HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — From Walt Disney Studios, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Jon Turteltaub comes The Sorcerer’s Apprentice—an innovative and epic adventure about a sorcerer and his hapless apprentice who are swept into the center of an ancient conflict between good and evil.
Balthazar Blake (Nicolas Cage) is a master sorcerer in modern-day Manhattan trying to defend the city from his arch-nemesis, Maxim Horvath (Alfred Molina). Balthazar can’t do it alone, so he recruits Dave Stutler (Jay Baruchel), a seemingly average guy who demonstrates hidden potential, as his reluctant protégé. The sorcerer gives his unwilling accomplice a crash course in the art and science of magic, and together, these unlikely partners pit their powers against those of the fiercest—and most ruthless— practitioners of all time. It’ll take all the courage Dave can muster to survive his training, save the city and get the girl as he becomes "The Sorcerer’s Apprentice."
“I love the world of magic, and to be able to bring that to a contemporary audience was really appealing to me,” says Bruckheimer. “I’ve always liked stories that have a magical element, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is one of the great magical stories of all time. We thought it would be tremendously exciting to develop the core of that concept into a brand-new story set in the modern world.”
View: The Sorcerer's Apprentice Premiere Red Carpet Pictures
Set in modern-day Manhattan, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice might have some New Yorkers looking over their shoulders. “The idea is that sorcerers and the ancient art of sorcery are alive and well in present day New York City,” says Turteltaub. “It’s much more entertaining to show audiences the magic in things they recognize than to create something.” Indeed, filmmakers took full advantage of the best the Big Apple has to offer, shooting in such iconic locations as Times Square, the Chrysler Building, Wall Street, Chinatown, Greenwich Village and Rockefeller Center. Bruckheimer, Turteltaub and team transformed New York into a vortex of science and magic, home to battling sorcerers and playground for their powers.
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice comes to the big screen thanks in part to the ‘sorcerer’ himself and his search for magic. Cage, who embarks on his seventh collaboration with Bruckheimer and third with Turteltaub, says he was ready to try something new. “I was making another movie at the time and I wanted to explore a more magical and fantastic realm, where I could play a character who had mystical abilities.”
And while the film isn’t a remake of the classic Disney piece from Fantasia, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice pays proper homage to it, a fact that didn’t escape the director. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice has such a great Disney pedigree to it,” says Turteltaub, “and I knew right away that I’d be dealing with something that had to be excellent, had to be special, had to live up to its important role within Disney and the history of film. That piece from Fantasia is as iconic as any eight minutes of film that has ever been created, so to be part of that was really exciting. You think, ‘all right, where do you go with that’—and that’s where all the creativity starts jumping.”
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