American magician and mentalist David Blaine sat down with The Hollywood Reporter during his THR photoshoot and dishes on studying the magic of Harry Houdini, how his insane near-death stunts began and the exciting part about being a magician.
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00:00what i love about magic especially with cards is i love the way they feel like i love the way cards
00:06just move in your hands i love the weight i love the size it's two and a half inches by three and
00:11a half inches it fits perfectly in the palm and there's so many different things that you could
00:17work on with a deck of cards there's 52 cards in the deck 52 weeks in a year there's four suits
00:23four seasons 13 cards per suit 13 lunar months per year if you count every single pip there's 364
00:32plus the joker makes it 365. so there's just so many little bits of information stored in a deck
00:40of cards to this day i'm not even kidding i fall asleep almost every night with a deck of cards in
00:46my hand or next to me and i wake up with cards stuck to me all the time
01:01there's so many fascinating figures that in the history of magic and if you look at all the old
01:06posters and all the art from the last few centuries it's incredible i was obsessed with studying harry
01:14houdini and there was a poster that he had made that he died before he was able to do it it was
01:18him buried alive and i said um what if we do it but i'm buried under water i'm in a coffin but i'm under
01:27six tons of water so it's a double a coffin with a coffin that's see-through on top that's full of
01:33water and then i'm buried there and what if i did it for a week instead of a month i'll last a week i'll
01:39lay in there with nothing no food just water and a trucker's tube you know that they use when they
01:46go to the bath and i'll fast beforehand and i'll do it so we went to queens where houdini was buried
01:54and there was there was a a funeral shop and i bought a coffin and i just started sleeping in it
01:59just to practice so i'd stay in the coffin one two three and then i oh well obviously i won't be able
02:06to eat obviously i'll need a a trucker's catheter a trucker's tube it's called and uh and i would
02:13need about four and a half liters of water a day and yeah should be doable i i practiced i did four
02:20days and then i was like i can do this and that was the beginning of the stunts
02:36the stunt that i'm probably most proud of is the balloons because i was able to show that one to
03:00my daughter she was 10 years old i wanted to give her do something that was happy and colorful and
03:06and nice and and and because i i stopped doing them when she was one and a half because i was injured
03:11and i said i'm never doing another stunt i stopped for a decade almost and then i want to give my daughter
03:18something beautiful and show her what what what i love doing so i put together a rig of balloons and i
03:25rode the balloons up to about no up to 25 000 feet and then released then jumped down landed and
03:33was brought to her so that's probably my favorite one the exciting part of being a magician is you're
03:38always practicing you're always learning you're always improving and there's no end to it so
03:44lots of the tricks that i do i've been doing for 30 plus years but i'm still changing them all the time
03:50and they're still evolving so i think there's just no end and i think the reason whenever i'm stopped
03:56or people ask me to do magic i always love to do it it's because even though i love the practice of it
04:01i'm also improving slightly always trying to make it slightly better
04:12wait george can you give me exactly half of the day
04:14no but i'm saying like uh this way because you want me to rip it yeah to hold that hold it yeah
04:28no let's check you try to
04:37seems pretty tough yeah i know i can't i can't rip it here's something i worked on for a while
04:44so now we're off exactly high i never imagined a deck of cards would take me around the world and
04:56i'd meet all these incredible people and i find all these amazing magicians that i only imagined or had
05:04read about and i would be able to learn from them i'm able to to to to entertain anywhere if i'm sitting
05:10on a train if i'm on an airplane if i'm on in a cafe whatever it yeah no it's the i never ever
05:16imagined a deck of cards would do that it brought me over the 52 cards literally brought me around
05:22the world and changed my life in the best possible way the world may have changed but magic is the same
05:27by the way the more technology advances the more ai and the more the the more this becomes relevant i
05:33feel it's like people are looking for something that they you know that defies logic but they know this
05:38is really happening in front of them so i think magic is like kind of perfect for that