Director Mike Newell On 'Harry Potter 4'

[Monday, September 19th, 2005]
Harry Potter 4 BookHarry Potter and the Goblet of Fire director Mike Newell says that the upcoming movie will be more of a thriller. "The first question that I asked myself was, 'Can I find a spine in this thing, which will allow me to tell the story of this book in a single film?'" Newell told Sci-Fi Wire. "And I found for my own satisfaction a very good way of pulling everything together, and it was that the thing is a thriller. And the thriller is that Voldemort, the creature of ultimate evil, is now feeling his power again, and he needs to reform himself. He needs to get his body back. And the only way that he can do that is to subject himself to a particular potion, which, in order to be effective, needs three drops of Harry's blood. And so this whole year is set up by Voldemort as a way of getting the boy sufficiently in his power."

Newell says that a lot had to be cut from the book in order to condense the story into a two hour movie, including a brief appearance by Harry's uncaring Muggle family, the Dursleys. "I'm sorry about the Dursleys, actually," he said. "Because I think there's a kind of a convention in the movies that it's enjoyable to see the Dursleys each time. But, in fact, if you read the books, the Dursley incident is absolutely tiny and not central at all."

Newell says he tried to approach the movie as realistically as possible. "People ask me, 'What was it like dealing with such a fantastical story?' And it wasn't a fantastical story to me at all," he said. "It was absolutely real. OK, it's got wands and stuff like that, but you could say that this was what it was like living in Europe in the '30s. There was something really bad out there, and people were either going to do something about it, or they weren't going to do something about it. And that really bad stuff was creeping ever absolutely remorselessly forward. It was getting worse. And so there are all sorts of things that you can do, really quite recent manifestations of this, that you can point to. And you can make a very real world out of it."

More On 'Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire'...

E-Mail This Article » Share your comments on 'Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire'