Free The Making of the Potterverse by Edward Gross

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Dracula
and I had access to Bram Stoker, I would certainly want to know what he was thinking.” If I were doing a World War II movie, I would hire a consultant who had been in the war and who knew what was happening, in terms of reality. Jo was a very willing collaborator. She never came in with a sledgehammer and said, “This must be done this way, you need to do this.” That never happened, and so, I just found it a joy to work with her. I’m being honest with you. It was four of us sitting in the room, and those were some of the best experiences that I had on this movie with Jo Rowling, Steve Kloves, David Heyman and myself. We laughed, we had fun, we talked about what would work on screen, what wouldn’t work on screen; we got the script to where we wanted it to be; and we talked about the design and the look, and Jo was just a collaborator. Sometimes, we would say, “Well, how can we make this work? We need to change it from the book.” A perfect example is the kids on the book cover who were wearing rugby shirts and jeans and sneakers with a wizard cloak over them. Well, we tested that look and it looked like a bad Halloween costume. So, we said to Jo, “Since this is steeped in British boarding school tradition, we need to get this to look like it exists in a real place,” and that’s why we came up with the uniforms, and she was all for that. I asked Jo at one point, “Do the kids wear wizard hats at all times?” and she said, “Yes, and most of them wear wizard hats through most of the book.” I said,“Well, I can’t justify that. I think that it will start to feel a little odd if they wear wizard hats throughout the film. Can we just use wizard hats for special occasions, for the sword ceremony and the final piece?” and she agreed to that. So, that’s the kind of conversations that you could have with Jo. She’s never, never in your face, never gets in your way.
    QUESTION: You decided to dramatize the opening monologue about how the baby shows up.
    COLUMBUS: And she was fine with that. Actually, the initial opening of the film was a flashback to the death of Harry’s parents, which Jo wrote for us. Well, we shot it and we realized that we should open the film with a bit of magic and slowly sort of lull the audience into the darkness, and the picture should get progressively darker as we get deeper into the film. So, we saved the death of Harry’s parents for later.
    QUESTION: Was there any concern about the fact it wasn’t going to be a two-hour movie?
    COLUMBUS: God no, I was hoping that it was going to be a three-hour movie, to be honest with you; but it’s definitely not true that there was a four-hour cut. There was about a two-hour-and-forty-five minute cut but that was all we had. Then I tightened it up, paced it up a little and took it to Chicago with very crude visual effects, showed it to an audience because I wanted to get an opinion. Fifty percent Harry Potter fans and fifty percent nonreaders. I wanted to see if it was going to work from a character point of view. Anyway, the audience loved the movie — but the nonreaders loved the movie as much as the readers. The nonreaders said that they all wanted to go out and get the book, and the readers just loved it. The readers were like, “Well, this was missing and this was missing, but I still loved it,” but the bottom line was that they all said it was too short. So, what I did was I put some things back and then I tightened the film up, and that’s how it ended up at two hours and thirty-threeminutes. I mean, that was the most shocking thing for me. I have to be honest with you, everyone who sees it, they seem to want more. People wanted to lose themselves in this world.
    QUESTION: Why do you think that Harry Potter has struck such a nerve virtually everywhere?
    COLUMBUS: I think that it really comes down to Jo’s imagination. You know, I think that it really comes down to the fact that she has tapped into something