The filmmakers behind Now You See Me: Now You Don’t know that you know that any magic trick can look good onscreen with the help of editing and visual effects.
So for the third film in the Now You See Me saga — about magicians who use illusions to expose white-collar evildoers — they tried to pull off their tricks with as little movie magic as possible.
The new film, out today, unites the original Four Horseman — played by Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco and Isla Fisher — with a new, younger trio played by Justice Smith, Dominic Sessa and Ariana Greenblatt. They face off with a diamond heiress/money laundress played by Rosamund Pike, and Morgan Freeman returns as magician/debunker Thaddeus Bradley. (We won’t spoil some other surprise returns.)
The heart of the film is a dazzling sequence, about 40 minutes into the action, when the two teams of magicians face off in a contest of close-up magic in a storied chateau. It’s shot in one long, continuous shot — with just one sneaky edit — giving audiences the sense that the actors really learned to perform their sleight of hand.
It’s all pretty real, says director Ruben Fleischer, who is joining the franchise after 2013’s Now You See Me and 2016’s Now You See Me 2.
“Prior to getting involved with this movie, I had seen the first one, but not the second,” says Fleischer. “When I went back and looked at them, there were times where it was clearly CG. And not to speak badly about the past movies, because they’re awesome, but it just felt like some things were not achievable in reality.
“So for me, with this movie, I really wanted it all to be able to be explained in real life, with things that could be achieved practically — and really be as true and honest about the magic as possible.”
The chateau is a kind of magic castle, filled with trick rooms. One, for example, is confusingly shaped so that people appear large on one side, and small on the other, thanks to an optical illusion devised nearly a century ago by scientist Adelbert Ames, Jr.
To get to the film’s magic castle, the filmmakers started with the real one.
Sessions
The Magic Castle, established by the Larsen family in 1963, is one of the most iconic locations in Hollywood: A chateauesque Franklin Avenue mansion where some of the greatest magicians in the world perform for mesmerized audiences.
One magician who frequented the club in the ’90s was a UCLA student named Randy Pitchford, whose great uncle was Richard Valentine Pitchford, a magician who performed under the name Cardini.
“If you’ve ever seen a magician with a tailed tuxedo and top hat, that was his look,” Pitchford says. “They’re all imitating Cardini. And he also developed and popularized and created what’s known as card manipulation. So anytime you ever see a magician produce a fan of cards and then throw it away and produce another fan of cards, and all that kind of stuff with card manipulation on stage, that’s all his work.”
When he wasn’t at UCLA, Pitchford would perform magic shows around Los Angeles and
“spend as much of my time as possible at the Magic Castle.”
He and his wife even married at the castle in 1997. Two years later, Pitchford and several friends co-founded the video game company Gearbox.
“My dad’s a nerd. We always had computers,” Pitchford says. “So working with computers and writing software and developing entertainment happened in parallel to growing up as a magician.
“Video games and magic are the same,” he adds. “It’s all entertainment.”
Gearbox became hugely successful thanks to hits like the Borderlands series. But the Magic Castle had ups and downs. At one point, Neil Patrick Harris, who was part of the castle’s junior magician program as a child star, and later became president of the Academy of Magical Arts, mounted a publicity campaign and worked behind the scenes to save the castle.
But when Covid struck, the castle fell on hard times again, because people could no longer gather there for nights out. So Pitchford, flush with video game money, bought the castle to keep it open as a showcase and homebase for magicians.
“So today, I am part of a team that handles all things Magic Castle, and we have unbelievable access to the greatest magicians in the world,” he explains.
Last year, Eli Roth directed a big-screen adaptation of Borderlands. One of the executive producers, Ethan Smith, who was also working on Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, introduced Pitchford to Bobby Cohen, who has produced the entire Now You See Me saga.
For the new film, Cohen wanted to “challenge myself to go back to our original inspiration when we started this franchise, which is that everyone wants to be simultaneously amazed by magic but also wants to instantly know how the trick worked — and that meant finding not just the best illusionists in the world but people that trusted us with their secrets.”
He calls Pitchford the “Godfather to magicians everywhere.”
“Randy’s childlike love of magic and the Now You See Me films’ reverence for the art of illusion made him the ideal and passionate collaborator,” Cohen continues. “I couldn’t imagine making this film without him and his wonderfully eclectic and deeply committed team of trickers.”
Pitchford leaned hard on his Magic Castle ties to make the film as authentic as possible.
“What we endeavored to do was create the world’s first magic department embedded into the production of the film,” he explains. “So my magic team and I were involved from development through prep, every single day of production and through post.”
Pitchford had already taught some magic to one member of the cast: Greenblatt had appeared in Borderlands, and had once seen Pitchford perform magic at a party with her Borderlands castmates.
“Kevin Hart’s there, Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis, and, of course, Ariana,” Pitchford recalls. “I was watching her brain exploding, and she really took to it, so I showed her a bunch of stuff.
“She got the bug,” he adds. “So when this movie came around, she was like, ‘Oh, I have to be in this.’ And she did the work.”
So did her castmates.
After Pitchford bought the Magic Castle, his wife helped convert an apartment adjacent to it — once inhabited by castle co-founder Milt Larsen — into a hidden lair for magicians only.
“My wife remodeled the apartment to make it like this really cool kind of magic lounge where we invite inner-circle people to session, where the lay people that are enjoying the Magic Castle won’t see us,” Pitchford explains.
Sessioning, he adds, is “our word for showing off with each other, but we’re also trading secrets.”
Soon the actors became the magicians’ students.
“And so they would work out there every day,” Pitchford explains. “Different actors would come by on a schedule, working with our magicians, practicing, practicing, practicing. Then you get to the set, and now we’re rehearsing. The practice is just to develop raw skills, to understand principles, to develop the dexterity to do some of the sleight of hand that’s in the film.
“But the rehearsal, it’s a whole other thing, because now we’ve got blocking and we’re figuring out the timing of everything, and we’re integrating it with the storytelling, with the actual acting, so we know when the lines are, but we’re not performing.”
They spent days choreographing a single scene, in which the actors do some sign-switching at a train station.
But the big showpiece was the chateau sequence.
Inside the Now You See Me: Now You Don’t Chateau Sequence
Fleischer details the chateau shot with the patience of a magician who has done his routine hundreds of times, referring to the returning actors by their real names, and the new ones, Sessa and Smith, by the names of their characters, Bosco and Charlie.
“First, Bosco makes a card vanish and then appear in Jesse’s pocket, and Jesse makes that card change, and then appear in Bosco pocket. Then Jesse makes his whole deck disappear, then Bosco levitates a card. Then Isla grabs the card, and she turns it into a diamond,” Fleischer recounts.
“Charlie grabs the diamond from her. He does the bowl, cups and balls thing, where he moves them around — around and around and around they go. Then Dave steals the diamond. He runs into the box.”
At this point, there’s a seamless edit.
“Then Woody does his trick,” Fleischer says.
This is a particularly impressive one, because the audience can play along by picking a card at the invitation of Harrelson’s character, Merritt McKinney.
“I don’t know if you picked a card when you were watching it, but part of the reason that trick is in there is because the audience, if they pick a card, there’s an 80% chance they’ll pick the card that he reveals,” Fleischer explains.
As the director continues, he references a trick called a “snowstorm in China,” in which a magician appears to shred a piece of paper to create an immeasurable amount of snow-like flakes.
“Then there’s the snowstorm in China,” Fleischer says, “where she rips up the card and turns it into confetti, and the confetti flows. Then Isla does her quick change. Then Bosco grabs one of the little flakes out of the air and turns it into a diamond, and then he makes it disappear. And then Jesse says, ‘How’d you do a vanish that good?’ And he kind of pats him down, and then he makes the diamond appear for himself. The diamond’s kind of the throughline for the whole thing.”
If you don’t want to know how they pulled off the breathtaking sequence, it’s time to stop reading.
But for everyone else…
“I mean, this is MovieMaker Magazine,” Fleischer says. “So I guess the whole point is to explain how the movie is made.”
The actors performed almost every single trick in the sequence live, during filming, with only a few changes made in post.
“I think we made a card change with CG from an ace to a five,” Fleischer says.
But for the most part, “everything is all in-camera. Like her quick change is real.”
The snowstorm in China was real too — though the VFX team added some snow in post. “We added like a layer of confetti,” Fleisher adds.
But the rest? Real.
Or at least as real as magic can be.
“When Bosco spins a card and it floats, that was an actual card on a fishing line that somebody else was operating,” Fleischer says. “And when Isla grabbed it, it had like a gummy on the back so that it could be released from its line. Then she folds that up and produces the diamond — and she didn’t have the diamond in her hand. Someone from below put the diamond in her hand, and we painted that out.”
As with many great magic acts, the small tricks distract you from a big one. Fleischer is excited that the new film has a rug pull he doesn’t think audiences will see coming.
“I felt like the movie only works as a whole, if the movie, in and of itself, can function as a magic trick,” he says.
Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is now in theaters, from Lionsgate.
Main image: (L-R) Dominic Sessa as Bosco, Jesse Eisenberg as Daniel Atlas, Isla Fisher as Henley Reeves, and Justice Smith as Charlie in Now You See Me: Now You Don’t. Photo Credit: Katalin Vermes/Lionsgate