We spoke to Harry Potter producers David Heyman and David Barron last week at the Studio Tour press junket. Read what they had to say about watching the actors grow up and what drew them into Jo Rowling’s story, and learn the truth about what it’s really like to ride a broomstick!
We have previously posted some parts of this round-table interview, so if you are interested, read Heyman’s retelling of Emma Watson and Tom Felton’s PoA bonding experience, their take on whether there’ll be a Potter remake, comparing HP to Twilight and The Hunger Games, and what they think about the Wizarding World in Orlando.
Question: To sum it up, what made Harry Potter such a famous series of books and movies?
David Heyman: I can theorise, but there’s some magic that all the theories can’t touch on. For me, I can tell you why I responded to it, which was because it reminded me of those books I read as a child. It reminded me a bit of Hans Christian Andersen, of Roald Dahl. It made me laugh, and I knew Harry, Ron and Hermione. I knew there were teachers who I liked and teachers who I didn’t like, and we’d all been to a school, but it’d be wonderful to go to a magic school. And I think that Jo’s books are about outsiders, and, I think, in some way, we all feel like outsiders. And I think that [the books are] just very moving, and there’s an innocence and a truthfulness about them. So I really responded to it just so completely, it just wrapped me up in this world. It is so vivid that I couldn’t put it down. But it’s not like, it’s hard to really be succinct or clear about why it worked, because it just does. And you see people trying to replicate it, taking the same format, and it doesn’t work. It’s just that magic dust that Jo created.
David Barron: Jo dealt with themes that resonate with everybody and in a way that was so captivating and enthralling, that it just, you’d have to be a complete philistine not to get involved with those characters and those books.
DH: And she never wrote down to the audience. They were books that were written for her. They weren’t written specifically for an audience. She wrote something that she would enjoy, and I think that’s, again, one of the reasons why [it was so successful].
Q: If you look at Tom and Rupert and all the others, are you happy and proud about the way they have grown up?
DH: There’s a real humility. It’s incredible. Chris Columbus, I think, deserves a lot of credit for that at the start. I mean, their families first and foremost. But when we were prepping the first film, Chris would leave here on a Friday to go to San Francisco and come back on a Sunday. Because family was so important to him. And he did that for 12 weeks. But that family atmosphere is something that he really encouraged, and I think we carried it on.
DB: And Warners was so supportive of it, too. They allowed us to work in a way that put the welfare of the children to the fore, which is not always the case. And I don’t know if we’d made the films in America if that would have been any different, but certainly here. They did everything they possibly could and allowed us to do everything we possibly could to allow the kids to be kids. Plus, making the films at Leavesden, it’s a great leveller, actually!
DH: Maybe now it’s really swanky, but it wasn’t [then]. There was a lot of leaking roofs, and it was like a school, concrete floors. It was not luxurious in any way at all. And they grew up here, so nobody could get away with anything. We all knew each other, we were like a family. So if anybody had got too high on their horse, man, they got knocked down. There was a lot of joking, a lot of playing, a lot of support. Dan [Radcliffe] was really, he knew everybody’s name and he would hang out . . . I’m sure he loved being with Gary Oldman and Michael Gambon, but he also loved being with the prop men and the cameraman and the costumer.
Q: One of the things the Studio Tour offers is the chance to ride a broomstick. Have you tried it?
DH: Not yet. But actually I went on a broom and it wasn’t something I was too keen to repeat . . . the boys are being really sweet about it, but actually, it really is painful.
DB: It’s painful in the lower seating area.
DH: If you want to have children, have them before you go on the broom!
Q: When did you know that you had something incredibly wonderful on your hands with Rowling’s books?
DH: When I read that book, when I was up at 4:30 in the morning, I realised that there was something very special there. As I say in the tour video, I had no idea. I thought if I was lucky, it might be my Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. And that it would be on that scale. I could never have imagined that we’d be here, 15 years on, talking about an exhibition for Harry Potter. It’s just bonkers, and it was most certainly something that I could never have imagined. But we knew it was special when [Philosopher’s Stone was] released, and that opening weekend we’d go, “Wow!” That was so far beyond anything that I had imagined. But then we didn’t know we were going till the end until after the 4th film.
DB: And even then all you can do is do your best. The books might be super successful, but all you can do is do your best and hope that you end up making a film version of each book that Jo likes and the audience likes, and they like enough to warrant you moving on to make the next one.
DH: At the box office, it made about $7 billion, total. It’s phenomenal, but you know there will come a point where they’ll make another two or three or four Bonds, and it’ll surpass it. It’s great, but it’s so temporary. I mean, it’s a lovely thing to be able to say in your life, but it’s all so transient, what we’re about. And it sounds hard to believe this but I promise you it’s true, we never refer to it as a franchise, ever. Because that’s not how we’ve approached making the films. It’s just making a film.
DB: Yes, we made eight individual films.
DH: And so it’s great there’s all this business surrounding it, no complaints. It’s wonderful, and it’s become a franchise. I get it. But for us, it’s about making films and telling stories you wanna tell.
Q: At what point did someone go, “Hey, what we need is somewhere to keep all these wonderful memories”?
DH: Well, we kept all the sets, those were kept organically, as David said we didn’t know what we were gonna need some day. And also, Warners is very keen on preservation, regardless of this place.
DB: It was around the beginning of the sixth film when people started to talk about it, and then during the course of the making of the sixth film and the early part of the sevens, it started to come to fruition.
DH: It’s pretty surreal, coming back here, driving along, and you see these yellow-covered buildings and they look so spick and span . . . they weren’t like that when we were filming, let me tell you! Not in any way at all.
For more exclusive Harry Potter Studio Tour coverage, check out our interviews with director David Yates and Leavesden Studio director Dan Dark, and watch our red carpet interviews with Rupert Grint, Tom Felton, Evanna Lynch, and Warwick Davis.
Image credit: SnitchSeeker.com
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