January 2005

The Harry Potter online scams continued, with some offering copies of the not-yet-published Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The online message claimed the book was available electronically only. “If you do not wish to wait for six months more, buy and start reading right now! Be the first to reveal all the secrets.” The site was shut down as soon as authorities became aware of it. For the record, no electronic version of a Harry Potter novel has ever been made available.

David Yates, virtually unknown as a director in America, who directed the critically acclaimed BBC series State of Play, was officially announced as the director of the film adaptation of Order of the Phoenix. Enthused producer David Heyman, “I am thrilled that David Yates is going to direct. Not only does he have tremendous passion for the world of Harry Potter, but he is a great director with a keen visual sense who fills every frame with humanity and compassion for his characters.”

J.K. Rowling gave birth to her third child, Mackenzie Jean Rowling Murray. Mackenzie is her second child with husband, Dr. Neil Murray.

When learning that children wanted owls as pets, J.K. Rowling was quick to point out that this was not a good idea. “If anybody has been influenced by my book to think an owl would be happiest shut in a small cage and kept in a house, I would like to take this opportunity to say as forcefully as I can: You are wrong. The owls in Harry Potter books were never intended to portray the true behavior or preference of real owls,” she wrote on her Web site.

J.K. Rowling’s lawyers made note of the fact that they were exploring whether or not they would sue the U.S. army for its Harry Potter–inspired illustration that appeared in their official publication, Preventive Maintenance Monthly.

February 2005

Preorders for the sixth Harry Potter novel, Half-Blood Prince, had, according to Amazon.co.uk, topped 100,000. The book’s publication date was announced as July 16.

While speaking to the Melbourne Herald Sun, Rupert Grint expressed his confidence he would be returning for film five. “There’s no reason, really, why we couldn’t go on,” he said. “I don’t know about the others, but I want to go on.”

Word leaked out that the names of the film crew would appear on gravestones in a Goblet of Fire cemetery sequence.

At the Visual Effects Society Awards, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban took home the top prize for Outstanding Visual Effects.

Rumors were making the rounds that Elizabeth Hurley was being pursued for a role in Order of the Phoenix, but these turned out to be false.

Lawyer-turned-author John Grisham admitted that the end of his reign on the top of the bestseller lists kind of bummed him out. “I was number one for a long time,” he said. “I tried to act like it was no big deal, but I kind of miss it.” He was dethroned, of course, by J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels.

March 2005

Scholastic released the cover for Half Blood Prince on the eighth of the month. Explained artist Mary GrandPre, “For the cover, the mood of the art is truly eerie. I wanted the colors to be strong and I chose upward lighting and dramatic shadows to convey a kind of surreal place and time.” In the image, Harry and Dumbledore are looking into a basin that is emitting a green light.

Electronic Arts and Warner Brothers announced a Goblet of Fire game that would complement the film and feature the likenesses of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint.

Scholastic reported that the forthcoming Half-Blood Prince was shattering all records with an initial print run of 10.8 million copies.

J.K. Rowling admitted that she thought the new book was the best so far. “Even if nobody else likes it — and some won’t — I know it will remain one of my favorites in the series. Ultimately you have to please yourself before you please anyone else.”

Academics from all over the world were expected to gather in Britain between July 29 and 31 to participate in the first Harry Potter Conference. Noted the BBC, “Professors and academics are involved in the event at Reading University, looking at topics such as the social issues of the wizarding community. Lighthearted events include a mock trial of potions master Severus Snape and a Hogwarts-style banquet. But those aged under 18 are not able to take part, despite the fact J.K. Rowling’s books are aimed at children. Seminar topics being discussed around the books include mythic symbols, alchemy and religious identity.”

Half-Blood Prince arrived in bookstores with a dire warning that carried serious consequences if the boxes were opened early. (Jim Sugar/Corbis)

April 2005

Fourteen people in Britain were convicted of using fake names to obtain millions in government funds. Among the fake names used was Harry Potter.

ABC announced that Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets would be airing on May 7. An extra treat for fans would be behind-the-scenes footage and clips from the forthcoming Goblet of Fire.

May 2005

IMAX and Warner Brothers announced that Goblet of Fire would be issued in the large-screen format in addition to regular format.

Speaking to USA Today, Daniel Radcliffe confirmed he would be returning as Harry Potter in Order of the Phoenix, and he also admitted that he had not gone back to watch his younger self in the earlier Potter films. “I kind of contemplated watching the first, then I decided I sort of valued my sanity a little too much. I think it would be far too strange and I would be self-conscious about what I do now.”

The BBC reported that at 12:01 a.m. on July 16, a global media competition would allow 70 people to attend a reading from Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling at Edinburgh Castle. Offered the BBC, “The lucky children will travel up the Scottish capital’s historical Royal Mile in horse-drawn carriages to the Castle Esplanade for the event, which will be broadcast live worldwide on TV and radio. The youngsters, who must be aged from 8 to 16, will return to the oak-beamed Great Hall of the castle later on the Saturday for a Hogwarts-style banquet. On the Sunday, the winners will then have the opportunity to be cub reporters and question Rowling, in what the author has promised will be the book’s only news conference.”

About two months before the publication of Half-Blood Prince, speculation was running high that Professor Dumbledore would perish in the book.

June 2005

Potterinsanemania — All things Harry were obviously getting out of hand, with a reporter from Britain’s Sun being shot at by someone who tried selling him an illegal copy of the Half-Blood Prince novel for nearly $100,000, and somehow J.K. Rowling’s lawyers got a court injunction designed to stop anyone with advanced knowledge of the new novel from saying anything publicly about it. Nice to have clout like that!

Emerson Sparts who runs the Web site www.mugglenet.com and Melissa Anelli of www.the-leaky-cauldron.org were awakened by phonecalls from J.K. Rowling inviting both of them to come “across the pond” to interview her. A rare opportunity indeed. “When the phone rang at 8 a.m.,” Anelli related to the Times, “I must have said, ‘Oh my God!’ forty-eight times.”

The success of Harry Potter in print and on the big screen inspired a tourism boom for fans wanting to check out real-life locations that relate to Harry.

Tie-in merchandise for the publication debut of Half-Blood Prince was cut down considerably as the expected boom of sales did not happen when Order of the Phoenix was published.

Amazon.com preorders for Half-Blood Prince were expected to top 1.3 million copies.

Oregon’s Natalie Jacobsen, age 15, spent a year writing her own 804-page Harry Potter novel with the hopes of showing it to J.K. Rowling. “I really love the books,” said Jacobsen, “and I want to be an author when I’m older. I went to the London premiere of the last Harry Potter film to try to meet J.K. Rowling, but it didn’t happen. So now I’ve come to Edinburgh and I really want to show her my book.”

July 2005

Nigel Newton of Bloomsbury said that since Harry Potter had been turned down by every other publisher, the character owes at least part of his success to Nigel’s daughter, to whom he had given a sample of Rowling’s manuscript. “She came down from her room an hour later glowing,” Newton told the New Zealand Herald, “saying, ‘Dad, this is so much better than anything else.’ She nagged and nagged me in the following months, wanting to see what came next.” Everyone knows the answer to that one.

Bloomsbury announced that Braille editions of Half-Blood Prince would be available at the same time as regular publication. This was a first for the series.

Harry fans were encouraged to purchase copies of Order of the Phoenix from Canadian sellers, the book being printed there on recycled paper.

As J.K. Rowling was getting ready to celebrate her 40th birthday on July 31, it was reported that despite her great success, she had not really changed as a person. Pointed out Scholastic’s Arthur A. Levine, “It’s a testament to her character, more than anything else, that she’s remained true to herself. She has managed to maintain her perspective. I think that takes a great deal of effort.”

British teenager Owen Jones, 14, won the chance to be the only person to interview J.K. Rowling on UK television. In that eventual interview, Rowling offered her thoughts on ending the series of novels. “I am dreading it in some ways,” she admitted. “I do love writing the books and it is going to be a shock, a profound shock to me. Even though I have known it is coming for the past fifteen years, I have known that the series would end, I think it will still be a shock.”

When a Canadian bookseller sold copies of Order of the Phoenix ahead of time, a judge ruled that the buyers could not say anything about it. One additional copy was inadvertently sold in America.

In a letter written several years ago, Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, expressed his opinion that Harry Potter was decidedly anti-Catholic.

On the verge of Half-Blood Prince’s publication, USA Today reported that nearly 2,000 bookstores in the U.S. were planning Harry Potter parties in which kids could dress up like Harry, make wands and place temporary lightning tattoos on their foreheads.

In its first 24 hours on sale, Half-Blood Prince sold 6.9 million copies.

Reviewed Molly Griffin of the Observer, “The penultimate book in J.K. Rowling’s massively popular series deals brilliantly with the difficult task of setting up the final tale of the boy wizard’s adventures. While not necessarily the best book of the series, it effectively brings together many of the multiple plot strings that arose in earlier volumes and pushes them forward for the final novel, which is no easy task. This book reveals the care and attention to detail with which Rowling planned the Potter series from the beginning.”

An aspiring Harry Potter holds a copy of Half-Blood Prince in a bookstore in Calcutta. (Pival Adhikary/epa/Corbis)

August 2005

Bootleg copies of Half-Blood Prince went on sale in China three months prior to the official publication of the translated version.

J.K. Rowling joined Stephen King, Nick Hornby and Bob Dylan as writers nominated for Quills awards in the U.S.

British director Terry Gilliam told Celebrity Spider that he was still annoyed at not having the chance to direct the first Harry Potter film, which he said he had been led to believe would be his. He also dismissed the Chris Columbus efforts: “[His] versions are terrible. Just dull. Pedestrian.”

September 2005

One rumor making the rounds was that Daniel Radcliffe was one of two actors being considered for a series of films based on the Young Bond novels. There was no basis to these rumors.

CBBC Newsround covered the fact that a three-dimensional portrait of J.K. Rowling was being unveiled at London’s National Portrait Gallery. “It shows J.K. sitting at a desk in a bare room,” the report goes on, “with a writing pad in front of her, along with three boiled eggs, to represent her three children.” At the unveiling, Rowling herself said, “This genuinely is the first time that I have seen this and I love it. . . . This shows more of me than any photo has ever shown.”

J.K. Rowling made audio versions of her novels available on iTunes. As the author wrote on her Web site, “Many Harry Potter fans have been keen for digital access for a while, but the deciding factor for me in authorizing the new version is that it will help combat the growing [number of] incidents of piracy in this area.”

Rowling also warned fans of fake signed Harry Potter items being offered on eBay.

J.K. Rowling loved Stuart Pearson Wright’s portrait of her that was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in September 2005. (Fiona Hanson/PA/CP Photo)

Emma Watson expressed her concern that other roles could be difficult to get. “My biggest fear is getting stereotyped,” she said. “I want to do other things. But I would hate to have another actress in the role. There is so much of me in her. Of course J.K. Rowling wrote the character, but in film terms I had a part in creating her.”

In an interview with the Los Angeles Daily News, director Mike Newell expressed his belief that there would be a different feel to Goblet of Fire because he was the first Englishman to direct an entry in the series. “Whether anyone will notice, I don’t know, but I hope it has a kind of authenticity. And it’s a little darker than the others, because these kids are growing up, and they have to face stuff that they haven’t had to before. But the real thing about it is that it’s a terrific adventure story and a really good thriller.”

Celebrity Spider featured an interview with Ralph Fiennes in which he said that his work on Harry Potter was changing his life. “No matter what I’ve done in the past,” he said, “now that I’ve played Voldemort, nothing else will ever match it again. I don’t know if I’m going to play Voldemort in all four remaining films, but even now, every time I go to the supermarket, people come up to me and ask if I’m really ‘he who must not be named.’ I can see Harry Potter taking over my life.”

Sales for all of the Harry Potter novels had exceeded 300 million copies.

More than 1,000 Harry fans attended the Witching Hour symposium on J.K. Rowling’s world held in Salem, Massachusetts. This was only the latest in a series of symposiums held in different states between 2003 and the present. In describing the symposium, www.witchinghour.org offered, “A chief aim of ‘The Witching Hour’ is to foster dialogue between academics and fans of the series. Harry Potter online fan culture — which includes original stories and art inspired by Rowling’s world — is rich and varied. It is already enormous and is still growing. For instance, one of the major fan fiction archive sites boasts nearly 200,000 new stories, contributed by writers from around the globe. And the fans themselves will be sharing their creative endeavors, reading from their fiction and displaying their artwork that features Harry and his friends — and enemies. Throughout the course of the conference, both fans and scholars will be able to interact [with] and learn from each other’s perspectives, to gain a deeper understanding of the series.”

J.K. Rowling took home a Quill Book Award for Best Children’s Book for Half-Blood Prince.

Actress Imelda Staunton confirmed she would be playing Professor Dolores Umbridge in the film version of Order of the Phoenix.

October 2005

Producer David Heyman announced that Steve Kloves would be returning to Hogwarts to write the adaptation of Half-Blood Prince after having to miss out on Order of the Phoenix.

The BBC reported that the Weasley’s flying car as seen in Chamber of Secrets had been stolen from the studio it was kept in.

A UK Sci-Fi Channel poll voted Harry Potter the Greatest Screen Fantasy Hero of All Time.

November 2005

In an interview with London’s Daily Record, Daniel Radcliffe pointed out that there was more to him than just Harry Potter, a point he would be proving at the end of the year by taking on the role of an orphan named Maps in the film December Boys. “He’s very different from Harry,” said Radcliffe. “He doesn’t have Harry’s zest for life. But I don’t feel pressure. I just want to do the best job I can.”

Smitten fans await the arrival of Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint at the New York premiere of Goblet of Fire. (Andrew Gombert/epa/Corbis)

Just before Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire hit theaters, the New York Post noted: “As expected, many scenes in the massive book are deleted, combined or shortened to make the film flow smoother and faster.” The article went on to detail some “surprising” changes, the most surprising of which “is in the film’s first scene, when the character out to kill Harry is revealed immediately. In the book, that character is kept a secret until the very end, when he is unveiled in a page-turning plot twist.”

Speaking to USA Today about Goblet of Fire, director Mike Newell pointed out, “What Harry is up against now is an utterly malignant human creature. This is not a three-headed dog. This is the ultimate evil itself. Voldemort is a lot more savage and cruel than any invented creature could be.”

In a separate article, USA Today credited the works of J.K. Rowling as the reason sales of science fiction and fantasy books had climbed 8.5 percent in a period of five years, which was nearly twice as much as the rate for all consumer books.

NASA actually transmitted Goblet of Fire to the International Space Station at the request of astronaut Bill McArthur.

Twelve-year-old Breeze Gardner, whose mom is confined to a wheelchair due to MS, wrote to J.K. Rowling to request an autographed copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince that she could auction off for charity. Amazingly, that’s exactly what she received and, according to the Daily Record, the rare volume was expected to go for about $10,000 in auction.

Director Mike Newell gave an interview in which he explained that it had been his hope to deal with a darker adolescent tone in Goblet of Fire, but, “I found, to my horror, that Alfonso had gotten there before me and with great style and determination.” In the same interview he added, “The children are growing up, and that’s what the basic story is. You have to be true to growing up in an abstract way and to these kids in a particular way.”

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was released on November 18, 2005, scoring $102,685,961 in its opening weekend. Domestically it would gross $290,013,036, with a foreign take of $602,200,000, for a global total of $892,213,036.

Cast and crew of Goblet of Fire met with the press shortly before the film’s release, and what follows are edited transcripts of those sessions.

MIKE NEWELL AND DAVID HEYMAN

(Director and Producer)

QUESTION: How does this film differ from the previous Harry Potter films?

MIKE NEWELL: For me, it is that I think in the previous films, because of the age of the people, the scale of the challenge to the leading character has been limited. He’s had a basilisk to deal with, he’s had this problem, that problem, but he’s never actually been challenged in his self. He’s never had to put up or shut up. He’s always had the group to rely on, and now in this one, he’s older, he’s more conscious, so he knows much more what’s happening to him, and he knows when Voldemort says in the graveyard, “Do you want to take it in the back or do you want to take it in the front? But you’re gonna get it, whichever way,” and what Harry says is “Alright, I’ll show you.” And he comes out, and he’s ready for a fight, and he knows that it’s a fight to the death. And he has the moral courage to do it. Of course there are lots and lots of wonderful new things about this, like the jokes on growing up and girls and, oh God, how do we dance, and all of those things. But the big difference is that the challenge is kind of a moral one, and he may not survive it.

DAVID HEYMAN: And for Harry, when we went and spoke to Jo [Rowling] the first time, it was very important to her that the theme that would continue through it all was to stand up and be counted. Even if you think you might not win, you have to stand up for what you believe in.

NEWELL: David [Heyman] took me up to see J.K. Rowling two years ago now. And she talked about just that, she talked about these moral challenges, and she was brilliant about it, and I took a great deal away from that.

HEYMAN: That’s really the essence that Mike [Newell] sort of took from the beginning, right through [to] the end: it is a thriller, another change. The world has expanded, we’ve got two new schools coming in, we have the first interaction with the opposite sex, both the good and the awkward and uncomfortable sides of that, that begin at thirteen, fourteen, and never go away. But its heart, as Mike said, is this moral stuff. Harry is now fourteen, he’s much more of an individual than he’s ever been before. He’s becoming more who he is.

NEWELL: It’s terribly interesting, isn’t it?

HEYMAN: What the Dark Lord is grooming him to be.

NEWELL: Both you and I are taking Emma [Watson] as a sort of honorary boy. But of course Emma now gets to be a young woman, which is something that I personally am very proud of, because I thought that she allowed herself to be very vulnerable. She could so easily have said, “Well I’m Hermione and I’m going to be this and that,” but she was very, very allowing of a vulnerability, and not knowing, and not being kind of cool. And I was very pleased by that. Just as in number three, there’s this hugely satisfying moment where she hits Malfoy, bop. So there is in this one this wonderful moment where she’s unsure and insecure.

HEYMAN: I think the kids are growing as actors, and Mike is benefiting from them having had two years with two films with Chris [Columbus] and one film with Alfonso [Cuaron]. Mike is one of the great directors of actors, and the kids are challenged. He didn’t let them rest one minute or get comfortable; he pushed and pushed and pushed, and I think the performances show it.

QUESTION: What is the challenge of using some of these great British actors as basically background to Harry’s story?

NEWELL: It’s actually a problem. And I think that the way that we attacked it, was that even though each of them — Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, Mike Gambon, Robbie Coltrane — is now established, there’s no more exploration for the audience to do of those characters. Indeed they mustn’t change, in a way. And so what you have to do is to find a kind of lapidary way of using these tiny little bits, which will show you parts of these characters that you’ve never seen before. And so you’ve never seen Hagrid in love before, and a very wonderful thing it is, too. She did this thing at rehearsal, nobody could believe it — this is Frances de la Tour — and they found themselves opposite one another, and of course they’re both of them great natural comedians, and so it was wonderful seeing these two people being kind of awkward and blushing and retiring with one another. And then suddenly she leant forward and does what she actually does in the scene in the movie, she picks something out of his beard, and we all thought, “Oh wasn’t that wonderful!” And then, God help us, she ate it. [Laughs] So you know, those little things, and a tiny moment like that will keep those characters alive, but yes, it’s something you have to work at — it’s difficult.

Mike Newell, director of Goblet of Fire, shows Voldemort how it’s done. (Kevork Djansezian/AP Photo)

QUESTION: Working with Dumbledore in particular has changed in that this is the first time we’re seeing things beyond his control.

NEWELL: Yes, that was really interesting, because Michael was very game for that. I think that he had not wanted to be the same figure that Richard Harris had been, who was a figure of tremendous Olympian authority. He’d wanted something different to do simply because he wasn’t Richard Harris. And what he found in this one was that Dumbledore is fallible. And not omnipotent, and indeed is behind the game, and a great deal of what he does is about being inadequate, rather than super-adequate, which of course is much more interesting to play.

QUESTION: Mike, did you have much knowledge of the movies and books prior to being approached for this one?

NEWELL: Yes, I’d read one book, the first book; and I’d seen both the films before I was approached, and so I was hoping to be approached. I was therefore educated pretty reasonably when I was approached, but then of course I started to particularly watch the films, obsessively. And I can still in my sleep do close textual analysis on numbers one, two, and three.

HEYMAN: And Alfonso was very generous.

NEWELL: Yeah he was, actually. As I’m sure Chris would’ve been.

HEYMAN: As Mike has been with David Yates [Order of the Phoenix]. And Alfonso now, you know, engaged Mike in discussions about the process and visual effects and allowed him to see the film early, just as Mike did with David Yates. And David Yates has seen a rough cut of the film, so it’s been really great. By the way, I wanted Mike from the very beginning.

QUESTION: This film is so different from the previous ones. Do you think it’s not just a kids’ movie anymore?

Producer David Heyman had secured the rights to the Harry Potter films before the books had become a phenomenon. (Ian West/PA/CP Photo)

NEWELL: Not a kid movie for me. It’s an adventure story, and it’s a huge entertainment. Warner Brothers absolutely hated me saying this, so I’m gonna say it. But for me it had all the kind of variety that a Bollywood movie has. It’s just — oh no, he said it! [Laughs] But at any rate, it’s a huge broad-based entertainment, but above everything else, David is habitually very modest about this stuff, but he was very, very good when he first approached me, because what he said was, “You must read the book, and if you find a way of doing the book, then you must tell us what that is. You mustn’t come because it’s a franchise, you mustn’t come because it’s the most famous children’s film that’s ever been, you mustn’t come for this, that, and the other reason, you’ve got to be able to see how to make a seven-hundred-and-fifty-page book into a single movie.” And we then had one of the meetings made in heaven, where we talked about the thing as being a thriller. Because that’s what I found in it; I thought that it was an absolutely God-given thriller — and then I convinced him.

HEYMAN: For me, the books are not children’s books. I think that’s a misconception. I think the books are books that appeal to . . . maybe you could say children of all ages, but I think they appeal to people of all ages. I think there is something for everybody in them, and I think with this film, each book is getting more mature than the one that preceded it, because it’s also dealing with a different age, a different year in Harry’s life. And in this one, Harry’s fourteen, so there’re different issues, there’s greater complexity, and I think that really shows in the film, because the film is true to that script. The other thing is, when you bring in a director like Mike Newell, just as when you bring in a director like Alfonso Cuaron, they’re not cookie cutters. You don’t bring in a director like Mike Newell and tell him “Well, you’ve got to make a film just like Chris Columbus.” I mean, it would be foolish. So for me, I look at this film, and I see Mike Newell — I mean, I see Jo Rowling, but I see Mike Newell written all over it, and that’s really exciting to me. Just as I saw with Alfonso, I saw Alfonso written all over Prisoner.

NEWELL: Yes, I saw that with Alfonso and with Chris.

HEYMAN: I think it’s really important. And I’m sure that David Yates will imbue the fifth [film] with the same. And it’s really exciting for me, this is a big, generous, smart, funny, thriller.

QUESTION: Are you happy with the PG-13 rating?

HEYMAN: Very much so. And I’m very happy with the 12A in the UK. One, I think it will be good for the slightly older audience, and two, I think that we had to be . . . it shows that we’ve been faithful to the material. The books do not talk down to an audience. The audience reaches for the books, and I think the films do the same. We don’t patronize our audience. The film is very much in the spirit; it’s not literally faithful, but it is in the spirit, it is truly faithful to the spirit of what Jo has written, and that’s really exciting to me.

NEWELL: One of the challenges was that, of course, everything goes back to the book, always. And that’s where the audience begins as well. And so as the audience, which began with the first book, progresses through two and three, they get to four, and they see that it’s a different kind of animal; it’s a much tougher beast than the others. And if you don’t get a PG-13, in a way, then that audience that began with number one and is now fourteen, fifteen, sixteen — or sixty-four, whatever — will kind of want to know why you are infantilizing the situation. Of course David says these are not children’s books, these are kind of adult stories, with a very strong moral aim and view. So with PG-13 they can believe; without it, I’m not sure they can.

QUESTION: How does this film rank personally for you?

NEWELL: I truly mean this: I can’t stand myself sometimes. David has seen me in rushes, where I simply can’t bear the ordinariness of what I do. And I always feel that about every [film].

HEYMAN: Even when it’s extraordinary?

NEWELL: Doesn’t matter. And I always hate the end result. And this time, and it may be a very bad sign, I don’t know, but this time I don’t hate it; this time I think it’s what I tried to do, what we all tried to do. Which was to make this wonderful, terrifying thriller ride. And so it pleases me very much, and that’s a better way of answering your question.

QUESTION: What were you expecting in terms of working with the kids?

NEWELL: My worst fear was that they would have realized that these films were stories in which they absolutely were the stars. Now in most children’s films, that’s not true. Most children’s films, they are a sort of a little bolt on a third of the story while the weight is still taken by the adults. In that way, Mary Poppins is not quite a children’s story, it’s an adult’s story. But that’s not the case here. This is a story in which the children are stars, and that can do terrible things to [child actors]. And miraculously, mostly because of the way they’re handled by the production and also because they’ve got very good parents — a good kid has good parents — they haven’t [been badly affected]. They know exactly what they’re worth, but they have not become impossible, and so they’re still loose, and they’re still curious, and they’re still prepared to have a go at anything. Before we began shooting, we had two weeks of acting classes, and the reason we did this was that I was very anxious that the established characters would not dominate the newcomers. Many of whom had never acted before. The Chinese girl had never acted before, the two little Indian girls had never acted before. And I didn’t want them feeling that they were secondary citizens, and so we had these two weeks where what we did was we played, we did physical exercises, we did improvisational exercises, so on and so forth. And by the end of that, everybody was loose in one another’s company, and there was no rank structure. It wasn’t that Dan outshone anybody else, they were all the same. And they were prepared to do that, which is a very wonderful thing. And it shows. What you’ve got now is an ensemble, rather than a top-down pyramid structure.

Joining the three regulars for Goblet of Fire were Katie Leung (Cho Chang), Stanislav Lanevski (Viktor Krum), Clémence Poésy (Fleur Delacour) and Robert Pattinson (Cedric Diggory). (INFGoff.com/CP Photo)

HEYMAN: I think in this film more than the previous three films, there was a sense of community amongst the kids. They all were playing and joking and laughing, and there was a lot more hanging out, and Dan, Rupert, and Emma were all part of that. And so it’s a much more extended community, much more like school life than I think it’s ever been.

NEWELL: That’s a good point, actually. I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right, it was much more like the kind of loose relationships that you would build up in school, but much bigger.

HEYMAN: And I have to say, we are blessed. The three kids who could, as Mike said, so easily be brats, are not. They want to learn, they want to get better at what they do, they are enthusiastic still, and they have a lot of fun doing it. I think partly the rehearsal that Mike had them do, but also by their very nature, they are nonjudgmental, open people, who are good people from the top down. I think Mike will attest to this. Though the buck always stops with him, ultimately, it’s a very democratic environment. It’s one in which everybody has a voice, sometimes too much of one [laughs], but everybody does.

NEWELL: I agree. The trouble is, you can’t start to play that game unless you play that game all the way through. I agree with you. HEYMAN: It’s a place in which everybody is welcome, and it’s a very safe place for kids to be; everybody to be.

QUESTION: How frequently did you consult with J.K. Rowling about the story line?

NEWELL: Actually, you should ask David, because this is an absolutely key function of David’s. Jo Rowling appears to me to be quite extraordinarily hands-off. Everybody says, “Oh we’re surprised to hear that, we thought that she was very controlling.” Well, I speak as I find — she wasn’t with me. I don’t think it’s in her nature, I don’t think she’s like that. The danger, of course, is straying too far from the novels because you could lose Jo Rowling, at which point you lose the audience. Because they come in the end for her. And she was very, very sweet, she was very available, she’s not the best returner of a phone call that I’ve come across, but she was fine. She gave me very clear things, when I needed them, like what did the Avada Kedavra curse actually do when it hit you. But she also had this very strong view of how the story fit into this seven-book arc. Beyond that, she didn’t control at all. But of course it was to David’s credit that she was brought into the process just as much as he knew she wanted to be, and not an inch more. I mean, how does that work?

HEYMAN: Jo is the most generous of collaborators. She sees each and every draft of the screenplay. We want to do that, because, one, I made a promise at the beginning that we would be true; but two, because we’d be fools to be otherwise. And so we show her each draft, and we also don’t want to do anything that will disrupt the books. Also, she has incredible knowledge. What’s in the books is just the surface of what she knows: she has notebook upon notebook of more material that doesn’t find its way into the books. I think one of the reasons for the success of the books is because the universe is so clearly thought through. There was one very significant change that we made, and we called Jo to ask her about it, because it was major, and it had to do with Barty Crouch Jr. being present in that very first scene in the film. With Voldemort and Peter Pettigrew. The scene takes place in the novel, but Barty Crouch Jr. is not in it. And the reason why we wanted that is because we needed Barty Crouch Jr. to be more a recognizable and formidable presence when you got to the end, when Moody turns back into him. And without that, the only time you would have seen him would have been in the flashback, when he didn’t look exactly like he did at the end. So I called Jo and asked her, and I think she said that’s absolutely fine. What she loved about the third film, she hasn’t yet seen the fourth, but what she loved about the third film was that it was true to the spirit, that it made changes, but it made changes in the spirit of the work. That’s what she has felt so far in the process, the inclusive process of the script. I know she’ll feel it when she sees the film. She was meant to see it last week, but some personal matters came up and she couldn’t.

QUESTION: How did the young actors handle all the physical challenges?

NEWELL: Well, Dan’s a very brave boy. He really is a brave boy. He’s a rotten swimmer, or he was, when this began. And he had great trepidation, and he came to me, about the swimming, and there wasn’t any way around it — he had to swim. He had to spend huge amounts of time underwater in the tank, and apart from anything else, he was by no means sure that he had the physical resources to do that. You couldn’t say that he was frightened of it, but [fear] was only a step away. And nonetheless, he knuckled down, and he did what he had to do.

HEYMAN: Actually, on the first film, when we began the process, Dan was not a physical boy. And he wanted to be more physical, and actually we encouraged that. We put him together with our stunt team, and he is now a jock of sorts. I mean, his body has changed, he’s really much more physical than he ever was. But lunch break for example, several times a week, he’ll go down to the gym and work out. It’s not something we’re asking him to do, he just loves to do it. At times he likes to do his own stunts, he’s very brave, as Michael said. In the underwater scene, he logged forty-one hours on his log book.

QUESTION: What role does screenwriter Steve Kloves play in the continuity of the series?

HEYMAN: Steve Kloves is one of the great experiences for me, one of the great joys of this entire series. I think he’s one of the best writers writing, he is a brilliant adapter in the sense that he’s able to retain the voice of the author that he’s adapting. He did it with Michael Chabon with Wonder Boys and I think he’s done it in the four Potter films that he’s written. He is a fantastic writer who has a keen sense of character, and really understands the voice of the actors he is writing for, and he can write with great emotion and at the same time also, great humor. He is not doing the fifth because he is writing another project for me called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which I thought he [might] direct, however he read the sixth [Potter] book and couldn’t stay away, so he’s going to come back and write the sixth. Michael Goldenberg is writing the fifth, he is another writer that I actually talked to about the first film, and he’s doing a fantastic job. You can never make a good film out of a bad script. You most certainly can make a bad one out of a good one, but the key is to have a good script, and I really believe that Steve Kloves, on each of the four films, has given us a really good script. He’s also a man, and Mike can speak to this a little bit, who writes without ego. It’s great when you sit in the script meeting with him, because you can say anything, and he’s thought through everything. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t defend what he has, but he does it in a way which explains the reason why he has done what he has done, but it’s always open to changes. He also has an encyclopedic knowledge of the world, and he and Jo are very much on the same wavelength.

NEWELL: It was the happiest collaboration I think I’ve ever had, certainly as an adapter. And he never gets in your way. I am one of those who will want stuff to be written and rewritten and re-rewritten. He would never, ever complain, he would always see why, and he would always dig down into his personal mine of stuff, and come up with wonderful things. I can’t tell you how happy I was with him.

DANIEL RADCLIFFE, EMMA WATSON AND RUPERT GRINT

(Harry, Hermione and Ron)

QUESTION: How did you identify with the character growing up in this film?

DANIEL RADCLIFFE: For me, it’s great because there is so much pressure on the films now to be better, especially after the third one, which for me was great. There was an awareness that we had to work really hard, to go further with it and to make it better, because otherwise people would be very disappointed, and so for me it is also a lot of fun, loads of fun playing Harry as he’s getting older. I think that when we [start with] Harry’s tenth birthday [in the book] — it’s almost as if [it’s] in real life and not just in the stories, but people sort of grow extra emotions. That’s partly to do with hormones and all the trouble that they cause, and then partly just a thing about growing up. You have other assets, and so it’s fun playing that in Harry as he grows older.

EMMA WATSON: And then there’s been a lot of speculation about whether we’re going to outgrow our parts or that the films will take longer, but it actually works out pretty well because each film takes about a year. Obviously that coincides with us doing our year at school. So we’re pretty much growing alongside them. Sometimes everything that we’re going through, in some instances, they are too.

DANIEL: There is always this thing of whether we will get too old for the part. People actually play a lot younger than they are in real life. I don’t think that it’s as big an issue as a lot of people make it out to be.

RUPERT GRINT: I think that all of the characters have sort of grown. I think Ron was a bit more moody in this one. There’s a few of those things, and I enjoyed doing it.

QUESTION: As you get older and more successful, is there a risk of you guys becoming party animals?

EMMA: Hopefully not.

DANIEL: I’m planning on buying twenty Porsches and crashing them all just to be extravagant. I don’t think so. I think that it’s a really good thing that we haven’t gotten like that. Because the characters are so well known and iconic, if we’d been going out — basically if we’d gone to every party under the sun that we were invited to, it would’ve been hard for people to divorce what they see in the film from what they see in magazines and stuff. So I think that would’ve been a mistake, which is why I think that we basically only go to the premieres.

EMMA: I think that we do have a kind of responsibility to that as well. I don’t think that we are the party animals.

DANIEL: I certainly quite enjoy not having the high profile thing. I quite like that, because I sort of feel like I’m fooling people, because it’s this massive thing and yet it’s still quite a low-key thing. I feel I’m tricking everyone [laughs].

QUESTION: What is it like when you return to school between films?

EMMA: You do get some funny looks, but after a while they just accept the fact that you’re there all the time, and that’s how I like it.

DANIEL: The only thing that I would sort of say is that basically when you get back to school, as Emma said, originally there’s a sort of novelty factor. People are going, “Ah, look who it is. It’s that person.” It’s like you’re sort of running along with an extra arm or something, but after a few weeks or something it sort of settles down and they go, “Oh. That’s just the kid with the extra arm.” So it doesn’t seem to affect everyone so much. I was at school when the third film came out and then it got sort of fever pitch again, sort of mad. But it’s not really a problem.

RUPERT: I’m finished with school now, and so I don’t really get that.

QUESTION: How would you describe the bond between your characters?

DANIEL: What’s quite nice about the thing that goes on between Harry and Ron in this one, and the tension, is that it’s funny for someone looking in on it, but to them it’s absolutely serious and they’re really angry at each other. Each of them feels that they have both behaved in a really bad way, and so it’s sort of like they feel betrayed by the other. It’s also mutual blame. They’re both to blame for how they are acting with each other, but to someone else on the outside sort of watching it, it’s quite funny, because in the long run it’s actually quite trivial what they’re arguing about, as a lot of arguments are. They seem really important at the time and then two years later you can’t even remember where it started or what it was about. RUPERT: It’s just sort of growing up. It’s natural.

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.

RUPERT: It’s the same, really. I’ve finished school now and so it sort of feels like I’m sort of more grown up now anyway. But Mike was great in a sort of brilliant way.

QUESTION: Now that you’ve played these characters over four films, do you feel a connection to them? And are you excited about doing the rest of the films?

EMMA: I’m hugely attached to Hermione’s character, because there’s so much of me that goes into her, and so much of my experience. One thing that Mike did was have me kind of regurgitate my own experiences and sort of put them into her.

DANIEL: That’s quite disgusting [laughs].

EMMA: [Laughs] Sorry. He made me apply them to what Hermione was going through. I know that if anyone else were to play Hermione, I wouldn’t be able to deal with that. It would kill me. I’m hugely close to her.

DANIEL: That was a good way of putting it. It’s not a pretty image, but you’re absolutely right in that he did make us draw upon our own experiences. I think that you can’t really help but feel attached to your character. I certainly can’t help but feel attached to [Harry] in some ways. I don’t know about twins. I don’t know if me playing him has turned out how I am like him now, or being so close to him over the past five years has influenced my own character. I mean, I don’t think that I’m going to develop a complex over it or anything, but it’s a sort of slightly interesting thing. I mean, it’s very hard to separate yourself from him in some ways, but ultimately you go home at night and it’s not like you stay in character all the time. It would be very hard to be a method actor on Harry Potter, because then you’d have to find the figure of ultimate evil somewhere, and they don’t exist. So that would be my not-particularly-clear answer to that question.

December 2005

Definitely proving his desire to stretch his acting muscles, Daniel Radcliffe agreed to star in Peter Shaffer’s controversial play Equus, which would require him to appear on stage in the nude. Harry Potter veteran Kenneth Branagh would direct. Some time later his spokesperson Vanessa Davies would note, “It is an extraordinary play, and he’s very much looking forward to the role. He is maturing as an actor and beginning to take on new and challenging roles.”

On her official Web site, J.K. Rowling expressed her feelings about writing the seventh and final novel in the Harry Potter series. “I contemplate the task with mingled feelings of excitement and dread, because I can’t wait to get started. I have been fine-tuning the fine-tuned plan for [book] seven during the past few weeks so I can really set to work in January.”

The year ended with actor Robbie Coltrane — better known as Hagrid to Potter fans — being given an OBE (Order of the British Empire).