Directing the Boy Wizard Part Two

HARRY POTTER director Chris Columbus chats about his adaptation of the super popular J.K. Rowling novel

By CHRIS WYATT     November 18, 2001

In part one of CINESCAPE's interview with HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER'S STONE director Chris Columbus, the filmmaker discussed the importance of maintaining a human element to the story, as well as his attempts to shelter the children actors in the film from the paparazzi and pratfalls that celebrity brings. As Columbus explains in the second part of our chat with him, sometimes these concerns for the kids carried over into the technical aspects of the production.

Because English law only allows children to work on film sets for four hours a day, the production decided to run three cameras at once during several scenes. This allowed them to get the action from simultaneous angles. "It makes it better because everything matches in terms of movement. I didn't want the kids to be thinking about putting a coffee cup down on such and such line, I wanted them to be as natural as possible. So, that enabled us to film some of the scenes like a documentary, with me as a raving lunatic yelling in the background."



Many fans are hoping that the film will be as good as the book, but Columbus has his own perspective on that issue. "In terms of [making] the movie be as good as the book... you can't. To me, it's a companion piece to the book. My goal was to involve Joe [J.K.] Rowling as a collaborator. I thought, 'If I were doing DRACULA and I had access to Bram Stoker, I would certainly want to know what he was thinking.'"

Columbus had a wonderful experience working with the author. "Joe was a very willing collaborator," he says. "She never came in with a sledgehammer... I just found it a joy to work with her. We talked about the design, about the look of like the Troll and those things. Sometimes we would say, 'Well, how can we make this work? We need to change it from the book.' A perfect example is this: the kids on the book cover were wearing rugby shirts and jeans... with a wizard cloak over them. Well, we tested that look and it looked like a bad Halloween costume. So, we said to [Rowling], 'Since this is steeped in British boarding school tradition, we need to get this to look like it exists in a real place.' That's why we came up with the uniforms, and she was all for that."

Columbus communicated with Rowling constantly. "I asked Joe at one point, 'Wizard hats, do the kids wear wizard hats at all times?' And she said, 'Yeah, and most of them wear wizard hats through most of the book,' and I said, 'Well, I can't justify that. Can we just use wizard hats for special occasions?' And she agreed to that. That's the kind of conversations that you could have with Joe. She's never, never in your face, never gets in your way."



One change from the film to the screen is the opening. "The initial beginning of the film... was to be a flashback with the death of Harry's parents, which Joe wrote for us," says Columbus. "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 let the picture get progressively darker as we get deeper into the film. We decided to save the death of Harry's parents for later. So [Rowling] wrote us a special three-page prologue. Only three of us have a copy of it. She wrote it in book form and then [screenwriter] Steve Kloves came in and wrote it in screenplay form."

One thing that Columbus didn't want to change was the unique "Britishness" of the tale. This, despite the fact that many people advised him to do a slightly different version for U.S. audiences. "People would say things like, 'You've got to, for the U.S. version, change bogie into booger,' and I said, 'You know, they didn't re-dub A HARD DAY'S NIGHT when it came to America, and I think that it's charming.'"

"What [the American publishers have] done to the books," continues Columbus, "if you compare [the originals] side-by-side [with the American versions], is not great. 'Brilliant' is changed to 'wonderful' in America. Certain things that are part of the language and part of the color of the British book should remain intact... that was our philosophy."



Columbus is so adamant about not changing the feeling of the book because he believes it is that atmosphere that has made the books strike a cord with so many people. "It really comes down to the fact that [Rowling] has tapped into something emotional and magical about kids."

And so has Chris Columbus.