Nolan shot The Prestige almost exclusively using handheld cameras, and he set much of the action amid sooty backstage areas and overcast streets, placing the film in cold, grim reality. The Illusionist, meanwhile, used sepia tones and darkened frame edges to amplify its turn-of-the-century setting. “I wanted the movie to have almost a hand-cranked quality to it, reminiscent of silent films,” Burger told Groucho Reviews. “I didn’t mind if it looked old, but it was more to take it out of time.”
Yet the movies share similar views on the power, and dangers, of magic itself. While The Illusionist features the more upbeat conclusion of the two, Eishenheim’s devotion to his craft ultimately leaves him aloof and emotionally raw. And in The Prestige, the two men’s obsessive desire to pull off the perfect act—and to undermine each other’s progress along the way—leads only to loneliness and regret. “Sacrifice,” notes a character in The Prestige, is “the price of a good trick.” (It’s also, as many filmmakers will openly acknowledge, the price of a good movie.)