‘The Prestige’: how Paul Newman and Robert Redford inspired Christopher Nolan
As a lifelong student of cinema, Christopher Nolan has never been shy in admitting that many of his movies are indebted to the films and filmmakers he grew up watching.
George Lucas’ Star Wars and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey changed Nolan’s life forever when he saw the two diametrically opposed sci-fi classics in quick succession when he was a child, inadvertently laying the groundwork for the career that he’d carve out for himself decades later.
Combining the eye-popping, tangible spectacle of the former with the existential musings and technological innovations of the latter has placed Nolan in a uniquely sweet spot where he can make whatever the hell he wants for however much he wants it to cost, leaving studios safe in the knowledge that audiences will turn up in droves to have their eyes and brains equally engaged.
Ridley Scott was his single biggest inspiration, and as a prolific auteur who works on a massive scale while weaving between genres, it’s easy to see why. That’s without even mentioning how Inception pilfered liberally from his love of James Bond, how The Dark Knight tipped its hat to Michael Mann’s Heat or any of the other touchstones Nolan has named over the years.
It isn’t all about the actors, though, with Nolan confirming that one of Hollywood’s most iconic double acts was a primary source of inspiration behind a film that stood in stark contrast. Paul Newman and Robert Redford pulled the ultimate con in 1973’s classic The Sting, which Nolan studiously admired when he was piecing together period-set thriller The Prestige.
When asked directly by Radio Free if there were parallels between Redford and Newman’s conmen teaming up to seek revenge on the crime boss responsible for the death of a mutual friend and the increasingly deadly game of oneupmanship between Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman’s rival magicians, Nolan answered with a succinct, “Well, yeah.”
“Particularly when we were trying to figure out how to sell this film to a studio early on,” he explained. “It’s like, what story paradigm is it? And there are very few sort of two-hander story paradigms. The Sting is one of them. There are others where there’s no good guy/bad guy, so it’s very tricky. They do exist, but they’re few and far between. The Sting is quite a close one.”
A box office success to the tune of over a quarter of a billion dollars, a seven-time Academy Award winner, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, and a worthy successor to Newman and Redford’s legendary first collaboration on Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, Nolan could have done a lot worse than look towards The Sting for inspiration, regardless of how little it seemed to have in common with his literary adaptation set in 1890s London.
