Now You See Me 2 screenwriter Ed Solomon has penned some outrageous scripts, more than one of which has ended up launching a series or franchise. From Bill & Ted to Men in Black to Charlie’s Angels, his stories are created to be both funny and fantastical, and ultimately entertaining for the audience.

Ed Solomon. Photo by Jonathan Wenk

His film Now You See Me was released in 2013. Directed by Louis Leterrier (Clash of the Titans) and with an all-star cast, NYSM followed the story of “The Four Horsemen” – a team of magicians who used their skills to do the seemingly impossible, robbing a bank across the world from the comfort of their performance venue. Showering the audience with the spoils of that heist and continuing to use their illusions to right the wrongs of the wealthy, the story took on a Robin Hood element and relevance in a social context.

But that wasn’t exactly the intention of the writer.

Now, three years later, the sequel (this time with director Jon M. Chu at the helm) sees The Four Horsemen in play again, with a whole new set of tricks up their sleeves and bad guy(s) to defeat. And also with one key character change – Isla Fisher’s Henley was replaced by Lula (played by Lizzy Caplan), due to Fisher’s pregnancy during filming.

What do you do when the whole point of your movie – which is to have your audience suspend their belief for a little while and just enjoy a wild ride – gets lost in a flurry of over analysis? And how do you start over when your first draft of a sequel is done and you need to write out a major character?

Creative Screenwriting recently spoke with the very candid Solomon about these challenges, as well as the enjoyment he took from writing about magic with a dream cast to inhabit his characters.

Woody Harrelson as Merritt McKinney in Now You See Me 2. Photo by Jay Maidment – © 2016 – Lionsgate

Was the experience of writing a movie about magic fun or challenging?

There were times when it was fun and there were certainly times where I was really feeling grateful, mostly for the opportunity to work with the type of talent that I did. In going through scenes with people like Woody (Harrelson) or Jesse (Eisenberg) or Mark (Ruffalo), those scenes themselves became better and better. I really learned a lot about writing just from doing that.

Mark and I were roommates in London when we were making the movie. We’d have these long talks, not just about the specific scenes that we were working on but just about scene work in general. When you’re working up close with people who are really at the top of their game in their own craft, it makes your craft have to rise to keep up.

I would think of the character or part of what the character was going through – whether it was Mark or Woody or Jesse or Lizzy or Dave (Franco) – and then I would run the scene with the actors and they would bring so much more to it. The way they would work was at such a deep level – none of these people are hacks, you know? They’re all really serious about their craft and have a point of view about their art. Because of that, they don’t just come up to you and say “Hey, tell me what to say and tell me where and when to say it”. They really were trying to get to the deeper parts of everything.

Funnily enough, it was actually the more super experienced people like Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine who were like “Tell me where you want me to go and when you want me to say it and I’ll do it”. And they’re great – they can do that as well.

Was writing of the sequel already underway when you found out that Isla Fisher’s character would need to be replaced?

Yes, it was after Pete Chiarelli and I had initially done the first version of the story. So we already had a draft written when Isla said that she was pregnant. It turned out that she’d be 8 months along while we were shooting the movie so there wasn’t a way that they could do it safely. Obviously certain things are a lot more important than whether or not your movie gets to be made the way you imagine it!

Isla Fisher as Henley Reeves and Jesse Eisenberg as J. Daniel Atlas in the original Now You See Me. Photo by Barry Wetcher, SMPSP – © 2013 Summit Entertainment, LLC. All rights reserved.

How did it change your approach to the story and what kind of rewrite did it require?

We had to really think through what we wanted to do. The first thought was, “What can we do to get Isla in the story?” We tried to come up with a lot of different storylines that would have her in briefly, but they all felt forced and fake.

So then it was a matter of “OK, is there any way to use this, inject some life in it and make it fun?” and “What opportunity does this give us?” Lizzy was fantastic and it was sad to lose Isla as well – it wasn’t like one was better than the other.

This sort of thing happens all the time in movies. A gigantic thing comes in and changes what you were initially planning. In this case, it was a blessing in one of our main characters’ lives – it was a good thing.

Sometimes it’s not a good thing. Sometimes it’s that there’s a hurricane and we can longer shoot in that part of the world. Suddenly it’s a situation of “Where are we going to film?” and you have to change your entire location, which then changes your plot.

Sometimes you lose an actor for a different reason or all of a sudden the movie that you thought was going to cost $90 million is going to cost $63 million and you have to change much of the way you were conceiving it. These things happen all the time in movies.

The key is not just how to keep your dexterity and be able to make changes on the fly, but how do you balance – when all the pressure is on – what is important to keep and what is OK to lose. And how do you know what are the important facets of all of these ideas. Basically, you have to know how to judge what is important and what is not and what to fight for and what not.

When we realized that Isla couldn’t be in the movie, we had to figure out what was important and what we were looking to do. We knew we wanted to have a woman, because the movie was very light on women and we wanted to have more of a female balance. But aside from that, we tried to think of how we could use the situation to bring something new to the movie.

What kind of research did you have to do, for both this film and its predecessor?

David Copperfield. Image by Homer Liwag

The main research constantly revolved around “How do you get into the mindset of a magician?” How do you think like a magician so that you can create magic tricks or things that feel authentic? We also wanted it to have the flair and tone of a really well-done magic show. That required really being able to think like a magician.

The main magic consultant was a guy named Keith Barry, who’s a magician/mentalist/hypnotist based in Ireland. He worked on the first movie, along with David Kwong. Keith was the head consultant in charge of all the magic in the sequel, and working with him were Blake Vogt and Andrei Jikh. When Pete Chiarelli and I had the idea for a heist involving a computer the size of a playing card and setting it up so the characters would be with the card the whole time, it was Keith, Blake and Andrei – along with Jon Chu – who designed it to be the best version it could.

On another level, there was David Copperfield. He was available by phone for about three or four weeks while I was breaking the script down. That was really fun.

What freedom did you enjoy in this film to flesh out character storylines that had already been established in the first movie?

We made the first movie with no idea that there would ever be a sequel. We didn’t expect it to be as successful as it was, so it wasn’t designed to be a franchise like some movies are.

That was both a blessing and a curse. The blessing of it was that we got to just focus on making the movie as fun as possible. There was definitely more story to tell…and if they make a third movie, I hope that there will be still more story to tell.

So when we found out about the second film, it was like “Oh wow…we’re going to do a sequel” – but I didn’t feel a burden to it. It was more “What’s the challenge here and how do we make the story one worth telling again?”

But to me, a successful version of this movie would be a version where it’s not that important, where the stakes aren’t the world and where it’s just about putting together a fun, entertaining movie. I think where the movie is least successful is when it tries to be important. Because it’s a trifle – it’s a soufflé and it shouldn’t be too heavy.

Jesse Eisenberg as J. Daniel Atlas in Now You See Me 2. Photo by Jay Maidment – © 2016 – Lionsgate

Could you speak to those timely themes underlying both films, i.e. banking in the first and now privacy in the second?

Those social issues have kind of become a part of the franchise, but I never thought they were the most entertaining parts of the movies. And I don’t think that they’re super successful in how we executed them on a writing level.

It became a bigger deal in the first movie – initially, the story was much more just about trying to figure out if the Horsemen were thieves or magicians. And then the social part kept growing, that Robin Hood part of it. That grew and grew until people started to consider it a film being done for social reasons.

I personally never fully bought into that idea, meaning that I still think it’s probably one of the lesser baked notions in the whole franchise. To me, the great idea was that of Ed Ricourt, who came up with it for the original movie: they rob a bank in Paris from a stage in Las Vegas – are they crooks or are they showpeople?

I thought that was a great concept and I don’t think we ever topped it with anything else. That, to me, gives way to the tone of it. It really wants to feel like a magic trick that keeps you guessing and makes you know that, all along the way, you’re going to be deceived and lied to – but you’re going to enjoy it because you know that ultimately, it’s all entertainment.

The tone was all taken from that. Where it gets too heavy is “and we’re making the world a better place”. I feel like that adds a weight to the movie that it shouldn’t have to withstand and takes away from the soufflé a little bit.

Lizzy Caplan in Now You See Me 2. Photo by Jay Maidment – © 2016 – Lionsgate

You’ve written fantasy before, with the Bill & Ted series and Men in Black. Would you classify this series as fantasy as well?

Oh this movie is so far from realistic! It never wanted to be realistic. This movie is more of a fantasy than any of the fantasies I’ve written. I think its roots are more in line with these characters having a super power, which is their ability to do magic. Only it’s not magic like Harry Potter – not witchcraft, but stagecraft.

So yes, it’s absolute fantasy – in fact, I think if the movie embraced that a little more, it would probably be more successful. If there was a way to make everyone know that this is all meant to be fun and isn’t trying to be anything important…in fact, everything that’s in it that’s trying to be important is kind of lame!

Really what it is, is just entertaining – and that’s OK too. Let it be fun. To me, that’s the most successful version of it – the part that just wants to be like a fun magic trick.