CraveOnline: Is doing a documentary on Tim very different than the “Penn & Teller’s Bullshit” series on Showtime?
Teller: Yes, it’s quite a different thing. We would go into a “Bullshit” episode really knowing our point of view after we had done some research. In this case, Tim lived this project for four years. He lived it for four years and we recorded every aspect of it. The real challenge was discovering the golden thread that would lead us through all this very complicated technical and personal material.
With “Bullshit” it was more of a statement to start with and this was more of an archaeological process where you look at the tomb site and then you figure out what the story of that tomb site is. When you wake up in the morning, you don’t know what your day is going to be and when you finish your day, you don’t know what your day was until you go and write in your diary. That was the thing about this. This was undifferentiated human experience that we then had to figure out what the diary entry was going to be.
When Penn did The Aristocrats did you not want to be involved in that documentary?
Actually, I’m in it but Penn and Provenza realized this wonderful thing about the standup culture which doesn’t hold a lot of interest for me. One of the ways you keep a partnership together for, I think we’re up to 39 years right now, is you try to let the other guy have a little space. Penn did The Aristocrats, he’s working on his new movie with Adam Rifkin called Director’s Cut and I’m doing my brand new version of The Tempest this spring in Vegas with music by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan and a lot of magic by me. Those are our little outside projects. This is one of those ones we felt was right to do together.
Had you both always intended Penn & Teller to go beyond magic into television, film and other subjects?
We always never limited ourselves, that’s all. The basis of everything we do, still the home base, the place that we always come home to is our live show. If you had to take everything else away from us, we would be theater performers and we’re pretty good at that, and that’s really how we earn our living. That, I think, is going to be there as long as either of the two of us is able to prop himself up and wheel himself on stage.
Has there been any history of productions of The Tempest using live stage magic?
Not for quite a long while to my knowledge. In the late 19th century when stage machinery was all the thing, there were versions of The Tempest and one of them was actually done by a magician, but I have a feeling the sensibility was way different. My sensibility is roughshod, carnival, raw, very simple looking and I think that will make the magic rather startling.
Are you able to do the complete text in a Vegas show?
Well, as much as anybody does the complete text. This is not a Vegas show of The Tempest. This is The Tempest by William Shakesepeare being performed in a tent outside the brand new performing arts center in Las Vegas, and it is The Tempest. It’s absolutely The Tempest. It’s not a magic show with a few words from Shakespeare. It’s the story of The Tempest, it’s the characters of The Tempest. It’s just done with I think maybe a greater sense of visual power and fun.
I’ll give you an example. Caliban in my show, instead of being played by one actor, is being played by two very gymnastic actors choreographed by Pilobolus, the great modern dance company, so that they function like a pair of conjoined twins. I think it’s going to be fabulous. We’ve worked a lot with these guys and they are just astounding. It’s astounding how two people can move like one monster.
What’s Tim’s next project?
As Tim says, when asked that question, Tim says, “I’m between obsessions right now.” Tim has a huge and very successful tech company that is really his full time job which he neglected for several years but fortunately had good people standing in for him. I imagine he’s going to go back to being Tim the dad and Tim the tech guy for a while, although I think he is still a little bit intrigued because we hope that Tim’s discovery will get more scholars reading some of the untranslated manuscripts from that period. If one of them stumbles across a description of this device or a Tim-like device that is on record, that’ll be a great big additional step.
Tim has established that it’s possible Vermeer worked this way and that something like this would enable a person to do what human beings otherwise can’t do. Physically we can’t record brightness in an absolute manner. Our retina does not permit us to do that. There’s a lot of literature on that that you can read up on. There’s a book by Margaret Livingstone from Harvard called Vision and Art that explains the center-surround principal pretty concisely. If Tim’t work and this movie got people started looking for written evidence, that might be really wonderful. Tim also things that maybe Caravaggio used something like this and he may do some tests on that but I don’t think there will be any big art projects for a while for time because he is painted out.
There are some sketchers and sketch artists who are able to do some amazing things with shading. Is that a different skill than with a paintbrush?
Absolutely, because that’s translating the image in your head into another medium. What Vermeer did was a kind of photographic matching of light that is very precise. As Tim describes it, when you walk along a line of paintings and one is a Vermeer, the Vermeer pops like it’s an image off a video camera because it’s a really different kind of thing.
Did you have a chance to see Now You See Me last summer, and did that movie do good things for people’s interest in magic?
I don’t know. When people try to put magic on film, they tend to glamorize it. I think the key to really, really putting magic on film is to unglamorize it, much the way it was done in a picture depicting the daily life of Kreskin with John Malkovich, [The Great Buck Howard]. That seems to maybe come closer to really feeling what magic is like, although that’s the movie I want to write some day. I’m going to write the right magic movie someday.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
