While I set out to write an essay on the movie version of The Prestige, I ended up reading the novel, too, and comparing the script to the book. Note that I did use the screenplay that was published in book form, not the shooting script PDF like I usually do for my MFA annotations. (If you don’t understand the significance of that, don’t worry about it.)
The Art of Adaptation: How the Nolan Brothers Improved Upon The Prestige
The Prestige is one of those films that’s based on a novel most viewers haven’t heard of, by an author who sadly passed away last month: Christopher Priest. While his 1995 book won the World Fantasy Award (weirdly, it’s categorized as “horror” at one of Alaska’s local libraries), and Priest wrote several more award-winning books, his telling of the story of turn-of-the-century prestidigitators Alfred Borden and Rupert “Robbie” Angier is a far cry from that of the Nolan brothers’ 2006 film. Where the novel’s narration is dry and distant, told first from the perspectives of Borden and Angier’s descendants in a way that does nothing to encourage continued reading, the film allows both characters to tell their stories evenly and without dilution or bias at an engaging pace.
The first line of the book foreshadows what is to come, but not in a good way. Andrew Westley, presumed descendant of Alfred Borden, says: “It began on a train, heading north through England, although I was soon to discover that the story had really begun more than a hundred years earlier” (Priest 3). At first blush, this seems like a surface-level play at creating mystery, but in fact, it shows that the author didn’t really understand what his story was about. That may sound blasphemous to the book lovers out there, but Priest consistently floods the narrative with unnecessary background information and “contextualization” that makes it difficult for the reader to feel like they’re reading something other than a fictional personal history, which is hard to get excited about. By the end of Part One, when the boring Westley meets the only mildly interesting Lady Kate Angier, I was left wondering if the rest of the book would really be worth my time. Nevertheless, I read on, seeing Alfred Borden would be the narrator for Part Two.
Unfortunately, Priest again started too far back, making Borden begin his tale at his birth (in 1856).
By contrast, the script begins with the puzzling and somehow sinister image of a bunch of top hats “clustered in a small glade,” threaded by a black cat and the movie’s title, and followed by a voiceover from Borden: “Are you watching closely?” (Nolan 3). Talk about an attention-getting opening! Four words and just a few lines in and the audience is rapt (unlike Priest’s opening page, which bogs us down in the details of Westley’s girlfriend dumping him and what he had for breakfast). We then cut from two snarling cats to a workshop full of caged canaries, which is later revealed to be a brilliant metaphor for so many things in the film: the predator-prey relationship Borden and Angier cycle through as they try to sabotage each other’s personal and professional lives, the rise and fall of their careers/morality as they both reach for things they can’t or shouldn’t have—I could go on. But for the purposes of this essay, let’s just acknowledge that the film’s opening is more engaging and relevant than the book’s.
The film’s structure also differs from the book, and is set up clearly in that opening sequence. Immediately after Borden’s voiceover, we hear Cutter, the ingénieur who first works with both Borden and Angier and later for Angier in the film, but only for Angier in the book, and not from the beginning: “Every magic trick consists of three parts, or acts,” he says (Nolan 3), and that’s what we’ve come to expect of Hollywood movies. Priest, on the other hand, chose to organize his story into five parts, which might have worked if he’d gone back and forth between Borden and Angier, but it still misses the opportunity the Nolans took advantage of to structure the story like it’s own magical act. Instead, we waste 32 pages on Westley, at least two chapters on Borden’s childhood/adolescence, 38 pages on Kate Angier, and at least 26 pages on the childhood/adolescence/early adulthood of Rupert Angier (Robert in the movie). And the story doesn’t even really start to come together until halfway through the book, when Angier and Borden meet (Priest 204).
In the novel, the feud between Borden and Angier starts when Borden tries to expose Angier as a magician “imposter” doing seances, and causes Angier’s wife, Julia, to lose their baby when he pushes her down in an effort to escape Angier’s assistant, Nugent (who doesn’t exist in the movie, and neither do the seances). This narrative is more (unnecessarily) complicated than the film’s, which pits Angier against Borden after the death of Angier’s wife (still named Julia) in a magical act they’re all part of as budding magicians and assistants to the professional magician, Milton. Borden ties a new knot around Julia’s wrists that she’s unable to slip out of in the water tank, so Angier (understandably) blames Borden, even though Julia had said she could do it and Borden “doesn’t remember” which knot he tied. This makes a lot more sense than Borden disrupting Angier’s seance hustle like some crusader grumbling about integrity, and allows viewers to “side” with Angier at various points throughout the movie, until that horrific moment when we realize Angier is willing to clone and kill himself over and over to best Borden’s magical act (Nolan 146).
Given Priest’s interviews included on the Prestige DVD’s special features, it seems he was happy with the Nolans’ adaptation of his work, which one must assume is because he knew his work had been improved upon. I for one completely support all the changes that occurred in the course of the adaptation, which served not only the characters but also the pacing and the plot, and demonstrate what’s necessary and what’s not for a good film, and just a good story. If more novelists apply cinematic structure and elements of filmmaking to their stories and more screenwriters study adaptations, readers and viewers alike are bound to benefit.
Works Cited
- Nolan, Jonathan and Christopher. Screenplay of The Prestige. Faber & Faber, 2006.
- Priest, Christopher. The Prestige. Tor Books, 1995.
Note: I used Word Press’s AI excerpt generator for the text that shows on the blog page; what do you think? Is that more useful than the copy-pasted text I usually use, pulling from the post verbatim? I’m curious!
Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum 