Now You Don’t Director Says The Biggest Illusions In The Film Were Practical [Exclusive]

There’s a decent list of reasons why the “Now You See Me” films are appealing, one that includes everything from each film’s stacked ensemble cast to the twists, turns, and thrills of the heist movie genre. The most unique reason by far is the fact that this is an action franchise centered around magicians, and as such, there are a plethora of dazzling illusions to be found in the movies. Pulling off these tricks is no mean feat, as it requires just about every department of the film to work together in concert, as well as the members of the cast to be at least a little proficient in things like sleight-of-hand techniques, so that the illusion can be best sold to the audience. Perhaps the most important aspect of selling these illusions is convincing the audience that extensive CGI work was not utilized. After all, if cinema itself is a magic trick of sorts, how can we be expected to believe in magic on camera?

While the previous directors in the series had their own approaches to this problem, the director behind this week’s “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t,” Ruben Fleischer, took the Occam’s razor approach: he did it practically. Of course, that’s not to say that every magic trick in the film is CGI-free, but that the majority of the tricks in the film had a strong practical element. This approach became dominant in the middle section of the movie, in which the Horsemen find themselves in a special chateau in France owned and operated by the mysterious magician organization known as The Eye. Within this chateau are a series of illusion rooms, which were all made for real, and I had the opportunity to chat with Fleischer about how they pulled off this particular trick.

Fleischer’s approach to the chateau began with constructing an enormous series of sets, as he explains:

“Everything in the chateau was practical and was built in Budapest, Hungary. The library itself, the main great room, was one of the biggest sets I’ve ever built and one of the most extravagant, that’s for sure. It was really impressive. And then as far as each of the individual illusion rooms, we built them all.”

One of the joys of the sequence in the film is how it employs a mixture of rarely seen illusions and others that are so tried and true, they’re veritable cinematic tropes. These latter ones come in the form of the rotating room (seen in films as varied as “Royal Wedding” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street”) and the hall of mirrors (seen in “The Lady From Shanghai,” “The Conjuring: Last Rites,” etc.). Rather than reinvent them, Fleischer explained how he only gave them little tweaks to make them work:

“The rotating room is an age-old Hollywood classic … So that was kind of a dream come true to get to create one of our own and to stage an action sequence in it that I thought was really cool and original, [and one] where you felt the gravity, unlike ‘Inception,’ where it’s all anti-gravity. In ours, you very much feel the gravity as people are falling from ceiling to floor and landing on top of each other or swinging from chandeliers. […] The hall of mirrors is something we’ve seen in movies before, and I think the real VFX of that was just removing the camera person who was in a lot of the reflections, but otherwise, it was entirely in camera.”

The Ames room, an optical illusion invented sometime in the early 20th century, has been utilized by many films before to provide forced perspective. For instance, it’s how Peter Jackson made the Hobbit actors appear small in “The Lord of the Rings.” Yet Fleischer wanted to make a proper Ames room for the chateau in “Now You See Me,” and have the action scene continue into the room (making the sequence feel like being in a funhouse) as well as see it from the wide angle. This caused him to get creative with his solution on how to do this, as he details:

“That type of room relies entirely on perspective, and where you’re standing in the room, it only works from one central sweet spot where everything lines up perfectly to look right. Most of the time, it’s usually just a box with lines that create that illusion and perspective. But we had a 19th-century chateau, so there was a bookcase and a fireplace mantle and tables and harps and instruments. So, for example, the harp had to be built at a crazy perspective that when you’re standing in the right place, it looks perfect, but from any other place, it looks like this super stretched Salvador Dali kind of harp that we actually had to 3D print on the exact proper perspective. Not only did it have to be printed at the right ratio, but if you were to move it to a different spot in the room than where it was assigned, it would look off. Everything had to be very specifically designed and implemented. So that was a real challenge for the crew, figuring out how to achieve that.”

Fleischer and his crew decided to tackle another famous illusion, the “infinity staircase” by M.C. Escher. This is something with other films have paid homage to, albeit by using some combination of matte paintings, green screen, CGI, and the like. Instead, Fleischer and production designer David Scheunemann devised a way of doing it practically, as he explained:

“[…] We really challenged ourselves to figure out how to achieve one of those practically. The big eureka moment was when the production designer proposed a room with a 45 degree mirror so that instead of the reflections happening at this angle, they happen where the floor is now reflecting into the wall, which is reflecting into the other wall. And the entire room was made out of Mylar, which is a reflective [material], it’s like those balloons. So it looked like a mirror, a plastic mirror in the entire interior of the room. Because it was at that angle in one direction, you would see so many reflections you couldn’t count. To stand in that room was really, really psychedelic. I’m not kidding. When you were in there, it was just super trippy because it was like being in a prism or a kaleidoscope or something.”

These rooms and the fight sequences staged within them aren’t the only standout moments of the chateau section, as the location is also where the film’s impressive one-shot magic trick scene takes place. Ultimately, all this work pays off in the way it makes the film feel distinctive, even from the prior two “Now You See Me” films. If these movies are to continue (with or without Fleischer as director), they would do well to keep things magically practical.

“Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” is in theaters everywhere.