The Making of the Potterverse (28 page)

DAVID HEYMAN:
And for Harry, when we went and spoke to Jo [Rowling] the first time, it was very important to her that the theme that would continue through it all was to stand up and be counted. Even if you think you might not win, you have to stand up for what you believe in.

NEWELL:
David [Heyman] took me up to see J.K. Rowling two years ago now. And she talked about just that, she talked about these
moral challenges, and she was brilliant about it, and I took a great deal away from that.

HEYMAN:
That’s really the essence that Mike [Newell] sort of took from the beginning, right through [to] the end: it is a thriller, another change. The world has expanded, we’ve got two new schools coming in, we have the first interaction with the opposite sex, both the good and the awkward and uncomfortable sides of that, that begin at thirteen, fourteen, and never go away. But its heart, as Mike said, is this moral stuff. Harry is now fourteen, he’s much more of an individual than he’s ever been before. He’s becoming more who he is.

NEWELL:
It’s terribly interesting, isn’t it?

HEYMAN:
What the Dark Lord is grooming him to be.

NEWELL:
Both you and I are taking Emma [Watson] as a sort of honorary boy. But of course Emma now gets to be a young woman, which is something that I personally am very proud of, because I thought that she allowed herself to be very vulnerable. She could so easily have said, “Well I’m Hermione and I’m going to be this and that,” but she was very, very allowing of a vulnerability, and not knowing, and not being kind of cool. And I was very pleased by that. Just as in number three, there’s this hugely satisfying moment where she hits Malfoy,
bop
. So there is in this one this wonderful moment where she’s unsure and insecure.

HEYMAN:
I think the kids are growing as actors, and Mike is benefiting from them having had two years with two films with Chris [Columbus] and one film with Alfonso [Cuaron]. Mike is one of the great directors of actors, and the kids are challenged. He didn’t let them rest one minute or get comfortable; he pushed and pushed and pushed, and I think the performances show it.

QUESTION:
What is the challenge of using some of these great British actors as basically background to Harry’s story?

NEWELL:
It’s actually a problem. And I think that the way that we attacked it, was that even though each of them — Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, Mike Gambon, Robbie Coltrane — is now established,
there’s no more exploration for the audience to do of those characters. Indeed they mustn’t change, in a way. And so what you have to do is to find a kind of lapidary way of using these tiny little bits, which will show you parts of these characters that you’ve never seen before. And so you’ve never seen Hagrid in love before, and a very wonderful thing it is, too. She did this thing at rehearsal, nobody could believe it — this is Frances de la Tour — and they found themselves opposite one another, and of course they’re both of them great natural comedians, and so it was wonderful seeing these two people being kind of awkward and blushing and retiring with one another. And then suddenly she leant forward and does what she actually does in the scene in the movie, she picks something out of his beard, and we all thought, “Oh wasn’t that wonderful!” And
then, God help us, she ate it. [Laughs] So you know, those little things, and a tiny moment like that will keep those characters alive, but yes, it’s something you have to work at — it’s difficult.

Mike Newell, director of
Goblet of Fire,
shows Voldemort how it’s done. (Kevork Djansezian/AP Photo)

QUESTION:
Working with Dumbledore in particular has changed in that this is the first time we’re seeing things beyond his control.

NEWELL:
Yes, that was really interesting, because Michael was very game for that. I think that he had not wanted to be the same figure that Richard Harris had been, who was a figure of tremendous Olympian authority. He’d wanted something different to do simply because he wasn’t Richard Harris. And what he found in this one was that Dumbledore is fallible. And not omnipotent, and indeed is behind the game, and a great deal of what he does is about being inadequate, rather than super-adequate, which of course is much more interesting to play.

QUESTION:
Mike, did you have much knowledge of the movies and books prior to being approached for this one?

NEWELL:
Yes, I’d read one book, the first book; and I’d seen both the films before I was approached, and so I was hoping to be approached. I was therefore educated pretty reasonably when I was approached, but then of course I started to particularly watch the films, obsessively. And I can still in my sleep do close textual analysis on numbers one, two, and three.

HEYMAN:
And Alfonso was very generous.

NEWELL:
Yeah he was, actually. As I’m sure Chris would’ve been.

HEYMAN:
As Mike has been with David Yates [
Order of the Phoenix
]. And Alfonso now, you know, engaged Mike in discussions about the process and visual effects and allowed him to see the film early, just as Mike did with David Yates. And David Yates has seen a rough cut of the film, so it’s been really great. By the way, I wanted Mike from the very beginning.

QUESTION:
This film is so different from the previous ones. Do you think it’s not just a kids’ movie anymore?

Producer David Heyman had secured the rights to the Harry Potter films before the books had become a phenomenon. (Ian West/PA/CP Photo)

NEWELL:
Not a kid movie for me. It’s an adventure story, and it’s a huge entertainment. Warner Brothers absolutely hated me saying this, so I’m gonna say it. But for me it had all the kind of variety that a Bollywood movie has. It’s just — oh no, he said it! [Laughs] But at any rate, it’s a huge broad-based entertainment, but above everything else, David is habitually very modest about this stuff, but he was very, very good when he first approached me, because what he said was, “You must read the book, and if you find a way of doing the book, then you must tell us what that is. You mustn’t come because it’s a franchise, you mustn’t come because it’s the most famous children’s film that’s ever been, you mustn’t come for this, that, and the other reason, you’ve got to be able to see how to make a seven-hundred-and-fifty-page book into a single movie.” And we then had one
of the meetings made in heaven, where we talked about the thing as being a thriller. Because that’s what I found in it; I thought that it was an absolutely God-given thriller — and then I convinced him.

HEYMAN:
For me, the books are not children’s books. I think that’s a misconception. I think the books are books that appeal to . . . maybe you could say
children
of all ages, but I think they appeal to people of all ages. I think there is something for everybody in them, and I think with this film, each book is getting more mature than the one that preceded it, because it’s also dealing with a different age, a different year in Harry’s life. And in this one, Harry’s fourteen, so there’re different issues, there’s greater complexity, and I think that really shows in the film, because the film is true to that script. The other thing is, when you bring in a director like Mike Newell, just as when you bring in a director like Alfonso Cuaron, they’re not cookie cutters. You don’t bring in a director like Mike Newell and tell him “Well, you’ve got to make a film just like Chris Columbus.” I mean, it would be foolish. So for me, I look at this film, and I see Mike Newell — I mean, I see Jo Rowling, but I see Mike Newell written all over it, and that’s really exciting to me. Just as I saw with Alfonso, I saw Alfonso written all over
Prisoner
.

NEWELL:
Yes, I saw that with Alfonso and with Chris.

HEYMAN:
I think it’s really important. And I’m sure that David Yates will imbue the fifth [film] with the same. And it’s really exciting for me, this is a big, generous, smart, funny, thriller.

QUESTION:
Are you happy with the PG-13 rating?

HEYMAN:
Very much so. And I’m very happy with the 12A in the UK. One, I think it will be good for the slightly older audience, and two, I think that we had to be . . . it shows that we’ve been faithful to the material. The books do not talk down to an audience. The audience reaches for the books, and I think the films do the same. We don’t patronize our audience. The film is very much in the spirit; it’s not literally faithful, but it is in the spirit, it is truly faithful to the spirit of what Jo has written, and that’s really exciting to me.

NEWELL:
One of the challenges was that, of course, everything goes back to the book, always. And that’s where the audience begins as well. And so as the audience, which began with the first book, progresses through two and three, they get to four, and they see that it’s a different kind of animal; it’s a much tougher beast than the others. And if you don’t get a PG-13, in a way, then that audience that began with number one and is now fourteen, fifteen, sixteen — or sixty-four, whatever — will kind of want to know why you are infantilizing the situation. Of course David says these are not children’s books, these are kind of adult stories, with a very strong moral aim and view. So with PG-13 they can believe; without it, I’m not sure they can.

QUESTION:
How does this film rank personally for you?

NEWELL:
I truly mean this: I can’t stand myself sometimes. David has seen me in rushes, where I simply can’t bear the ordinariness of what I do. And I always feel that about every [film].

HEYMAN:
Even when it’s extraordinary?

NEWELL:
Doesn’t matter. And I always hate the end result. And this time, and it may be a very bad sign, I don’t know, but this time I
don’t
hate it; this time I think it’s what I tried to do, what we all tried to do. Which was to make this wonderful, terrifying thriller ride. And so it pleases me very much, and that’s a better way of answering your question.

QUESTION:
What were you expecting in terms of working with the kids?

NEWELL:
My worst fear was that they would have realized that these films were stories in which they absolutely were the stars. Now in most children’s films, that’s not true. Most children’s films, they are a sort of a little bolt on a third of the story while the weight is still taken by the adults. In that way,
Mary Poppins
is not quite a children’s story, it’s an adult’s story. But that’s not the case here. This is a story in which the children are stars, and that can do terrible things to [child actors]. And miraculously, mostly because of the way they’re
handled by the production and also because they’ve got very good parents — a good kid has good parents — they haven’t [been badly affected]. They know exactly what they’re worth, but they have not become impossible, and so they’re still loose, and they’re still curious, and they’re still prepared to have a go at anything. Before we began shooting, we had two weeks of acting classes, and the reason we did this was that I was very anxious that the established characters would not dominate the newcomers. Many of whom had never acted before. The Chinese girl had never acted before, the two little Indian girls had never acted before. And I didn’t want them feeling that they were secondary citizens, and so we had these two weeks where what we did was we played, we did physical exercises, we did improvisational exercises, so on and so forth. And by the end of that, everybody was loose in one another’s company, and there was no rank structure. It wasn’t that Dan outshone anybody else, they were all the same. And they were prepared to do that, which is a very wonderful thing. And it shows. What you’ve got now is an ensemble, rather than a top-down pyramid structure.