He sings the cinema electric

I tell him, yeah, I did, and it's true. As to whether I enjoyed it as I might enjoy a really good Sudoku session, or on some possibly more profound level, I'm not quite sure. But it will keep people guessing the whole way, I promise him that.

It isn't easy to conduct an interview about a film like this one, and Nolan makes me promise to keep certain answers -- about the exact nature of the illusion known as "The Transported Man," say, or about one character's slightly dubious accent -- off the record. "It's a bit of a challenge," he says. "I've been doing a lot of interviews with journalists, and I almost don't know what to say without chucking the whole game."

One thing he can do is explain the peculiar title, a term that has a specific meaning in the realm of stage magic. "The 'prestige' refers to the final act of a magic trick," he says. "The last of three acts. First comes the pledge, when the magician shows you something that appears to be ordinary: a bird in a cage, or a playing card, or a woman in a box. Of course it probably isn't something ordinary after all. Next comes the turn, when something happens" -- e.g., the bird is made to disappear, or the girl in the box is sawed in half.

"Last of all, you have the prestige, which is when the magician shows you something you've never seen before, something completely unexpected. It refers both to the last stage of the trick and to the object, or product of that stage." When the vanished bird is made to reappear, 10 yards away, or the sawed-in-half girl is reconnected and emerges unharmed -- that's the prestige, and the bird and the girl are themselves also the prestige. (That's a clue, people! As Cutter repeatedly and ominously asks in the film, "Are you watching closely?")

Early in the story, Angier and Jackman are friends, but their relationship is already prickly. They work as assistants for a mediocre magician (played in fact by master magician Ricky Jay, a key advisor on the film) and know they can do better. When an escape trick involving slipknots and a tank full of water goes wrong, however, their relationship changes forever.

After some negotiation over phrasing, Nolan offers: "I think we can say that one of them does something, or may have done something, that hurts the other one grievously. When Jona [his brother Jonathan] and I were writing the script, we really tried to find a cinematic equivalent for the way Priest's novel manipulates and directs the reader's sympathy. Each of these guys engages our sympathy at different times. Each of them is wronged, and each of them does terrible things. We really want it to be a fluid, unstable situation for the viewer, and in terms of which one of them you wind up rooting for, I really hope that's an open question."

Nolan doesn't much try to impress us with stage magic in "The Prestige"; that's a fairly useless thing to do in a film. Instead, he shows us how certain well-known tricks are performed: The bird made to disappear has actually been crushed to death in a collapsing trick cage sent through a trapdoor into the table, and another bird in an identical cage is produced. Is this, I ask, a metaphorical version for what happens in the movie on a grander scale?

More of that evasive laughter. "I shouldn't like to go too far with that analogy," he responds. "But yes, I suppose so. Without getting specific about it, there's a cruelty and a ruthlessness to the competition between these men, and on some level neither of them is overly concerned over who gets hurt. As long as the trick works, as long as the audience is entertained. Remember that when Angier approaches Nikola Tesla and asks him to build him a machine for his stage show, Tesla asks whether Angier has considered the true cost of the machine. He doesn't mean the price, which is also very high. He means the cost."

At one point, Michael Caine's character, who seems to serve as an authorial voice, offers the observation that a magician makes the real world, which is actually simple and solid all the way through, seem full of mystery. When I ask Nolan whether that's also what the movies do, he says, "Very much so. Movies can create a realm of magic and mystery, where anything and everything is possible. I think people look to them as an escape from the predictability of ordinary life. There's nothing wrong or shameful in that. That's why I love movies myself."

But does he really think, then, that the real world is devoid of mystery? "There are times when I'm afraid that's true, yes. But in movies, in storytelling, in imagination, so many other things are true. I suppose part of me believes that if we can imagine wonderful things, create them in art or fiction, then they're actually real."

Next page: "The manipulative, deceptive, shape-shifting essence of the story"