Are you watching closely?

We just finished watching The Prestige again. Jesus, that's a brilliant movie. This was probably our sixth time seeing it and we still found new reasons to pause it and chatter excitedly to each other. It's based on a book by Christopher Priest, which I haven't read and don't plan to for a combination of reasons (the predominant being that I'm afraid the book will alter my perception of the story, which I am perfectly in love with as told by the movie). But I want to talk about the writing as it pertains to the screenplay. Or, I suppose more accurately, the storytelling as it pertains to the movie.

I'm sure I've blogged about the movie's storytelling before. The tale is told brilliantly, carefully layering brushstrokes on top of brushstrokes so that it's not until the last word--literally--that the whole picture and all of its ramifications are revealed, but so that you see the formation, the buildup of the characters and conflict along the way. Really, just gorgeous.

What really struck me tonight was the movie's opening, perhaps influenced by this guest blog from Carolyn Jewel over at Kristin Nelson's blog.The opening is pretty spare--no music that I can recall; tight camera work; simple visual compositions that make it easy to direct the audience's attention without being heavy handed. The focus is on the voiceover narration: Michael Caine's character explaining the three parts of a magic trick and how they work together to produce the desired reaction in the audience.

The true genius of the opening is that between this explanation and a handful of the images presented during the narration, the whole story is laid out before you. In those carefully chosen words--less than 150 of them, because I've looked up the text online and counted--the essence of the entire story's conflict and the main characters' motivations is completely, perfectly encapsulated.

Wow.

You don't necessarily know it at the time, of course. You can't realize how you've just heard an echo of the tale you're about to watch unfold, because you don't know the story yet (assuming it's your first time watching). But you feel the importance of it, the intake-of-breath feeling that lets you know to pay close attention, even if you don't know precisely why. And those 142 words are circling your subconscious throughout the rest of the film, being stroked by subtly placed reminders throughout the story as it swells toward the final reveal when every action, every word suddenly comes together and you can finally see.

That's how I want to write.

I'll leave you with this quote from the movie, because it speaks so well to why I write fantasy-based fiction:

You never understood why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple, miserable, solid all the way through. But if you can fool them, even for a second… then you can make them wonder. And you get to see something very special. You really don’t know...it was the look on their faces.