The Making of the Potterverse (30 page)

QUESTION:
Was it difficult finding a balance and tone in this film?

EMMA:
I think that it was quite difficult. I mean, the book has such a huge audience, which are children, and so you get a lot of young kids who are in [to] this, and so part of the people who are making this film feel like we shouldn’t make it too scary, because they’ll cut out this huge audience who are so passionate and love the Harry Potter films. At the same time, they want to be faithful to the book, which is a darker book; and I think that they did get a really good balance. I do think that it was faithful, and I think that this one is darker and scarier. I think that was the best way to go, because from the very beginning they wanted to stay faithful to what this is about and were not worried about pleasing everyone.

DANIEL:
I think that it wouldn’t have been as hard for us as for Steve Kloves, who wrote the script. I mean, to do something as massive as the fourth book would be hard. I certainly wouldn’t envy that task. He did an amazing job on it. To me, the humor is actually essential to the darkness in a way, because if you have that darkness running through the entire film, by the end you would be tired and it would be completely ineffective. Whereas if you’ve got the humor, it’s easier. What’s quite nice is that Mike [Newell] lulls you in. You’ve got that quite dark opening with the snake and the caretaker being killed, but it then goes into this sort of feel that’s like the first film again. It’s all wide-eyed and full of wonder and everything, and that highlights
the fact that suddenly they come out of the tent and everything is ablaze. And you sort of instantly are taken in, and it’s more of a shock when you go into that darker world. I do think that the humor is essential to that.

The three stars of the Harry Potter films have grown up before our eyes. (Rex Features/CP Photo)

EMMA:
I don’t think that Mike held us back in any way. He’s always really, really pushed us. He’s been able to make it really, really real. He really went there. The other thing is that he really treats us as adults. He was expecting us to be professional the whole time; more than before, in some ways.

DANIEL:
When we could get away with more, because we were a bit younger.

EMMA:
Yeah. And so there were no excuses, and he really pushed all of us, which was nice because it made me feel like I was well challenged.

QUESTION:
Daniel, what were the underwater sequences like?

DANIEL:
That was amazing. I mean, that was quite hard work and those days I feel like were the ones where I did work, because normally I think that I’ve got this thing in my mind that work can’t be fun. I trained for about six months beforehand and I would go under
there and I was sharing someone else’s air from their scuba diving tank. So we both sort of had regulators. And they’d say, “Three, two, one . . .” On the three, I would blow out all the air in my lungs and then on the one I would take a very big gulp of air in and then it’s sort of how much action can you do with that amount of breath in your body, kind of thing? The hard thing was not just holding your breath, but it was the fact that I wasn’t actually allowed to let any of the air out because Harry is supposed to become a fish with gills. I suppose that there’s not supposed to be bubbles going around then. I do have to point out that I had the most amazing stunt team backing me up, the people that I trained with for six months and who were down in the tank with me. They were fantastic.

QUESTION:
Are you interested in acting beyond
Harry Potter
?

RUPERT:
I think that I’m really enjoying this. Doing all these films has been a really good sort of experience. I think that I’d like to do it in the future. I love this job. I’d like to continue. Definitely. It’s not a bad job.

EMMA:
I definitely don’t want
Harry Potter
to be the last thing that I do. Originally what I sort of used to love was being on a stage and sort of reacting to a live audience. So maybe my calling is more in theater. But I don’t know. There are so many different things you can do within it that I don’t know where I’ll end up. I’m definitely looking around and definitely interested.

DANIEL:
I just love doing this and I was trying to sort of work out the other day what’s the attraction, why do I love it so much. And I have no idea. I mean, the sort of conclusion that I reached was that it was something to do with the idea that maybe it’s like a power thing, because you have a character and in many ways it’s up to you how that character is perceived by people who are watching the film. Obviously, it’s not just up to you in terms of how it’s written in the script and the direction as well. So I suppose that’s one of the things. I mean, I love doing it. I have a huge passion for acting, but also I’m quite interested in eventually maybe directing or something like that.
It’s simply because I’ve been so inspired by working with Chris Columbus and Alfonso [Cuaron] and now Mike, and having conversations with David Yates who’s doing the fifth film, and also talking to Gary Oldman, who directed this film
Nil By Mouth
, which is a fantastic film. But I think that’s a long way down the line for me.

QUESTION:
Are there parallels between what your characters are going through and what you are? Do you have boys chasing you?

EMMA:
I don’t know how to answer that, to be honest. Daniel, you’re good at those questions. You take it.

DANIEL:
Do I have boys chasing after me? [Laughs] To be honest, you talk about parallels in the film, there is a parallel in that both me and Harry are not very good with women. I think I’m better now than I used to be, but I think any man who ever says that he’s never had an awkward moment with a girl is a liar. So I think that’s probably the main parallel with me and Harry in this film. I would like to say that I got huge amounts of attention, but I think that there’s a sort of dividing thing between what people think they’re going to get when they see the film and what the reality is. I think that it’s slightly grimmer possibly [laughs].

RUPERT:
[Laughs] I’m pretty much the same as Danny. I’m probably very close to Ron, really. He’s not very lucky.

DANIEL:
That’s the thing that I quite like about Harry and Ron, they are the worst dates in the world. There were these two cool girls who are played by Afshan [Azad], the girl who plays Padma — she had the misfortune of going out with Ron. She’s one of my best friends. I thought that it was just great, because you just feel so sorry for them because this night should be the best night in the world for these girls, but it’s horrible and then you have that little bit outside which is quite sort of true with those kinds of dances, those things where you’ve got sort of the ballroom casualties who are outside weeping, because the night has gone so horribly.

EMMA:
Hermione included. That’s the thing. I loved doing it so much, because I could relate to so much of what she was going
through and I so know that frustration where guys can be so insensitive. I can relate to a lot of things that she experiences and all of her awkward moments, and what that’s all about. What’s nice about the relationship that she and Victor have, and what Mike really wanted to show, was that Hermione is so insecure about herself and she’s never really had any attention from any guy before. So when she sees that they’re looking at her it’s one of those, “Is that guy really looking at me or am I just crazy?” I mean, he genuinely wanted to come across as she is quite literally being swept off her feet. She doesn’t know what is happening to her and she gets caught up in this whirlwind that is this incredibly famous Quidditch player and she can’t quite believe that it’s happening to her. So it’s quite an emotional roller coaster for her.

QUESTION:
What’s the best part of this process?

DANIEL:
Harry Potter is a very gradual process, because it’s so huge and you piece it together day by day and it goes through all these different stages. It’s fifteen minutes of credits, thousands of people work on it and all that work is [as] important as the rest. And then it amounts to this massive thing at the end of it which is amazing, and it’s just a fantastic thing to see, because even if we hadn’t . . . I mean, I believe that we’ve made a great film, a really good film, but even if we hadn’t, the sense of achievement would still be this amazing thing. So that would probably be, for me, the thing about this film.

EMMA:
You kind of think that after working on something for the five years that I’ve been doing this, you would start to get bored, the shine would start to wear off and that it might get boring, and that you would get complacent and want to move on. But a couple of weeks back, the trailer was shown for the first time on ITV News and I remember coming into the kitchen and it was on the screen and it said that it was going to play in five minutes. I was literally filled with excitement all over again about the fact that I was part of it and that I was in it. When I saw it, I was literally so excited again. So
probably sort of starting to see it all come out, because there’s a huge wait. A killer wait. You’ve worked on the film for eleven months, and then you have to wait six months to see it and it’s painful. You just so want to know what it looks like.

RUPERT:
I find it hard to actually remember anything, really. It’s quite a long time in between. So I would say, yeah, seeing it at the end is the thing. Definitely.

QUESTION:
What stands out about this film in terms of your character?

DANIEL:
I think that the main theme of the entire film is sort of like a story arc — and I think that it comes across more in this film than it has in the last ones — is that the whole film is about a loss of innocence. If you look at the first one it’s all sort of very wide-eyed and almost naive. He’s quite naive in thinking, because it’s a magical world that it’s going to be better than the world that he’s come from. Whereas in actual fact, it’s not. There are further extremes. It can have extremes of joy, which possibly are more than in the normal human world, but also the depths that people can sink to, in terms of people like Voldemort. I think that in this film he starts to wake up to that fact even more than he did in the last one. I think he comes to the realization that if he’s going to make it in life, he’s going to be making it alone. I think that’s probably the main thing he experiences, that he sort of discovers in this film.

QUESTION:
Can you talk about what it’s been like working with Mike Newell?

EMMA:
It was so nice that he really wanted to hear what we had to say and what we thought, because that might kind of take it to a new level. In a way, I think sometimes it’s difficult, and I go, “I can’t get this right. Just tell me what you want me to do and how you want this to be, because I’m going crazy.” And he’d just say, “I can’t tell you how to do it and I’m not going to tell you how to do it. Just think about it.” It was nice the way that he guided us really well. We had to take responsibility for ourselves, for our roles, for how we came across. He put a lot of trust in us to do that.

DANIEL:
I suppose that’s sort of the main thing that I got out of Mike’s directing was that we’re now old enough to appreciate scenes being analyzed and broken down. The fact is that there is such a rigorous process of drafting the script on a Harry Potter film. The same is true on all films, but on Harry Potter we must go through about seven drafts before we get to the one that we start shooting on. So basically by that time, if it’s in the script, it pushes the story forward and it advances things and it is there for a reason. Mike was fantastic about going into detail about things. I remember sort of the first time we were rehearsing with Mike. It was me and Matt Lewis, who plays Neville, who is fantastic. He’s just the greatest guy. We were doing the scene, and on the page the scene was around an inch and a half long and we spent about an hour and a quarter rehearsing it and going through different things. We were sort of going, “Right. If this is how long a scene that’s an inch and a half long takes, how long will it be when we get to the twelve-page scene with Voldemort?” We were sort of slightly apprehensive about how we were going to be pushed, but it was very exciting. I mean, he realized that we’re now old enough to appreciate really going into detail with us about the scenes. I think that was probably the main thing that changed.