The Toronto Sun has released three new articles featuring new interviews with the cast and producers of the Harry Potter franchise. In light of the release of The Half-Blood Prince DVD, producer David Heyman and David Barron talked about putting as much information about the behind-the-scenes making of the series in the DVD and the uniqueness of the franchise.
“I have very mixed feelings about it,” Heyman admits. “I made — we made — a conscious decision early on to reveal very little. If you look at the early DVDs, there is very little behind-the-scenes materials. That was for a couple of reasons. We wanted to preserve the mystery. And I think there is real validity to that, although we are probably the only film in the world that now takes that position. The other reason that we withheld is that we didn’t want to put anything on the DVDs that would show how things were being done in the upcoming film. We wanted the pleasure of the new film not to be interrupted. Now that we’ve come to the end (with the production of Deathly Hallows), we’re a little more comfortable. On this sixth DVD, for instance it is much more open in terms of what we are showing.”
“There is no other franchise (like it),” says producer David Barron. “The Bond franchise has been around a lot longer,” Barron says of the 007 spy movies based on Ian Fleming’s novels. “But they’re all individual stories. This is a singular story that has taken seven books and eight films to tell.”
They also talked about the future of the three lead actors.
“On the first two films, they were really, really young,” Heyman says of a decade ago when Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone first went into production here at Leavesden Studios, in the pastoral country setting of Hertfordshire. Heyman worked with the original director, American Chris Columbus, and his English casting agents to find the kids to populate their movie franchise.
“It was literally: ‘Chin up, look left, look right. Come on Dan — Rupert, stop laughing!’ It was literally that. And now they give as good as they get. They ask questions about motivations, about characters. They’re more active collaborators and that evolved over time.”
Heyman has predictions about co-stars Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson:
“Dan will continue acting and maybe directing. I think he’s interested in that.
“Rupert will continue acting. Rupert is one of the most original people you will ever meet, really lovely. He’s a one-off. And I think Rupert is a really talented actor with great comic timing.
“Emma, if she wants, can be a movie star. She is hugely talented and incredibly in touch with her imagination. She is fiercely intelligent and I think she could do whatever she chooses to do.”
Lastly, they also talked about author JK Rowling, who they have to thank for for her imagination.
“I’ve never actually asked her but she may well have found it a way of exorcizing the ghost of Harry Potter,” says Barron. “As much as all of us will find it really hard when this comes to an end, for her — having spent 17 years giving birth and raising this idea and then it being so phenomenally successful — (it is tougher). How you walk away from that I have no idea.”
To read the complete interviews, please click on the links above.
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