The Making of the Potterverse (12 page)

QUESTION:
Did these kids have any idea of what they were in store for in terms of the media’s response to them?

COLUMBUS:
Well, my initial feeling was that they shouldn’t go to America and do things like Jay Leno or David Letterman; that they should remain slightly obscure. The good news is that they’ll get to come back to England [to shoot the sequel] and get away from the publicity.

QUESTION:
And you think Daniel Radcliffe will be able to handle the pressure?

COLUMBUS:
In his case he’s surrounded by two very strong, loving parents, and I think that they’ll protect him.

QUESTION:
In essence, do you think that’s the difference between him and Macaulay Culkin?

COLUMBUS:
Well, you know, I’ve had ten years away from that and I’ve learned from that experience. I learned as a director, again, like I said, you have to cast the parents; you have to see what kind of environment this kid lives in. You also have to realize that Dan really seems to love doing his work. I think that’s one of the things that you look for as well — kids who are interested in the job, interested in being there and also, just that the parental relationship is a good one and a healthy one.

QUESTION:
Are you saying that Macaulay didn’t want to do the
Home Alone
films?

COLUMBUS:
I don’t know. I think that he was more interested, to be honest with you, in being a little kid and Dan has found a way to balance working and being a little kid, which I think is incredibly healthy.

QUESTION:
Did you factor that in when you were holding auditions?

COLUMBUS:
Yes, it was extremely important, and all of these kids were very real and very honest, and they hadn’t done a lot of . . . well, Dan had done
David Copperfield
, obviously and about two seconds in
The Tailor of Panama
, but for the most part, most of the kids had never even been on a film set before. So, for me, that was important in terms of getting their performances to be real, because they don’t come in with any sort of stage mothers or stage parents telling them how they should act. So, it’s all very real — and psychologically, that’s important; no stage mothers, no stage fathers. These kids come in and they realize that they’re doing a job. British actors, I
have found, and particularly even with the stars like Richard Harris and Maggie Smith, it’s not about how big your trailer is, or, “Do I have a trainer, do I have a cook?” and all that star stuff that is so upsetting to me when I work in Hollywood sometimes.

QUESTION:
How did you deal with making the movie as good as the book, as well as controlling the running time?

COLUMBUS:
To me, it’s a companion piece to the book. My goal was to involve Jo Rowling as a collaborator. People would say, “Well, isn’t that going to interrupt your vision and isn’t that going to get in the way of what you want this film to look like?” I thought, “If I were doing
Dracula
and I had access to Bram Stoker, I would certainly want to know what he was thinking.” If I were doing a World War II movie, I would hire a consultant who had been in the war and who knew what was happening, in terms of reality. Jo was a very willing collaborator. She never came in with a sledgehammer and said, “This must be done this way, you need to do this.” That never happened, and so, I just found it a joy to work with her. I’m being honest with you. It was four of us sitting in the room, and those were some of the best experiences that I had on this movie with Jo Rowling, Steve Kloves, David Heyman and myself. We laughed, we had fun, we talked about what would work on screen, what wouldn’t work on screen; we got the script to where we wanted it to be; and we talked about the design and the look, and Jo was just a collaborator. Sometimes, we would say, “Well, how can we make this work? We need to change it from the book.” A perfect example is the kids on the book cover who were wearing rugby shirts and jeans and sneakers with a wizard cloak over them. Well, we tested that look and it looked like a bad Halloween costume. So, we said to Jo, “Since this is steeped in British boarding school tradition, we need to get this to look like it exists in a real place,” and that’s why we came up with the uniforms, and she was all for that. I asked Jo at one point, “Do the kids wear wizard hats at all times?” and she said, “Yes, and most of them wear wizard hats through most of the book.” I said,
“Well, I can’t justify that. I think that it will start to feel a little odd if they wear wizard hats throughout the film. Can we just use wizard hats for special occasions, for the sword ceremony and the final piece?” and she agreed to that. So, that’s the kind of conversations that you could have with Jo. She’s never, never in your face, never gets in your way.

QUESTION:
You decided to dramatize the opening monologue about how the baby shows up.

COLUMBUS:
And she was fine with that. Actually, the initial opening of the film was a flashback to the death of Harry’s parents, which Jo wrote for us. Well, we shot it and we realized that we should open the film with a bit of magic and slowly sort of lull the audience into the darkness, and the picture should get progressively darker as we get deeper into the film. So, we saved the death of Harry’s parents for later.

QUESTION:
Was there any concern about the fact it wasn’t going to be a two-hour movie?

COLUMBUS:
God no, I was hoping that it was going to be a three-hour movie, to be honest with you; but it’s definitely not true that there was a four-hour cut. There was about a two-hour-and-forty-five minute cut but that was all we had. Then I tightened it up, paced it up a little and took it to Chicago with very crude visual effects, showed it to an audience because I wanted to get an opinion. Fifty percent Harry Potter fans and fifty percent nonreaders. I wanted to see if it was going to work from a character point of view. Anyway, the audience loved the movie — but the nonreaders loved the movie as much as the readers. The nonreaders said that they all wanted to go out and get the book, and the readers just loved it. The readers were like, “Well, this was missing and this was missing, but I still loved it,” but the bottom line was that they all said it was too short. So, what I did was I put some things back and then I tightened the film up, and that’s how it ended up at two hours and thirty-three
minutes. I mean, that was the most shocking thing for me. I have to be honest with you, everyone who sees it, they seem to want more. People wanted to lose themselves in this world.

QUESTION:
Why do you think that Harry Potter has struck such a nerve virtually everywhere?

COLUMBUS:
I think that it really comes down to Jo’s imagination. You know, I think that it really comes down to the fact that she has tapped into something emotional and magical about kids, and I do think that they really want to believe in magic. Some of the questions for the kids at a press conference were, “Do you believe in magic?” Well, no one really believes in people who fly around on broomsticks. It’s like the guy who said that they were flying the wrong way on broomsticks. I said, “Well, if one of these ‘witches’ wants to fly up to me the right way on a broomstick, I’ll redo the shot.” But yeah, I think that it’s the belief that magic and hope can potentially exist in your life. You know, I think that you get that in the book, obviously, in a non-sentimental way and a really straightforward way that touches people.

(Professor Dumbledore)

QUESTION:
Did you enjoy making this film?

HARRIS:
Well, I enjoyed seeing it more than I enjoyed making it. I enjoyed watching it, and I think that it was great. We had a whole bunch of kids there yesterday. They were children too young to go to the premiere, who were kind of my godchildren and they sat through it, and I said, “Was it too long?” and they said, no, they could have done another hour. It was unbelievable.

Richard Harris originally turned down the part of Dumbledore, until his granddaughter threatened to stop speaking to him if he didn’t take the role. (Max Nash/AP Photo)

QUESTION:
Was the shooting difficult?

HARRIS:
It’s difficult, because you only have so many hours a day to work with the kids. The laws here are very strict, and quite rightly so. So when your turn comes to perform, they watch you and tell you that you have an hour to do it, because the kids are back in an hour. So, you have to get in and get it done quick; but yeah, I enjoyed it. It’s a wonderful job for a guy my age.

QUESTION:
Are children challenging to work with?

HARRIS:
They’re marvelous, and I’ll tell you what happened. When Christopher Columbus, the director, asked me to come down and meet the kids, I met Ron [Rupert Grint] and Dan [Radcliffe] and
Emma [Watson], and I kind of hung around them for a couple of hours to get to know them. And then, Chris Columbus asked me if I would mind reading with them, doing scenes with them, and I said, “Sure.” So, we played all the scenes, all the scenes that we had to play together, and when it was all finished, Rupert looked at me and he said, “That was quite a good reading that you gave. I think that you’ll be okay in this part.” An eleven-year-old!

QUESTION:
How much Dumbledore came from the book and how much came from discussions with Chris Columbus?

HARRIS:
I just talked to Chris and I said, “I know what I’m going to do,” and that was to find a voice, because there are no references. I mean, he has no scenes, in this picture anyway, except with the boy, and they’re just lectures. There are no acting exchanges between me and the kids in the picture. All he’s doing is lecturing and giving speeches.

QUESTION:
Would you say that kids are going to be your biggest critics?

HARRIS:
Oh, you bet your ass. A young girl, yesterday, she was the daughter of a journalist that I had to give an interview to, and she was at the picture in the afternoon, and Molly was her name, and she was sitting there, and I said, “What did you think, Molly?” She said, “I liked it, it’s good, but of course, it wasn’t called the Dark Forest, it’s called the Forbidden Forest in the book,” and she’s only about nine. Then she said, “Hermione, she’s all wrong,” and I said, “What do you mean?” “Well, she’s supposed to have buckteeth.” These kids know every single thing about that book and if you put a finger wrong, boy, they jump on you. They wanted to know, some of the kids that were there from my family, the young ones, eight, nine and ten, they said, “Well, your beard was slightly wrong,” and I said, “What?” They said, “Well, your beard was supposed to be under your belt.” Critics.

QUESTION:
Why do you think Harry Potter has taken off the way that it has?

HARRIS:
I’m afraid that I don’t know. All I know is that my granddaughter — and this is a legendary story now, and so I’m only repeating what’s been in the press before — but when they wanted me to do it, originally, I didn’t want to do it. And the reason that I didn’t was not because of the quality of it or the content of it, it’s because you had to commit your life. I mean, if they’re going to make seven movies, I’ve got to do them, that was it. There was no way out of it, and I hate commitment. I loath it, I loath having dates and I hate having to be someplace. Like, I hate having to be here, which really doesn’t matter. So, the point really is that the idea that my life has now been controlled, if they make seven, and they’re certainly going to make three, maybe even four, and the idea that your life is controlled by that doesn’t suit me at all. I hate that.