The Making of the Potterverse (29 page)

Joining the three regulars for
Goblet of Fire
were Katie Leung (Cho Chang), Stanislav Lanevski (Viktor Krum), Clémence Poésy (Fleur Delacour) and Robert Pattinson (Cedric Diggory). (INFGoff.com/CP Photo)

HEYMAN:
I think in this film more than the previous three films, there was a sense of community amongst the kids. They all were playing and joking and laughing, and there was a lot more hanging out, and Dan, Rupert, and Emma were all part of that. And so it’s a much more extended community, much more like school life than I think it’s ever been.

NEWELL:
That’s a good point, actually. I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right, it was much more like the kind of loose relationships that you would build up in school, but much bigger.

HEYMAN:
And I have to say, we are blessed. The three kids who could, as Mike said, so easily be brats, are not. They want to learn, they want to get better at what they do, they are enthusiastic still, and they have a lot of fun doing it. I think partly the rehearsal that Mike had them do, but also by their very nature, they are nonjudgmental, open people, who are good people from the top down. I think Mike will attest to this. Though the buck always stops with him, ultimately, it’s a very democratic environment. It’s one in which everybody has a voice, sometimes too much of one [laughs], but everybody does.

NEWELL:
I agree. The trouble is, you can’t start to play that game unless you play that game all the way through. I agree with you.
HEYMAN:
It’s a place in which everybody is welcome, and it’s a very safe place for kids to be; everybody to be.

QUESTION:
How frequently did you consult with J.K. Rowling about the story line?

NEWELL:
Actually, you should ask David, because this is an absolutely key function of David’s. Jo Rowling appears to me to be quite extraordinarily hands-off. Everybody says, “Oh we’re surprised to hear that, we thought that she was very controlling.” Well, I speak as I find — she wasn’t with me. I don’t think it’s in her nature, I don’t think she’s like that. The danger, of course, is straying too far from the novels because you could lose Jo Rowling, at which point you lose the audience. Because they come in the end for her. And
she was very, very sweet, she was very available, she’s not the best returner of a phone call that I’ve come across, but she was fine. She gave me very clear things, when I needed them, like what did the Avada Kedavra curse actually do when it hit you. But she also had this very strong view of how the story fit into this seven-book arc. Beyond that, she didn’t control at all. But of course it was to David’s credit that she was brought into the process just as much as he knew she wanted to be, and not an inch more. I mean, how does that work?

HEYMAN:
Jo is the most generous of collaborators. She sees each and every draft of the screenplay. We want to do that, because, one, I made a promise at the beginning that we would be true; but two, because we’d be fools to be otherwise. And so we show her each draft, and we also don’t want to do anything that will disrupt the books. Also, she has incredible knowledge. What’s in the books is just the surface of what she knows: she has notebook upon notebook of more material that doesn’t find its way into the books. I think one of the reasons for the success of the books is because the universe is so clearly thought through. There was one very significant change that we made, and we called Jo to ask her about it, because it was major, and it had to do with Barty Crouch Jr. being present in that very first scene in the film. With Voldemort and Peter Pettigrew. The scene takes place in the novel, but Barty Crouch Jr. is not in it. And the reason why we wanted that is because we needed Barty Crouch Jr. to be more a recognizable and formidable presence when you got to the end, when Moody turns back into him. And without that, the only time you would have seen him would have been in the flashback, when he didn’t look exactly like he did at the end. So I called Jo and asked her, and I think she said that’s absolutely fine. What she loved about the third film, she hasn’t yet seen the fourth, but what she loved about the third film was that it was true to the spirit, that it made changes, but it made changes in the spirit of the work. That’s what she has felt so far in the process, the inclusive process of the script. I know she’ll feel it when she sees the film. She
was meant to see it last week, but some personal matters came up and she couldn’t.

QUESTION:
How did the young actors handle all the physical challenges?

NEWELL:
Well, Dan’s a very brave boy. He really is a brave boy. He’s a rotten swimmer, or he was, when this began. And he had great trepidation, and he came to me, about the swimming, and there wasn’t any way around it — he had to swim. He had to spend huge amounts of time underwater in the tank, and apart from anything else, he was by no means sure that he had the physical resources to do that. You couldn’t say that he was frightened of it, but [fear] was only a step away. And nonetheless, he knuckled down, and he did what he had to do.

HEYMAN:
Actually, on the first film, when we began the process, Dan was not a physical boy. And he wanted to be more physical, and actually we encouraged that. We put him together with our stunt team, and he is now a jock of sorts. I mean, his body has changed, he’s really much more physical than he ever was. But lunch break for example, several times a week, he’ll go down to the gym and work out. It’s not something we’re asking him to do, he just loves to do it. At times he likes to do his own stunts, he’s very brave, as Michael said. In the underwater scene, he logged forty-one hours on his log book.

QUESTION:
What role does screenwriter Steve Kloves play in the continuity of the series?

HEYMAN:
Steve Kloves is one of the great experiences for me, one of the great joys of this entire series. I think he’s one of the best writers writing, he is a brilliant adapter in the sense that he’s able to retain the voice of the author that he’s adapting. He did it with Michael Chabon with
Wonder Boys
and I think he’s done it in the four Potter films that he’s written. He is a fantastic writer who has a keen sense of character, and really understands the voice of the actors he is writing for, and he can write with great emotion and at
the same time also, great humor. He is not doing the fifth because he is writing another project for me called
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
, which I thought he [might] direct, however he read the sixth [Potter] book and couldn’t stay away, so he’s going to come back and write the sixth. Michael Goldenberg is writing the fifth, he is another writer that I actually talked to about the first film, and he’s doing a fantastic job. You can never make a good film out of a bad script. You most certainly can make a bad one out of a good one, but the key is to have a good script, and I really believe that Steve Kloves, on each of the four films, has given us a really good script. He’s also a man, and Mike can speak to this a little bit, who writes without ego. It’s great when you sit in the script meeting with him, because you can say anything, and he’s thought through everything. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t defend what he has, but he does it in a way which explains the reason why he has done what he has done, but it’s always open to changes. He also has an encyclopedic knowledge of the world, and he and Jo are very much on the same wavelength.

NEWELL:
It was the happiest collaboration I think I’ve ever had, certainly as an adapter. And he never gets in your way. I am one of those who will want stuff to be written and rewritten and re-rewritten. He would never, ever complain, he would always see why, and he would always dig down into his personal mine of stuff, and come up with wonderful things. I can’t tell you how happy I was with him.

(Harry, Hermione and Ron)

QUESTION:
How did you identify with the character growing up in this film?

DANIEL RADCLIFFE:
For me, it’s great because there is so much pressure on the films now to be better, especially after the third one, which for me was great. There was an awareness that we had to work really hard, to go further with it and to make it better, because otherwise people would be very disappointed, and so for me it is also a lot of fun, loads of fun playing Harry as he’s getting older. I think that when we [start with] Harry’s tenth birthday [in the book] — it’s almost as if [it’s] in real life and not just in the stories, but people sort of grow extra emotions. That’s partly to do with hormones and all the trouble that they cause, and then partly just a thing about growing up. You have other assets, and so it’s fun playing that in Harry as he grows older.

EMMA WATSON:
And then there’s been a lot of speculation about whether we’re going to outgrow our parts or that the films will take longer, but it actually works out pretty well because each film takes about a year. Obviously that coincides with us doing our year at school. So we’re pretty much growing alongside them. Sometimes everything that we’re going through, in some instances, they are too.

DANIEL:
There is always this thing of whether we will get too old for the part. People actually play a lot younger than they are in real life. I don’t think that it’s as big an issue as a lot of people make it out to be.

RUPERT GRINT:
I think that all of the characters have sort of grown. I think Ron was a bit more moody in this one. There’s a few of those things, and I enjoyed doing it.

QUESTION:
As you get older and more successful, is there a risk of you guys becoming party animals?

EMMA:
Hopefully not.

DANIEL:
I’m planning on buying twenty Porsches and crashing them all just to be extravagant. I don’t think so. I think that it’s a really good thing that we haven’t gotten like that. Because the characters are so well known and iconic, if we’d been going out — basically if we’d gone to every party under the sun that we were invited to, it would’ve been hard for people to divorce what they see in the film from what they see in magazines and stuff. So I think that would’ve been a mistake, which is why I think that we basically only go to the premieres.

EMMA:
I think that we do have a kind of responsibility to that as well. I don’t think that we are the party animals.

DANIEL:
I certainly quite enjoy not having the high profile thing. I quite like that, because I sort of feel like I’m fooling people, because it’s this massive thing and yet it’s still quite a low-key thing. I feel I’m tricking everyone [laughs].

QUESTION:
What is it like when you return to school between films?

EMMA:
You do get some funny looks, but after a while they just accept the fact that you’re there all the time, and that’s how I like it.

DANIEL:
The only thing that I would sort of say is that basically when you get back to school, as Emma said, originally there’s a sort of novelty factor. People are going, “Ah, look who it is. It’s that person.” It’s like you’re sort of running along with an extra arm or something, but after a few weeks or something it sort of settles down and they go, “Oh. That’s just the kid with the extra arm.” So it doesn’t seem to affect everyone so much. I was at school when the third film came out and then it got sort of fever pitch again, sort of mad. But it’s not really a problem.

RUPERT:
I’m finished with school now, and so I don’t really get that.

QUESTION:
How would you describe the bond between your characters?

DANIEL:
What’s quite nice about the thing that goes on between Harry and Ron in this one, and the tension, is that it’s funny for
someone looking in on it, but to them it’s absolutely serious and they’re really angry at each other. Each of them feels that they have both behaved in a really bad way, and so it’s sort of like they feel betrayed by the other. It’s also mutual blame. They’re both to blame for how they are acting with each other, but to someone else on the outside sort of watching it, it’s quite funny, because in the long run it’s actually quite trivial what they’re arguing about, as a lot of arguments are. They seem really important at the time and then two years later you can’t even remember where it started or what it was about.
RUPERT:
It’s just sort of growing up. It’s natural.