Chalk it all up to sibling scribery

FILMMAKERS Chris and Jonah Nolan appear to be brothers in name only.

Chris has the scruffy pallor of a sleep-deprived father (the 36-year-old has three young children), while Jonah, 30, shows the robust physique of a gym rat. Chris favors suits and dress shirts, Jonah jeans and T-shirts. Chris speaks with an English accent, while Jonah’s is Chicago American. Chris doesn’t even use e-mail, but Jonah lives by the Internet.

People who meet them “think they are putting them on when they say they are brothers,” says David Goyer, who wrote the story and shared screenplay credit on Chris Nolan’s “Batman Begins” and wrote the story for Chris and Jonah’s screenplay for the sequel, “The Dark Knight.” “You don’t think of brothers having totally different accents and mannerisms.”

Despite all their obvious differences, though, the Nolan brothers speak with a distinct and unified screenwriting voice. Their collaborations -- “Memento,” “Batman Begins” and its upcoming sequel, and Friday’s “The Prestige” -- have accomplished what few screenwriters and directors manage: They wowed moviegoers and critics simultaneously.

“The Prestige” likely represents their greatest challenge yet. While “Memento,” which Chris adapted from Jonah’s short story “Memento Mori,” was told in reverse chronological order, it didn’t carry an exorbitant pricetag, budgeted at $5 million. “Batman Begins,” on which Jonah served as a creative consultant but had no screenplay credit, cost a fortune at $150 million, but it benefited from pervasive brand-name awareness. “The Prestige,” for its part, occupies Hollywood’s most dangerous middle ground: It’s a medium-priced (more than $40-million) adult drama based on a complicated novel unknown to most ticket buyers.

Written by English science fiction author Christopher Priest, “The Prestige” is an account of a duel between two magicians in turn-of-the-century London. Alfred Borden (played by Christian Bale) and Rupert Angier (whose first name is changed to Robert in the film and who’s played by Hugh Jackman) are each obsessed with the other’s tricks, especially iterations of a deception in which the rival magician appears to be transported across the stage -- or even across the theater -- in the blink of an eye.

The film as well as the 1996 book are anchored by the competition between the illusionists, which grows increasingly personal and cold-blooded. The book’s largely diaristic narrative also strays in several directions, with elements of a ghost story and a detour into anti-spiritualism and the birth of electricity -- all framed by a modern-day storytelling device. But the very literary ambitions that made “The Prestige” a memorable novel (it won the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) turned it into a nearly unsolvable cinematic riddle, one that would take the Nolan brothers seven years to crack.

“It’s a really tough adaptation,” says Chris. “It’s just sprawling. It’s got all this different crazy stuff in it. But you know there’s a great movie in there.” Adds Jonah: “It’s just a grind figuring it out.”

The resulting movie -- like so much of the Nolans’ earlier work -- revolves around identity, the distinct differences of personality even within the same person. (Chris’ first feature film, 1998’s “Following,” a movie about a mysterious voyeur made without his brother, as well as “Memento” and “Batman Begins” all dwell on various explorations of the self, the struggle between what a person assumes he is or wants to be and what he truly is destined to be.)

Those themes play a prominent role in “The Prestige,” but there’s not much more that can be said about the movie without giving away its plot twists. Let it be said that magic is only part of the deceit.

The movie wasn’t always going to be a joint effort of the Nolan brothers. Aaron Ryder, an executive producer of “Memento,” optioned Priest’s book for Chris. Around the time he was directing Al Pacino in the remake of the Norwegian thriller “Insomnia,” Chris tried to boil the book down.

“I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out what to do with it,” Chris says. “And then it became apparent I wasn’t going to have time to get on with it. So I told the story to Jonah -- basically described it to him to see if it sounded interesting -- and for years he wrote on it and wrote on it.”

Rather than Jonah and Chris’ spending all of their time sitting across a desk from each other bouncing around ideas, Jonah would retreat to write a draft by himself. Once he had enough to show his brother, he would ship it off to Chris, who would then make revisions.

“We are always talking,” Jonah says. “So there’s a collaboration there in terms of setting both of our minds on the task. But we write separate drafts. This has been the way that it has worked.”

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Key ingredient: dissent

BOTH Chris and Jonah say that their best work often grows out of their most spirited disagreements.

In the case of “The Prestige,” the brothers argued over the modern-day framing device (it’s out) to one character’s suicide (it’s in). “For the longest time, we couldn’t figure out what to do with the women,” Jonah says. Were they central to the story or glorified magician’s assistants? They ended up favoring the former over the latter.

Nearly every line of dialogue was a battleground.

“In terms of story and script, Chris is the most rigorous taskmaster I’ve ever worked with,” says Goyer. “It’s like the way a coach would be on an athletic team, ‘Give me 10 more!’ And you say, ‘I can’t, I can’t.’ But you can.”

“I’m almost at the point,” Jonah says, “where I have a hard time thinking an idea through without hearing his opposition to it. If it’s not opposed, it’s not a good idea. Unless there’s some friction, there is no achievement. It seems counterintuitive, but if an idea survives the combat, it’s better.”

Says Chris: “In all honesty, it works like this with the studio as well. When you are challenged on things, you have to really think about why they are important to you. You immediately know what it is you care about in a draft when somebody else criticizes it. It’s a quite healthy process in that regard. To me, the key is to talk to somebody who has no agenda. There’s no politics, no dealing with people you don’t trust. And that’s why I like to work with Jonah.”

“It’s not that I don’t have an agenda,” Jonah says, interrupting his older brother for once. “It’s that you know what my agenda is, and most of it involves getting to the essence of the story.”

As with any decision-making, though, one voice ultimately must trump the other, or else some choices would never be finalized. As with other movies, that power rests with the director, since Chris is the one who must stage the action and cut it all together.

Near the film’s conclusion, for example, one of the magicians makes a lengthy speech about the state of the world; the text remains mostly unchanged from what Jonah wrote. Those words were originally spoken by Borden, but in the end Chris had Angier speak them. Says Chris: “The director is the person who has to make it work.”

Being topped by his elder brother doesn’t seem to bother Jonah much -- “I have figured out various ways to trick him into liking my ideas,” he says.

Between “Dark Knight” revisions, Jonah is working on a screenplay about the legendary 1871 Chicago fire, largely without his brother’s assistance. “But I think I would probably find it impossible to write something without showing a draft at some point to Chris and figuring out what I’m blowing completely,” Jonah says.

The apparent lack of competition between Jonah and Chris springs in part from their backgrounds -- they never aimed for the same careers. Chris grew up wanting to be a filmmaker. Jonah dreamed of becoming a writer.

“And Chris grew up in the English school system. I grew up in the American school system,” says Jonah, who attended Georgetown while his brother went to University College London; the family, including older brother Matt, moved from England to Chicago when their father’s job changed. “So we were never able to compete on any of the standard markers that I think you need for a sibling rivalry. We couldn’t compare our SAT scores. Chris played entirely different sports than I did. There were no points of reference, which actually was good.”

Chris isn’t 100% certain it will always be that way. “When my career is in the toilet,” he says, “and Jonah’s is doing really well -- that’s when there will be a sibling rivalry.”

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john.horn@latimes.com