Potter-Watch (23 of 77): Momentum and Jeopardy

We're nearly six weeks away from the release of the beginning of the end of one of the greatest motion picture phenomenons of all time, so things are going to be more fully loaded from here until then. Don't expect many posts on single topics, because we're surely about to get a great flood of promotional material for these films. However, before we go on any further, I'd like to offer a teaser from my upcoming review of Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone:

What made this first film such a success wasn't the quality of the work. After all, the film was made by Christopher Columbus. More than anything, what made this film a hit was the source material. The book itself is such an amazing thing, and when the film came out, there was such a huge following that people just ate it up. These days it's hard to forget how many people are in love with this series, and we can attribute that to the absurdity of the Twilight phenomenon. Whenever I hear about some annoying teenage girl who dislikes Harry Potter but loves The Twilight Saga, I feel the impulse to smack them in the face.

Yesterday the set visit reports for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows were released, and we got a great deal of insight into the making of the final installment. Of course, a great deal of what we've heard was abbreviated, as the second part of the film doesn't come out until next summer. So most of what you're about to see is from the first part.

~Steve Weintraub (Collider): The first thing you notice about the [Great] Hall is the stone floor. Unlike most movie sets that cheat with the way they build practical locations, the Great Hall was built to last and that meant stone floors and thick walls. While the walls weren’t stone, it was not the typical paper thin walls that you find on most movie sets. As we arrived, all around us were tons of people working. The Hall was filled with camera people, kids in uniform for the scene, hair and make-up people, Daniel Radcliffe, stand-in’s – the room felt like it was alive and I couldn’t believe how large the set was.

~Director David Yates (Collider):

Q: The final book is so dense and has so much pay off, talk about the challenges of adapting that for the cinema but keeping in everything that fans love about the final book?

DY: We had things, of course, the book is pretty rich but you have to try and sometimes create a little bit more momentum or jeopardy. There are sections in the book that while are every fun to read, like the big tent section in the middle, going chapter after chapter wouldn’t easily translate on screen. Then we’ve added moments. We’ve added a couple of sequences, which aren’t and the book that I think raise the emotional stakes and the jeopardy stakes. So the process is always fraught with challenges, you want to try and keep the best of what Jo came up with but you have to refine it and shape it. So we’ve lost things, I’m sure, that some of the fans will be frustrated by but fortunately we’ve kept more than we’ve ever been able to keep in some of the other adaptations I’ve worked on. Simply because we can spread the whole story of the two movies and as you say there are some loose ends we can tie up as well as we go... We’ve added a scene where after Ron is gone, Harry comes back to the Tent and finds Hermione listening to some Muggle music and they have this dance with each other, which is a very tender, awkward and emotional moment for the two of them because they’ve lost their friend but also there is always that question. They have a very special friendship as characters and there is always that moment where you think could this trip beyond friendship to something else? It’s a very naturalistic, charming moment and quite intriguing. So we added that and a big chase towards the end of the first part. Jo gave us these brilliant characters called Snatchers so I wanted to have some more fun with them so we added an extra beat where they chase the trio.

~Daniel Radcliffe (Coming Soon):

Q: Could you talk a bit about the moment where there are seven Harry Potters on screen?

DR: Yeah, absolutely. That was one of the most sort of daunting scenes to do because it was a highly technical visual effects scene. A lot of it's more just painstakingly slow than it is complex, but in terms of basically how we did it, I mean, there was one shot which was 95 takes. Yes, you may well recoil (Laughs) because basically if I'm here in the scene and that's the real Harry, then we filmed say seven or eight takes of me playing the scene as me and then keep the camera, so it's a motion controlled camera, so it's controlled by computers so it can recreate exactly the same move, exactly the same time every time. And so, I stand there, we do the take with just me standing there and then the camera continues it's move which was panning around. And at this point it's panning around just an empty space. And then we do the next take and the camera goes through the same move, but instead I'm standing here and pretending to be Fleur or whoever mid-starting to take the drink and then to transform. And the camera pans around us all. And so, basically we filmed it each time sort of in seven different places. That's how it's done, but at the end of the day we were then shown a very primitive version of what it was going to look like eventually. And after 95 takes you're kind of crawling up the walls anyway. And it was the most gratifying thing to see how good it looked because it really does look great because you know how normally in films if there's a scene with one person playing two people you're sort of aware that the screen's been split and that they're always like, this far apart, you know? But, in this scene, it's great because everyone's overlapping and it's all arms and hands and it should be really effective and it did take a long time to get right because if I stood one inch too far to my left, then I was in fact standing on the feet of the me that was then going to be visual effects in later. So, yeah, it was a tricky scene to do, but ultimately very, very gratifying, and fun to be able to do the kind of impersonations, some of them are very sort of – there was no middle ground. They either were almost so subtle that you will have no idea which character it's supposed to be, or so caricatured and exaggerated that you can be in absolutely no doubt which character I'm playing. I didn't manage to find particularly a middle ground on that day, but it'll be very obvious which one's Mundungus.

~Edward (The Leaky Cauldron): For Deathly Hallows, [Yates] says, “these kids are on the road, they feel very small in this very big world. They’re away from Hogwarts, this very, big and familiar comfort blanket that they’ve grown up with. They feel quite surprisingly vulnerable and fragile in this big Muggle world. And I’ve shot it in a very vérité way so it feels not as measured and it's not as conventional... with Half-Blood Prince I wanted it to be quite elegant, so [Hallows] feels a bit raw…"

~Andrew Sims (Mugglenet): "Towards the end of Part 1, Bellatrix and Hermione have a moment that was shot differently than most. David Yates revealed this when he was talking about being able to pull an audience into a theatrical experience: “There’s this torturing with Bellatrix. Emma was really keen to do this torturing scene. I said ‘it will be really great, and we have to be really careful of how we do it. And [Emma] completely gave herself to the process. What we did was we set up a couple of cameras and Helena got on top of Emma... She was scoring [a word] into her skin.We just let the whole thing roll for about three or four minutes. In that three or four minutes there were some good bits, and some not so good minutes. And there were one or two really powerful bits where Emma was able to just let go a little bit and forget that she was acting. She’s still acting, but she lost herself in this process for a moment. And the screams were quite horrible to listen to. On the stage, everyone felt uncomfortable. Everyone just sort of stepped back a bit. It was a very odd energy in the room because she was kind of exploring... exercising demons really. And serving the scene in doing that. It was really interesting.”

It certainly sounds like they were doing some pretty fantastic work back then, and I sure hope we get to see some of that on screen come November. Just a few more things worthy of note, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 got a PG-13 rating from the MPAA for some sequences of intense action violence and frightening images. Capping things off, J.K. Rowling appeared on Oprah last friday for a somewhat interesting interview. It's definitely worth taking a look, so have at it.