Phixius

11th Nov 2011

The Prestige (2006)

Question: When Borden and Fallon are in the same scene, is someone else playing Fallon? Or does Christian Bale play both, the same way Arnie Hammer did on Social Network?

Answer: It's Bale, at least whenever you can see Fallon's face. The same way they do twins played by the same person in any other film.

Phixius

5th Apr 2007

The Prestige (2006)

Question: When Tesla first tests the 'machine', the original hat stays in place, while the copies appear in the woods. Does this mean that whenever Hugh Jackman's character uses the machine during his show, he is actually sending a copy of himself up into the balcony, and sending himself to drown below the stage? If this is so, the implication would be that the 'copies' contain every memory, etc. of the original Hugh, up to and including the point at which the copies are made.

Answer: Tesla himself suggests the mechanism is not so much "a copy" as "a pair of duplicates." Neither is the original and neither is a copy. They are both the same individual, there are just two of then now. One got teleported and the other did not. Admittedly, it requires a pretty abstract point of view to understand it.

Phixius

Answer: Angier states himself as he is dying that it took courage for him to step into his machine every night, because he didn't know if he'd be the one that ends up drowning or the one that ends up in the prestige. So the teleportation/cloning is entirely random.

Phaneron

11th Feb 2007

The Prestige (2006)

Question: What significance do the melted hats have on the field outside scientist's lab?

Jason Riley

Chosen answer: They weren't melted. They were duplicated hats and they were there because the transportation machine Tesla was working on worked more like a fax machine instead of a mere transporter, creating a duplicate in another location.

Phixius

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