The Making of the Potterverse (23 page)

QUESTION:
Is this one darker because of what was in the book or because of your style?

CUARON:
I think that it was just the subject matter. Harry is growing up. Everything is his perception of the world, and that’s becoming darker and more mature, a little more introspective.

QUESTION:
At what point did Richard Harris die?

CUARON:
Very early into the process Richard Harris passed. That was a big blow for everyone on
Harry Potter
. I mean, the only thing that I can say I was lucky with was that I was the only one who never had the fortune to meet him. He actually was David Heyman’s godfather. So that was a very tough one. So we decided for many months to not even mention looking for a new actor. It took many months before we were ready to start looking for actors and talking about names.

QUESTION:
How did Michael Gambon’s name come up?

CUARON:
Michael Gambon is one of the most powerful actors out there. He has such an amazing presence and command. I’m very, very, very grateful for what Michael did in this film.

QUESTION:
Aren’t there a lot of differences between the book and the movie?

CUARON:
Just in terms of the logistics. Because I have to say, in terms of the spirit, I think that it’s very, very faithful to the spirit of the book. Now Jo Rowling’s said from the get-go, “Be faithful to the spirit. Don’t try to be literal.” So when you do that, you just have to take certain shortcuts. It was clear that we didn’t want to spend time in Diagon Alley this time, just to give you an example. But at the same time, we wanted to start with the
Monster Book of Monsters
. So we had to make a separate scene where we established the book that is in Harry’s bedroom. It’s stuff like that. It’s about finding shortcuts or ways to convey the information cinematically.

QUESTION:
Was it difficult finding a look for the dementors?

CUARON:
First of all, in terms of the design with the dementors, the thing is that you have the most amazing iconography of black hooded creatures in cinema. Not only in cinema, but in art. But then Peter Jackson did the ultimate black hooded character [in
Lord of the Rings
], and we were saying, “Well, what are we going to do? He did it so beautifully,” and it wasn’t until one of my many revisits to
Lord of the Rings
— I was watching the first one and there’s a big confrontation between these creatures and our heroes on top of a mountain, and I realized how strong and how physical these creatures were. I said, “That’s the key. It’s the opposite.” The dementors don’t have physical strength. Actually, I’m sure that if you slapped the hand, the hand would disintegrate. They’re such corrupt organisms. So the difference is that the dementors are more ethereal, more metaphysical, more abstract. So I remember that Jo Rowling came in at one point and said that she thought that the dementors wouldn’t work. This is when I thought about an amazing puppeteer from San Francisco called Basil Twist. He does puppeteer work underwater. He’s amazing. He had a show here in New York many years ago and that’s where I saw his stuff. What he does is puppeteer with fabrics under water. It’s just the most amazing, beautiful effect. So we did some puppets and Basil went to London. We did tests. They were beautiful, but at the end of the day, they were not very practical. So we took the dementors to ILM and gave them Basil Twist’s stuff as a reference. So pretty much what they did is computer generated, they recreated what we tried to do.

QUESTION:
Did the kids’ voices change at all during production?

CUARON:
No. I think that Chris had to deal more with that stuff in the second film. Here, their voices had already broken more or less. So, we didn’t really have to deal with that much. The kids, pretty much from the beginning to the end, yeah, they changed quite a lot, but not in a way that would be noticeable.

QUESTION:
The clothing seemed more contemporary.

CUARON:
That came out of a conversation with Jo Rowling. She said she thought it was great that they had uniforms and clothes, but I think that this is the first time they’d be wearing their street clothes. For me, as a director, it just gave me another tool to make character comments, through costumes.

QUESTION:
Was it intentional to shoot sequences that looked like a black-and-white movie?

CUARON:
From the get-go, together with the cinematographer and the production designer, we decided on a more monochromatic palate. We just tried to subdue a little bit the colors, but not take the extreme to black and white. It’s this game of shadows and light.

QUESTION:
What did you learn about Daniel Radcliffe from working with him?

CUARON:
He’s the coolest guy. What’s something about Daniel and his family is that they keep a very, very, very healthy balance between work and school. They keep their priorities very, very, very straight. I think that helps a lot in making the amazing kid that Daniel is. As odd as Harry Potter is, he’s still a normal kid. He’s a normal, extraordinary kid. I have to say that [Daniel is] very eccentric. He has a wicked sense of humor. He’s a like a sponge. He just absorbs absolutely everything. That would be okay, but what makes him so extraordinary is his sense of humor.

QUESTION:
Any anecdote about working with him?

CUARON:
Well, there are a lot of them. There’s a scene with Michael Gambon, the scene where the kids are in the sleeping bag and Michael Gambon had a fart machine in the sleeping bag that he would operate with remote control. Michael Gambon, by the way, is such a wicked man. Everybody was taking in the seriousness of the situation and Michael would operate the thing and the funny thing is that the camera was in a close-up on Dan, and Dan was trying to keep it together, and you would see behind Dan little heads that
would start getting up. The funny thing was that the first kid who got up was making the point, “It wasn’t me. It was the girls.”

QUESTION:
Is Michael’s sense of humor verbal or more in the form of practical jokes?

CUARON:
He loves practical jokes. He’s infamous because of that. Actually, this fart machine, he was performing and some friends of his were going to be at the play and he hid the fart machine under the seats of his friends. He’s acting, he’s performing Shakespeare or whatever and he used the remote on his friends sitting over there. He’s such a wicked man. I love him.

QUESTION:
Is it scary to be in another country and doing something that’s so English?

CUARON:
I feel responsible. No. That’s what is fun and is eccentric, that Englishness. At the same time, the greatness of Harry Potter is so universal. It doesn’t have boundaries. They’re wizards, but their emotions are so human.

(Harry Potter and Hermione Granger)

QUESTION:
How do you think you’ve changed over the course of the three movies?

EMMA WATSON:
We’ve just been getting older.

DANIEL RADCLIFFE:
I think that we’ve probably changed as actors as well. But I’m not conscious of it much. I haven’t worked on the first one for three years now. So I can’t really compare it to the third, because it’s not very fresh in my mind.

QUESTION:
Were you more confident this time around?

EMMA:
I think that you get more and more confident every time, really.

DANIEL:
That’s because we’ve had more experience with directors.

EMMA:
It’s funny because a lot of the crew who were on
Harry Potter I
are still doing
Harry Potter III
, so it’s great.

DANIEL:
Yeah, and now
IV
as well. It’s like a family.

QUESTION:
Was it challenging adjusting to the different directorial styles of Chris Columbus and Alfonso Cuaron?

DANIEL:
Basically, I think that everything we learned with Chris we were now able to put into practice with a different director. I think that the reason Alfonso was able to do longer takes and more complicated shots was because with Chris we didn’t have the experience or the focus to do that kind of stuff. We did with Alfonso. It is hard. It’s more challenging, which is good because we’re getting older and if we’re not getting better there’s no point in doing it, really. I think that we just learn more with each director and now with Mike Newell directing the fourth, I think that we’ll learn even more as well.

QUESTION:
Were you able to teach Alfonso anything about your characters?

EMMA:
One of the first things that he did when we met him is that he asked us to write an essay about our characters. Not just to help us, but to help him to see the character through our eyes. He gave us a lot of freedom with that as well, which was really good.

DANIEL:
I think it’s quite important to mention that when we did the essay, we basically did exactly what our characters would’ve done in that situation. I wrote a page and it was fine. It was okay. It wasn’t great. It’s what Harry does. Rupert [Grint] didn’t do it. Rupert forgot to do it. How many pages did you write?

EMMA:
It becomes a little bit more every single time [I tell it — Laughs]. I have big handwriting. I needed six pages.

QUESTION:
Can you talk about how this has affected your ambitions? Are you going to go into politics?

Rupert, Emma and Daniel walk the red carpet at the New York premiere of
Azkaban.
(Diane Bondareff/AP Photo)

DANIEL:
God help the nation if I become a politician. I really enjoy acting. I really love acting. I think it’s really something I’d like to go on doing. Again, there’s loads of other stuff, mainly music and writing and that, but I’d love to continue acting.

EMMA:
I feel incredibly lucky to have been given the opportunity to be in such a fantastic film with tons of people. My ambitions couldn’t even have dreamed of the scale and the greatness that Harry Potter is. So I feel really lucky about that. I love performing. I love being creative. There are so many aspects to the film world that even if I don’t pursue acting, there’ll be something in it for me that I’ll end up doing. I’m just going to see what happens.

QUESTION:
Anything from the book that didn’t make it into the film that you kind of miss?

DANIEL:
There was one scene in the third book. I can’t actually remember what Harry said in it, but it was something, it was kind of him, I think. I may have this wrong because I haven’t read the book
in quite a while, but it was something where he comes out of Lupin’s office and basically sits down. It’s almost him just slightly despairing, but telling himself that he’s got to get himself together if he wants to fight Voldemort. That’s all I can remember. I think other than that, I got to play all the ones I wanted.

EMMA:
I think that they did a really good job on this one. A lot was cut, but they did a great job of making sure that everything that was put in the film is really relevant to the plot. One of the things I think is really great about the film is that it’s really fluid, it’s really fast moving. I think that they did a really good job of getting everything that was important in there.