Caine, Jackman and Bale on movies and magic tricks

Last weekend, the US film industry was buzzing with excitement over something very unusual: three high-quality and Oscar-caliber films battled for supremacy at the box-office and emerged as that weekend’s top three grossing films. Industry stalwart Exhibitor Relations calls it an "extraordinary event never seen in a long time."

The films were Clint Eastwood’s war epic Flags of Our Fathers, Martin Scorsese’s masterful crime drama The Departed and Christopher Nolan’s beguiling, suspenseful magical thriller The Prestige, which took the crown as the weekend’s runaway winner, grossing over $15-M despite showing in fewer theaters than the other two.

From the acclaimed director who gave us the twisty and clever thriller Memento and last year’s impressive re-imagining, Batman Begins comes this year’s highly-original, staggering, magical mystery based on the best-selling novel by Christopher Priest.

The Prestige tells the story of two dueling magicians in Victorian England whose obsessive rivalry turns nasty when a magic trick triggers a chain of events that would see them challenging science and the art of magic itself.

The rival magicians are played by two of the screen’s biggest stars: Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. They also most recently graced the screens separately as Wolverine in X-Men: The Last Stand and as embattled caped crusader Batman in Batman Begins respectively.

Joining them are great British actor Sir Michael Caine, Scarlett Johansson (Lost in Translation, The Black Dahlia, Piper Perabo (Coyote Ugly) and legendary rocker David Bowie, who appears in the film as the real-life inventor Nikola Tesla.

Jackman, Bale and Caine sat with The Philippine Star two Saturdays ago during the junket held at the Ritz Carlton Resort in Pasadena, where they talked about the movie, the magic tricks they learned, and the concept of competition and rivalry in fiercely-competitive Hollywood.

"I was supposed to know them all, but the only trick I learned was the cage with the bird," Caine volunteers. He plays the retired magician Cutter who conceptualizes magic acts for the two main protagonists. "I don’t want to know, I want to be entertained. I have a line in the picture: ‘You look at it but you don’t want to know," because you want to be fooled."

The 73-year-old actor has been fooling audiences for over 50 years with a wide array of film characters in over 90 movies like the titular playboy chauffeur in Alfie, other half of the original Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and the absinthe-addicted abortionist in The Cider House Rules. This time, he plays a part that is his most refreshing in years. "What I do now is I don’t work," he says. "I have perfected the art of holiday-making and I get to do it for a living. But then occasionally something would come along that I absolutely cannot refuse that I have to come to work. This is one of them.

"I’ve already done Batman Begins with Christopher (Nolan) and Christian (Bale) and when he (Nolan, the director) showed me the script, I thought it was so great, so incredible, and the part was wonderful."

He particularly liked the stirring rivalry between the two main characters which somehow mirrors his own show business experience. "Just like every sports, show business is extraordinarily competitive," he reveals. "Actors are obsessive – all of us. You don’t make it in this business unless perhaps you know the producers. To become an actor at all is an obsession. I think obsession is important in any difficult endeavor."

"Obsession is a young man’s game. I am no longer that obsessive about it," he adds.

The actor who says he liked Spencer Tracy "because he was the only leading man at the time with blond hair like me" is just like every other guy. Asked who among the current stars he wants to work with next is, he blurted out, "Angelina Jolie" and let out a seemingly satisfied, naughty laugh.

Hugh Jackman, who plays Robert Angier the showman, was in brown buttoned-down long sleeves and looked surprisingly slimmer in person compared to the brawny Wolverine we see in the X-Men series.

The Australian actor who made his American film debut in the first X-Men installment has also appeared on Broadway and won the coveted Tony Award for Best Actor in 2004 for his role in the musical The Boy from Oz.

Asked to compare his art as an actor to that of a magician, he replied: "Probably, exactly the same. The only thing with the magician is you are largely on your own so it’s a solitary kind of pursuit while an actor relies on other actors or if in front of an audience, with the audience. So it’s a much more group-oriented thing."

"I didn’t realize how much acting was involved in magic," he adds. "In the performing of the trick, if you are gonna make a ball disappear from your right hand – the trick will only be successful if the magician believes – ‘what happened to the ball?’ if you can’t act that, the audience will not have that – ‘what happened to the ball?’ It’s the acting that really makes a magician great."

Jackman began acting in his native Australia and in 1999 was named "Australian Star of the Year."

"I love acting. I really enjoy doing it," he says echoing what Michael Caine earlier said. "I remember when I was in drama school for three years, I never missed a day. It took all my time and I just remember loving it. Maybe, that is obsession."

Christian Bale joined us last. He was dressed in black casual shirt and multi-pocketed cargo jeans. He was sporting a ruffled look and he looked rather good with long hair.

Bale, whose grandfather was a magician, plays Alfred Borden, Angier’s bitter rival who, at the beginning of the movie, commits something that sets afire the fierce and relentless rivalry between the two.

"What I discovered through working in The Prestige was that the big mechanical tricks are simply annoying when compared to the sleight-of-hands which I find more appealing," he says.

The actor, who will reprise the Batman role in the sequel called The Dark Knight, first graced the screen as a child searching for his parents in Steven Spielberg’s classic film Empire of the Sun nearly 20 years ago. In between his first film and his recent re-discovery as Batman, the actor languished in semi-obscurity making mostly small films and occasionally setting the critics on fire with his performances in American Psycho and The Machinist.

On his character’s intense obsession to top his chief rival, Angier, the actor says: "It’s just the classic thing of the superior talent and not having the talent to communicate his talent to other people against somebody who is a brilliant showman who is a great talent himself and is able to market himself. So, the public who doesn’t have time to really analyze what this man – my character – is really doing believes that the other one is a better one because he is more accessible."

"I see that as a frustration for many people who are brilliant at what they do but absolutely abysmal at communicating that to other people and feeling it’s a lack of integrity if he had to go begging for some kind of recognition," he adds, hinting at something which we vaguely got answers later.

Released by Warner Bros., The Prestige opened last Wednesday, Oct. 25.