Free Emma Watson by David Nolan Page A

‘My biggest concern in hiring a director was deciding who would bond with the kids,’ Columbus told the BBC. ‘This was a very special relationship we had over the past four years and I wanted to make absolutely certain that they would be in good hands. When I met Alfonso and I saw how he was interacting with the kids, from the very first moment I knew that they were in great hands.’
    Cuarón had come to prominence with the 2001 film Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother Too) , a sexually charged road movie about two teenage boys and their encounter with a woman in her late twenties. ‘Obviously the tone of the movies is completely different,’ Cuarón told USA Today  when asked to compare his best-known film with the new Potter. ‘Y Tu Mamá was very realistic, with social observation. Here it’s a magic world, a fantasy, a bigger canvas. But emotionally it’s exactly the same thing. It’s a journey of a character seeking his identity and accepting who he is. To step out of the shadow of his father, for instance, is one of the themes. And, as in the non-magical world, the characters’ emotional lives have more intensity. The hormones are buzzing, and so is their anger about things. And rather than repressing those things, it’s about letting it flow. It’s not about encouraging it, but just letting it be … I didn’t want those emotions very polished. Sometimes they got carried away. I would let them. I didn’t want them to be neat. I wanted it a little raw.’
    Y Tu Mamá También proved, if nothing else, that Cuarón knew how to direct teenagers. J. K. Rowling said, ‘Alfonso was mentioned very early on, and I was really enthusiastic about the idea – and I loved Y Tu Mamá También . Alfonso just obviously understands teenage boys backwards.’
    Indeed, producer David Heyman described Cuarón as a ‘teenager at heart’, making him the ideal choice to direct Emma and her two young co-stars. ‘Well, teenagers recognise other teenagers,’ the director told the BBC at the time. ‘From the moment I read the material, it was something that I connected with. This is the story of a kid who is seeking his identity as a teenager and I felt it was something I knew how to make into a film.’
    In taking over from Columbus, Cuarón had his work cut out for him. Chamber of Secrets had earned £10 million inits first weekend and another £55 million in its first three days across America. He clearly wanted to stamp his own authority on the new Potter movie but success was expected – on a large scale. Before filming started, he asked Emma, Daniel and Rupert to write an essay about their characters and about themselves to help him understand the essence of Hermione, Ron and Harry. The idea behind the essays, Emma told Entertainment Weekly , was ‘not just to help us, but to help him see the character through our eyes. He gave us a lot of freedom with that as well.’
    ‘The kids were very brave,’ Cuarón told USA Today. ‘They bared their souls. They were very eloquent. At some point, I wanted to publish them, then I thought no. I promised them it was just for the work of the film and it’s their personal stuff.’
    The end products of this exercise turned out to be highly reflective of the young actors, their personalities and the personalities of their characters. ‘We ended up being freakishly like our characters,’ said Radcliffe. Daniel wrote a nice, straightforward page. Rupert Grint forgot about it and never wrote a word. Typically, Emma – a high-achieving Watson – did nearly a dozen pages. Her co-stars would use this example of her eagerness to please as another way of teasing Emma – the number of pages she apparently wrote would increase with each retelling of the story. ‘It gets more and more every time,’ Emma exclaimed during a press interview when Radcliffe upped the number of pages she’d written to 20. ‘It was 10, then 12, then 16, now 20? Come on! I have big handwriting, and I