Fougou 36 - part 2
2nd half of my conversation with Olivier Nicoleau and Vincent Chaigneau for episode 36 of their French magic podcast Fougou. Part 1 is HERE. You can listen to Part 2 here:
Chapters:
00:04 - Introduction — a look back at part one
01:08 - From Mentalism to the Occult — Oracle Belline, the spectator as hero, and a voodoo bar in Bangkok
05:08 - Silence as a Reaction — performing in a psychic setting
06:36 - “Where Did You Get That Power?” — an illusionist’s perspective
09:38 - Claiming Powers or Leaving Room for Doubt — from disclaimers to horror movies
11:54 - What the Audience Brings to the Experience — memories, beliefs, and conversation
15:49 - Learning to Read Tarot — credibility, Rider-Waite, and intuition
23:55 - The Rules We Set for Ourselves — labels, visible technology, and props
26:40 - Who Gives a Card Its Meaning? — symbolism, projection, and improvisation
29:43 - Other Magicians’ Tricks — Chelman, Chenevière, and Michael Close’s Invisible Deck
33:37 - Entourage and ACAAD — two effects that made an impression
36:09 - Finding Your Identity — a personal repertoire, Hiroshima, and stories from real life
40:25 - Premise and Character — how a story transforms an effect
42:21 - Beyond the Catalog — buying tricks, reading books, and knowing what suits you
45:06 - Magic from Asia — Chinese coins, TCC, and PITATA
49:11 - Talking About a Culture on Stage — Hiroshima and Ian Adair’s advice
51:38 - From Movies to Magic — a scene, a memory, or an emotion
58:32 - Pacing a Show — Peter Gabriel, The X-Files, and telling a story backward
01:02:16 - Vincent’s Movie Posters — 2001: A Space Odyssey and Zatoichi
01:06:52 - Grave of the Fireflies — can magic move people the way movies do?
01:13:17 - Vincent’s Books — Devil’s Tarot, Echo, Mental Theater, and upcoming stack projects
01:17:33 - Independent Publishing — print on demand and keeping books available
01:19:28 - The Fougou Promo Code and How the Podcast Got Its Name
01:21:41 - Fifteen Years of Babel, How Props Age, and the Blog
01:23:34 - Thanks and Closing
Transcription:
FOUGOU — EPISODE 36
[00:00:04] Introduction — picking up from part one
Vincent Chaigneau
Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 36 of Fougou, the magic podcast with a little bite. As always, I'm here with my longtime partner in crime, Olivier. Hi, Olivier.
Olivier Nicoleau
Hi, Vincent. Hi, everyone.
Vincent Chaigneau
A lot of you listened to part one with our guest Vincent Hedan, where we talked about mentalism and how he approaches it. Today we're turning you over to part two. You'll see, there's still a lot of extraordinary stuff to discover, and there's a little surprise for anyone who listens all the way through.
[00:01:08] From mentalism to the occult — Oracle Belline, the spectator as hero, and a Bangkok voodoo bar
Host
A lot of what you do leans toward psychic and paranormal stuff, tarot, all the themes you explore with Echo, for example. Is that because of Asia, or did some other influence bring you there?
Vincent Hedan
Have I converted to shamanism?
Host
No, but maybe you discovered a whole new area. How did all of that make its way into your repertoire, and why did it take on such a big role?
Vincent Hedan
I'd already published on the subject around the time of Oracle Belline, years ago, maybe 2015 or thereabouts. I'd already gotten a glimpse of something, and I certainly didn't invent it. Some subjects lend themselves better to an experience that gives the audience something. They're not questioning the procedure you're asking them to go through, and the emotional, personal impact and the benefit they get are much deeper.
A lot of the magic we see, and maybe I'm out of touch with the trends, I don't know, but when I was growing up, the magician was usually the hero. The magician had powers, the magician impressed you, the magician controlled the assistants and the props around him. And that's fine. Some magicians are in complete control of their surroundings and I have no problem with that.
But there's also a kind of magic that asks how you make the participant the hero. That's usually a little trickier. How do you teach someone to be the hero in a world they didn't create, with a method they don't know? So you have to make them feel like they're becoming the hero. Mentalism is really interesting for that. Instead of doing a Russian roulette routine where I'm the one who survives, I'll do one where the spectator ends up sitting next to his future wife, or something along those lines, like the chair test I published.
As for the occult in general, that did come out of my time in Bangkok, Thailand. There was a bar right near where I was staying. I just wanted to get a drink, and I walk in and the entire place is done up in New Orleans voodoo imagery. An American had set it up. He explained the whole thing and told me his story. He used to work in aviation and he'd bought this empty building because his wife was an actual Thai tarot reader and ghost hunter. People in Thailand paid her to spiritually cleanse their houses. It was incredible. He thought, I love my wife, this is what she does, and she doesn't really have anywhere to practice. So let's open a bar, because I like a drink, he said, and she can read tarot on the side. There's a mezzanine where she does her readings, and the bar is downstairs. All the décor comes from his world, New Orleans.
I see all that and tell him, look, I do magic and mentalism and all that. Maybe we could come up with something together. I was in Thailand for three months at the time, so we worked something out. For those three months, I went there two or three nights a week. The challenge for me was to avoid doing magic. People weren't there for that. They came for the atmosphere and maybe for the chance to talk to the woman who was doing actual tarot readings on the side. Out of respect for her, for the place, and for what people expected, I wasn't going to pull out Matrix or Dynamic Coins or anything like that. I had to stick to the subject.
I like having a constraint when I create. Otherwise I end up doing whatever, and sometimes that works, but I don't enjoy it. The idea was for people to sit with me for ten minutes, then leave unsure whether they'd seen magic or had an actual paranormal experience. Everything had to have that feel. I did a routine with a die, for instance, where I guessed the number, but it was steeped in occultism and personal divination. The tarot routines in Devil's Tarot, which I put out last year, came out of that setting. I refocused everything on that theme. It was almost a formal exercise. How do you come across as credible in that world when it isn't where you come from?
[00:05:08] Silence as a reaction — performing in a psychic setting
Vincent Hedan
I realized that people reacted completely differently. First, they didn't applaud. You applaud somebody who's done something impressive, but you don't applaud somebody who's just told you something about yourself in a conversation that feels organic. People don't applaud at psychic fairs. It just doesn't happen. You have to recalibrate. You think, wait, was I terrible or what? No reaction. And a lot of the reactions are silence. A lot of people lean back in their chairs and look inward. They're thinking, my God, what just… They're processing what just happened.
And then there's the conversation. I don't know how many times I did revelations with the Cut Deeper Force, the Balducci Force, you know, a classic card force I adapted to tarot. It's based on an idea by Christian Painter, an American mentalist whose work I translated. To me, I was doing a card trick. But I leaned so hard into tarot and interpretation, let's talk about your life, past, present, future, that people would just keep talking afterward. I'd have to say, listen, I've only got ten minutes and then we have to move on. Switch people, switch people. They'd go, your mother, this and that, and where did you learn this? Where did you get this gift?
It's a completely different world, and people are very kind. I'm a complete rationalist, so I don't take any of it seriously as a belief. But you have to respect the people in front of you. You have to be kind when they come into an experience like that.
[00:06:36] “Where did you get that power?” — the illusionist’s answer
Host
Which brings up the next question. You're a complete rationalist. You don't believe in it yourself and you absolutely respect the people in front of you even when they see it very differently. So what do you say when somebody asks where you got this gift? Do you play along?
Vincent Hedan
No. I found an answer that works for me, and plenty of other people have found answers that work for them. I really encourage people to decide where they stand. I talk about it in Devil's Tarot, in Oracle Belline, maybe even on my blog. You don't need to take some hard, dogmatic stance or try to convert anybody. You just need to know where you stand, because people will ask.
Like I explain in the book, change the color of a silk and people ask how you did it. Tell them something about their future or their past, or whatever it happens to be, and some really surprising things can happen. When people open up to you completely, and you're open to them, you make connections naturally. I'm not talking about mysticism. And those connections can take you into very complicated, delicate, personal subjects. They're not going to ask you what kind of marked deck you're using. They ask, “So how did you discover your power?”
I've found an answer I'm comfortable with now, because people won't accept it. I tell them the truth and they don't accept it, so if they go off on some wild tangent after that, that's on them. I explain that my job is to get extremely good at creating the illusion of the experience they've just had. I always see myself as an illusionist. I explained that in one of my books. It's almost an actor's job, and that's also what lets me have a clear conscience and sleep soundly at night. On both ears, as we say in French, which is physiologically pretty difficult. Both ears.
If I tried to sell them crystals afterward, or Saint Joseph medals, or whatever, I'd have a really hard time with that. It's not how I was raised. But here I see it as almost a show. There's a set and I'm in costume. I'm not dressed in anything outrageous, but it's maybe not what I wear every day. There's a rhythm, there's a script. They're taking part in a play whose lines they don't know. Sometimes there's music. All those artificial elements are there to say, “Look, this is artificial. You're having an experience that was created for you. This isn't reality.”
And I hope people understand that I'm not there to screw them over or scam them physically, mentally, financially, or in any other way, and that what I'm doing isn't real. It's very hard to convince people once they're emotionally convinced of something else. “I'm very good at simulating, at creating the illusion of what you just experienced.” They don't find that answer satisfying. It doesn't explain the how, the why, all the ins and outs. But I stick to it and it works for me.
That probably won't work for everybody. I've got a friend here called Justin Pinon. Not Pignon like François Pignon. Pinon, without the G, is how they say it here.
[00:09:38] Disclaimers and ambiguity — what horror movies leave to the imagination
Vincent Hedan
Justin Pinon is the biggest mentalist in the Philippines. He's on TV everywhere and he's played a lot of venues over the years. He opens his show with one of mentalists' favorite topics, the disclaimer. He says he doesn't have powers. What he uses is basically a combination of the Derren Brown and Banachek scripts. That's the idea. I don't like doing it. It works very well for him. Personally, I don't like disclaimers. Let me go back to movies for a second. The parallel might explain where I'm coming from.
In an American horror movie, the standard thing is to show the monster, or the horror, whatever's disgusting or scary. At some point, in the light or in the shadows, you'll see the thing you're afraid of. You might even touch it. The fascinating thing about the Japanese counterpart is that they never show it. Take Hideo Nakata's Ring, made in the '90s. There's the very good Japanese version, the original, and the disastrous American version with Naomi Watts, for what it's worth. You can feel that it's American and it was made for them.
Then there's Dark Water, also by Hideo Nakata, if I'm not mistaken. It's an excellent Japanese horror movie. It's genuinely terrifying. That was also adapted from a story by the author of Ring, so they go together. The American version was made by a Brazilian director, if I remember right. I forget his name. It has Jennifer Connelly, who's an extraordinary woman and a wonderful actress. The director chose to go much more for this pervasive dread than for “there's a monster in your head, here, we'll show you the thing.” It really works.
Why am I talking about this? Because in the Japanese movie, the monster they don't show you, the one you make up in your head, is bound to be worse than any makeup in the American version. I like that idea in magic and mentalism too. I could tell you I am this or I'm not that, or whatever. If I don't say anything, you have to put something into that space, and it'll be better than any script I could've written. People are really good at filling that space with their own fantasies, their own beliefs.
[00:11:54] What the audience adds — memories, beliefs, and conversation
Vincent Chaigneau
The situation you're describing, where you've ended up, I got there by trial and error too. I'm not a professional. Olivier and I always say we're amateurs who make our friends, our families, and people close to us laugh. We do roughly a thousand different things because we don't perform onstage, so we're always looking for something different.
I'm lucky in my work that every three months I get to spend three days with a client at conferences and trade shows. This client happened to find out I did mentalism, and now every time I go there to work, they ask me to do some mentalism at the evening events. The same questions come up every time. “Where did you get that power?” Exactly the same kinds of questions. And I went through exactly the same thought process. I don't want to tell them I've got powers. I don't. So I explain and, sure enough, they don't want to believe it.
What's interesting is there are about 180 people at each event and they don't all see it. I go table to table, so seven or eight people see it at a time. Somebody always comes up to me and says, “You should go see that guy and do something for him.” And he sells the show before I get there. He tells people about things I've never done. Very clearly. He's describing tricks I wouldn't know how to do, because he's added all kinds of things to them.
Host
He's really overselling you.
Vincent Chaigneau
Yeah, but the things he sells! I'd love to be able to do what he's describing. Anyway, that's what he remembers and I'm delighted. Then I have to find something to do every time. It's fascinating to see how much people put whatever they want in the space you've left empty. They always fill the gap. So holding back and leaving things unsaid is probably the best answer.
Vincent Hedan
When the conversation is open, because in the situation you just described, or the one I was in, and I'm sure Olivier's had the same thing happen, you're there to talk. Onstage, if you're afraid, you can run away after the show and avoid talking to anyone. No problem. But in informal or really interactive situations, which I like because of the human side of close-up mentalism, you need to be ready to have a conversation.
So I tell them I create a convincing illusion of what they've just experienced. Of course they're not happy and they come back with all sorts of things. Some really do say I have powers. One day somebody told me, “You must be incredibly powerful if you dress in black all the time.” That was at the psychic fair in Manila. Why? Because I didn't know what they believed. Black attracts bad energy, so to be able to take that much of it all the time… No, no, I wear black to hide the disaster that is my body. It's got nothing to do with vibrations or whatever. You discover things like that when you talk to people.
Sometimes I tell them I create the illusion of what they've just experienced, and they don't like it. They say I have powers, or the deck is marked, or I've got a stooge, or there's a mirror behind them, or whatever. Instead of arguing about whether they're right, I say, “The way you responded to what I just said is interesting. Let's talk about that. You went straight to mysticism, or straight to probability, or straight to a stooge. Why did you say that?” I don't say it in an attacking way. I'm interested in how they approached what I do. Let's talk about it. It takes the discussion away from what kind of gaffed deck I'm using and onto something else. And they enjoy it because what they really want to do is talk to the person.
Vincent Chaigneau
That's an interesting approach. “Let's talk about what you think of what I did.” I've never explored that.
Vincent Hedan
It's that same thing with people. What interests them is themselves. So let's talk about you. That'll be interesting.
[00:15:49] Learning to read tarot — credibility, Rider-Waite, and intuition
Vincent Chaigneau
Olivier, you wanted to ask about tarot, didn't you?
Olivier Nicoleau
He's a mentalist. We talked a little about it beforehand.
Host
Well-prepared, this mentalist. That's pre-show, if you ask me.
Olivier Nicoleau
I knew it. I was going to say sincerity, but that's not quite the word. Did you learn different spreads? Did you learn what the cards mean? Do you use all the cards, the minor and major arcana, or just the majors? You mentioned the Cut Deeper Force earlier, but with 22 cards it's a little tricky.
Vincent Hedan
Absolutely. Mechanically it's really tricky because there aren't many cards, and you lose track of how deep you are in the packet really quickly. As for your question about tarot, I think there's a broader answer. I don't think you can do Haiku, my book test, if you know absolutely nothing about Japanese culture. People will see right through it. We're social animals and we can smell a con. If I pull out the book and say, “Here are some haiku from China in 1950,” there'll be people in the room thinking, no, he's making this up. He doesn't know anything about what he's talking about. He's pretending. It could be anything. Someone might do a cheating demonstration and get the rules of poker wrong.
Apart from whether you believe in what you do as a magician, I think it's really important to pick subjects you can talk about. You don't have to be an authority or have written a book on them, but you should be able to talk about them for ten or fifteen minutes without saying too many stupid things. With Pi Max, I can talk about pi for one, two, three hours without making stuff up. Same with Haiku, and tarot's the same.
One reason I went to the psychic fair for the first time in 2023 was that I wanted to know what people do at these conventions. What actually happens? I didn't know. I know what happens at a magic convention. Those are the only conventions I go to. Maybe Japan Expo in Paris sometimes. But a psychic convention? Are there witches flying around on broomsticks? What goes on? So I went and got a little look into their world.
There were speakers, of course, and it was very funny because one of them literally performed a magic effect, only there was no method and no revelation. That might sound weird. An effect with no method and no ending is a strange thing. But she was offering an experience that, in their vocabulary and their lives as believers, was a legitimate way to use tarot to solve problems and answer questions. I was watching from the outside, thinking, right there, add a marked deck and a multiple out and you've got an effect. You don't have to change a thing. The presentation is already perfect. Keep the script, add a gimmick and you're good. That's literally what it was. The woman practiced reiki, where you lay your hands on someone, as well as tarot and other things.
I went and saw how sincere people were. They're not a bunch of nuts to look down on. They're there because they have problems and want answers. They're searching like everybody else. Tarot is where they look for answers. For other people it's politics, religion, whatever. Of course I picked things up from spending time with them. I already knew some things because tarot is originally a very European practice. It's part of our culture in a way the I Ching, Chinese divination, or Nordic runes aren't. As a European I had more of a background in tarot to begin with.
Somebody talked about the Rider-Waite Tarot, which I already knew, just not in that depth. That's when I realized, and I recommend this on my website and blog, that Rider-Waite was a better choice for me than the Tarot de Marseille. Marseille is very symbolic, how can I put it? There aren't pictures on the cards. You've got symbols, swords, wands, and so on. Personally, I find it harder to tell a story from a symbol as bare as three crossed swords on a card than from a whole scene, practically a painting on a playing card. And the Rider-Waite deck, as you know because you've seen the cards, literally has paintings. Pamela Colman Smith drew them by hand at the time, on commission from A. E. Waite. It's interesting. He told her to draw things of the period, modern at the time but old to us now.
There's a pictorial quality to it. There are characters, actions, situations, weather, values. I mean moral values, not spades, clubs and diamonds. It's like an animated film. You can dive into Rider-Waite and become a tarot reader on day one, because you almost just have to relate the picture to the person's question or to what they're looking for. To me it's much easier for a beginner to start with Rider-Waite, because all you have to do is look at what's in the picture.
You mentioned sincerity and authenticity in reading the cards. When I do it, I'm not trying to connect with the divine or taking some weird deep breath. There's nothing mystical about how I read tarot. I tell people, “You've got a question. You can tell me what it is or keep it to yourself. That's up to you. Then we'll look at the pictures, you'll tell me what speaks to you and what doesn't, and the pictures will guide us.”
That's literally what I do. I trust, again, not in any mystical sense, that these images have worked for so long because they're symbolic archetypes, like the ones in the Avengers, in comic books, in all sorts of things. They speak to people whether we like it or not. People literally make the connection themselves. It almost plays out on its own if you let yourself do it.
Olivier Nicoleau
But did you learn the meanings of the major arcana, or not at all?
Vincent Hedan
I didn't learn them in the academic sense, sitting down to study them the way some people do, with the symbols and everything. This might be a little controversial, but like I said, I'm a complete rationalist, so I don't believe in any of it. I studied science and all that.
Spending time with these people and talking to them, one of the questions I asked, and it wasn't a trick question, I really wanted to know, was how do you become a better tarot reader? How do you improve at something that has no basis? It's very hard. If I tell you to improve your tennis serve or your ability to translate from, I don't know, Ukrainian to Hebrew, you can work on that. There are exercises. But how do you practice something that doesn't exist, if we're being a little blunt about dismissing the belief? They don't have an answer, because they work entirely by intuition. They don't have real exercises for it.
More importantly, I've noticed that for three years, when I tell somebody, “This card means this for you right now,” nobody's said, “Actually, on page 53 of the good tarot reader's manual, whatever, that's not what it says.” You could do that with the Bible. If I quote a verse and get it wrong, somebody could say, “No, no, hold on.” I don't know the Bible, but they could tell me that's not what it says in whatever book. They can correct the quotation itself, even before you get to the interpretation. There's no definitive document on tarot or runes. There are people known as experts, but they're experts in nothing, in a way, because there's no tangible way to verify what they do. I know that sounds harsh, but unfortunately that's what I've found in practice.
So nobody's going to catch you out. Whereas with Haiku or Pi Max, if I tell you pi is 8.5, somebody's going to correct me. You can check that without doing magic. If you want to start reading tarot, doing occult readings, reading tea leaves or whatever, that can free you up. There's nobody policing or checking these practices because they have no basis. So it's very much about the connection and intuition.
Olivier Nicoleau
I asked because it's something I'm interested in, and I'm reading about it right now. In some magazines, I see people saying there really are rules and you have to respect them, and if you know nothing about it, stay away from it. I wanted to know where you stood. That's clear now.
[00:23:55] Personal rules — labels, visible technology, and props
Vincent Hedan
I'm a lot more relaxed about it. And that applies to magic too, because you talked about people guarding the truth, gatekeepers. We have them in magic too. “Hold on, if you're a mentalist you need to dress in black and have a candle and stay away from playing cards.” I already explained it in the essay I published in my book I Am Not a Mentalist. That's one reason I reject the label.
It'd be completely insane to tell Spielberg he can only make movies about the Holocaust, like Schindler's List, or that he can only make movies about dinosaurs. You made Jurassic Park once, now that's your life. You have to do it forever. He refused, actually. Jurassic Park 2 was done by a cinematographer from Jurassic Park 1. He passed the torch, and now it's turned into the disastrous series we know. You can make a case for the first three, though. There we go, back to movies.
But I reject that idea because in the same way, and I'm not putting myself at that level, Robert De Niro can take whatever roles he wants. He isn't trapped by how he looks or how he thinks. He can explore what he wants. Take Picasso. Toward the end of his life he used markers more than paint. I'm sure some people thought it was heresy to see Picasso using markers. But Picasso's genius isn't in the marker, it's in his head. It isn't in the paint either. He drew freehand and so on. It's fine to work in different forms and on different subjects.
I hope that answers your question. I have a real problem when it turns into proselytizing, when you say there's an absolute rule and people have to respect it, and you impose it on others. On the other hand, I have extremely strict rules for myself, but I've stopped pushing them on other people because I saw it annoyed them. I've talked about it before. I absolutely refuse to use visible technology, and I've written about it. Another rule I've written less about but really try to stick to is no objects that don't exist.
I mean I don't want to use something that doesn't exist in the audience's world. If I show you an object, you should know instantly what it is. I can't have a glittery box with two panels that slide around, and nobody knows what the hell this thing is. It looks like nothing. There are magic props that do exist in the audience's world. Cups, for example, are turned metal cups. There's a Turkish tradition. We know they exist, so that's fine. But if an object doesn't exist in their world, I don't want them asking what that thing is. It's a magician's prop, so I won't use it.
That rules out all kinds of things, like my rule about visible technology. But I'd rather work with creative constraints than do whatever and end up with an act that doesn't look like anything. People can do what they like. That's for me. I'll still talk to you if you don't do that. No problem.
[00:26:40] Who gives a card its meaning? — symbolism, projection, and improv
Vincent Chaigneau
What's interesting about tarot and the way you see it, trying to take away people's fear of getting the symbolism wrong, is that we often learn what symbolism is through religion and through dogmatic readings of symbols. One symbol equals one definition equals one interpretation. But there are a lot of other possibilities. Symbols exist outside religion and are used in all kinds of spiritual and intellectual traditions.
In those settings, a symbol doesn't have to be fixed. You can interpret it and make it personal. The question becomes what meaning I give it. That's a lot more interesting. And like you said about Rider-Waite, you just describe the card and the person makes it their own. That's really interesting, and it's absolutely true. As soon as you give them something tangible, they connect it to who they are. It means something to them even though all you did was describe what was on a card. They did the rest. That's exactly the symbolic work people do when they're interested in spiritual traditions outside religion and use symbols.
Vincent Hedan
It also makes it easier to connect with that person on their own terms. Say you ask yourself a question and draw a tarot card. I've got my own history, so I see the card and it means something to me. I focus on one element. I don't know, there's a lion, a woman, a heart, a house. For whatever reason that day I can't stop thinking about the lion. I ask, “What do you think of the lion? What does it say to you?” And the person might be thinking, no, I was looking at the house more than anything else, because I'm building a house. I'm making a home for myself.
Imposing your own symbolism on the person in front of you is a little unfair in the first place. They're the one paying for the reading, so maybe they should decide. The customer's always right and all that. But you're also missing out on a deeper connection if they've already made one with that card.
Vincent Chaigneau
And it's what you were saying before. We're all a lot more creative when we're given constraints. The people in front of you can imagine more when you give them limits. The limit is the card they drew and the things on it. Then they can build something within that. You see the same principle in improv theater, for example. You pile on constraints to stimulate creativity. That's exactly what we're doing with a tarot card, or several tarot cards we put in front of somebody, to help them come up with an idea or build the story they want to see play out.
[00:29:43] Other people’s tricks — Chelman, Chenevière, and Michael Close’s Invisible Deck
Vincent Chaigneau
Getting away from tarot, are there effects, tricks, routines you do that aren't from your own repertoire and that you particularly like?
Vincent Hedan
Yes, a lot. I do tend to use my own repertoire a lot, but there are props I love using that aren't mine because I don't have the expertise to make them. Electronics in particular. Obviously I don't have the know-how or the skills, so I get those things elsewhere. As for effects, there are a few I keep coming back to.
I'd encourage people to look up Christian Chelman's Copper Silver Brass routine, CSB. The title is a little generic. It's like saying, check out so-and-so's ace cutting routine. Copper Silver Brass is the name of the prop and the theme. The Chelman routine is on The Best of Christian Chelman Seminar, to go back to the videos we mentioned earlier. Despite the title, it's in French because it was filmed in France. I don't know why, but that routine really got to me. I do very little coin magic. It might be the only coin routine I do. It works really well table to table. It isn't necessarily narrative, but it's very visual, with a Chinese coin, a Romanian coin, a silver coin, and so on. I love it. He figured out how to make the whole thing perfectly logical. It's beautifully constructed and I come back to it a lot. It's often in my pocket.
Another recommendation is Altitude by my friend Stéphane Chenevière, the 2001 French champion in card magic. The whole book is terrific. You could do just about every routine. My favorite is Hofzinser II, named after the famous Hofzinser. People pick a card and you show the four aces. The ace of the same suit as the selection, which you've never seen, turns over and then changes into the selection. It's extremely visual. It might sound odd for a mentalist to recommend a visual ace trick, but I don't see any heresy in it. There's an interaction and a rhythm to the routine, a dynamism I love. I do it table to table all the time.
Sticking with cards, a lot of us do the Invisible Deck, the gimmicked version where the cards stick together. I stopped doing that after seeing Michael Close's version. It's in Workers 5, which he sells as a PDF on his site now. You can get it even if you don't want to order the physical book. Michael Vincent performs it in The Best of Michael Vincent Seminar. It's devastating. You get the Invisible Deck effect, you eliminate the weaknesses I'll mention in a second, you improve it, and most of all, you can do it with a regular deck.
What's great about Close's version is that, though it's a little technical, the card is always revealed in the middle of the deck. If you do the Invisible Deck with the cards that stick together, you know that if the spectator happens to name one of the pairs at the top or bottom, the spread has absolutely no feng shui. It looks awful. The card is off to one side. Marlo had already solved it with an extra control to get the card back to the middle, but it's very complicated. Here, in Michael Vincent's performance, it's always in the middle. It's extraordinary.
And above all, when I was going table to table, I wanted a regular deck. Otherwise you've got an Invisible Deck in one pocket just for that effect, and another deck for the Ambitious Card or whatever else. This way I can do an hour of card magic, go straight into the Invisible Deck without a visible switch, then do another hour of card magic after it. No problem. I can do the effect eighteen times in a row. It's beautifully constructed and it doesn't take a huge amount of effort. I encourage people to look it up. Michael Close, Workers 5, the Invisible Deck.
[00:33:37] Entourage and ACAAD — two standout effects
Vincent Hedan
I just remembered another one because it came back out recently. It's called Entourage. Same word in French.
Host
Oh yeah, that one.
Vincent Hedan
It's by Gordon Bean, if I'm not mistaken. Gordon Bean or Beam, with an M or an N at the end, I don't remember. A friend showed it to me and I kept it in my pocket for years. I found out it had been out of stock for years, and now it's back. If you're looking for something you can do with six cards in your pocket, where the choices are free and the presentation is wide open, it's a kind of reverse Russian roulette and you can put any story you like over it. I do it as a gambling thing with people, as mentalism. The reactions are absolutely crazy. The method is so clean.
Vincent Chaigneau
For a long time I did, what's it called, Duvivier's Tempête sous un crâne. I always had it on me. That was my go-to. As soon as somebody asked me to do something, that's what I did. And the day I, actually it was you, Olivier, who showed me Entourage. From the day I discovered it, that was all I did. I couldn't believe how strong it was. It's great to do, it resets, you're ready to go again. You can do it a thousand times in a row. It's brilliant.
Olivier Nicoleau
When I saw it, I think it was one of the last copies around. And it did come back at Penguin, I think. It's Gordon Bean, with an N. I think we talked about it on an episode. Then Vincent and I talked about it, he bought it, and I think he fell in love with it. It's one of my favorites of that kind too.
Vincent Chaigneau
Something that surprised me in a good way, and I'm still working on the presentation, I showed it to a small group a few days ago, is ACAAD, Any Card at Any Dice. It came out recently. You pull out a huge handful of dice for people to roll. You've got a lot of dice and you can get a lot of people to roll them. At the end, you take the results and ask them to do a calculation. They multiply all the dice, get a number, and then you deal for each digit of that number. You land on a card in the deck and you predicted that card right at the beginning.
So you've got that card-at-a-number element, which everybody in card magic likes doing, with a pretty crazy prediction. That's the one that got me excited recently. I thought it was cool. The method is incredibly simple. If you want to play around with it, it comes together really quickly. It's a little effect I discovered recently and it was a lot of fun.
[00:36:09] Finding your identity — a personal repertoire, Hiroshima, and lived stories
Vincent Hedan
I've got a few friends here, English-speaking Filipinos, who are practically hooked up to an IV of all the different catalogs coming out all the time. I'm surprised, because for one thing it takes an effort to keep up, and things are coming out faster. I'm a little disconnected from all that. Sometimes somebody asks if I've heard about some extraordinary new mentalism thing, and I've never heard of it. So I feel a little out of the loop about what these products are.
It's also because I'm really busy doing my own stuff. I encourage people to do that sometimes. I talk about it in the book, but I'll say it again because I think it's important. If you spend your life doing other people's repertoire, you're less likely to find out who you are. What makes Derren Brown great, what makes Dani DaOrtiz great, what makes Yann Frisch great, is partly that they took existing things somewhere new, sure. But they also found their identity.
If you buy the entire catalog of whoever, or buy things from several different artists, you'll end up with such a lopsided patchwork that it'll be really hard to figure out who you are and find your identity. And ultimately that's what people connect with the most. Who are you? I've seen whole acts, and I've seen shows by colleagues, some wonderful shows, where I walk away thinking I don't know who was onstage. I didn't learn anything about them. There's no identity. You could put another performer in their place. And people do that when a performer is masked elsewhere. You could put somebody else there. We barely know who it is. And it doesn't matter, which is such a shame. The reason Matrix works, or one of my favorite movies, or your favorite movie, is that you're attached to the character, their journey, the way they interact with the world around them. Same with Harry Potter.
I'm saying this in part because I'm incredibly busy publishing my books right now. The one I'm about to put out, I actually finished it yesterday, so I can announce it to you right now. It's all extremely personal routines. There are two scripts. In one, I talk about my grandfather during World War II. The other is an effect that takes place in Hiroshima and was the opening of my show when I was in Paris. It sounds so personal you'd think it'd be impossible to make it your own. What I explain in the book is that you can take the narrative structure or the method and put it to work in your own story.
Sometimes I'm talking to somebody and they tell me a story from their life, just talking in confidence, and I ask, “Do you do a trick with that?” Because it's an extraordinary origin story for a character. I was talking to Chris Rawlins, who has put out a few books in French because I translated them, Dessin mental and so on. He's a brilliant guy, a remarkable young guy who plays in a band in Manchester and works with Luke Jermay too. One day we're talking in England and he tells me that when he was a student he waited tables at a Chinese restaurant. You have to picture Chris Rawlins. He's tall, blond, and skinny. As a Chinese waiter, he doesn't quite look the part. There's a bit of a mismatch, but why not?
He waits tables at this Chinese restaurant, of course everybody around him is Chinese, the owners are Chinese. After closing they play a kind of poker, a variation of Chinese poker. Chris plays with them because he's part of the staff. The dishwasher plays, the waiter plays, the cook plays, everybody plays. He cheats a little from time to time, working on his cheating techniques to see if he can get away with them without having his fingers broken. He's telling me all this, we're just chatting, and I say, “Do you use that in a routine?”
There are so many people who do gambling demonstrations with cards or dice or whatever, with no backstory, basically saying, “Here's the last trick I learned, let me show you.” We don't care much. He could start by saying, “I spent a summer waiting tables in a Chinese restaurant as a student. They taught me poker. I'll show you what they showed me.” And right there you've got an incredible opening for the effect. Maybe I'm biased toward stories because my mother's a storyteller too, but people don't realize they're carrying extraordinary stories they could use to make something that's genuinely theirs.
[00:40:25] Premise and character — how a story changes an effect
Vincent Chaigneau
Olivier and I talked a few episodes back about the importance of the premise. The same trick, the same mechanics, the same effect. Actually it's the same effect, but with a different premise it becomes a different trick. Yeah. Because you bring a flavor, you give it something. It gives it substance and a life it didn't have before.
Most of the time, when you look at commercial effects, they show up out of nowhere. There's not much there to lead into the effect. Which means there isn't much you can do with it beyond a one-shot thing where you say, “Oh, I learned this recently, let me show you.” If you take it into another world, bring your own story, your own experience and sensibility to it, it becomes a much bigger effect.
Vincent Hedan
It solves a lot of problems too. When you're creating an act, or even doing informal magic, you can ask, what do I say? How do I dress? How do I talk? There are lots of questions about how to make that experience. But if you say, “Okay, I'm a psychic, I've been doing this for ten years,” you can build a whole profile. This person might dress a certain way because he's French and he's in the Philippines. He'll use this deck for whatever reason. That solves a lot of problems, even with the method. You know you won't be able to use a particular method in a particular setting, because it'll show, because it's too risky, or because it doesn't suit how you'll have to move in that situation. Sometimes that helps you come up with an original method.
When you see Yann Frisch do Baltass, you think, what book are those techniques in? That's impossible. Of course. It comes from this completely disheveled, eccentric character who does magic in a world of his own. That solves all the problems he had in designing the act.
[00:42:21] Beyond the catalog — buying tricks, reading books, and knowing what suits you
Vincent Chaigneau
That comes back around to what you said earlier, about knowing who you are, having to define yourself to move forward. To know who you are, you need to get outside the commercial catalog. The problem is it's hard to define yourself when you don't know what's out there. Olivier and I often use this example. We talk about tricks a lot, so we talk about things that come out commercially. We've all been through that phase, or most of us have, where you buy a lot of things compulsively because you're discovering the world, until one day you're kind of sick of all of it.
Vincent Hedan
I do think a lot of people follow pretty similar paths. You discover magic by buying things from catalogs. When I was a kid they were paper catalogs. Yes, we're old. So you bought stuff without knowing quite what it did. There weren't any videos. At the same time, you used your imagination a lot more.
Vincent Chaigneau
Right. When you read those catalogs, you had your own picture in your head.
Vincent Hedan
Exactly. Then one day I discovered this object. You've probably heard of it. What's it called? A book. It's a pretty interesting object. It costs a lot less than a single trick, but it's full of ideas. For fifty euros you get a book with ten ideas, five ideas, I don't know, instead of some piece of plastic crap that does one thing and it's purple, so you can't even use it. Discovering that is the next stage. “Oh, books!” Then you fall into the same trap of buying a ton of books, not reading them, not practicing what's in them, and so on. You go through that whole progression.
One reason I don't know what ninety percent of the things in Murphy's, Penguin, CC Éditions, or whatever are is that I know exactly what I like and what I don't. Sometimes people send me a video of an effect they've made or something they like and ask for my oPinon. “What do you think of this thing that was on TV?” Five seconds in, I know if I'm going to like it. If the guy takes out a cell phone, I know instantly it's going in the trash. It can't be for me. For me, I didn't say for everybody. And from a different angle, if I know somebody's using invisible thread, it's probably not for me either, because I'm terrible at it. It's a tool that scares the hell out of me. I don't have any control over it. So there it isn't because it's no good, it's because I'm…
Host
You're not comfortable with it.
Vincent Hedan
Exactly. And you save a lot of money. When you know who you are, you don't buy every voodoo skull or self-lighting candle or whatever comes out, because that's not your thing. You'll buy something else, or you won't buy anything and you'll make your own prop, like some people do.
[00:45:06] Magic from Asia — Chinese coins, TCC, and PITATA
Olivier Nicoleau
Earlier you were talking about things that caught your eye, or you were, Vincent. Now I say Vincent and nobody knows which one I'm talking to. Vincent, my cohost. One of the new things I saw was called The Ever Free Tongbao. I don't know what it means, but there's a string with little coins at the ends that stop it slipping through. You've got two small coins, a big coin, and a brush. Chinese coins, I should say. It happens in the spectator's hands. You put in the brush and tie the strings around it. It's a little like that cord with the beads threaded onto it. You know what I mean? It happens in the spectator's hands and I think it works on the same principle. That interests me. And because it comes out of that Asian world, I thought of you, Vincent. The other Vincent this time. Vincent Hedan. Vincent H.
Vincent Hedan
That's interesting too. I don't know the creators, but I'd bet it's Chinese or Asian creators putting out those kinds of things. TCC, or PITATA, or others. PITATA was a revelation for me. They put out a prop and said on the packaging or in the advertising that it was designed with the ten biggest Chinese mentalists. And in my head, I'm thinking, I have no idea who they are. The ten biggest mentalists. I'm not putting down their work at all. They're so far from me culturally, and in commercial terms, that I just don't know who they are. I've got friends in Singapore and Taiwan and so on, but I know very few people in China.
That's fascinating, because Chinese creators who have access to Western magic culture are bound to take it somewhere else and come back with something that has, I don't want to call it a Chinese flavor, but a Chinese cultural coloring or perspective. They don't think like us, because culture also informs how we think, so they won't go in the same direction. It's interesting to give them the same starting point as us and say, go ahead, run on your own, let's see where you end up. They'll end up somewhere interesting, somewhere we didn't even know there was ground to run on.
Vincent Chaigneau
That's what's interesting. With globalization, and you're living it because you're in Asia, as Asia opens up to a different kind of magic, less traditional, we're going to see, and we're already seeing, some extraordinary things. The work TCC has done, Olivier and I have said several times that we need a TCC special because there's so much there. They started off making things that were very European to break into the market. Now more and more of their catalog has a distinctly Asian character. It shakes up what we're used to doing and makes us think differently.
For me, Chinese coins meant Troy Hooser's Charming Chinese Challenge. That was all there was for me before. And it's a coin routine. I wouldn't call it a standard one, but it's a coin routine. They're bringing in other things now with what they produce. It's really interesting.
Vincent Hedan
Yeah, and the beliefs and mythology are different, so it's going to develop in interesting ways.
Olivier Nicoleau
I haven't had a chance to get the trick I was talking about, unfortunately, because none of the shops near me carry it. My take is that everything coming out right now bores me to death, and this is basically a classic. The premise is pretty classic, an object penetration in the spectator's hands. But maybe it's because the object makes you think of countries far from us. Not from you, Vincent, but from us. It's already telling me a story. That goes back to what we said about coming in with a premise.
[00:49:11] Talking about a culture onstage — Hiroshima and Ian Adair’s advice
Vincent Hedan
That made me think of one more thing we shouldn't forget. There's cultural appropriation, and you have to be a little careful about it. I feel like I can do Haiku, talk about Hiroshima, talk about Japan in my show and some of my effects, because I've been there. I can talk about it from genuine personal experience that has nothing to do with magic. If I wanted to talk about traditional magic in certain African countries, which does exist and is probably fascinating, I couldn't. I've never been there and I don't know anything about it. It'd be like putting on a mask, figuratively, to add color or make it exotic or whatever. It'd be a real cultural risk, so you have to pay attention to that.
When I talked about Hiroshima in my show, the atomic bombing isn't exactly a fun event. Before I did the show in 2017, I went to Japan and I went to Hiroshima. I've been back three times since. I'm not going to say I know what I'm talking about. I wasn't there. I couldn't have been. It was 1945. But I've spent enough time there and in the culture, and done enough research on the event, that I can talk about it in front of an audience without it coming off wrong. Otherwise people tune out. They think, no, you're using that subject for your own purposes. It can be very delicate.
We were also talking earlier about facing a blank page and not knowing who you are, so I wanted to give people a piece of advice. The book is impossible to find. It's a book on children's magic by Ian Adair, a great author of children's magic books, and also a very good magician, English originally, I think. He wrote something that really hit me. I'm really young, eight or nine, reading this as a kid, and this advice stayed with me my whole life. If you don't know who your character is, it's you. Turn up the parts of your personality that work well for magic.
When I was eight or nine, I was very shy. I didn't talk to anybody. I was in my room doing magic all the time. Just turning up the parts of my personality that helped me speak in front of people and do theater and all that let me develop my character. If you don't know who you are, be yourself. Just turn it up so it comes across bigger on screen or onstage. It's a good starting point. Obviously that won't turn you into Piff the Magic Dragon or some really colorful character, but it's a starting point.
[00:51:38] From movies to magic — a scene, a memory, or an emotion
Vincent Chaigneau
Since we're talking about roles and who we are, you've talked about the influence of movies on your blog a few times. You talk about it in your books, in your trilogy.
Vincent Hedan
I'm a little obsessed with it.
Vincent Chaigneau
It's clearly something that interests you outside magic. You must watch a lot of movies. How do you make that leap? We're talking about movies because that's your thing, but how do you carry something concrete that already exists over into magic? It could be literature, plays, all sorts of things. How do you get from something that exists to something you create?
Vincent Hedan
You're right to bring up different media. It applies to literature, to movies, sometimes to music, whether it's lyrics or something musical. Video games too. We shouldn't forget them, because they're a narrative, participatory medium, and actually the only one. In that sense they're really close to magic. You're dropped into an experience whose rules you don't know, and you have to get through the story. That's a very magical experience.
There are different levels of interpretation, or different starting points. The really obvious one is that there's a scene in a movie and it's basically a magic trick. You just learn it from the movie and do the same thing onstage with a method that works. One example is a movie I love and cite all the time, Zabou Breitman's Se souvenir des belles choses, with Bernard Campan and Isabelle Carré. It's a beautiful film in its own right, a little French film that's hard to find now. There's a scene where a former wine expert who's forgotten everything has to relearn how to tell wines apart blind. I see this and at the time I wasn't an alcoholic, so I didn't know about wine yet. I'm kidding, I don't have a problem, I don't have a problem. I see the scene and think, that looks like magic. The guy can identify wines by taste alone while blindfolded. The procedure feels magical, the blindfold, the things getting mixed up, all of that. So I made an effect out of it and described it in lecture notes.
That's the easy one, in quotes. There's an effect on the screen or an effect in the book. Jorge Luis Borges wrote things that are literally magic effects into his fiction. I talk about them on my blog. You take them, put them onstage, you don't have to change anything. You just have to supply the method. No problem.
Sometimes it's a story. I'll see a scene and think, this is crazy, this is my story. I've already lived it in some other archetypal form, somewhere else. If you've seen the excellent animated film Ghost in the Shell, who directed it? Mamoru Oshii. It almost sounds like we're speaking Chinese now, but it's Japanese. Mamoru Oshii made that animated film. There's a series too, and there's an episode that's devastating. It actually happened to me in real life. It's a story in a hospital with a friend, and so on. I wrote a story around it.
I saw that scene and thought, that's funny, I've already lived that. When you see your own story on the screen, in literature, in a video game, it gives you poetic license to make it your own and do it onstage. Sometimes you think, I can't put this story onstage. It's too delicate, or too uninteresting for people because it isn't their story. Then you think, wait, Mamoru Oshii, the greatest Japanese animation director, put it on the screen. He saw value in it. Maybe I'm allowed to talk about it in my own way too. And that story became the center of my show Le Souhait when I wrote it in 2017. So sometimes it's a scene and you think, hey, that was mine, let's put it in.
Sometimes it's just an emotional impulse. You think, this movie makes me feel something, or makes me think about an idea I'd never explored, and it'd be interesting to bring it into magic. If you read one of the prefaces to Christian Chelman's Légendes urbaines, which is a book of bizarre magic, there's a line, I've forgotten his name, Raffaele De Ritis, I think. I'm probably mangling his Italian name. He says one of the problems with magic is that it's almost incestuous. We do the fourteenth version of Matrix, or tell the fourteenth version of the king of hearts falling in love with the queen of hearts. And nobody cares.
So try reading books, watching movies, playing video games, talking to people, going rock climbing, doing different things. Yves Carbonnier, the French magician, is a good example. He's passionate about food, he's a very good cook, and what does he do? He does magic in the kitchen. That idea would never come to me. I don't come from the world of cooking. Yann Frisch studied circus, so of course circus shows up in what he does. But if you're a plumber, a train driver, a teacher, a linguist, whatever, it'll find its way in.
It's more about unlocking inspiration. The fourteenth phase of an Ambitious Card routine isn't usually where you get inspired. It doesn't make you want to create a new trick that explores something else. What I'm saying might sound pretentious or idealistic, but it's about finding more sources of inspiration. In this case it's movies because that's what we're talking about. And you think, okay, they're allowed to do this in a movie. Why shouldn't I be able to do the same thing onstage in my magic?
Vincent Chaigneau
There's something interesting in what you're saying. There's a difference between doing magic and showing tricks. Anybody can show tricks, you just have to learn them. You buy them, you learn them, you show them. Does that make you a magician? Probably.
Vincent Hedan
On a basic level, sure, probably.
Vincent Chaigneau
I think being a magician means you've developed a kind of sensibility, made a whole repertoire and a culture of magic your own. Olivier and I talk about this a lot. We make a point of trying to cite our sources and explain where things came from and why. It's only when you know the basics and the history that you can start building something new. Otherwise you're just repeating things.
Maybe that's also the difference between two actors. Some actors just recite the words and stay in community theater, and some understand the history of what it means to be an actor, what it means to interpret a role, and they take it to another level. We've all seen the difference between really great actors and amateurs. I think the same is true of magic. It's interesting to see that you have to open things up, you have to look elsewhere. And creativity and invention aren't the same thing. You can take a starting point in your own direction without starting from absolutely nothing.
[00:58:32] Pacing a show — Peter Gabriel, The X-Files, and telling a story backward
Vincent Hedan
I'll give you a tip that's going to sound kind of dumb, but I used it for my show. I'm talking through a show with a friend right now and he couldn't figure out the structure. What order to put the effects in, how long each one should be, all of that. I didn't have the answer, but I gave him the trick I used for my show. We're not exactly talking about movies anymore, but you'll see, it's a very cinematic show. It's Peter Gabriel's Growing Up.
Peter Gabriel was the drummer, I think, no, not the drummer. He was in Genesis originally with Phil Collins. Years later he had his own band under his own name, Peter Gabriel, and did a concert called Growing Up. It's a completely crazy concert. Apparently David Copperfield took inspiration from it for a circular stage. It's a stage in the round, visible from every side, which is a nightmare for magic, but anyway. I loved the concert. A friend gave it to me. I thought it was brilliantly structured. You get a breath at the right time, there's some good rock, some good ballads, some visual moments. Sometimes he's alone, sometimes there are several people onstage.
So what I did was take the entire running order of his concert and look at how long each song was, what it was about, and how it was staged. Then I compressed it. The concert's two and a half hours long, like this podcast, and I compressed it into an hour for my show. My opening piece was going to have the same feel, the same length, the same mood. I wasn't going to sing. I was borrowing the structure. If he did it that way, he presumably knows what he's doing. He's not bad at it. It might work.
Host
And either way, it worked for you, so that means it'll work for some people. It worked for me.
Vincent Hedan
Sometimes you see… Do you guys know The X-Files? It was a really interesting show. It's interesting to see people using the same structure now, twenty-five years later. Every episode started the same way. The first ten minutes were this thing where you had no idea what led up to it or what came after. You're thrown straight into the action. Then the opening credits, and then Mulder and Scully are in their office and go investigate. Little by little you understand what happened in the opening scene.
You see it now with movie trailers on YouTube, in Shorts, on the internet. They throw you into the action right away, show you the four strongest scenes up front, and then run the trailer so you understand the structure. You could imagine a magic trick that starts like that. You're dropped in the middle of the action, then you go back to the beginning and play it out in order. It's time travel, which would be hard to do live, but it could be interesting to explore.
Vincent Chaigneau
If I'm not mistaken, that's one of the latest effects to come out. It came out through Vanishing Inc. It's Reverse Logic.
Host
Reverse Logic, exactly.
Vincent Chaigneau
That's the premise of Reverse Logic. The name says it all. You explain the ending and then do the whole trick backward.
Vincent Hedan
Right, you start at the end and work all the way back to the beginning. Dave Chappelle has used that structure too. He's an American comedian, probably one of the greatest working right now. In that special, he literally does it. He tells the audience, “I'm going to give you the punch line, the last line that makes you laugh.” He says it. It's horrible, so I'm not going to say it here. You might know the reference. Then he says, “Okay, now the joke.”
He tells the whole joke, and it's so well told, there's such a narrative, and the guy's a genius, he's such a great performer. When he gets to the punch line, you've forgotten that was where he was headed. But when he says it, it hits you again. That whiplash back to the beginning, and you think, the guy's a complete artist. What he just did was extraordinary. He told us he was going to do it, and we still didn't see it coming.
Vincent Hedan
It's incredible.
[01:02:16] Vincent’s posters — 2001: A Space Odyssey and Zatoichi
Olivier Nicoleau
We did an interview together in 2017. I don't know if you remember, Vincent. It was in writing.
Host
Vincent H.
Olivier Nicoleau
No, I meant Vincent Hedan, yes, on the website. I was looking through it and all your references were to Asian works, especially what we called manga at the time but apparently now we have to call anime.
Host
Oh, okay. It's different now.
Olivier Nicoleau
In France they changed what they call it. We don't say manga anymore, we say anime. When I… The listeners can't see it, but we can see your interior. I mean your apartment. I'm not talking about anything else.
Vincent Hedan
Can you see what's right behind my head?
Host
Might be a little heavy.
Olivier Nicoleau
Maybe, no, that one would be difficult. But the one right behind you, I was really surprised to see an American film about space and what was the future then and isn't anymore.
Vincent Hedan
Yeah, that's true. It's a rather unusual work, though. It's Kubrick. It's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It isn't necessarily accessible to everybody.
Olivier Nicoleau
It surprised me given what we'd talked about, and I wanted to know why you had that poster.
Vincent Hedan
I think I've got one, two, three, four, five posters at my place. I've got 2001: A Space Odyssey because, and I'll make this quick, it's a fascinating film. Understatement of the year. I saw it in a theater in La Rochelle when I was a student, and it was almost a transcendental experience. If you remember the film, at the very beginning there's a prehistoric sequence, literally, with prehistoric apes discovering how to use a tool. Then you jump into space for most of the film. At the end there's a sequence, I think it's over ten minutes, that's completely hypnotic. Kubrick just splashes you with light. He's really saying, right, we're going to travel through time, and it'll take ten minutes.
I've tried to show it to lots of people. They said it wasn't for everybody. I've never seen anybody sit through that sequence at home without stopping, really take it full in the face. If you haven't seen the movie, it isn't shocking or visually violent. It's just such a crazy thing to tell people, we're going to put a kaleidoscope of colors on the screen for twelve minutes with this extremely hypnotic music. There's no other word for it. When I saw it, I thought, it's crazy that a film lets itself do that. At the time I didn't have that magic background, that movie background. Telling slip there. I thought it was incredible.
And again, like when we were talking about Shoot Ogawa or others who do a different kind of magic, it's liberating to see that something else is possible. That experience can exist in movies, in video games, in literature, because some literature is completely wild. You see certain books and think, my God, where did they find that idea?
And there's a literally magical sequence at the end where the same character teleports from room to room and ages. That's the final sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm going to assume that if the film came out fifty years ago, I can talk about the ending without spoiling it for too many people.
Host
Fifty years later. Watch out, Bruce Willis is dead. Careful with that kind of thing.
Vincent Hedan
For those reasons it feels very magical to me. It's also mind-blowing. There are magic tricks because it takes place in space. There's simulated weightlessness, objects float, and Kubrick, in his genius and madness, found completely wild ways to show that.
Right across from me, I can't show you, but I've got a Zatoichi poster. I talked about it at length on my site during COVID. I made twenty-eight videos on the films. There are twenty-eight movies, a hundred television episodes, a novel, and manga about it too. It's a Japanese film from the 1960s, in black and white. I get that it won't be for everybody, but the movie's fascinating, the whole series is fascinating. The character's blind, he's a masseur, and he cheats at dice. You can imagine what that means for magic. We were talking about the dice routine with ACAAD earlier. He's a swordsman too, an expert in a particular sword technique called iaidō. You draw the sword and put it back in the sheath in one motion. It's magical to watch, almost like threading a needle. I encourage everybody to watch those films. One idea after another. There are fifteen ideas for magic effects in every movie, with coins, cards, dice, anything.
What do we have on the other side? The most important film is hidden behind my head, which might be symbolic.
[01:06:52] Grave of the Fireflies — can magic move people the way movies do?
Vincent Hedan
That's Grave of the Fireflies back there, the Japanese poster. If you haven't seen it, watch it when things are quiet and you're doing okay. It's an incredibly bleak film. It's about two children living through the firebombing in Japan in World War II. So it's not a lot of laughs. The animated film is based on a novel, itself a true story told by the person who lived through it with his sister during the war.
It was a revelation to me too. I won't spoil the story. I ran into it by chance on Arte, so thank you, Arte. By luck, I saw it from beginning to end. I was shattered. I was in tears at the end. If you've seen it, you know how devastating it is. I had a shock at the end because I realized, and I talked about this on my site, that Japanese animation was born less than a hundred years ago. It's documented. We have the first bit of film that exists. It's less than a hundred years old and it's grown beyond its status as children's entertainment.
If we're roughly the same age, I'm forty-two, forty-three this year, I grew up with Goldorak, Olive et Tom, Albator, Dragon Ball Z, Japanese animation on television. It was for children. No adult back then was talking about the great, prestigious art form of manga or Japanese animation. It was really for idiots. People thought it was for kids. If you remember, the TV news predicted kids would turn out stupid.
Host
Well, that one did come true.
Host
It's not our generation, it's the others. We're never the problem.
Vincent Hedan
But yeah, absolutely. It was completely looked down on, just like video games were then. Now video games are simply the biggest entertainment industry in the world by revenue. And manga and animation, yeah, absolutely. We're really lucky in France. Along with the United States, we're among the biggest consumers of that art form outside Japan. There's literature for adults, literature for teens, major subjects that get tackled, and they're tackled with real artistry. It completely outgrew that old image.
Meanwhile, if you think about it, magic has been around five thousand years, I don't know, at least since the beginning of writing, because we have records. And even in France, a developed country and all that, there are people who immediately go, “Oh, you're a magician? Great, I've got a kids' party in two weeks. Do you do the rabbit and everything?” You have to wonder what turn we missed, that in five thousand years we haven't gotten to the status manga reached in a hundred. There was something we couldn't change or leave behind. Same with video games, which are now treated as an art form in their own right. There's really strong storytelling in that medium.
So that movie became a kind of promise for me. I thought, okay, that's settled. I don't want to keep doing magic unless I can get at least a little closer to that goal one day. Not necessarily to make people cry the way that film made me cry. But to go beyond, which sounds grand, and give my audience an experience on that level. That's what I tried to do with my show back then. I wanted to show that magic can be more than entertainment for kids or the school fair. I'm not looking down on that, because children are an audience in their own right. That's not the point. It can be intelligent. It can make you think. It can bring out emotions other than laughter, the gag, or… It can even combine them.
If you've seen Kaamelott, I didn't follow the series that closely, but I know the structure and I know Astier. I saw his show, the lecture, I've forgotten the name, the pseudo-scientific one. It was very…
Host
L’Exoconférence.
Vincent Hedan
L’Exoconférence, thanks. He explains something brilliant. You can watch Kaamelott and think it's completely stupid, because it's jokes and the characters are broad. I mean exaggerated in how they're played. There's so much absurdity in Kaamelott, it's like a modern French Monty Python. But what he's talking about is social structure, belief, politics, relationships. He does it through comedy, but Astier isn't stupid. There are several layers to it.
In the same way, The Lion King is Shakespeare. It's the same structure. I forget which play specifically, but it's Shakespeare. And of course when you're five, you see colors moving and lions singing, and it's fun and great. You've got kids, you know. I loved it too. If you want to see the political or social drama in The Lion King or Pocahontas or whatever, you can see that structure too. Disney's clever that way. There's no reason magic can't have that depth.
Host
There's a lot of bad stuff in movies too. Maybe we haven't found the magician who's going to take what they do to the level of pure art by bringing out that kind of emotion.
Vincent Hedan
Time sorts things out too. You think, my God, Beethoven was brilliant. Sure, and there were probably terrible people around in Beethoven's time that we never hear about because they were bad. They died in obscurity, and that's what they deserved. There were probably people who were just as good, but their marketing wasn't as good, so Beethoven stood out.
What's an example? Chopin and Mendelssohn. There's a very particular musicality to Chopin. I'm no expert, but Chopin really does have a particular sound. One day I was listening to music at random, on YouTube, I think it was on shuffle, and I hear this piece and go, this new Chopin is brilliant. I look it up and it's Mendelssohn, a contemporary of Chopin who's completely forgotten. Same kind of output, same talent, but there was room for only one Chopin at the time, and Mendelssohn got a little forgotten. I'm sure the same thing happened in magic. Robert-Houdin wasn't the only one around at the time, and so on.
Vincent Chaigneau
I just looked it up because I didn't know, see? You learn something every day. The Lion King is a loose adaptation of Hamlet.
Vincent Hedan
There you go. Very, very loose. Very, very loose.
Vincent Chaigneau
But I'd say what matters is that it ends up in the same place.
[01:13:17] Vincent’s books — Devil’s Tarot, Echo, Mental Theater, and stack projects
Vincent Chaigneau
We've talked about a lot of things you've created. You've mentioned all kinds of things coming at the end of the year, soon, and so on. If we do a little recap, what can we say and what can't we say? Any scoops? We did a little pre-show on the fact that there was a scoop, but broadly, what can we expect from Vincent Hedan over the next few months, maybe years? There might be some things.
Vincent Hedan
Going back to our tarot conversation, last year I put out Devil's Tarot, which is a collection of five or six effects, I think. I forget how many. They use tarot and, just to reassure people, you don't need mystical powers. You just need a regular tarot deck, which you can easily get on Amazon. You can do different routines with an emphasis on a very personal experience for the spectator. So if you want to do mentalism that means something…
It's called Devil's Tarot because it's meant to be a series. Devil's Tarot, The Fool's Tarot, The Magician's Tarot, each taking a different card from the deck with different routines. This one is The Devil. I promise the devil isn't in those pages. You're safe.
And as a continuation of that I put out Echo, which also comes in different books. You mentioned something interesting in a previous episode. You wondered if the idea of Echo was for everybody to buy every volume, all twelve books that had been announced.
Vincent Chaigneau
Actually I wasn't thinking of Echo. I meant some other ones.
Vincent Hedan
But that isn't the idea. Say you're working on a routine about cartomancy in general, not necessarily just tarot. Or specifically tarot, or palm reading, which is the best prop because you've always got it on you, or tea leaves, which is the next one coming out. And you think, I'm missing an effect on that theme. Well, now you can do a book test where the entire book is about the subject of your act. So you're right on theme. If you're doing a tarot session and then do a book test with Doumer's book test, for example, Les Misérables is a little harder to work into tarot. I've got nothing against Doumer's book test. It's a thematic issue. It doesn't fit the subject.
So there's Echo, which is out and will wrap up soon. And then I finished writing a book yesterday. I don't know if I should announce the title because I'm still not sure about it, but I'll say it and we'll see if it sticks. It's called Mental Theater. The idea is effects I've used in shows, so there's that theater dimension. I did theater for ten years. It focuses on the theatricality of effects, why something works with this staging or this script and so on. And to reassure people, all the effects are adapted for close-up. You can do them close-up or onstage. There's no expensive equipment, no cards, no electronics, no stooges, no memory work, no sleight of hand. It's in the same vein as Your Mind Is My Playground.
The themes are extremely engaging for the audience because they take you off the beaten path. You're not showing them the umpteenth Matrix or ACAAN. The methods are extremely direct and simple for you. We try to get people involved, make them participants, and in some of the effects, make them the heroes. I don't know when it's coming out. The book is finished, but I need to illustrate it and translate it. This summer, I think.
Then there are plans for a book on Mnemonica, because I've got a lot of unpublished routines for it, alongside a book on my own stack. I've never shared that either. People are knocking on the door saying, we've been waiting twenty years for you to share this. Please, you're going to die soon, you need to publish it.
Host
Not die soon, but you have to be careful.
Vincent Hedan
Right. I've got a lot of publishing projects. The issue is more what order I push things into the pipeline so they come out first. I don't really know what's going to happen. But the one that's finished and that I can announce today is Mental Theater. It'll be 150 pages, with five close-up and parlor effects and some unusual themes. There's a Russian roulette where people torture the magician. There's another effect about Hiroshima and the theme of luck. There's one about my grandfather during World War II that people can adapt to their own stories. So there are some original things in there in terms of storytelling.
[01:17:33] Independent publishing — print on demand and keeping books available
Vincent Chaigneau
What's interesting about you is that you always control the distribution. You stay independent with how you distribute your work.
Vincent Hedan
Yeah, it's almost more out of practicality than anything else. I discovered I could self-publish with other partners before, and now with Amazon, which does print on demand. That's another aspect of my nomadic life, although I'm a lot less nomadic now that I'm based in Manila, but of where I am geographically. French people have said to me, “If I buy a book, can you sign it? Or can you send it from the Philippines? Isn't that risky?” Don't worry, it's coming from Mayenne. The printer's in Mayenne, in France, so it'll get to you just fine. All the books I publish, whatever they are, are printed in France for French readers. They aren't taking a fourteen-hour flight to get to you. The downside is that I can't get my hands on them. They're made by the printer, so I don't have access to them. When I come back to France I'll happily sign your copy if you want, but right now I can't get to it.
The other advantage is there's no inventory. I don't have to worry about a particular book. Say you decide to get into Pi or Haiku and you love the effect. Some magic effects stop existing. The book I was talking about earlier was out of stock. Haiku will never be out of stock. Literally, if I die tomorrow, Amazon still has the files. If it wanted to, it could keep distributing it after my death. It gives certain books a life beyond their initial release.
The other thing that throws people is that they'll say, “Oh, Babel just came out.” No, Babel came out fifteen years ago. It's also representative of where book tests were at the time, just like Multitude, which came out ages ago, and so on. So yeah, I control all that. If people want to buy it on Amazon, no problem. At a magic shop, no problem. If they buy from me, there are lots of discounts. There are automatic discounts that combine a lot of things.
[01:19:28] The Fougou code and how the podcast got its name
Vincent Hedan
Speaking of that, to thank anyone who's listened to the end of the podcast, I'm giving them a discount code. If you can spell Fougou, you know how, it's on the screen. That's not how you normally spell it. If you know how to spell Fougou, enter FOUGOU in the promo code box when you order on my site, and you get ten percent off all your orders for a week after the episode comes out. It's just for people who listened to the end. They've got the code. It's a gift.
Olivier Nicoleau
Speaking of Fougou, there was a photo that made me laugh at the time. I told Vincent about it. It was you in front of a restaurant with a fugu.
Host
Yeah.
Vincent Hedan
With a fugu, yeah.
Olivier Nicoleau
I said, “Do you think he did it for us?” I don't think he knew us. He didn't do it for us, which was disappointing, but it was really funny.
Vincent Hedan
It was in Tokyo, near my hotel. I was walking along and I see it and go, all right, I'll be funny, let's puff up my cheeks. I've got cheeks, I can do it. Or maybe I suck them in all the time and every so often I can show them. I don't know what it is, but yeah.
Olivier Nicoleau
So Fougou is a loose interpretation. We wanted something with a little bite. Cactus was taken, so we went with this animal. Then we thought, we'll spell it however we like, because that's not how you spell it, but it's a little… French-style.
Vincent Chaigneau
Yeah, French-style. It was easier to get people to say it right. Otherwise there'd have been a fifty-fifty chance they'd say “fu-gu” the French way, and it wouldn't have worked at all. So we Frenchified it. It also meant we could put the little fish where we wanted. It fit into the logo. So that was cool.
And thank you, first of all. We've officially entered the influencer world. We give out promo codes during episodes. We're sponsored. This is great.
Vincent Hedan
I'll put ads in afterward.
Vincent Chaigneau
Anyway, thank you very much on behalf of the listeners, Vincent, for offering that. Your effects are on your website. You said there are a lot of automatic discounts, and there are other promotions that are really… Anyway, the one I love that you do every year is your pi promotion.
Vincent Hedan
Oh yeah, 3.14, obviously. I can't help myself. There's a special date every year for Pi Day. I had to make it my date.
[01:21:41] Fifteen years of Babel, props that age, and the blog
Vincent Chaigneau
When you say Babel is fifteen years old, I think, wow. It puts it in context, you know? It was my first book test. I think, right, that's how long I've been doing this. It helps date things, but it also shows that I still do it now and it doesn't feel out of place. It still…
Vincent Hedan
Yeah, because some things are timeless enough. If I'd put out an effect with computer floppy disks, or CDs, or even VHS tapes, it'd practically be a museum piece if you used it now. On the other hand, when you see Christian Chelman do bizarre magic, some of the objects he uses are so old that they become part of the history, history with a capital H and the story with a lowercase s. That's interesting too.
You mentioned the site earlier. I also wanted to point out something. It's free. I know people are on social media and see a lot of stuff, but they don't necessarily go to the site itself. Don't forget there's a blog on my site that I never promote because I'm an idiot. There are hundreds, literally hundreds of free articles, and they aren't product promotions. I don't talk about my products. I talk about movies, video games, literature. I say “talk” because some are videos and some are written. I explain why visible technology is a cancer, I talk about different things. There's a search box. Type in whatever subject and you'll find it. It's free and always on your phone if you want to get to the site. So it's pretty… And it's interesting too.
Vincent Chaigneau
You don't have to say that yourself. We'll say it for you. There are some really good ideas. There's material there to develop yourself, develop your thinking, develop your own world of magic. We've said it already, but it's smart, and that makes it interesting.
[01:23:34] Thanks and closing
Vincent Chaigneau
Well, we've come to the end of the episode. Thank you very much, Vincent Hedan. That's the other Vincent talking now. Thank you, Vincent, for your time and everything you shared. Olivier and I have wanted to have you on for a while, and we're thrilled we got to do it. We're happy we could spend this time with you and talk freely, because that's kind of what the podcast is about.
I think what you've said fits perfectly with what we often say. Magic is something you have to make your own, something you have to work on, really get to grips with, if you want to make it interesting for the spectators. So thank you for sharing all of that, and for the promo code people can use on your website if they don't already own all your effects. We hope to see you in France soon. We see each other on video, but we don't actually see each other.
Vincent Hedan
I don't know when yet, but thank you for having me and for the time we spent talking. It was interesting to share all that. We do click on a lot of subjects, which made it interesting. Thanks for having me. Excuse me, I'm a little thrown. The moment of parting is overwhelming me.
Olivier Nicoleau
No, it was really nice, because it's been a long time. We'd exchanged messages a few times, but we'd never had a chance to actually talk, so I'm really glad we did. We'll keep following your work with a lot of interest. Don't be surprised if we make announcements like the one for your book test at the beginning.
Vincent Hedan
What's going on? I'm disappointed.
Olivier Nicoleau
I think my next purchase will probably be Devil's Tarot, because it's a subject I'm interested in right now. I'm curious to see what you've done with it. Thanks for your time. Thanks to everyone who listened, and see you soon.
Vincent Chaigneau
Should we remind people it's important to subscribe to get the next episodes? Especially since this episode will be in two parts, and if they want the second part, they need to subscribe to the podcast. And most of all, leave us a comment on social media. Ask us questions, tell us what you thought. That's what lets us make better episodes in the future. So please do. We're always happy to hear what you think of the episodes.
Apart from showing that you listened, it lets us try a few new things each time, little changes to make the episodes better for you. Anyway, we're always happy to hear from you. If you have questions for Vincent, we'll pass them on. Maybe that'll give us a chance to come back to the episode or do a Q&A if questions come up. Thanks, everyone. Subscribe, share it, tell your magician friends about it, and we'll see you very soon for the next episode.
