Emma Watson (3 page)

Rupert recorded a video to sell himself to the film’s producers. ‘My video was in three parts. I dressed up as a woman and did a little sketch in the character of my drama teacher, then I read some Ron Weasley dialogue.’ The third part was a rap: ‘Hello there, my name’s Rupert Grint, I hope you like this and don’t think I stink …’

Tom Felton – who would win the part of Draco Malfoy – also remembered seeing Emma during the audition process. ‘The crazy thing about the audition was that at my very first audition – when they had thousands of kids in, day in day out – Emma Watson was standing next to me and we did it together. And I came back in two weeks and she had been cast!’

As the auditions progressed, young Emma was alarmed to see a well-known child actress – who’d already appeared in a movie – taking part in the auditions. She would later recall ‘crumbling’ at the sight of the girl; was there any point in carrying on? Here was someone who had already done an actual film, who knew how to ‘do it’. Surely, she had no chance. To make things worse, the girl was ‘bonding’ with a boy in the running for the part of Harry
during breaks in the process – Emma spotted the two children playing cards together. ‘I was like, “Oh, my God, they’re making friends already! I’m definitely not going to get it. I was so, so upset. I wanted it so badly.’

As other girls fell by the wayside, Emma’s desire to be Hermione increased; in her words, the best way of getting the role was to ‘rehearse and rehearse and rehearse’. Her obsession – her compulsion – with getting the role began to ‘terrify’ her parents, who worked hard to manage their daughter’s expectations. Emma made videos of herself practising for the next round of auditions, watching them over and over again. ‘I started working on the audition at nine in the morning and didn’t stop until five in the evening,’ she recalled in an interview with
Marie Claire
magazine. ‘The tape was just me doing the same thing hundreds of times over, until I got it exactly right. I was just amazed at my stamina. The grown-ups said, “We had to stop you; you wanted to keep going.” I’ve always been like that. I give 100 per cent. I can’t do it any other way.’

Producer Heyman clearly hadn’t taken to the
card-playing,
experienced actress: Emma – whom he would later describe as being ‘astonishingly bright … radiant and relaxed’ – was moving up the running order. But Heyman was still looking for his Harry, too. A night out to see the Irish play
Stones in his Pockets
in London would soon change that. The play is about the dramatic effect becoming involved in a film production has on a small community. ‘One night, looking for a break,’ he would later explain to the
Los Angeles Times
, ‘I went to the theatre with screenwriter Steve Kloves [who went on to
write all of the Potter films apart from
Order of the Phoenix
]. There sitting behind me was this boy with these big blue eyes. It was Dan Radcliffe. I remember my first impressions: he was curious and funny and so energetic. There was real generosity, too, and sweetness. But at the same time he was really voracious and with hunger for knowledge of whatever kind.’

In fact, Radcliffe’s parents had already said no to the role on his behalf, believing the pressure of a big-budget potential franchise would be too much for him. They had both been actors, but by the late nineties his mother had become an acting agent and his father a literary agent. Daniel was already an old hand. He’d appeared in a BBC adaptation of
David Copperfield
, playing the title character as a young boy, and had missed the initial round of Potter auditions because he was filming the Pierce Brosnan movie
The Tailor of Panama
, which would be Radcliffe’s big-screen debut.

After four months of auditions and interviews, Emma was called into the production office along with Rupert Grint, and the two youngsters were told that they had won the parts of Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley – or, in the businesslike language of the film industry, that they were being offered ‘preferred-candidate contracts’.

‘We were together,’ Emma later said, describing the day she and Grint were summoned. ‘We thought, Oh, my gosh, another audition! We were both together, and then we were told that we were chosen to be Ron and Hermione.’

It was the moment she had dreamed of for months. Emma would later recall that she asked Heyman to pinch
her, to check that she wasn’t actually dreaming. Dad Chris was there too – and immediately became her manager, steering her through the early years. Both Emma’s parents would be involved in the contract negotiations that initially tied her to just the first two Potter films. The chances of any child performer being able to last the full run of the stories were considered slim to say the least.

Not surprisingly, it was hard for nine-year-old Emma to keep the news to herself. ‘I rang my best friend literally minutes after I’d been told,’ she later told the BBC children’s programme
Newsround
. ‘She answered and said, “So, have you got it?” I said yes and she went “aaaaargh!” I had to hold the phone out here so she wouldn’t break my ear. She was almost more excited than me.’

There was to be another important telephone conversation for Emma – this one with J. K. Rowling herself, who rang the youngster to congratulate her on getting the role. The author had a lot invested in the casting of a part based so much on her own persona as a child. ‘Emma Watson in particular was very, very like Hermione when I first spoke to her,’ Rowling later told
BBC Online
. ‘I knew she was perfect from that first phone call.’

With Emma and Rupert already in place, Daniel Radcliffe was the final young performer to be brought into the production. ‘We saw so many enormously talented kids in the search for Harry,’ said Chris Columbus in a statement released by Warner Bros. ‘The process was intense and there were times when we felt we would never find an individual who embodied the complex spirit and depth of Harry Potter. Then Dan walked into the room and
we all knew we had found Harry. We were equally elated upon meeting Emma and Rupert, who are perfect for the roles of Hermione and Ron. I couldn’t be happier to begin work with such talented, inspiring young actors.’

Shortly after the trio was completed, photographs of the three started to appear online, along with enough personal information to potentially identify where they lived. Fearing they’d be swamped by the media, the Watsons acted swiftly. ‘The announcement was on the Internet, everywhere, within five minutes,’ Emma later recalled in an interview with
The Times
. ‘My stepmother grabbed a bag of clothes for me and we all went to stay in the Landmark Hotel [in London]. The day after, I was doing a press conference for 50 journalists.’

Emma Watson’s life had changed for ever.

T
he three tiny figures blinked at the rows of journalists pointing microphones and cameras in their direction. They’d never experienced anything like it. The reporters were all there to see
them
.

Daniel Radcliffe, sporting Harry Potter-style round glasses, sat in the middle behind a hefty wooden table. To his left was Rupert Grint, babbling on about living in a barn and cracking jokes about being paid in ‘Muggle money’ (‘Muggle’ being the term used in the Potter universe for people outside the magical world). On the other side sat Emma Watson – pretty, poised, dressed in purple and propped up with cushions so she could reach the microphones. The question posed was an obvious one: how did you feel when you found out you’d got the part of Hermione Granger? ‘I don’t have a word for it … I was pretty excited,’ Emma replied in a clear, clipped voice.

The two boys sounded like regular, everyday lads – but this girl was clearly a cut above. ‘I’m really looking forward to filming. So far it’s sort of turned things upside down. I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before. It’s going to be so amazing to see how things are done.’

When asked whether she was similar in any way to her character, the little girl was once again a model of politeness: ‘I’m not top-of-the-form goody two shoes. I’d
like
to be top of the form.’

At her first public engagement, Emma Watson may have come out tops for poise and professionalism, but it was Daniel Radcliffe who melted the hardened hearts of the reporters at the press conference to unveil the new stars of the first Harry Potter film. ‘I remember at the first press conference, he was so overwhelmed by the whole thing,’ Emma would later recall to the
Daily Mail
. When asked by journalists what he did when he heard he’d got the part, Radcliffe replied, ‘I cried, actually.’

Producer David Heyman rounded the press conference off by reading out a message from J. K. Rowling. It gave the credit for discovering the three youngsters squarely to the film’s director: ‘Having seen Dan Radcliffe’s screen test, I don’t think Chris Columbus could have found a better Harry. I’m also delighted to see that we’re going to have a screen Ron and Hermione who can bicker as if they’ve been doing it all their lives. Chris’s choice of three wonderful British actors in the leading roles shows how well he understands the spirit of these books. I wish Dan, Emma and Rupert the very best of luck and hope they have as much fun acting the first year at Hogwarts as I had writing it.’

The press conference was over. Emma and her young
co-stars
would have to get used to such things – thousands more interviews lay ahead over the coming decade.

With the journalists temporarily satisfied, there was the small matter of actually making a £100 million film to attend to. What’s more, they had only six months to shoot it. The young stars headed for their new home from home, Leavesden Studios near Watford in Hertfordshire, where purpose-built sets were under construction.

Emma, Daniel and Rupert arrived at the studios together. ‘Our first day was September 29, 2000,’ Daniel Radcliffe would recall nearly ten years later in an interview with CNN. ‘Me, Emma and Rupert had all travelled up that day in a minibus, and we sat on the back seat – which was undoubtedly my influence – pretending that we were DJs on a radio station.’

Emma said, ‘I just remember the wide-eyed excitement and awe. I just came into Leavesden every day, just to be so excited about what I was going to see next. Every time I walked on to a new set or someone new did something new, it was all just so overwhelmingly exciting. It just went by like this [snaps fingers] doing that movie. I have some really fond, silly memories from that.’

The studios were on the site of a former aerodrome where Wellington bombers had been built and had already been used for films such as
Goldeneye, The Phantom Menace
and
The Beach
. It would become the
de facto
home of the Potter franchise.

A dizzying array of locations around Britain were also
used to bring the book to life. Gloucester Cathedral, Durham Cathedral, Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire and Northumberland’s Alnwick Castle were all brought into play. ‘It’s not as glamorous as I thought it would be,’ Emma admitted to
Entertainment Weekly
in one of her first on-set interviews. ‘I mean, it’s a lot more complicated, a lot longer days, more work.’

In order to make the film within the time frame set by the studio, Emma would be away from home for long stretches. But the little girl seemed to treat it with the kind of stoicism that many children approach being sent away to boarding school. There’s even a sense that it provided something of a relief from the toing and froing that any child experiences when marriages break down. ‘I didn’t have much stability at home,’ Emma told the
Sunday Times Magazine
nearly ten years after filming began. ‘Making the films has been a constant in my life, very stabilising, even if people think the opposite. My mum was definitely a bit worried. I was going into the unknown. She could no longer give me advice or tell me what to expect or even that it was going to be OK. I was a long time away from her.’

To her mum’s relief, there were some sections of filming that were close for Emma, as her home city of Oxford was used for location work. Oxford University’s 15th-century Divinity School stood in as Hogwarts’ hospital; its Bodleian Library was used as the wizarding school’s library; and the Great Hall of Christ Church College acted as Hogwarts’ grand dining room.

The scale of the buildings – and of the whole production – took Emma’s breath away. ‘I like the Great Hall – I
thought that was really great,’ Emma later told Jonathan Ross for his
Film 2001
programme. ‘All the extras, all the tables, all the floating candles – I thought that was fantastic. There were so many people to rely on. Can you imagine relying on just Rupert and Dan to make sure they didn’t stutter their lines up or go to the wrong place or get in front of the camera? Imagine relying on 600 children to get it right? Really hard work.’

Along with the hard work – four hours on-camera time per day – there were also on-set school lessons to attend. Emma took to this a little more readily than Radcliffe and Grint. ‘When we were on set,’ she told the BBC, ‘we had a tutor to keep up with our school work – three hours minimum, five hours maximum, so we kept up and everything. I really enjoy school.’

As well as filming and school, there was even time for some fun. The two young boys would tease Emma constantly about how posh she was. The young girl would take her revenge the best she could. Borrowing a hairstylist’s label printer, she set to work to get back at the boys. ‘I printed out about 20 of these stickers,’ she later told US chat-show host Rosie O’Donnell. ‘Pull my hair, kick me, punch me … and stuck them on people’s backs. They didn’t notice for about 20 minutes which was really funny.’

In turn, Radcliffe launched an attempted counterstrike against Emma, courtesy of a remote-controlled whoopee cushion. ‘He tried it on me, but it didn’t quite work,’ she said. ‘Then he tried it on someone else who was going to sit down on a massive sofa. When it went off, Chris
Columbus, the director, said, “Cut! What is that thing?” And everyone burst into laughter.’

Despite – or maybe because of – the teasing and pranks, Emma was starting to like her young co-stars. ‘They’re very well mannered,’ she observed coolly. ‘As far as boys go.’

The cast and crew used golf buggies to get around the vast maze of sets. Emma had a customised bike to get from one place to another on time. Robbie Coltrane, playing kindly school groundsman Hagrid, took great delight in watching Emma, Rupert and Daniel use the film sets as their own personal playground. ‘They’d throw things at each other and play their Game Boys,’ Coltrane told
Entertainment Weekly.
‘They liked to get the makeup people to give them gashes. Daniel got one to give him a black eye, and he came in the morning and the other ones said, “Oh my God! What happened?” Columbus was wonderfully patient. He should be sainted. It’s extraordinary how he gets performances out of them.’

But, when she wasn’t having fun and getting her own back on the boys, Emma Watson – just as she had been taught from a very young age – wanted to ‘step up’, to absolutely do the best that she could during filming. Unfortunately, her drive to please ended up actually slowing down production. ‘I wanted everything to be so perfect,’ she later told
Flare
magazine. ‘I would work so hard to memorise my lines and the scene. We would have to stop shooting because I was mouthing Rupert’s and Dan’s lines at the same time. That’s something I had to get over.’

Columbus – who had vast experience in directing children, especially after his hit movie
Home Alone
– had his work cut out for him in dealing with such young performers. ‘He had to guide us through it because we didn’t know what we were doing,’ Daniel Radcliffe later admitted on American TV show
Inside the Actors Studio.
‘They wanted to encourage us that is was make-believe, that all we were doing was what we’d done all our lives as kids … just pretend and make-believe and play.’

The young stars worked in short bursts and the style of filmmaking and the way scenes were shot was a reflection of the young stars’ attention spans. Shots were short purely by necessity. ‘Rupert had a tendency to laugh a lot during the first two films,’ Columbus later told the BBC. ‘So getting one line on the first film was a little difficult; second film, maybe two or three lines. The first film had a style where you could shoot the kid for one line and then you would have to cut away.’

Another technique that Columbus used was to treat scenes with the youngsters like a silent movie, so that he could talk them through the action, telling them exactly what he wanted. ‘What I found so very helpful and considerate was that Chris Columbus just turned the sound off on the set, and we dubbed our lines in later,’ Emma told
Paste
magazine. ‘That way, he could give us direct instructions on what to do, and where the special effects were to come in. Now that added a lot to his schedule, but it was so generous of him. Consequently, he got relaxed performances.’

But Daniel was a bit of an old hand compared with
Emma and Rupert, something that the young actress became increasingly aware of as time went on. ‘I don’t come, like Dan, from a very actorly family, so I was Bambi in the headlights – I never had anyone to guide me,’ Emma later explained to
The Times
. ‘I hadn’t been to [acting schools] LAMDA or RADA, and I had a chip on my shoulder about it.’

Emma’s parents were keen to make sure that their daughter did not get carried away with her new life. ‘When I heard I’d got the part of Hermione, my mother said to me it was very important to keep the friends I’d made already,’ she told the
Daily Telegraph
. ‘She told me that in the future it would be important to know people liked me for myself and not because of my career. I try to keep my social life up as much as I can. And my mum and dad made a really big effort for me to see my friends a lot. I even brought some of them up to the set, which was really good fun.’

There was also an on-set visit from the woman who had conjured the whole of Harry Potter’s world into existence, J. K. Rowling. ‘One of the most disturbing feelings, and yet wonderful as well, was the first time I visited the film set,’ Rowling later told ITV. ‘I walked into the Great Hall, and I’d drawn the director, Chris Columbus, sort of a rough diagram of how I saw the Great Hall. The production design manager had just done the most astonishingly good job, and that felt like walking into my own head. I just walked into this place that I had imagined for so long and there it was and it really looked exactly as I imagined it, and it was astonishing.’

Rowling’s rare visits to the set would have a profound
effect on Emma, bringing out a little bit of that Hermione insecurity. ‘I just really want her to
like
me,’ she said in an interview with the
Los Angeles Times
. ‘I’m always really keen to tell her how I feel and maybe it’s a bit much. She is so down to earth and funny and witty. I definitely see Hermione in her. She’s genuine and brilliant.’

In turn, Rowling would also sometimes find the set visits a little disquieting. ‘They showed me the chamber where [Hogwarts teacher] Quirrell faces Harry at the end of
Philosopher’s Stone
,’ she said. ‘There was a spooky, spooky moment when I was stood in front of the Mirror of Erised, seeing myself, of course, exactly as I am.’ In the book the mirror shows the ‘deepest and most desperate desire of our hearts’ – Erised is Desire spelled backwards. ‘So I was seeing myself as a successful, published author,’ Rowling recalled. ‘So that was a very, almost embarrassingly symbolic, moment.’

A bad winter meant constant delays to filming, pushing the end of schedule past March as planned and into July. Producer David Heyman had to extend the applications for Emma, Daniel and Rupert to miss more school and be tutored on set. By July, filming was finally done – the occasion was marked in the way any
right-minded
young girl would mark it. ‘I went on a
clothes-shopping
spree around London,’ Emma later told the BBC. ‘That was my treat.’

It would be a rush to get the film into cinemas by November – and to an extent it shows. ‘Could have been better’ was Chris Columbus’s verdict when asked how he felt about the finished product on America’s PBS television
network. ‘The visual effects … we didn’t have enough time. We had a wonderful team but we didn’t have enough time to do the effects.’

Despite Columbus’s misgivings,
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
is still a perfectly respectable start to the franchise. From its opening shot of an owl on a sign showing Privet Drive – the home of the dreadful Dursley family, the ‘worst sort of Muggle imaginable’ – to Harry’s moving farewell to Hagrid on the platform of Hogwarts’ train station, this is a totally solid family film