The new documentary Tim’s Vermeer gave us the rare opportunity to interview Teller by himself. Of the magic duo Penn & Teller, getting just Teller is almost unheard of, and not because of the silent partner thing. He’s spoken on talk shows, magic documentaries and “The SImpsons” voiceovers, but rarely does major press rounds. Penn Jillette often does his own interviews, be it for “The Celebrity Apprentice” or The Aristocrats documentary. Jillette is involved in Tim’s Vermeer and even narrates it, but Teller gets solo directing credit.
Tim Jemison is an inventor based in Texas who fields many various obsessions. The subject of this movie is his attempt to recreate a painting by Johannes Vermeer, who achieved photorealistic paintings. Jemison invented a device that let him trace real images with a paintbrush, a la camera obscura, over the course of 130 painstakingly detailed days after years and years of research. Teller shared with us his own obsessions and how he put a focus on Jemison’s project for the film.
CraveOnline: How many assholes today made a joke about doing a silent interview?
Teller: Nobody, actually. It may be that the class of people that writes about film is a little better than the class of people that writes about TV or live shows, I don’t know, but people have been very respectful. It was a good joke though. I appreciate it.
You’re welcome. I think the secret is out after a number of your appearances. Tim is so meticulous with the Vermeer. Are you that meticulous with magic?
Mm-hmm. You have to be. You have to be because magic is a very unforgiving form. There’s not this is good, this is pretty good, this is not so good in magic. It’s either a miracle or it’s crap. It’s either an amazing, uplifting, heart-stopping event or it’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen and it’s an on/off switch. So it means that magic has to be prepared, rehearsed and perfected to a degree that I think very few other art forms do. Really, if a pianist misses a note, maybe jazz aficionados notice it. If you see where the dove is coming from, it ain’t magic.
Your only appearance in the film was going to be in the Queen sketch that got cut?
Yeah, you see a little reflection. I think you see me leading Martin Mull into the warehouse, into the loft so we’ll call that my Alfred Hitchcock appearance.
What was the Queen sketch going to be if Tim hadn’t gotten in to view the painting?
We actually shot it and I imagine the thing will be in the DVD in its entirety. The Queen sketch was basically well, if the Queen won’t let him look at her old stinky painting then Tim’s just going to paint a better one. That was the theme of that.
Did you have 130 days of footage of Tim painting?
Oh yeah. We had up to nine cameras on him at all times while he was doing the painting. This meant that when we boiled the footage down to only the usable stuff, we were down to a mere 2400 hours of footage, which is I think a rather high ratio for a movie that’s a hour and 20 minutes long. So yes.
Tim’s Vermeer is a lean 80 minutes. Did you have a longer cut?
Here’s the thing. What made this movie hard to do was because the topic and the process was so fascinating in all of its particulars. What we finally came down to was saying, “Let’s just make anything that doesn’t bear directly on Tim painting a Vermeer, let’s leave that part out.” So there’s all sorts of fascinating stuff that Tim discovered that you don’t see in it. We’ve presented only the very simplest version of the process that relies on Tim’s key invention.
Tim’s key invention was he came up with a way to match absolutely accurately the brightness of a scene with the brightness of the paint on the canvas. There were many other things that he had to do in order to get that picture onto the canvas. We focused on just that to keep it lean and mean, because after all, the danger of this thing is it’s going to be a movie about somebody painting a painting. This runs a massive risk of being the most tedious thing you’ve ever seen. So we really tried to keep it moving that way.
Also fortunately, Tim is funny. And also, Tim is suffering. Funny people are good and suffering people are funny so it was a good that we had Time undergoing all that crazy stuff with his wry sense of humor. It helped a lot. In fact it helped so much that at one point the painting sequence was just too funny. I went back in and I put some of the tedious stuff in there just so the audience would have to really feel how much pain Tim’s going through to get every one of those tiny little perfect strokes in there.
Is the film really the reason Tim finished at all?
I think if we hadn’t been doing a film, Tim would have satisfied himself that he could have done the process but I bet he wouldn’t have carried it all the way through to the end of the painting.
You really think he would have given up?
I don’t think he would have given up. I think he would have said, “Okay, I see this process works. I’m correct about this. My hypothesis is correct.” But because we were doing the film, he felt not only do I see that this process works, but I’m going to make this into a work of art.
