David Blaine on Being Inspired by Harry Houdini, Reveals the Stunt He's Most Proud of & More | THR Video - video Dailymotion

The Hollywood Reporter

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

David Blaine on Being Inspired by Harry Houdini, Reveals the Stunt He's Most Proud of & More | THR Video

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