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Balthazar Blake (Nicolas Cage) is a master sorcerer in modern-day Manhattan trying to defend the city from his arch-nemesis, Maxim Horvath (Alfred Molina). Balthazar can’t do it alone, so he recruits Dave Stutler (Jay Baruchel), a seemingly average guy who demonstrates hidden potential, as his reluctant protégé. The sorcerer gives his unwilling accomplice a crash course in the art and science of magic, and together, these unlikely partners work to stop the forces of darkness. It’ll take all the courage Dave can muster to survive his training, save the city and get the girl as he becomes The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
Walt Disney Studios, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Jon Turteltaub, the creators of the “National Treasure” franchise, present The Sorcerer's Apprentice -- an innovative and epic comedy adventure about a sorcerer and his hapless apprentice who are swept into the center of an ancient conflict between good and evil.
Balthazar Blake (Nicolas Cage) is a master sorcerer in modern-day Manhattan trying to defend the city from his arch-nemesis, Maxim Horvath (Alfred Molina). Balthazar can't do it alone, so he recruits Dave Stutler (Jay Baruchel), a seemingly average guy who demonstrates hidden potential, as his reluctant protégé.
The sorcerer gives his unwilling accomplice a crash course in the art and science of magic, and together, these unlikely partners work to stop the forces of darkness. It'll take all the courage Dave can muster to survive his training, save the city and get the girl as he becomes The Sorcerer's Apprentice. The screenplay is by Matt Lopez and Doug Miro & Carlo Bernard from a screen story by Matt Lopez and Larry Konner & Mark Rosenthal.
A Magical Journey Through Time
“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” has sparked the imagination of some of the most creative minds in history—from Nicolas Cage, Jon Turteltaub and Jerry Bruckheimer to composer Paul Dukas and Walt Disney.
But it all started with a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a great German writer, thinker and natural scientist who penned “Der Zauberlehrling,” the enduring work of poetry, in 1797. Goethe’s 14-stanza poem is narrated by the apprentice himself, who, upon being left to his own devices by his old “Hexenmeister,” takes it upon himself to arrogantly demonstrate his own magical arts. The apprentice orders an old broomstick to wrap itself in rags, grow a head and two arms and, with a bucket, prepare a bath for him.
The living broomstick fills not only the tub, but every bowl and cup, and the apprentice has forgotten the magic word to make it stop, resulting in a massive flood. The apprentice takes an axe to the poor old broom, splitting it in twain…resulting in two living broomsticks. The apprentice is finally bailed out, quite literally, by the return of the old hexenmeister, who quickly sends the broom back into the closet from whence it came, with an imprecation that it will return only when he, the true master, calls it forth once again to do his bidding.
A hundred years later, the poem was adapted into a hugely popular 10-minute symphonic piece, “L’apprenti sorcier,” by the French composer Paul Dukas. An immediate success for its brilliant musical coloration and rhythmic excellence, and its wonderfully jaunty “march of the broomsticks,” the scherzo has truly stood the test of time and is, to a popular audience anyway, Dukas’ most enduring work. Walt Disney discovered it some four decades after that, creating an animated version for his immortal “Fantasia,” casting none other than Mickey Mouse in the title role of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” In the summer of 1937, while dining alone at Chasen’s restaurant in Beverly Hills, the still-youthful king of movie animation invited the famed conductor Leopold Stokowski to join him, and something extraordinary was conjured up between them.
Walt Disney had already utilized music as a foundation of his animated film series, Silly Symphonies, and hoped to collaborate with Stokowski on a cartoon short based on Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
The idea of putting classical music to animated segments was later expanded, ultimately creating the wildly risky but wonderfully ambitious “Fantasia.” The 125-minute film—unusually long even today for an animated feature—opened to great fanfare on November 13, 1940, at the Broadway Theatre in New York City. The music was enhanced by a multichannel sound system, especially developed for the film, called Fantasound, and “Fantasia” became the first commercial motion picture ever to be exhibited with stereophonic sound. The film now stands as an eternal testament to Walt Disney’s artistic ambitions and unshakable will to advance the art form of both animation and motion pictures by creating something which audiences had never before seen nor heard. “Fantasia” is one of the films selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” episode is generally considered the best and most beloved episode of all.
Now, 69 years after the release of “Fantasia,” Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Films have created a fresh story for the big screen. While inspired by those that came before it, 2010’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is an all-new live-action adventure. The message remains simple and fun, yet timeless and profound. “What’s great about the story is this little lesson about cutting corners, doing things the easy way, trying to fulfill this desire we all have to grow up a little too fast,” says Turteltaub.
The living broomstick fills not only the tub, but every bowl and cup, and the apprentice has forgotten the magic word to make it stop, resulting in a massive flood. The apprentice takes an axe to the poor old broom, splitting it in twain…resulting in two living broomsticks. The apprentice is finally bailed out, quite literally, by the return of the old hexenmeister, who quickly sends the broom back into the closet from whence it came, with an imprecation that it will return only when he, the true master, calls it forth once again to do his bidding.
A hundred years later, the poem was adapted into a hugely popular 10-minute symphonic piece, “L’apprenti sorcier,” by the French composer Paul Dukas. An immediate success for its brilliant musical coloration and rhythmic excellence, and its wonderfully jaunty “march of the broomsticks,” the scherzo has truly stood the test of time and is, to a popular audience anyway, Dukas’ most enduring work. Walt Disney discovered it some four decades after that, creating an animated version for his immortal “Fantasia,” casting none other than Mickey Mouse in the title role of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” In the summer of 1937, while dining alone at Chasen’s restaurant in Beverly Hills, the still-youthful king of movie animation invited the famed conductor Leopold Stokowski to join him, and something extraordinary was conjured up between them.
Walt Disney had already utilized music as a foundation of his animated film series, Silly Symphonies, and hoped to collaborate with Stokowski on a cartoon short based on Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
The idea of putting classical music to animated segments was later expanded, ultimately creating the wildly risky but wonderfully ambitious “Fantasia.” The 125-minute film—unusually long even today for an animated feature—opened to great fanfare on November 13, 1940, at the Broadway Theatre in New York City. The music was enhanced by a multichannel sound system, especially developed for the film, called Fantasound, and “Fantasia” became the first commercial motion picture ever to be exhibited with stereophonic sound. The film now stands as an eternal testament to Walt Disney’s artistic ambitions and unshakable will to advance the art form of both animation and motion pictures by creating something which audiences had never before seen nor heard. “Fantasia” is one of the films selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” episode is generally considered the best and most beloved episode of all.
Now, 69 years after the release of “Fantasia,” Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Films have created a fresh story for the big screen. While inspired by those that came before it, 2010’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is an all-new live-action adventure. The message remains simple and fun, yet timeless and profound. “What’s great about the story is this little lesson about cutting corners, doing things the easy way, trying to fulfill this desire we all have to grow up a little too fast,” says Turteltaub.
Locations
“The idea is that sorcerers and the ancient art of sorcery are alive and well in present-day New York City,” says director Jon Turteltaub. “It’s much more entertaining to show audiences the magic in things they recognize than to create something.
“New York City is an extraordinary place,” Turteltaub continues, “and New Yorkers are so busy achieving, they often don’t actually notice what is here. If you stop and look around, there are amazing things everywhere. If you walk through Manhattan one day, and instead of looking straight ahead you look up instead, you will see the most amazing architectural details on those buildings. New York is an entire universe.”
For its adoring inhabitants and millions of visitors, New York is truly a city like no other. It has, of course, been the backdrop for countless films, including, now, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
“New York has everything,” says the Detroit-born producer Jerry Bruckheimer, “wonderful high rises, a fast pace, the greatest restaurants in the world, the centers of publishing and finance. It will never look as magical as it does in ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.’”
“This movie is a love letter to New York City,” says Montreal native Jay Baruchel. “Anyone who’s spent any time in New York knows that it is truly the world’s capital. In the film, when we’re driving in Times Square or on Sixth Avenue in the car chase, we’re actually doing it. Everybody, including my mother, has been blown away, gobsmacked and awestruck by the size, grandeur and detail. People are going to see our movie and get taken away into a New York that they recognize, but have never really seen before.”
Baruchel also got a kick out of shooting at New York University in Greenwich Village for very particular reasons. “It was amazing for me, because I’d always dreamt of going to NYU Film School and could never float the bill. So many great movies have come as a result of that institution, and it’s so seared into the collective consciousness.”
“It’s an incredibly photogenic city,” says London-born Alfred Molina, “and has such a dramatic presence and throbbing life. When the magic happens, it happens in a city which is magical in itself, so there’s a double whammy.”
“I’ve never spent much time in New York before,” admits Australia-born Teresa Palmer, “but there is a magical energy there that just feels so alive and energetic. It’s the sort of city where dreams really do come true, and I think the film definitely lends itself to that.”
Adds Toby Kebbell, “Although New York is so much younger than London, where I live, you can have all these amazing things going on right in front of your face, and you just brush it off, because with all of the millions of people milling about, your brain doesn’t even register them.”
“The goal of this movie,” says director of photography Bojan Bazelli, who originally hails from far-off Serbia, “is to create ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ New York. We are not trying to particularly change the look of the city, we are embracing it, and then blending it with our own magical vision. The energy between light and dark are in almost every shot, and we used the latest technology and most creative people to give audiences a New York that’s fresh, different and alive with magic.”
Of course, shooting in NYC has its challenges, including vehicular and human traffic. But filmmakers ultimately found a wide range of real locations with extraordinary history behind them. Locations spanned the city, from Times Square and Midtown Manhattan to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. Production designer Naomi Shohan worked her magic in Tribeca, creating the exterior of the Arcana Cabana in the 1869 Grosvenor Building on White Street.
Duking It Out in the Arcana Cabana
The first action sequence of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is a spectacular sorcerer’s duel between arch enemies Balthazar Blake and Maxim Horvath in the Arcana Cabana, Balthazar’s decidedly bizarre old curiosity shop in Lower Manhattan, its spooky confines stuffed to the rafters with all manner of bric-a-brac. The magical battle is witnessed by 10-year-old Dave Stutler, who has been lured to the shop by a runaway love note he penned to young Becky.
The Arcana Cabana battle is the first time we see sorcery in action in the film, from Merlin’s dragon ring, which very magically comes to life and walks onto Dave’s finger, to Horvath’s emergence from the Grimhold, and then Balthazar and Horvath using the full range of their powers to cast spells, move objects and, in essence, blow the place to bits before they’re both sucked into a large urn—where they will remain until both return into each other’s (and Dave’s) lives in a decade.
“The Grimhold,” explains Nicolas Cage, “is a prison for the very, very scary and wicked Morganians, and the more evil the Morganian, the deeper into the circles of this sort of Russian nesting doll they go. Morgana is in the center. The obstacle is that it keeps getting taken, and every time that happens, Horvath has the ability to open it and release another very dangerous force of Morganian evil.”
The Arcana Cabana sequence provides a perfect example of how interdepartmental cooperation was essential to creating a compelling and believable sequence. As with every other foot of film, the scene combined the efforts of director Jon Turteltaub along with the other magicians of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” His key creative team included masterful director of photography Bojan Bazelli, production designer Naomi Shohan, costume designer Michael Kaplan, visual effects supervisor John Nelson, legendary special effects supervisor John Frazier and his on-set coordinator, Mark Hawker, and stunt coordinator George Marshall Ruge.
“This scene establishes the magic that sorcerers are capable of doing,” says Nelson. “We see plasma generated and fired for the first time, fires are created through pyrokinesis, there are concussion blasts, matter is moved through telekinesis, and there’s a gravity inversion spell by Balthazar which sends Horvath hurtling up to the ceiling. It’s a true collaborative effort of practical effects, stunts, the actors, camera, direction.”
In the last decade, Nelson has earned three Oscar® nominations, winning for his work on 2000’s “Gladiator.” His professional philosophy is straightforward. “We do visual effects for things that are too dangerous, too expensive or impossible to do,” says Nelson. “My idea of a perfect visual effect is one that starts with a practical effect—a real event that can be photographed—and then goes into something that’s amazing that looks real, ending with another practical effect. We have a great group of people under physical effects supervisor John Frazier working on set, and they’re terrific at providing what’s known as ‘floor effects’ to make everything as real as possible. Then we take it someplace else.”
“With this film, we knew there would be a really great mix of CGI and live mechanical effects,” says Frazier. “That’s the way Jon Turteltaub likes to shoot. He wants as much of it live as possible, and then enhance it with CGI. Audiences are now so sophisticated, they don’t want to see stuff like what we did in the ’60s and ’70s that was totally mechanical. But on the other hand, sometimes when something is done entirely CGI, it looks like a cartoon rather than a movie.
“We did a lot of live effects on ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,’” continues Frazier. “Magic has always been about smoke and mirrors, and we have both in the movie!”
Refining the Car Chase
“We have huge adventures all throughout Manhattan, including a magical car chase,” says director Jon Turteltaub. “It’s a Jerry Bruckheimer movie; you’ve got to have a car chase. Are you kidding? You sign a piece of paper when you work with Jerry: ‘Yes, sir, I’ll do a car chase.’”
“We not only wanted a car chase even more exciting than the one that Jon directed in London on ‘National Treasure: Book of Secrets,’” says Bruckheimer, “we wanted one the likes of which has never been seen on screen before.”
“Everything takes on a more magical flare than you would normally anticipate from a car chase sequence,” says Nicolas Cage. “Cars morph into other cars, they go into a mirror world at one point. They’re operating by a different list of physics and rules than you would normally imagine a car chase to have.”
Turteltaub says the film’s rooting in sorcery weighed heavily on the scene. “In prepping the sequence, we had to think, ‘All right, if I were a sorcerer, how would I have a car chase?’ Your car doesn’t have to stay your car and your environment doesn’t have to stay your environment. In typical car chases, your obstacles are the other cars on the road, the environment you’re in and the other person. But if you’re a sorcerer, you have the added element of being able to change all of those things. So what happens when the car you’re following stops being a slow truck and turns into a Ferrari? And what if that Ferrari turns into a garbage truck and tries to crush you?”
The chase begins with the Merlinean heroes in Balthazar’s fashionable ride of choice, a gleaming 1935 Rolls-Royce Phantom. This magnificent artifact of a truly golden age turned heads everywhere, with locals and tourists posing for photos in front of the vehicle, as if it were one of the stars of the movie. It’s owner? Nicolas Cage, a noted vintage-car enthusiast.
“Most Rolls-Royce cars are special because they were handmade in limited quantities in England,” says Dan Dietrich, who maintained the Phantom throughout production. “But what’s special about this one is that it’s one of a kind. There are no other vehicles exactly like it. Rolls-Royce made about 2,000 Phantoms, and of that, only 19 were made as coupes. Back then, the cost of an average Rolls-Royce was several times what a house would cost, so to make a coupe, you had to be really wealthy.
“When you purchased a Phantom back in the 1930s,” Dietrich explains, “you basically got an engine and a chassis, and then it was up to you to choose the coach maker to build the body. And what makes this one so special is that the original owner bought the body out of the only Rolls-Royce dealership in Montreal and picked a body that didn’t exist before.”
The car chase scene called for picture car coordinator Mike Antunez to acquire a large number of vehicles, including an exact replica of the priceless Phantom—utilized as a kind of stunt double for the real car for the chase scene.
“The replica was pretty good,” says Dietrich. “It’s pretty incredible that it was built in only six weeks.”
In the chase scene, which required three weeks of combined first and second unit filming over long and often rainy nights, Balthazar and Dave’s sorcery morphs the Phantom into a sleek, modern Mercedes McLaren SUV and then incongruously (and mistakenly) into a 1976 Pinto. Horvath, on his end, begins the chase in a Mercedes GL500, which transforms first into a New York yellow taxicab, and then into a speedier Ferrari F30 and, finally, into a weirdly threatening garbage truck.
The "Fantasia" Scene
In his underground lab, trying to hurry for a date with Becky for which he’s waited a decade, Dave breaks the first rule of sorcery: “Magic is not to be used for personal gain or shortcuts.” In an effort to quickly tidy up the lab, Dave begins to manipulate mops, brooms, buckets and even sponges to perform his chores for him…with disastrous results!
“‘Fantasia’s’ ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ is one of the greatest works of Disney animation, so we had to be very careful with how we adapted it,” says producer Jerry Bruckheimer. “We didn’t want to ruin the magic, but create new magic as a loving homage to the original.”
Says director Jon Turteltaub, “One of the biggest mistakes a director can make is to take on a piece in which every critic in the world will be judging you against one of the greatest things ever made. We’re taking eight of the most famous minutes in movie history, and what are our choices? We could either wisely just make a little wink towards it and then move on and try not to compete. Or we can really go for it. Let’s update, let’s do our version relative to this movie, with the technology that we now have—and for me, this is the key element—keeping the moral the same.
“Paul Dukas’ music was the inspiration for the episode in ‘Fantasia,’ while the original story from the Goethe poem was the inspiration to the music,” Turteltaub continues. “So with an enormous number of people and resources, we put together what we hope is a really entertaining, fun experience which really takes the essence of Walt Disney’s ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ and gives you our version, which is the essence of the fable, the Goethe poem, the Dukas music and the Disney animation.”
Jay Baruchel was challenged and honored by the task at hand, but never intimidated. “It’s a huge honor and a tremendous responsibility to walk in Mickey Mouse’s shoes. Those are pretty big shoes to fill, and I wondered how to do my own thing and make it funny without stepping on or moving away from what made that sequence so iconic in the first place. For me to be in this movie, and be allowed to put my stamp on and at the same time pay homage to one of the most beloved sequences in film history, wasn’t lost on me. It was an absolute treat, incredibly fun, and I loved having all those mops and brooms kick my butt. It was just magical. It was hard not to be a kid in that situation, man. I grew up watching that scene in ‘Fantasia,’ so after getting to do my own version of it, I could retire right now.”
Part of what gave Baruchel so much impetus and creativity in his own interpretation of the scene was his intrinsic and thoughtful understanding of the tale’s essence. “Adam and Eve couldn’t help but eat the apple, right? It’s the old ‘curiosity- killed-the-cat’ thing. Trying to find the quickest, easiest way of getting something done is an ambition that we all share, and we’ve all had that come back to bite us in the butt cheeks, right? The sequence is about somebody trying to cut out the middleman, and paying a huge price for it.” Although the final version of Paul Dukas’ timeless music was freshly adapted by composer Trevor Rabin, a traditional version of the piece was played on set during the sequence’s filming, not only for atmosphere, but also for specific timing purposes. And although the live-action feature version doesn’t mimic the animated original, there are a few direct references—the shadow cast on the lab wall by Dave wearing his hoodie looks curiously like the one cast by Mickey Mouse in his peaked sorcerer’s cap.
Creating a City Within a City
For “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” production designer Naomi Shohan was tapped by filmmakers to highlight the iconic magnificence of New York City and find the hidden magic as well. “In the early stages, we talked about insinuating that there has always been a presence of sorcery in Manhattan,” says Shohan, “and we talked about where we might find that. In Manhattan, you come upon these miraculous buildings and interiors everywhere you look. So, I was hoping to establish a kind of undercurrent of possibility.
“The Victorian buildings from the turn of the 20th century were particularly beautiful,” Shohan continues, “and they have a poetry about them that lends itself beautifully to sorcery. Other sets have to do with the infrastructure under Manhattan which was being built in the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, which we incorporate in the underground training lab set. I tried to create atmosphere that’s at once realistic and has to do with a kind of grubby, visceral feeling of New York City, the shoulder-rubbing, intense density of it all. In New York, you can walk down the street, open a door, and find yourself in a new world…so I liked the idea of walking between worlds.”
Shohan, whose credits include “I Am Legend,” “Tears of the Sun” and “Training Day,” also designed sets of extraordinary detail which were either constructed inside of soundstages at Steiner Studios (site of the former Brooklyn Navy Yard) or within the confines of the 1907 Bedford Armory, also in Brooklyn.
The massive, meticulously detailed underground lab/sorcerer training room set is the site of some of the film’s most important sequences, including the “Fantasia” sequence, and was unquestionably Shohan’s most ambitious structure created for the film. “In the script, the lab where Dave Stutler conducts his experiments was described as a basement room somewhere,” says Shohan. “From that, I extrapolated that it could be really deep underground, because he’s working with incredibly high-voltage equipment, which needs a protective space. Earth is the best insulator, and New York really does have some amazing subterranean spaces which are usually off-limits—beneath Grand Central Station, there’s a switching station which dates from the World War II era, and under City Hall, there’s an incredibly beautiful subway station that’s out of use, arched and very elegant. Our set needed to be interesting enough to sustain many scenes.”
What Shohan created was an old subway turnaround, redolent of old New York, converted into a makeshift laboratory, its interior graced with an arched and tiled dome ceiling, cast-iron walkways and staircases and rusted old elevators. For Dave’s lab, the interior is tricked out with scientific paraphernalia, a plasma generator, cages filled with obsolete scientific materials, two huge, rusted generators, Jurassic-age computers with reel-to-reel disks and other detritus of the generations.
A crucial piece of Shohan’s design for the underground lab was the Merlin Circle with its seven domains—Space Time, Motion, Matter, Elements, Transformation, Mind and, most importantly, in the center, Gold/Love—which Balthazar conjures up from the cobblestoned floor of the lab. Shohan and her team did considerable research, even consulting a genuine Wiccan to figure out the symbols.
“One of the coolest sets in the movie is the Arcana Cabana,” says director Jon Turteltaub, “which is a store of antiquities, obscurities, oddities and all the things that Balthazar’s collected over his millennia of existence. In our heads, it was sort of like the Staples of sorcery, so that when a guy needs a special ring, some special dust and the eye of a newt, he goes to the Arcana Cabana.”
The Clothing Alchemist
Filmmakers called on Michael Kaplan to create the centuries-spanning wardrobe for “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” The pro, whose credits include “Armageddon,” “Pearl Harbor” and “Flashdance” was up for the challenge.
“The characters in ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ were so much fun and so diversified,” says Kaplan. “There were contemporary clothes, medieval, Chinese armor—I wanted each character to have their own color palette and for each one to be recognized immediately not only from their faces, but from what they’re wearing.
“Balthazar Blake is mysterious and timeless,” continues Kaplan, “kind of a dark figure even though he’s a good guy. I saw him as a shadowy figure, always in the same clothes throughout the movie—his uniform. I thought about sorcerers and their long robes and imagined that he should have a long leather coat instead, with a leather vest beneath. I wanted it to have a period feeling but not any specific period, with elements he had picked up through the ages, some never really seen: a necklace with amulets from different time periods, keys he could have used in the last century, small lockets with old hand-painted pictures of loved ones he might have left behind, stones which bring luck of protection, a shark’s tooth in a little pouch, a sun pin he wears on his shoulder, a bracelet with cobalt stones.”
Kaplan worked with the actor to perfect the look. “Nicolas Cage was very specific about some of the things he wanted as part of that costume. Balthazar’s sorcerer ring, which might date back to the time of Merlin, is a green diamond, the rarest of all diamonds, which Nic feels is very empowering. Balthazar wears rings on every finger, and each one was made for Nic, because we needed so many multiples. Most of them look ancient and as if they’re from different parts of the world.
“But I didn’t want Balthazar to be a character who, when he walks down the street in New York, gets stared at like he was from another planet,” continues Kaplan. “He does look a bit eccentric, but by New York standards, it’s within the realm of acceptability.”
Everyone on set knew when Nicolas Cage—or at least his long coat—was approaching, from the incredibly earthy smell of the leather. Ten copies of the coat were handcrafted. “Most of the costumes were custom-made,” says Kaplan, “including the hats. Balthazar’s hat was based on a fedora, but we adjusted the height to make it into a quasi-peaked sorcerer’s hat.” Balthazar’s hat is emblazoned with crescent-moon and star pins, an obvious tip of the brim to Sorcerer Mickey’s famous headwear.
Dave Stutler’s look was a little less eccentric. “I wanted Dave to seem a brilliant but scatterbrained NYU student who was more interested in science than clothes,” says Kaplan. “So his clothes don’t necessary always match. Dave has his little uniform of his hoodie, plaid shirt, blue jeans and sneakers, just stuff that he throws on every day. I wanted it to be cinematic, but not to look like he’d put a lot of time or care into it.”
Kaplan dressed Teresa Palmer’s Becky with effortless elegance in a student-like combination of sweaters, parkas, pants, scarves, blouses, skirts and boots. Alfred Molina’s Maxim Horvath, however, harkens back to the ’20s, the era in which he was imprisoned in the Grimhold; he wears the bowler hat and spats to prove it.
“Horvath is very dapper, very well dressed, always in beautiful suits and coats,” says Kaplan. “I tried to find fabrics that had metallic threads in them. It just added a level of mystique and I thought, perhaps, that his alchemy would work better if there was a fabric which was a conductor of electricity. He has an amazing fur-fringed coat with this material. Horvath wears a different homburg in each one of his scenes.”
 Production notes provided by Walt Disney Pictures. |
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The Sorcerer's Apprentice