"In an era before television and radio, just at the very beginning of cinema, magicians were very much larger figures in the entertainment world than they are now," says co-writer/director Christopher Nolan, best known for Memento and Batman Begins.
"They were the rock stars of their day. Magic still exists today, and always will, but it was much bigger then. It took to the popular culture's consciousness and imagination, and for that reason the stakes of the story become much higher than if it were set in the contemporary world, because of the element of fame, fortune and professional rivalry between magicians. It was also a time of massive technological change, and the story deals with the birth of the modern scientific era in the post-industrial revolution. So, it was a pretty extraordinary era, actually, in terms of intellectual adventure and scientific experimentation."
The story revolves around this conflict, where the lines that delimit reality and fiction, scientific or supernatural, are not clear. "The film has elements of what I suppose could be considered supernatural, but it is more about the relationship between new science and magic. When scientific discoveries are new, and the film takes place soon after the birth of electricity, for example, there are a lot of new and exciting things going on in the world of science at the time that would be seen as supernatural, but are not really. So, it is also perhaps about science fiction, about the science of tomorrow, in a way."
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