Preview, review & interview | Now you see Macau, Now you don’t

Director Jon M. Chu, J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), Walter Mabry (Daniel Radcliffe), Lula (Lizzy Caplan), Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson) and Producer Bobby Cohen on the set of NOW YOU SEE ME 2

Macau features for a good 45 minutes in the plot of blockbuster Hollywood sequel “Now You See Me 2,” and it takes a central role in the action.
As in any magical gig, some scenes, supposedly happening in the “Vegas of the East,” were actually shot in an East London studio, as were scenes placed in New York City. That’s the magic of any “cinecittà.” (And it’s also cheaper for production.)
Macau hosts a crucial and, for this reviewer, the most remarkable sequence of the movie, which takes place (supposedly) inside the iconic Science Museum.
The movie picks up a year after the end of the first movie. The Four Horsemen are still fugitives. No one’s seen them, they’ve gone underground…
I’m not going to reveal spoilers, no.
Although I’ve already seen the movie in a preview at the Venetian Theatre last week, my aim here is to tell the story behind the scenes and to account for Macau’s performance in this major Hollywood production that has racked up AUD2.8 million “across 250 screens in its opening weekend to claim the top spot at the weekend box office.” The movie opens this week in Macau, tomorrow in the USA, but tested brilliantly Down Under.
Flashback. I am at this huge theatre with a few hundred more in the audience. And for more than two hours I experienced one of the most dramatic moments of the post-Facebook era: I was disconnected. It’s weird, I tell you. All of us had to tender our phones (more or less smart) at the entrance to an army of gadget keepers and went through an x-ray detector of the airport type to enter the screening room.
At roughly 8:15pm, the lights are out. Suddenly the first shot of Lionsgate Studio’s spot hits the screen, illuminates and rocks the room like a thunderstorm; the public applauds.
Cut! Silence… Action!

Dave Franco stars as ‘Jack Wilder’ in NOW YOU SEE ME 2

My attention to the plot is being distracted because I am counting and checking minutes, words, places, streets, alleys, casino floors. Looking at my “dumb” watch while scribbling notes in the dark which I would decipher later to tell you, for example, this:
Macau richly enters the plot by roughly minute 30 of a lengthy feature film that runs on the silver screen for 129 minutes. The “Macau” word was first spelled out clearly yet mysteriously around that time, when Woody Harrelson says, “This is not New York… This is Macau!” In total, the characters say the name of The City of God five or six times. (I lost count because at some point I was under some sort of Lizzy Caplan spell.)
In terms of spelling it out, the climax came when, about the hour, great Morgan Freeman (Thaddeus) had an epiphany in NYC and uttered, “They [The Four Horsemen] are in Macau.”
I tell you, along with Lizzy Caplan, Freeman’s “Macau” added “gravitas” to the situation.
“Anything that man [Morgan] says sounds important and worth listening to,” Lizzy Caplan told the Times during a long night of shooting back in March 2015.
Lizzy and I met in a suite on the 12th floor of Sands Macao when shooting on location was taking place. Up there, the whole flat was occupied by the production set and the rooms were transformed into offices, make-up, wardrobe, dressing, relaxation rooms…

Lula (Lizzy Caplan, far left), Jack Wilder (Dave Franco, center left), Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson, center right) and J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg, far right) in NOW YOU SEE ME 2

The suite was a mess. Blankets, sheets and pillows on a pile against the wall, you get the picture. Lizzy welcomed us (this reporter and two fellow female journalists) in a decidedly plain outfit. She was between takes.
– May I?
– Yes, please.
– You look gorgeous!
– Oh, come on… I know, a lot of makeup and pajamas, that’s the secret, she mocks with a smile.
Lizzy Caplan plays Lula, “She’s the newest Horseman, newest member of the team. And she is into magic that’s kind of shocking and gross, and they’ve let me make it as shocking and gross as I want. You know, as shocking as you can make it for PG-13, I guess.”
Caplan was summoned to join the cast after the only female interpreter of the Four Horsemen, Isla Fisher got pregnant and couldn’t make it for the sequel. So, instead of just replacing actress-by-actress in the same role, as happens frequently, the screenwriters invented a brand new character for Lizzy.
“I think it’s a very different character. I’m trying to make Lula a little annoying and again as kind of disgusting as they’ll allow. Isla’s character [Henley] was… I mean she did some kind of nasty things… That piranha [act] was sort of bloody and gross, but she definitely wasn’t annoying.”
The Horsemen needed a fourth member to pull off their tricks, says Lizzy. “So they discovered me; Mark Ruffalo’s character [Dylan] found me working on the underground magic circuit and thought that I would be a good fit. They don’t trust Lula so much at the beginning, but they gradually… [started to like her].”
Except, perhaps Jack (Dave). “I have a very big crush on Dave Franco’s character and I come after him really hard, like really aggressively. I really flirt with him, I let him know my feelings very much from the first scene, which is also kind of nice because you don’t get that opportunity as a girl character very often to be the aggressor in that way,” tells the co-star of the hot TV series “Masters of Sex.”
The movie, the plot, is indeed about trust and aggressively about relationships. Bobby Cohen, producer:
“What you’re seeing, intentionally, is all of these different types of relationships, father/son relationships, brother relationships… That’s part of what, on a character level, the movie is going to be – it is where the power will come from.”
Cohen walked us through the shooting that dawned at the Sands casino where the Horsemen – Woody Harrelson (Merritt), Dave Franco (Jack), Jesse Eisenberg (Atlas) and Lizzy Caplan (Lula) –  were in the middle of a classy act involving a dragon and lion dance troupe around a baccarat table, while Daniel Radcliffe (Walter), the villain of the story, looked down upon them from the window of his lavish penthouse suite with the striking sight of Macau’s skyline.
The scene was being shot at four to five in the morning, a challenge for Jon M. Chu, the director:
“This [was] a scene I was concerned about because it’s in a live casino and it’s in the middle of the night so people are probably tired. We have dancers, we have gamblers, we have dealers, we have our actors – we have a lot of different things happening. But it’s been going pretty smoothly.”
The production hired hundreds of people in Macau to play extras – many were at the preview, laughing or giggling as they spot themselves on the big screen. Many others appear as volunteers in street shootings downtown.
“We probably had, let’s say, 200 extras that we had hired, but the street [Rua da Felicidade round and about] is so filled. We’re shooting there in the middle of the night, and by the time you’re shooting there’s probably about 1,000 people in the street and they’re all just watching,” says Cohen, expressing real joy by the choices they made for the sequel.
“Why Macau? For a bunch of reasons. The first movie takes place in Las Vegas, and New Orleans, and New York, and Paris. So, I think first and foremost, that part of the expectations of the films, as the series now evolves, is taking people to places they haven’t been before.”
Besides, “it started with something that’s true to the story, which is that Macau actually, like New Orleans in the United States, has this tradition of magic. So that was something that we immediately latched onto, that there is actually a great tradition of magic. Starting with the Portuguese, there were a lot of great magicians who performed here. And of course there’s the [Iong’s] magic shop which is a major location in the movie, and it’s the oldest magic shop here in Macau.”
The decision on Macau was made in the middle of 2014, between the producer, the director and screen writers. “The studio loved the idea of it, of course. Then it was about six months of work to figure out how to actually come here and how much crew we would bring, and how much crew we would find from Hong Kong, and how much we would find from here, working with the Sands people.”
Rua da Felicidade, Rua dos Mercadores, Macau by night, Sands, Venetian, Science Museum, NAPE district, and of course, the magic shop “owned” by Li (Jay Chow) and his grandma Bu Bu (Tsai Chin) get a great deal of exposure in a major production which relies on going back to basics, the simplicity of good old tricks, with a twist, played out in the streets or docks or ships, or the Tower of London – not shiny big stages, unlike the first movie. A film performed by a formidable cast, highlighted by the contribution of masterful actors Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman. Add “Harry Potter” to that.
According to the producer, Daniel Radcliffe actually wanted in: Can I be part of it? Is there anything for me to do? “We’re like, ‘Well, do you want to play the bad guy?’ And he was like, ‘Yes.’ The only thing that he asked us [was] that, since he is known all over the world as Harry Potter, he did not want to ever have to say the word… magic.”

Director Jon M. Chu (left) and Lula (Lizzy Caplan) on the set of NOW YOU SEE ME 2

We didn’t get a chance to interview “the young villain,” but we had a chat that night with another rising star, Jesse Eisenberg, who played Facebook’s Zuckerberg in “The Social Network.” Surprisingly enough he knows his way around, “I [came] to Macau about 10 years ago just to visit. [Now] it’s very different. I don’t remember any casinos, or certainly not these kinds of casinos.”
“I was curious about Macau,” says Jesse. “It’s an interesting place being a [former] Portuguese territory in the middle of China. It’s really an interesting place. I was going all throughout China from Beijing to Xi’an, Kunming, Chengdu even to Lhasa, and Tibet, and Nepal, and then I came here, after.”
Macau comes out of the role in this Hollywood (Lionsgate) production with a positive persona. It’s more the Macau, Cotai, the Chinoiserie, the gambling, the luxury… The Portuguese element is a bit of an outcast in the movie. We see some old patios and street names. But also, it can be spotted in the character of a supposed museum curator (Allen Scott-Frank); his moustache and manners could fool me for a Luso-British highly-educated fellow of the likes of Major Alvega, who was a hero-RAF pilot in old WWII comics.
And, of course, here and there, is a touch of the underworld, a place where private armies and shotguns would pop-up at a finger-snap of villain Walter, the bastard-son of arch-billionaire Arthur Tressler (Caine) and his associate (Merritt’s unknown twin brother).
Not exactly an original feature in movie history, Woody plays two characters, himself and his twin. The twist here lies in the theme: now you see Woody…
The association of Chinese-American director Jon Chu with the project comes from the idea of mixing his geek mind and vision with the heart of a choreographer.
“If you think about the movement of the movie, and the way the Horsemen do their tricks – it is like dance, it is choreographed, it is about the movement of bodies, and how you shoot that.” So, Bobby Cohen had a feeling, “that Jon would latch on right away to it, and he did. Part of the expectation of the films is that they’re very buoyant, there’s a lot of energy, the camera moves a lot and he’s someone who knows how to do that.”
The dancing, the choreography extends to camera movements with the abundant use of drones, providing exquisite angles, and grows and zooms to the most action-charged scenes.
“I think magicians are some of the most skilled storytellers in the world. It’s not about the trick, it’s more about the story they’re telling you to draw you into the trick. It’s very similar to dance, actually. A good dancer is someone who can do lots of tricks. A great dancer is someone who uses those things to tell a story in how they’re performing. So I think there are a lot of similarities there,” director Jon Chu told us that night, while evoking his Hong Kong roots and his visit to Macau when he was a teenager.
“They [Lionsgate] knew I loved magic so when the [time] came, there was this opportunity to work with this amazing cast and also shoot in Macau and London. My family is Chinese [from Hong Kong] and so I always wanted to shoot in Asia. I’ve never shot here before. So it was a great opportunity to just come and make a fun movie.”
Jon looks and dresses like a kid ready to pick up his skateboard and hit the road, and “felt frightened” when he was invited to direct such legendary stars.
Yet what Jon M. Chu achieves, masterfully, is the combination of two art worlds, which play tricks at about the same rate: magicians’ and filmmakers’. A statement that begs for Fellini’s words, and written in stone: “If I weren’t a moviemaker, I would have been a magician.”
The movie ends on New Year’s Eve, on the River Thames, in London.
My mobile is back on…

Paulo Coutinho (Text)
Jay Maidment (Photos)
MDT Exclusive

Q&A

Scott Messinger | ‘We always look to bring the world’s best entertainment here’

Sands China was in a “state of shock” by that time, in early March 2015. LVS had just announced the resignation of then CEO Edward Tracy “for health and family reasons.” Tracy was the man behind the strategy that brought together SCL and Lionsgate to produce the “Now You See Me” sequel in Macau. By the time the shooting began, Scott Messinger, senior vice president of marketing, was coordinating the operation on Sands behalf. He stood with us on the night of the shooting at Sands Macao and he actually took a minor role in the casino scene as a player at a baccarat table.

MDT – Were you betting big there, Sir [at the scene]?
Scott Messinger – (Smiles) Yes, very big since it’s not my money. I’m not much of a gamer, so it was quite easy to play with someone else’s money.

MDT – We’ve asked the producer if coming to Macau was their initiative. He told us it was a kind of a matching point, that both of you (Lionsgate and SCL) were eager to do something.
SM – Yes, I’d say that is so. As you know, we take seriously our role at Sands China in terms of helping Macau expand its image and become a great destination for leisure and business travel. And we always look to bring the world’s best entertainment here. So, whether it be great Asian acts like K-pop; Western concert stars like Rolling Stones, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, [Katy Perry]…
We are also involved in a lot of movie production. But we had not done a major Hollywood motion picture here before. And when we’d heard that the screenwriter was thinking of including Macau in the motion picture, we actively sought and went to Los Angeles and pitched our involvement in the project because we thought it would be important to Macau.

MDT – Is it causing operational issues for the casino?
SM – Certainly there’s a certain amount of inconvenience. But the Sand’s casino floor here, and also when they shoot inside the Venetian, both [are] very large casino floors. And we’re able to segment it to […] relocate some of the live tables to other sections of the casino while the shooting is going on for minimal disruption. PC