Emma Watson (2 page)

The grim reality of Rowling’s day-to-day life – so very different from the privilege of Watson’s – would soon become the stuff of magazine feature writers’ dreams: ‘Literary Triumph of Downtrodden Single Mum on Benefits’. Though true, it’s a pigeonholing image that seems to annoy Rowling, particularly when it was subsequently suggested that the story was PR spin. In 2006, she explained her irritation to Channel 4’s
Richard and Judy
show: ‘Not to crack out the violins or anything, but if you’ve been through a few years where things have been very tough – and they were very tough – and it’s dismissed in half a sentence, “starving in a garret”, and occasionally I’ve thought, Well you try it, pal, you go there and see. It wasn’t a publicity stunt, it was my life, and at that time I didn’t know there was going to be this amazing resolution. I thought this would be life for twenty years.’

The original idea for the book had come to her in June 1990 (several weeks after Emma was born) as Jo Rowling was travelling from Manchester to London on a delayed train. It’s become part of Potter folklore that the world of Harry Potter came to her in one overwhelming creative wave. ‘I didn’t know then that it was going to be a book for children – I just knew that I had this boy, Harry. During that journey I also discovered Ron, Nearly Headless Nick, Hagrid and Peeves. But with the idea of my life careering round my head, I didn’t have a pen that worked! And I never went anywhere without my pen and notebook. So, rather than trying to write it, I had to think it. And I think that was a very good thing. I was besieged by a mass of detail and if it didn’t survive that journey it probably wasn’t worth remembering. So I got back to the flat that night and began to write it all down in a tiny cheap notebook.’

She began to weave a story about the orphan Harry Potter, who is transported from the grim suburban life he endures with his guardians when he discovers he is a wizard. Sent off to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, he makes friends with fellow young wizards Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger and with equal ease makes an enemy out of another pupil, Draco Malfoy.

Harry, Ron and Hermione uncover the magical stone of the title, which has the power of immortality. An evil wizard called Voldemort needs the stone to restore his powers. Voldemort killed Harry’s parents – when the boy wizard discovers this, he vows revenge. Harry has to use all his cunning – and the help of his newfound friends – to get to the stone before the evil wizard does.

One of the characters was particularly close to Rowling’s heart: Hermione Granger. In the first of the Potter books, Hermione is first spotted on the Hogwarts Express heading for the school of magic. She’s described as having big teeth, big, brown, bushy hair and – most importantly – a very bossy voice. She would use this voice to rather annoying effect, criticising Ron’s ability to cast spells.

Rowling has repeatedly described herself as being ‘annoying’ as a child. ‘I’m quite open and I say that Hermione was at least partially based on me when I was younger,’ she would reveal to NBC. ‘I loosened up quite a bit as I got older, and so does she through the books, under the healthy influence of Harry and Ron. Hermione’s a bit of an exaggeration. But I was deeply insecure, as is Hermione. She’s covering up a lot of insecurities by trying to get good marks and so on. That’s the place she feels most secure, in the classroom with her hand up.’

Rowling managed to get a literary agent, Christopher Little, to help her find a publisher – a dozen turned her down before Bloomsbury editor Barry Cunningham took an interest. ‘Harry Potter came along because Jo had been turned down by everybody already,’ Cunningham told the
Writer Unboxed
website. ‘I believe she chose her agent, Christopher Little, because his name sounded nice, but he was really an adult author’s agent. I really don’t think he had any other children’s book authors, but he knew my background and knew what I was looking for, so he sent me Harry Potter. I’m sure he had read it, but I’m not sure he knew what he had. I read it, and really the sky didn’t
part and the lightning didn’t come down, but I just really liked it.’

Cunningham recalled his first impressions of Jo Rowling to biographer Sean Smith. ‘I thought she was shy about herself but very confident and intense about the book and, most importantly, confident that children would like Harry,’ he said. ‘She just so understood about growing up.’

Bloomsbury gave Rowling a £1,500 advance for the manuscript and advised her to use the initials J. K. so boys would not be put off reading a book written by a female. Barry Cunningham later recalled the gentle warning he gave to Rowling just before the first book was published: ‘You’ll never make money out of children’s books, Jo.’

Three days after it was published, the book was the subject of a bidding war among American publishing houses. It went to Scholastic Books for $100,000 – Jo Rowling was news and the Harry Potter phenomenon had truly begun.

Shortly after publication, a copy of the book came into the office of British-born film producer David Heyman, who had several cult movies under his belt, including the drug-fuelled comedy
The Stoned Age
. He’d just started work on a cannibal western called
Ravenous
. Rowling’s book promptly found itself on his ‘low-priority’ shelf alongside other stories that would be unlikely to make it to the big screen. That’s exactly where it would have stayed if it weren’t for production secretary Nisha Parti, who took the book home, read it and advised Heyman to do the same. ‘I read it and was captivated,’ Heyman later told the
Guardian
, although he admitted he thought the title was
‘rubbish’. ‘The writing was so vivid and the characters so easy to relate to: Harry the outsider, Hermione the swot, Ron from a big family, the battle between good and evil. I went to a school like Hogwarts, but without the magic.’

Heyman began an 18-month-long courtship and eventually acquired the film rights. He didn’t set the bar too high in terms of his expectations for the movie. ‘I thought it would be a modest film,’ he told the
Daily Telegraph
in 2000. ‘My
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
.’ He would become the architect of the entire Potter series, bringing Warner Brothers into the deal.

By now, with two more books under her belt –
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
in 1998 and
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
due in December 1999 – Jo Rowling was a very different person from the Edinburgh single parent she had once been. She was a millionaire and more than capable of calling the shots to protect her creation. The first film would be the start of an epic cinematic journey, and Jo Rowling wanted to make sure the journey was under her guidance, despite the fact that only she knew the outcome. ‘The biggest thing by far was that I was looking for an agreement that said they would follow my story even though the rest of the books weren’t written,’ she told US broadcaster NBC. ‘What I didn’t want to do was sell the rights to the characters and enable them to do sequels that I haven’t written. That was my worst nightmare. So I was quite happy never to have Harry Potter films if I couldn’t get that guarantee.’

The film’s director needed to be involved from the early stages. Chris Columbus – who’d helmed hits like
Home
Alone
and
Mrs Doubtfire
– came across
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
(or, as it was renamed for the American market,
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
) thanks to his young daughter, who tried to coerce him into reading it. ‘I said, “No, I don’t want to read it, it’s a kids’ book,”’ he later told US talk-show host Charlie Rose. ‘I don’t have any interest in it. I finally picked up the book, read it and fell in love with it. I said, “I have to make this into a film.”’

Unfortunately for Columbus, his old boss Steven Spielberg was in the frame to direct the first Potter film. As a screenwriter, Columbus had a hand in Spielberg hits such as
Gremlins
and
The Goonies
. ‘If Spielberg’s going to do, it’s not even worth thinking about,’ he said. ‘It’s not even a possibility.’

When Spielberg pulled out, Columbus got the job. He’s since admitted that he had become ‘artistically stale’ churning out films in Hollywood and saw the chance of working with new, untried performers as a way to reinvigorate his work. Columbus threw himself into the audition process to find three young performers to play the lead parts in the film. ‘I thought, I can turn this into some form of interactive filmmaking and be an active participant. By hiring these kids who aren’t accomplished actors, I can get in there and act with them. Basically, it was almost like acting school. Turn these kids into actors. And that was the passion behind it.’

Emma Watson had, meanwhile, become a fully fledged ‘Dragon’, moving out of Lynams and up to the main prep
school. While she was at the Dragon, a fellow pupil, future comedian Jack Whitehall, and another boy took some of Emma’s possessions and sold them online after she became famous. ‘We found some socks with her name tag in, so we whacked them on eBay,’ he later claimed in Scotland’s
Daily Record
. ‘We thought, She’s doing well for herself, let’s make some money. I can’t recall what we got for the socks. It wasn’t over a fiver. She wasn’t my friend and didn’t want to be my friend at school.’

Outside of school, she had settled into the routine of her life split between London and Oxford. Although Emma would repeatedly state that her childhood was happy, it wasn’t, to use her word, ‘consistent’. ‘Although I think divorce has a huge effect on children and I’d never make light of that,’ she told
Women’s Weekly,
‘I have a good relationship with both parents. It’s very rare to see an amicable and harmonious divorce, and it makes a huge difference to children.’

Consistency would have to wait. It would come later in surprising ways: from stage hands, makeup artists, cameramen and actors. Routine and consistency would be provided by the very world that took her away from her family. But for now the nature of a routine spent between two households – in Emma Watson’s case some 60 miles apart – always meant one thing: a lot of travelling. Books were the means to pass the time. And Emma liked a particular series of books to while away the time: the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling. Dad Chris would read them to Emma and Alex on long journeys and as their bedtime story. Emma in particular was a convert from the
very first book. ‘Everything about the book, everything about J. K. Rowling’s world, is thought down to the very last detail,’ she later explained to
The Times
. ‘You can pull apart the spells and they’re Latin and they actually mean what they are doing. And all the names are so interesting and so unique and different and everyone has their own history. And how she’s come up with all of this is just so amazing. At the end of each book, it’s almost like an Aesop’s Fable. Every time, every year, there is a lesson that Harry learns.’

Emma Watson was halfway through reading
Prisoner of Azkaban
– she declared it her favourite – when the young Dragons, along with hundreds of other schoolchildren across the country, were offered an opportunity to audition for a role in the film version of
Philosopher’s Stone
. It would be the first time Emma had tried for a part beyond the school. Despite this, she threw herself into the task. ‘I
sooo
wanted to be Hermione,’ she explained to
Vogue
more than ten years later. ‘Even if I’d been ill. Even if I was dying, I would have found a way to go to school that day.’

The producers weren’t looking for some random yet talented little girl: what they were searching for was very specific. Producer David Heyman wanted a youngster who embodied the essence of Hermione Granger. She had to be suitably forceful, but still have an essential likability. ‘There was no open audition,’ Emma would later explain to journalist Derek Blasberg. ‘They went all over England to find these characters, and not just drama schools. They came to my school and asked if they could put forward a group of twenty children between the ages of nine and
twelve. They took my photograph in the school gym, and then I got a call three weeks later. I loved the books; I was a massive fan. I just felt like that part belonged to me. I know that sounds crazy, but, from that first audition, I always knew. At the beginning, they were casting the other characters as well – but I always knew I was going out for Hermione. She came so naturally to me. Maybe so much of myself at the time was similar to her.’

When Emma’s name was called out at school assembly so she could be told she had got through the first round, she thought she was in trouble for not handing in homework or being late for class. What followed was a hefty series of interviews and auditions. ‘Eleven auditions!’ she told
Entertainment Weekly
. ‘That’s a lot. Rupert only had to go through three.’

Slowly, the producers whittled the girls down, finding out more about them as individuals. ‘The vast majority of the auditions were them asking me questions about myself,’ Emma later recalled in an interview with the
Daily Telegraph
. ‘Then they started having me read, and I think the lines I was given were where I was talking to Harry about not going after [villain turned hero wizard] Sirius Black.’

There was another reason why the film’s producers were interested in the young actors’ own personalities. A huge part of the task ahead would involve being able to handle the intense scrutiny and pressure that instant fame would bring, as well as the gruelling international round of promotional activities and interviews that would lie ahead.

Emma would later recall meeting Rupert Grint at several
such auditions. Grint, from Hertfordshire, stood out from the crowd thanks to his shock of red hair. Like Emma’s, his acting experience so far stretched only to school plays and theatre-school productions. He had entered the auditions after spotting an item about the casting on the BBC’s
Newsround
. He came up with a novel approach to get the producers’ attention. ‘I’d sent in one application and had heard nothing back,’ Grint later told the
Mail
. ‘So I figured there was nothing to lose by being a little inventive.’