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Creating the Vision:
Interview with JK Rowling and Alfonso Cuaron
Transcript written by Veritaserum.com
David Heyman: The books lead us, I mean, we are in a good position of having had Jo Rowling provide us with this fantastic source of material.
Steve Kloves: All you have to do is read the books to sense the place. It's the tone and atmosphere which I thought she'd done - and continues to do - so brilliantly.
David Heyman: In the very first film, Jo came to the set when we were coming up with a lot of the designs, and had a look through everything to make sure that we weren't wildly off.
Mark Radcliffe: Jo created this world. We wanted to stay true to it, organic to it, and that's been our mission.
David Heyman: All that vision is born very much from the book, part the universe that Chris, and now Alfonso has built upon.
Alfonso Cuaron: From the get go, what I was aiming for was serving the material.
[PoA Set Footage:
Michael Gambon: I think that that's everything of importance. Let's begin the feast.
Alfonso Cuaron: That is very good.]
JK Rowling: Of the five books that are published, writing Azkaban was the easiest, and in some ways I think that shows. Although it's a tricky plot in some ways, as Alfonso will really appreciate and Steve Kloves, the scriptwriter, will really appreciate, because they've kind of had to negotiate the same ascent that I had to negotiate. At the same time, I felt I was really given space to do that, so it was an enjoyable process.
Alfonso Cuaron: The moment I read the book, I just felt so connected. For me, everything was so clear in how it should look as a film and how it should be told as a film. And then having the luxury of working with Steve Kloves - he's fantastic.
Steve Kloves: We tried to discover the best way to convey what Jo was expressing on the page - in movie terms. That led us to some interesting places.
Alfonso Cuaron: You deal with so many abstract concepts like the time traveling. That is such an abstract thing, and actually this is so difficult that even trying to explain it right now is hard.
JK Rowling: Yeah, it is hard, because you just go in circles.
Alfonso Cuaron: But then in the book, everything makes perfect sense.
JK Rowling: I loved watching that part of the film, I loved watching the Time Turner sequence. There was just enough humor in it, just enough nuances. Dumbledore's comment when they come back is just spot-on, it's just perfect.
[PoA Footage:
Harry: We did it.
Dumbledore: Did what? Goodnight.]
David Heyman: We got to Scotland to meet with Jo. One, I think it's important for Jo to feel comfortable, and two, I think that Jo is a wonderful source of information, she's incredibly generous with us.
Chris Columbus: I remember when she walked in the door, I thought - for some reason, I expected to meet someone who was like seventy. Jo walked in, she was younger than I was, we liked the same films and we liked the same music. It was just an immediate connection.
David Heyman: When she met Alfonso, he talked about his vision for the film. They talked through many ideas.
JK Rowling: Alfonso was mentioned very early on and I was really enthusiastic about the idea. And I loved "Y Tu Mama Tambien." Alfonso just obviously understands teenage boys backwards. You know, they're thirteen now.
Alfonso Cuaron: These kids were starting to take themselves seriously as actors, so they were willing to explore more emotional territories.
[PoA Footage:
Harry: He was their friend and he betrayed them. He was their friend!]
Alfonso Cuaron: I was so lucky that I had them so raw and so willing to go there.
JK Rowling: I think all three of them give their best performances to date.
[PoA Footage: Hermione punches Draco.]
Alfonso Cuaron: Poor Malfoy.
JK Rowling: He deserves it, though.
Alfonso Cuaron: He deserves it.
JK Rowling: But Tom took that punch really well. He really did a good job on that.
Alfonso Cuaron: Oh, they loved it. Emma was looking forward for that moment, and I remember Tom telling Emma, "Now if you want to hit me, just hit me."
JK Rowling: [laughs] What a hero!
Alfonso Cuaron: The universe is a universe that you created. You know, every corner of that place.
[PoA footage: Weasley twins give Marauders Map to Harry.]
Stuart Craig: This was a map of the world. This drawing is Jo Rowling's drawing that she executed in just a few minutes. As you see, it has all the principal ingredients. The Dark Forest is here, the Whomping Willow, the Quidditch pitch, Hogwarts castle itself. The Loch Lake is there, the perimeter road, Hogsmeade village. She had a very, very exact and precise understanding of her world and her creation - she knew exactly the relationship between all of the elements, so she was able to give it to us, and that became our Bible.
Alfonso Cuaron: We needed a place where the kids could see the execution of Buckbeak, and we thought about having a graveyard. And when we consulted Jo about it, she said, "No, the graveyard is not there." And I said, "Why?" And then she gave me the whole explanation why the graveyard cannot be there because it's in a different place of the castle because it's going to play... She knows her thing, she knows exactly what's going to happen later. Once, I remember having little people in some storyboards, playing some keyboards and an organ in the Great Hall, and Jo said, "No, there are not little people in this universe." And I said, "Yes, but it's like ladybugs kind of." And she said, "Yes, lovely image, but they don't make sense."
JK Rowling: I was really mean. I wouldn't let him do it. That's not fair, is it?
Alfonso Cuaron: It was just about trying to serve as much as possible the story and the spirit of the story. Because that's what's great about the book is, for me. The third book is so abstract and deals with so many different abstract concepts but at the same time, it's in the frame of an adventure.
David Heyman: I think it's very, very important that Alfonso Cuaron would be allowed to make this own film. It's important that any director come into a situation like this and feel the freedom, feel empowered to make it their own. That's how you're going to get the best films.
Alfonso Cuaron: Pretty much all of the decisions, the visual decisions, were made as we were shooting, not in the cutting room. We made most of those decisions during storyboard or when we blocked the scene with the actors we'd work with the actors and we decided how to approach the scene.
David Heyman: What's he's done is built from the foundation of the books, built from the foundation that Chris Columbus has established in the first two, but made it very much his own to serve the story.
JK Rowling: Alfonso had very good intuition about what would and wouldn't work. He's put things in the film that, without knowing it, foreshadow things that are going to happen in the final two books. So I really got goosebumps when I saw a couple of those things. People are going to look back on the film and think those were put in deliberately as clues.
Steve Kloves: Jo wants the movies to be faithful to the books. On the other hand, she realizes that they're completely different mediums. To be entirely faithful, these films would be sixteen hours long.
Alfonso Cuaron: In this film, the thing was about a child trying to find his identity as a teenager.
[PoA Footage: McGonagall talks with Madam Rosmerta in Hogsmeade.]
We found the theme and whatever stuck there we kept, and whatever didn't - sorry. As long as they didn't directly contradict either the universe or what is to come.
Chris Columbus: My biggest concern was the visual effects. I wanted to make absolutely certain that the visual effects would again move up a notch from the last film. In the first film, we were fairly rushed, and the effects were never up to anyone's standards. In the second film, we improved them greatly, and I wanted to take another leap in this film.
Alfonso Cuaron: We were watching it, and we said, "Wow, look at that hippogriff - it looks really great." We were just praising the conceptual artists and the CG artists who put it together. And then someone says, "Yes, but don't forget who imagined it in the first place," and here she is.
JK Rowling: I think it's important to say I didn't invent a hippogriff. Well, I invented that hippogriff, but the creature the hippogriff, as you know, exists in folklore and in mythologies. So that's not my creation, but I really thought hard about this because it could've been in the book, it could've been an absurdity, and indeed, it really could've been in the film as well. But you made him a real creature.
Alfonso Cuaron: There are not that many iconographic representations of hippogriffs and that's something we discovered was very interested in there. Sphinx, there are several sphinx, and you see creatures that are half bird and half cat, a lot of different things, but for hippogriffs, it was actually hard to find...
JK Rowling: I knew that because I went looking. You can't find any anywhere, so I saw a complete liberty to invent. I had a nightmare when I was in my teens in which I saw hooded, gliding figures. And they could almost be figments of your imagination, a tortured imagination, as indeed they are. But you know what I mean, they could be figments of a mentally ill mind, and that was a whole thing I was exploring in the book. Harry's particularly vulnerable to them, but he's got a much worse past, so he would be. You know, it's not weakness; it's just the fact that he's faced more.
Chris Columbus: I think Alfonso came up with an amazing design for the dementors, because they truly are unlike anything you've ever seen, but they are a close cousin to maybe what we've all sort of perceived as death over the years, and that's very, very frightening.
JK Rowling: I thought the shrunken head was very funny, I really liked that.
[PoA Footage:
Shrunken Head: Little old lady at twelve o'clock!]
JK Rowling: I thought they fit it in very well; it was a really funny idea. I mean, I said to Steve Kloves many a time, "I wish I had written that." But obviously, that's what you want, isn't it? You want to be working with people who come up with great stuff. It's great when I'm looking around for all these little bits that are completely consistent with the world, but I didn't write them. I wish I had, but there you go.
Chris Columbus: For me, one of the great memories was sitting in a room with Steve Kloves, Jo Rowling, and David Heyman, the producer. Just the four of us for several weeks discussing Quidditch, talking about what it's going to look like. That excitement, that sense of making something really special was something that I took with me through the making of the first film and the making of the second film.
Steve Kloves: The overall process was incredibly open and incredibly creative.
JK Rowling: I think in this case, the book and the director were really made for each other. There's a unity about the film, there's a consistency about it - its tone and its feeling. But it's very, very enjoyable for me, and that's not an easy thing for the author of the original material. I'm completely happy - what more can I say?
November 24, 2004.
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