I spent most of last night on the set of the new Jerry Bruckheimer movie, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice starring Nicolas Cage, et al. The film is based on the poem/Fantasia segment of the same name — Cage is the Sorcerer (not named Yensid) and Alfred Molina portrays Horvath, Cage’s nemesis and fellow sorcerer. In the film, Horvath picks up a sidekick in the form of professional illusionist Drake Stone (Toby Kebbell).
The evening started off watching some of the vehicles being prepped for the evening’s filming.To start with, 2 of the 4 lanes along Sixth Avenue were closed off for about 10 blocks.
Micro-spoiler: It appears Horvath, most likely while being persued, plays a neat little trick and turns all of the New York City taxis into clones of the one he’s in. As you’ll see in the photos, there were about 20 taxis that were all re-numbered to cab number 8B42, right down to the medallion on the hood.
First, they filmed Molina and Kebbell in their taxi, becoming engulfed in taxi clones. They did this a few times (the crew had a habit of forgetting to remove the orange cones that were placed in the street to mark off the road — once, there was just a single cone left behind). This was followed by shooting another rigged taxi clone from behind, chasing it with the camera.
After a break courtesy of craft services, Molina and Kebbell were back to work, this time in a silver Mercedes SUV. By now, *all* of Sixth Avenue was closed off for the production. They did at least a couple of takes (someone forgot to remove cones the first time around) and after 6 hours of being on set, I decided to call it quits for the night. The only other thing I can offer was that they rigged up a sanitation garbage truck to film whoever was ‘driving’ it — they brought in the cab of a semi to pull it.
See the photos after the jump. Continue reading…
