dh1989
10-11-2002, 04:45 PM
Here it is.....
The cast and crew who brought us Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone have scarcely paused for breath since storming the box office last autumn. Living and breathing the magical world of Hogwarts, the young cast are growing up fast on set, as Martyn Palmer witnessed when he got an exclusive glimpse of The Chamber of Secrets in the making.
As a general rule, Miriam Margolyes would prefer not to work with children which, when you are playing the green-fingered Professor Sprout in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, is bit of a problem. (How she feels about acting alongside three-headed dogs, talking spiders and an airborne Ford Anglia is not clear.) Because today, as with most days at Leavesden Studios, there are kids everywhere. An old Rolls-Royce factory near Watford where most of the Potter fantasy is filmed, it now resembles a secondary school at breaktime. Children chat, grab fizzy drinks and cakes and wait their turn in front of the camera.
Young production assistants, with walkie-talkies crackling away on hipster jeans, have taken on the mantle of weary parents helping on a school outing and shepherd some to the loo, others to their makeshift classrooms and all of them in and out of wardrobe. They emerge, transformed and preening, as pupils of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, clearly delighted, for once, to be in a uniform. "Can we try to stay together in the right houses, please?" pleads one young lady trying to round up her extras. "Gryffindors should be on the left. And don't lose your wands."
Margolyes, gloriously eccentric off-screen and delightfully dotty on, is working with the three young leads - Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Emma Watson (Hermione Grainger) and Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) - and a class full of 12 and 13-year-olds, almost lost in a jungle of exotic-looking greenery, and we are on take four. "Hermione gets all of the big words," says a rueful Watson, 12, whose grandparents are watching her at work. "And some of them are a real mouthful. You try saying, 'Mandrake or mangora is used to return those who have been petrified to their original state, it's also quite dangerous and the mandrake's call is quite fatal to anyone who hears it' You see?"
She has a point, but it's doubtful she would get much sympathy from a seasoned old pro like Ms Margolyes. Dressed in "Hallowe'en" garb covering her small, rather dumpy frame - a long, flowing brown robe with a "lovely" pointy hat - she is giving a class, as Professor Sprout, on the magical powers of certain plants to Hermione and her pals. A few minutes later, in one of the canteens dotted around the Leavesden complex, she greets me with the rather disarming opening line: "Ask me whatever you want. I'm 61, I weigh 13 stone and I don't like children. They're a pain in the arse, they want attention all the time. I don't make allowances for them. They have to come up to my level; I don't want to come down to their level."
Before giving the impression that Margolyes would be better off playing the Wicked Witch in a remake of The Wizard of Oz, it would only be fair to point out that she seems to have been won over by Master Radcliffe and the others. "These children are nice, actually," she says with a note of surprise in her voice. "They are not precocious and uppity, they are just very natural and that's what I like."
When the film of the first of author J. K. Rowling's Potter books, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was released on Friday November 16 last year it took the worldwide box-office by storm and has now made $ 948 million. By the following Monday, the Potter production, with barely a pause for breath and a celebratory glass of champagne (for the adults) was back in full swing for The Chamber of Secrets and another marathon nine-month shoot.
There were new cast members - along with Margolyes there's Kenneth Branagh as Gilderoy Lockhart, the professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts, Jason Isaacs as the malevolent Lucius Malfoy, Mark Williams as the father of Harry's best pal, Mr Weasley, but essentially the same core team of film-makers - director, producer, screenwriter, production designer - and its leading cast (as well ( as the children, Richard Harris as Dumbledore, Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall, Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid) was intact.
"We haven't had much rest and I must say I wouldn't mind some," says David Heyman, the English producer who acquired the film rights to all of the Potter books. "But it's been a fantastic adventure and, touch wood, it's all gone very well. One of the greatest blessings is that none of the children has been sick."
Chris Columbus, the American director of both the Potter films, insists that it was best to get straight on with the next instalment rather than savour their moment of professional triumph. "We didn't have time to think about it, celebrate it," says 43-year-old Columbus. "It was back to work on Monday morning, and I think that kept us all very focused. And our goal was always to make a better film the second time round. They have to get progressively better because that can be the death of any series of films - the moment they put the nipples on the bat suit, so to speak."
That latter comment is a reference to Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever which, after two earlier and very successful films with Michael Keaton in the leading role, cast a hapless Val Kilmer in a camp sequel, complete with an over-the-top bat suit looking like something from a fetish mail-order catalogue, and was critically mauled. The Potter franchise is rolling along very nicely, thank you - they are already committed to a third film, The Prisoner of Azkaban, and, if all goes well, hope to make all seven of the books Rowling plans to write (there are four published so far, the fifth is now long overdue).
Much, of course, will rest on the slender shoulders of the young star of the show, Daniel Radcliffe, who turned 13 in July. A year after I first met him, it's impossible not to notice that he is, quite obviously, growing up fast. "But if you think I've changed you should see Rupert... (Grint)," he says.
He would love, he says, to do as many films as they will let him but the party line is that after number three, we'll all have to wait and see whether there will be any more. "People were saying, 'Oh, they can't do all seven because they'll grow out of the parts,'" says Daniel. "Well, why not? Harry actually grows, he progresses, like ( in the first one he was 11, now he's 12 and I grow with Harry, Emma grows with Hermione, and Rupert grows with Ron."
Daniel feels, too, that he's getting better as an actor. Both Heyman and Columbus agree. "In the first film I had to do eight or nine takes, now I only have to do three or four," says Columbus.
"And Dan, you will see in this film, has really become a leading man. In the last film the heart-throb was Tom Felton who played Draco Malfoy - everybody loves a bad boy, right? In this film it's going to move over to Dan. He's really matured into an action-adventure hero so in that respect he's a much stronger presence."
Heyman and Columbus are very protective of the children in their charge and understandably so. "They have more confidence but that doesn't mean they have become brash," says Heyman. "They are very good kids and one of the biggest bits of luck we had is that we cast very well, not just as actors but as people."
Columbus has seen it all before, of course. He directed Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone and witnessed at first-hand the damage that intense publicity can do to a youngster. A year ago he told me that the crucial difference with Daniel - and indeed Emma and Rupert - was that they had strong support networks and came from good, solid families. A father of four himself, it would be difficult to think of a director better equipped to work with children. "I feel like a big brother to the kids, particularly Dan because there's not a frame he's not in. And he's coped with it all phenomenally well. There's been a couple of incidents when he's been at the movies or something and people have recognised him and he's had to leave, but for the most part, the kids are able to lead their normal lives."
Leading "a normal life" is not quite the same as leading the life that he'd have led had he not won the part of Harry Potter, of course. For a start, he's spent most of his time recently on a film set instead of at school. Instead, he has one-to-one tuition, and every child, including the extras, has lessons each day. The production has its own headmistress and varying numbers of teachers, who make sure that the children work to the curriculum.
Daniel himself is pretty chuffed about his exam results. "They are the best I've ever had," he says. "Yes, phew! I've passed my common entrance exams into my next school."
I will finish it in the next post....
The cast and crew who brought us Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone have scarcely paused for breath since storming the box office last autumn. Living and breathing the magical world of Hogwarts, the young cast are growing up fast on set, as Martyn Palmer witnessed when he got an exclusive glimpse of The Chamber of Secrets in the making.
As a general rule, Miriam Margolyes would prefer not to work with children which, when you are playing the green-fingered Professor Sprout in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, is bit of a problem. (How she feels about acting alongside three-headed dogs, talking spiders and an airborne Ford Anglia is not clear.) Because today, as with most days at Leavesden Studios, there are kids everywhere. An old Rolls-Royce factory near Watford where most of the Potter fantasy is filmed, it now resembles a secondary school at breaktime. Children chat, grab fizzy drinks and cakes and wait their turn in front of the camera.
Young production assistants, with walkie-talkies crackling away on hipster jeans, have taken on the mantle of weary parents helping on a school outing and shepherd some to the loo, others to their makeshift classrooms and all of them in and out of wardrobe. They emerge, transformed and preening, as pupils of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, clearly delighted, for once, to be in a uniform. "Can we try to stay together in the right houses, please?" pleads one young lady trying to round up her extras. "Gryffindors should be on the left. And don't lose your wands."
Margolyes, gloriously eccentric off-screen and delightfully dotty on, is working with the three young leads - Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Emma Watson (Hermione Grainger) and Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) - and a class full of 12 and 13-year-olds, almost lost in a jungle of exotic-looking greenery, and we are on take four. "Hermione gets all of the big words," says a rueful Watson, 12, whose grandparents are watching her at work. "And some of them are a real mouthful. You try saying, 'Mandrake or mangora is used to return those who have been petrified to their original state, it's also quite dangerous and the mandrake's call is quite fatal to anyone who hears it' You see?"
She has a point, but it's doubtful she would get much sympathy from a seasoned old pro like Ms Margolyes. Dressed in "Hallowe'en" garb covering her small, rather dumpy frame - a long, flowing brown robe with a "lovely" pointy hat - she is giving a class, as Professor Sprout, on the magical powers of certain plants to Hermione and her pals. A few minutes later, in one of the canteens dotted around the Leavesden complex, she greets me with the rather disarming opening line: "Ask me whatever you want. I'm 61, I weigh 13 stone and I don't like children. They're a pain in the arse, they want attention all the time. I don't make allowances for them. They have to come up to my level; I don't want to come down to their level."
Before giving the impression that Margolyes would be better off playing the Wicked Witch in a remake of The Wizard of Oz, it would only be fair to point out that she seems to have been won over by Master Radcliffe and the others. "These children are nice, actually," she says with a note of surprise in her voice. "They are not precocious and uppity, they are just very natural and that's what I like."
When the film of the first of author J. K. Rowling's Potter books, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was released on Friday November 16 last year it took the worldwide box-office by storm and has now made $ 948 million. By the following Monday, the Potter production, with barely a pause for breath and a celebratory glass of champagne (for the adults) was back in full swing for The Chamber of Secrets and another marathon nine-month shoot.
There were new cast members - along with Margolyes there's Kenneth Branagh as Gilderoy Lockhart, the professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts, Jason Isaacs as the malevolent Lucius Malfoy, Mark Williams as the father of Harry's best pal, Mr Weasley, but essentially the same core team of film-makers - director, producer, screenwriter, production designer - and its leading cast (as well ( as the children, Richard Harris as Dumbledore, Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall, Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid) was intact.
"We haven't had much rest and I must say I wouldn't mind some," says David Heyman, the English producer who acquired the film rights to all of the Potter books. "But it's been a fantastic adventure and, touch wood, it's all gone very well. One of the greatest blessings is that none of the children has been sick."
Chris Columbus, the American director of both the Potter films, insists that it was best to get straight on with the next instalment rather than savour their moment of professional triumph. "We didn't have time to think about it, celebrate it," says 43-year-old Columbus. "It was back to work on Monday morning, and I think that kept us all very focused. And our goal was always to make a better film the second time round. They have to get progressively better because that can be the death of any series of films - the moment they put the nipples on the bat suit, so to speak."
That latter comment is a reference to Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever which, after two earlier and very successful films with Michael Keaton in the leading role, cast a hapless Val Kilmer in a camp sequel, complete with an over-the-top bat suit looking like something from a fetish mail-order catalogue, and was critically mauled. The Potter franchise is rolling along very nicely, thank you - they are already committed to a third film, The Prisoner of Azkaban, and, if all goes well, hope to make all seven of the books Rowling plans to write (there are four published so far, the fifth is now long overdue).
Much, of course, will rest on the slender shoulders of the young star of the show, Daniel Radcliffe, who turned 13 in July. A year after I first met him, it's impossible not to notice that he is, quite obviously, growing up fast. "But if you think I've changed you should see Rupert... (Grint)," he says.
He would love, he says, to do as many films as they will let him but the party line is that after number three, we'll all have to wait and see whether there will be any more. "People were saying, 'Oh, they can't do all seven because they'll grow out of the parts,'" says Daniel. "Well, why not? Harry actually grows, he progresses, like ( in the first one he was 11, now he's 12 and I grow with Harry, Emma grows with Hermione, and Rupert grows with Ron."
Daniel feels, too, that he's getting better as an actor. Both Heyman and Columbus agree. "In the first film I had to do eight or nine takes, now I only have to do three or four," says Columbus.
"And Dan, you will see in this film, has really become a leading man. In the last film the heart-throb was Tom Felton who played Draco Malfoy - everybody loves a bad boy, right? In this film it's going to move over to Dan. He's really matured into an action-adventure hero so in that respect he's a much stronger presence."
Heyman and Columbus are very protective of the children in their charge and understandably so. "They have more confidence but that doesn't mean they have become brash," says Heyman. "They are very good kids and one of the biggest bits of luck we had is that we cast very well, not just as actors but as people."
Columbus has seen it all before, of course. He directed Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone and witnessed at first-hand the damage that intense publicity can do to a youngster. A year ago he told me that the crucial difference with Daniel - and indeed Emma and Rupert - was that they had strong support networks and came from good, solid families. A father of four himself, it would be difficult to think of a director better equipped to work with children. "I feel like a big brother to the kids, particularly Dan because there's not a frame he's not in. And he's coped with it all phenomenally well. There's been a couple of incidents when he's been at the movies or something and people have recognised him and he's had to leave, but for the most part, the kids are able to lead their normal lives."
Leading "a normal life" is not quite the same as leading the life that he'd have led had he not won the part of Harry Potter, of course. For a start, he's spent most of his time recently on a film set instead of at school. Instead, he has one-to-one tuition, and every child, including the extras, has lessons each day. The production has its own headmistress and varying numbers of teachers, who make sure that the children work to the curriculum.
Daniel himself is pretty chuffed about his exam results. "They are the best I've ever had," he says. "Yes, phew! I've passed my common entrance exams into my next school."
I will finish it in the next post....