The Making of the Potterverse (17 page)

QUESTION:
Technically, what was the toughest sequence to pull off?

COLUMBUS:
The toughest was Dobby. The basilisk was fun to shoot. That was one day we just threw out the storyboards and decided to really have a lot of fun. We took the camera off the tripod with the
basilisk. But with Dobby, Dan basically had to focus on a green [
sic
] ball at the end of a stick. The first day was a little difficult, and then he got into it. Even in the dailies, where you saw him interacting with this green ball, you realized, “God, it feels like there’s someone else there,” even though Dobby wasn’t in the frame yet. The animators at ILM [Industrial Light and Magic] said they’d never seen any actor do it as well as Dan. They said they’ve had actors twice his age who haven’t been able to focus. But he makes those scenes work really well. We also wanted the character of Dobby, because he is
CG
, not to have this certain curse of another
CGI
I won’t reveal. This guy was so annoying and he scared the hell out of us.

QUESTION:
How much does a Potter movie feel like a big Hollywood movie and how much does it feel like a little British movie when you’ve got these respected British actors?

COLUMBUS:
It never feels like a Hollywood movie. That’s what’s great about being in England. You’ve got these stars — Maggie Smith and Richard Harris. There is ego, but they’re there to work. It’s all about the work, so there aren’t trailers and cooks and trainers and all of that nonsense. Also, I think I’ve seen every one of them on the West End. They need to do theater and it’s not a step down for them to do
TV
. So they’re constantly working. There is none of that Hollywood stuff. And the kids themselves did the (U.S.) premiere last year, did Letterman and Leno, and then the movie opened on a Friday. Three days later they were shooting
Chamber of Secrets
. So they didn’t even have time to be affected by all of this. And going back to England is different. Even though the press there is pretty savage, they’ve stayed away from the kids. They’ll follow Victoria Beckham and those people around the streets forever, but for some reason they’ve left the kids alone. I think that in two years there’s only been one photograph of Dan in the newspaper, walking with his mother. They got a couple of other photographs of stand-ins and stuff. So they’ve been kind to the kids, which is great.

Director Chris Columbus noticed that Emma Watson, along with her other two co-stars, had become much more comfortable in front of the camera by the second film. (John D McHugh/AP Photo)

QUESTION:
How has Dan changed since this all began?

COLUMBUS:
He’s not changed personally. He’s kind of becoming more of a leading man. He’s got more confidence as an actor, which I think is pretty obvious from the film. As a person, he still thanks me after a take. You’re not going to get Julia Roberts thanking me after a take.

QUESTION:
How about Rupert? He does a much better job in this film, especially in his handling of the comedy.

COLUMBUS:
I think that Dan and Rupert particularly, and Emma to a certain extent, have become more comfortable. We all knew we weren’t going to get fired, so it was a good experience. The first time around, honestly, I got on the set every day and thought I was going to be fired. The kids were terrified because Rupert and Emma had never been on a set before. Rupert couldn’t stop looking in the camera the first couple of days of shooting
Sorcerer’s Stone
. Suddenly, after 150 days of what was almost this acting workshop, they got confidence, they felt better about themselves, they became accustomed to 250 people on the set. By the time we started shooting the
second movie there was a whole level of confidence and ease, and the ability to even do some improvisation, which we had never done before. That all made for a very easy shoot in one sense, time-consuming and intense, energy-wise. By the end of the shoot I couldn’t get Rupert to get through a take without smiling or laughing. He was having such a great time. I said to his dad, “Is everything funny to him?” He’s amused by everything. His dad said, “He’s just very happy. He loves it.” So I think that comfort and relaxation shows in the second movie.

QUESTION:
Did that sense of relaxation and comfort carry over to the production itself, in the sense that you could flex some more creative freedom and veer from the book a bit?

COLUMBUS:
There’s certainly a sense out there among kids and among (Potter) fans that
Chamber of Secrets
is not the most popular book. If you ask kids, the first answer you get is
Azkaban
, usually, and that’s followed by
Sorcerer’s Stone
and
Goblet of Fire
, kind of tied.
Chamber of Secrets
is rarely mentioned. But, from a filmmaking point of view,
Chamber of Secrets
had a hidden little sequence in and of itself, which is that the spider sequence and the basilisk sequence work on the page, from a literary point of view, but they weren’t full-blown action sequences. So that’s really where we changed a lot. We wanted to develop those into big action sequences.

QUESTION:
The first film introduced the world of
Harry Potter
and we got to know all the major characters. This film feels more like characters we know and like are being put on a ride and sent off to have fun. How different a challenge was that for you as the director in that you’re not telling as emotional a story?

COLUMBUS:
I think it’s a combination. I set out to make a film that I knew would be two and a half hours long, but I wanted it to feel like it was about 30 minutes long. I wanted the audience to never be bored, never get tired of it. I was conscious of that. I wanted it to be incredibly exciting for everyone. My main concern was that I wanted
to make a film for the parent as well [as the kids], because the parents are there with the kids. And I am sick and tired of sitting in films that I’m bored to death by, that are just aimed directly at kids or below their intelligence level. So that was a conscious effort. From an emotional point of view, I’ve been knocked around a bunch of times about being too sentimental, so I tried to pull back a little on the emotion. And I realized as I pulled back some of the emotion it became stronger, in a sense. You learn as you get older that by having a little less emotion on screen it becomes a bit of a more emotional experience. So I think it does get emotional, but in a different way.

J.K. Rowling made a substantial donation to a Scottish university in their efforts to combat multiple sclerosis. “I became patron of the MS Society Scotland in early 2001,” she explained, “after I discovered the appallingly poor quality of care available to people with MS in Scotland, the MS capital of the world. Since then I’ve been heartened by the huge strides the MS Society Scotland is making, but there is still so much to do, especially in the field of research.”

The Leaky Cauldron Web site (www.the-leaky-cauldron.org) turned to its enormous readership to help raise the necessary funds to bid on a 93-word teaser written by J.K. Rowling that provided clues for the next novel,
Order of the Phoenix
. The site’s Melissa Anelli explained the site’s intentions saying, “We were worried that a wealthy fan would win it and keep its contents private from the millions of fans eagerly waiting for more than two and a half years to find out about the next book.”

Warner Brothers asked for permission to shoot portions of
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
at Glencoe in Scotland. Their intention was to make a gatehouse, stone cottages and a sundial garden.

Russian prosecutors claimed they were going to launch an investigation into whether or not the Harry Potter novels served as an instigator of religious hatred. One could ask who exactly those prosecutors would sue.

J.K. Rowling exchanged emails and made phone contact with a young girl named Catie Hoch (to whom Rowling even read over the phone) who was dying of cancer. After the girl’s passing, word reached Rowling, and so she wrote to Catie’s parents. As reprinted in the
Albany Times Union
, that letter read, in part, “I consider myself privileged to have had contact with Catie. I can only aspire to being the sort of parents both of you have been to Catie during her illness. I am crying so hard as I type. She left footprints on my heart all right. With much love, Jo.” Eventually the author donated $100,000 to a charity set up in Catie’s name.

The majestic stairway in Christ Church College at Oxford served as the Hogwarts entranceway in the first two films. (Fionna Boyle)

In a headline that read “Harry Potter, Get Ready to Meet Count Dracula,” MTV reported that Gary Oldman had been offered the role of Sirius Black in
Prisoner of Azkaban
. Noted the actor’s manager, Douglas Urbanski, “They’ve asked him to do
Harry Potter
and I know he’s really seriously looking at it. He’s delighted to have been offered the role, especially because he’s got kids — he’s a full-time single dad.”

It was revealed that students from the King’s School, located next to the Gloucester Cathedral, which stands in for portions of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films, worked on
The Chamber of Secrets
as extras.

Warner Brothers announced a two-disc DVD release of
Chamber of Secrets
that would hit the streets on April 11.

New York police officers nabbed over 400,000 Ecstasy pills being pushed on the streets that featured an image of Harry Potter on them.

David Thewlis was announced for the role of Professor Lupin in
Prisoner of Azkaban
.

A short surge of controversy as the media began to report that Dobby seemed to feature a too-close-for-comfort resemblance to Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia. Some believed that the filmmakers were mocking Putin.