Zitat des Tages über Magier / Magicians:
Indeed, most magicians catch the bug as kids. My first audience was my family in Long Island. My first 'assistant' was my mother, whom I levitated on a broom in our living room.
My mother brought me magicians and witches, because I was very ugly, really revolting. So she thought somebody had put a spell on me - this is the truth - so she made me drink some horrible terrifying potions, for year.
Because 'Gob' was a terrible magician, he was always, in great comedic moments, messing up his magic act. We used to have magicians come in to work on these tricks to actually get them wrong. But they still had to work. We had to bring magicians on to make magic not work.
It is the unspoken ethic of all magicians to not reveal the secrets.
Actors are like magicians. They'll sit there and do all their tricks to each other. It's very competitive, and the goal is to get them bonding, to get them to know the real person as quickly as possible.
You can just go to a magic shop or magic builder and buy what most magicians do, but that's not what I'm about. With 'Mindfreak' on television and 'Believe' live, I want to bring things that people have never seen before. That process is very difficult. It's very challenging, and you never know how long it's going to take - months or years.
I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.
I kind of thought that stand-up comedy would suffer from the Internet because people seem to know more about the craft of stand-up than ever before. I thought it would seem trite. Kind of like if you know more about magicians, you wouldn't love them.
In a way, we are magicians. We are alchemists, sorcerers and wizards. We are a very strange bunch. But there is great fun in being a wizard.
Actors and magicians are both performers, and they represent things that are not necessarily who they are.
Magicians from the nineteenth century threw cards distances, but I think I'm the first one who made a thing about using them as weapons.
Great liars are also great magicians.
For me, I live for performing live because people look at magicians on television, and they always wonder, 'Is it a camera trick?' 'Is it a stooge?' whereas, live, they know there's no set-ups; there's no stooges.
I always wanted to go to the Chavez school but I could never afford it when I was growing up so a lot of my learning came from magic books and watching other magicians. I was also very lucky that I had a couple of really good magic teachers.
It was just like a digital fixation with cards and math and science and then I started to look at images of great magicians from Houdini down the line.
In 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,' I wanted to create the most convincing story of magic and magicians that I could.
I was always interested in enchantment and magicians and still am.
The cosmetics world and mentalism are both arenas of deception, but I suppose the difference is that mentalists and magicians are more honest about it. People tell me I have good skin, and I tell them the magic secret is E45 cream: cheap, cheerful, and very effective.
Magicians are typically introverted; they don't tend to work with others, but I work with software programmers, composers, designers, so it's a very diverse group and the result is always more interesting than something I could have done by myself.
I'm such a proponent of the theatrical experience and the cinematic experience, and we've reached this point where the magicians are not only giving away their tricks, but they're telling us how they're doing the tricks in advance before you even come to the magic show. It'd be nice to get a little of the mystery back in.
I never talk much about my family, but my grandfather was friendly with these guys, with magicians and ventriloquists on the highest levels, and I was just... interested.
Nobody who is a Penn & Teller fan thinks of us first and foremost as magicians, but as a comedy team.
