UK Press Junket 22 June 2007:
David Heyman, David Yates, Michael Goldenberg

Staffer Lauren attended the UK Press Junket for OOTP. Below is the transcript of the press conference with the producer (Heyman), director (Yates) and writer (Goldenberg) of Order of the Phoenix.

DH : I’m David Heyman.
DY : I’m David Yates.
MG : I’m Michael Goldenberg.

Q : What was the unique challenge of doing Order of the Phoenix?
DY : You know, fundamentally, these are huge books to condense, so the first challenge you face is the adaptive process, and making choices, really; making choices about what you keep and what you lose. And I think we are all probably all Harry Potter fans, I mean, these films are made my fans, people who love this material, so that was the hardest part… starting that series of choices about what you’re gonna let go. Because you know every time you let something go, a fan somewhere is going to really miss it, and we really missed a lot of that stuff, that we let go. So, that’s probably the biggest challenge, and then what I think we wanted to try and achieve is a story that felt organic and felt like it had an arc, like it wasn’t a series of episodes or chapters, so we set out to make a film that felt cohesive, and felt like it had a really clean through line.

Q : Specifically, what was the arc, or the through line?
DY : Well, you know, for Dan and for Harry, it’s really a journey of feeling isolated and misunderstood. Feeling outside of a community. Felling that a place that had been very familiar, and very special, suddenly felt very cold and uncomfortable. And then realising that that community that had turned its back on him, suddenly needed him, and the skills that he had, because of this intrusive political regime that suddenly arrives at Hogwarts. And it’s about him coming to terms with the fact that it’s probably better to work with his friends, and to help them to fight the Dark forces from without; and parallel with that is a journey about a kid just wrestling with his own inner demons. You know, that stage that a lot of us have been through, when we’re growing up, and which Jo captures beautifully in the book. The teenage stage, where you kind of struggle with yourself, a little bit, you fight and you kind of get – you know that’s probably the most dramatic part of growing up, because anything could happen. A lot of kids go badly wrong, between the age of thirteen and seventeen, because you’ve got all these hormones raging around you, and that’s a very dramatic phase of childhood, and Jo captures that in the book, and we were really keen to express it, metaphorically, in the story, with Dan’s kind of obsession about is he becoming Dark?... is he losing control?... And the whole Voldemort thing allowed us to express that in a metaphorical, magical way.
DH : It’s very nice to hear David say that all his demons went away between the ages of thirteen and seventeen… mine haven’t.
MG : I actually believe it of you

Q : How much work on this film did you do with JKR?
DH : Jo is a big part of all these films, obviously the books supply the foundation on which we build. She is a dream collaborator, in many ways. She’s busy, she’s writing books, so she’s not on-set and she’s not intrusive in any way. But she’s there when we need her, in terms of answering questions. One example is the Black Family Tree, which is something that, I don’t know how many names were on it in the book, but it’s very few. When you’re making it into a film, you’re visualising things, so I called Jo up and fifteen minutes later this drawing arrived, this family tree, which was, you know seventy-five names, five generations, with birth dates, death dates, marriage dates, who as married to whom, who had been exorcised from the family, like Sirius, with a black hole. We talked quite a bit about the ending, actually. I’d say that is one of the challenges, in the film, is actually providing a language for the end of the film. It’s a very internal journey. And we talked to Jo about the prophecy. But really the books provide the lions’ share of the information. And then Michael, alone in his room, manages to put it in the script, for David to bring to life.

Q : My question is about adapting the book to a two and a quarter hour movie – do you set out to write 120 pages, or just write and then trim later? And, secondly, I wanted to ask David Yates about collaborating with the kids, who are already familiar with their roles.
MG : It wasn’t as daunting as it might appear, at least to me, in the sense that, even though it’s a very long book, the amount of story in it isn’t considerably more than in the other books. There are a lot of wonderful digressions, and wonderful details and some side journeys, but when you boil it down to the basic narrative, it was pretty self-contained. The decision that we all made, very early on, was that the spine of it was going to be Harry’s emotional journey, and once that decision was made, it made things much easier.
DH : He’s painfully modest.
MG : So, anything that supported that story, and fed into that, and helped illuminate different aspects of that, we kept in – and things that didn’t, unfortunately, we left out. Although, we did try, because, as David says, we’re all fans, to have the sense that the story elements that weren’t in the film were happening off screen, somewhere, and that you could imagine that these other stories were taking place, simultaneously. A very rich and generous film, in the same way that the books are so rich and generous. So, for me it was just a process of finding Harry’s story, how the other stories reflected that, in terms of his journey. His coming of age, for me, was always something that was at the core of it, moving from a more childish world view, where he thinks in black and white, to a more complicated and nuanced view, where he sees shades of grey. And David put it beautifully, one day, when we were talking, he said, “It’s Harry learning that the world is complicated, and that he, himself, is complicated” and that all really came from the book. There’s a line in the book that, from the first time I read it, I triple-underlined. When Sirius says to Harry, “The world isn’t divided into good people and Death Eaters.” And that really struck me and in a way that’s, for me, his journey was from… there are a lot of scenes in the book that support that. The revelation about his father, the authority figures who he has both idealised and demonised, in the previous books, turn out to be quite a bit more complicated than he first thought. And it’s also about coming out of that sort of self-absorption of adolescence and that anger, and realising that there are bigger problems in the world, and by connecting to his friends, Ron and Hermione, first and foremost, and then the larger group of Dumbledore’s Army and the larger groups of Hogwarts and the Wizarding World, in general… having responsibility to protect them and champion them and go into battle for them, actually gives him purpose and connection that he was missing at the beginning of the story. So, it all tied together, for me, pretty elegantly, and it’s all from the book.
DH : It wasn’t… it didn’t all come out of the book… no offence, Michael, but… Michael worked long and hard… we all did… but Michael and David worked long and hard to make it and shape it… and I think you’re right that the fundamental structure of it, that Michael defined in the first draught, remained the fundamental structure that we carried on, but the script was worked and worked and worked and worked… right up until the last day of shooting…
MG : But I loved that. I mean, that wasn’t ever a burden. We were all the same, really on the same page from the beginning. It was a really, I mean, for me, a kind of…. Utopian ideal, and that sounds kind of... I don’t want to go all mushy on you, it was an incredibly collegial and civilised and fun process, from the first time David called me, about doing the film… I said to him, “This is going to be fun, right? I want to have fun, doing a Harry Potter film should be fun.” And he absolutely delivered on that. And that rewriting – we all felt like every rewrite was a chance to make it better. Was a chance to improve it even more, fins something new, find something better. Right up until each sequence was shot, pretty much, we would kick the tires and look at it again. See if anything that David had learnt, from the actors, or from what was working best in the process… we should really have some more of that… so it was a very organic process, and great fun for me.
DY : It was a very secure creative environment, where you are prepared to test things, kick the tires Because, when you make something like this, I think you’ve got such a responsibility to kind of exceed audience’s expectations, because they’re waiting to see it, and there’s not an ounce of complacency and what I find remarkable about David, is he’s made five of these films, now, and he’s still got the enthusiasm of a fifteen-year-old, and any normal human being should be thoroughly exhausted by it, and he’s not, and that spirit is infectious. And so we really did have a jolly time, making the film, and pushing the script. And, as far as the actors go, Dan and Rupert and Emma, what’s unique, probably, about this franchise, compared to any others, is that the audience is witnessing these characters, and these actors, grow older, in front of them. And that’s a kind of really extraordinary thing. And, for me, as a director, they weren’t the same people at the end of the shoot, as they were at the beginning. They’d changed, they’re more curious, they’re more inquisitive, they had more confidence, they’re physically different. They’d just got bigger. And that change continues, so, for me, as a story teller, what is wonderful is I get to take advantage of the relationship they’ve shared, for all these years, which is very tender and supportive with each other. To see them away from camera is wonderful, sometimes, because they really watch out for each other. They’re just great kids, basically, great young people, so you really work with that, and what was great with this film, for me and for them, was doing things they hadn’t done in some of the other films, necessarily. Stretching themselves. Certainly Dan, with Harry’s character, it was a bit more emotionally complex for him, this time, more difficult for him. He was going through things he’d never been through in the previous films. And Emma was really getting confident about changing gear as an actress. She loved to turn something on a sixpence, you know, we’ll try something, we’ll try a line that was funny one way, and then say “let’s try it another way and put it on its head” and she really embraced that opportunity to. And I think, for me, it’s all about the script, and it’s all about performances, and they particularly responded, I think, to someone who really cared about how good they were, in a particular moment. And I pushed all of them, a lot, and they really liked that, I think, and they really responded to it.

Q : The films, like the books, get darker with every installment, and this is the darkest yet. You don’t shy away from any of the elements, that were there in the book. From some things that might be quite scary for ten-year-olds, or younger kids, who may be Harry Potter fans.
DY : Did you never enjoy being scared, when you were a kid? When I was growing up, one of my favourite moments was I’d watch TV, and Doctor Who would be on, and, you know, I’d love being scared. I think children kind of love to be taken into that territory, ‘cos it just makes them feel vital and alive, it’s a really important thing, I think. And I also think it’s important that children aren’t patronised, too, that we give them story telling and material that means they just have to stretch their fingertips that bit. And we tested this film in Chicago, we went over and we showed it to a very young audience, and for two hours, ten minutes, or however long this movie is, they were… they were kind of buzzing around before it, they have Coca-Cola this big, and they’ve consumed so much chocolate, when they start the movie, they’re all like this... whoooooaoooo… and then the movie plays, and you could feel this stillness in the room, and these were very young kids… and they like things that don’t talk down to them, they like things that make them think… and I think that’s a really beautiful thing, if we can achieve that.
DH : As David said, I think kids do like to be scared a little bit. There’s a literary tradition of children’s fiction that is certainly every bit as scary as this is. Read some of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. People think it’s darker… I actually think it’s darker because it’s more emotional, and you connect with it more emotionally. To me, that’s really exciting, because that means we’re being really true to the book. You’re right, the films are growing up, the books are growing up, and I think that if we were to be anything other than what we are, that children would feel patronised and we would lose our audience.

Q : But you don’t have Dolores torn to bits by the centaurs. Isn’t that what happened in the book?
DH : No.
MG : She’s taken away, into the forest, exactly as it is in the book.
DH : I mean, you can imagine what happened off camera. But Dolores and the centaurs … it’s not in the book.
MG : I think the great thing about it being Harry Potter, is you have not only the opportunity, but the responsibility to be true to the book, so I found that terrifically liberating, that, because the whole world is watching, you have to be true to that. And Jo has very ambitiously staked out that territory, and with each book, and this is one of the things I respect so enormously about her gifts, is that she’s using the capital of her success to really push the envelope in interesting and ambitious ways, and write books that she wants to read. And has an absolute integrity to them, internally and emotionally, and the films should do nothing worse.

Q : The actors were talking and laughing about the scene with the kiss and the scene after that. Can you tell us what that was like from your side?
DY : The kiss. You know, we really just wanted to create, for the kiss itself, an environment which felt very… we cleared the set… if I’ve ever done sex scenes in the past, with a film, you always get anyone who’s non-essential out of the way, because everyone wants to gawp, for a start, and of course, just outside the set, there’s a monitor, and everyone’s gawping. So, everyone can see. And Katie was very sweet, and charming, and Dan was very sweet and charming, and we talked about first kisses, generally, and what first kisses felt like, and I just wanted it to… and Michael had written it in this way, to be as tender and as true as possible. And what was really charming, was the fact that many people who had spent a lot of time with Dan, growing up through these films, Amanda, who does his make-up and he’s got a lovely chap who dresses him, as well, and looks after him, and they all gathered round the monitor, and they felt very… it was like they were watching someone they love very much snogging for the first time, and they got very emotional, actually. It was quite sweet, they got quite choked up, watching this. a very odd, strange thing, but a very beautiful thing. And then afterwards, that scene afterwards, what was lovely about that, was they know each other so well, Rupert, Emma and Dan, and we used a lot of improvisation. Michael had written a beautiful scene, but we kind of improvised a little bit. And I encouraged them to kind of… because it’s odd, sometimes you turn up on the floor, and you’re working a scene, and you can feel something in the room, feel an atmosphere, and that day there was just something about the way they were all a bit giggly together. And I just encouraged them to kind of embrace that, and have fun with it, and Emma, in particular – it’ll be in outtakes, one day – but she had such a fit of hysterics, that went on for about five minutes, and she couldn’t stop, and we kind of caught it in a bottle, really, and I’m very proud of that scene.
DH : The end of the scene, it was literally, when Emma and Rupert are laughing, well, they talk about spontaneity, but that’s not acting… that was them… sorry, not to take away your brilliant work, sorry David… but literally, the scene was over and they were just being, and David’s achievement, and one of the things I love about David, is about finding moments in unexpected places, and he just let the camera roll, because they were having a good time, together, and it was really beautiful. Going back to the kiss, I mean, it is… as one person, who has been with them since the beginning… it was a very weird and emotional thing, that kiss… here’s somebody who you are very protective over, who you care for, immensely, who you’re close to, and you’ve seen grow up, from the age of ten… I mean, I saw Dan, and I remember when I saw Dan, in the theatre, and it was… it was honestly a very significant moment, for me… and then to be sort of fifteen feet from him, kissing, was both really moving and also really uncomfortable… let’s face it, it’s not really comfortable being fifteen feet from anybody when they’ve got their tongue down someone’s throat, but when it’s someone that you care for, like so many of us care for Dan, it was weird, but really moving, and when you saw it in dailies – and that was one of the best attended dailies – people were choked up, they were really moved by it, it was really beautiful. I think that is one of the things that David captures, as much for the kiss as throughout the film, is that he really encouraged the kids to push their craft. But he also encouraged them to bring as much of themselves to the table, I think more so than ever before. They’re older now, they’ve had more experience, they have more to draw upon. And he encouraged them to participate in their performances, much more than they’d ever before. But that was partly because they were able to. And they sought it out and they took it and, what I love about the way David works, and what I think I really love about this film, is the truth of it. It feels very real. And it’s one of the reasons why, way back when, I was interested in David Yates doing the fifth film. I wanted the film to feel real and true, and honest and emotional, and he’s delivered on all that. One of the things I’m most proud of, on these films. For all their special effects, and for all the fantastical things that, no question, people are drawn to, and people come and see, what really makes the books what they are, and what makes the films what they are, is the characters, and David allows and enables the characters to live. Jo has done it brilliantly, in all the books, Michael has done a brilliant job in adapting it, and making them come to life, as David did in the film, is just beautiful.

Q : Could the two Davids talk about the contribution of Imelda Staunton, and how difficult was it to cast Professor Umbridge?
DY : Oh, it was very easy to cast; we kind of, like, I walked into the office, and the Umbridge conversation on who we should cast went like this: David said, “How about Imelda Staunton?” and I went, “Great!” and then I went off, had coffee with Imelda, sat down with her, looked her in the eye… and I just thought, oh, god, she can do this so… we just knew. So it wasn’t really a kind of competition, or a… we just knew, really. And I think that Imelda is such a gifted actor, and what was lovely about Umbridge as a character, is she is actually quite… there are alls orts of layers, so she’s desperate to be liked… she’s so officious, she’s such a bureaucrat, quite a fundamentalist, really… and yet, she’s deeply repressed, and so there are quite a lot of complicated corners in there… and also she had to be quite good fun, as well. And Imelda got all of that. And we just had a ball, sort of running with that. And I love Imelda when... one of my favourite scenes in the film, is when she takes Harry into detention. And what we explored there was this sort of slightly religious, this cleansing thing. She’s convinced that Harry had done something terrible, in lying, and she just wanted to cleanse him of his sins, and I thought that was something that we both found could be very interesting, for the audience. It’s actually quite an interesting scene for younger audience to see, as well, that you know, an adult can be quite abusive, in that way. ‘cos that’s something I don’t think we’ve seen in these films, before, a very subtle form of abuse. But it was great fun, and we had a blast, anyway. She’s a bloody good actor, actually.

Q : Were there any aspects of your vision for this film that were conflicting with the rest of the series, and how were they resolved?
DH : Well, David has this quill….
MG : No, I felt we were on the same page from the very beginning.
DH : It all comes from the books, and it’s a really organic process. Jo has created a really vivid world, and Michael is someone whose writing I’ve admired for ages… and he’s been a huge Potter fan… the fifth book wasn’t the first one he’d read… he’s a big fan, so there was not really any question about… this is not… we discussed, amongst ourselves, as Potter fans, all of us… what you could get away with not doing… would this exist in the Potter world… and if we ever got into too much conflict, this is not a dictatorial environment… except for David… it is the most collaborative environment… we are all in it together… if there really was anything that we would be uncertain about… we would….. call Jo… There was one time… there was a character we were going to cut out… we sort of discussed that amongst ourselves, and then Jo reads the screenplay, and… she said “no… I wouldn’t do that… or… you can… but, if you get to make a seventh film…. You’ll be tied in knots… so you might want to…” I can see your mind racing, Mr Veritaserum.com! this man probably knows Potter better than anybody in this room! No disrespect. So, she made sure that that character… she didn’t make sure, she just recommended…

Q :What character was it?
DH : I thought you might ask that question… I’m not gonna say…

Q : There are such dark and horrible things happening to them, how did you get the Trio to portray things they could never have encountered?
DY : D’you know, it was the same process I always engage with any actor. It’s ultimately, you just talk about the story, you talk about the character, and for example, Dan’s got an amazingly vivid imagination, and there’s a moment we were doing at the beginning of the film, and he’s sat on the swing, and he’s had a long, hot summer, and Harry’s been kinda neglected by his friends, and he’s feeling very lonely, and he said ‘I think this is probably what it feels like to be a Vietnam vet, you know? One of those guys who came home from the war, and no one understood them, and they were ignored by everybody…” so, he’s really well read, and intuitive. But it’s a process, and the word ‘truth’ I use a lot, and it’s basically, you want to talk about… what must it feel like, to experience this… it’s easy for these big films for it all to become a bit generic… and a bit ‘with one bound, you’re free’… but we would say, if Imelda points that wand at you, it’s like she’s pointing a loaded gun at you… and it would kill you, and your friends would never see you again, and so I would always try and pull in something from the real world, to try and allow them to lock into… with Dan, we got this bereavement counselor in, and Dan and I spent an afternoon with a bereavement counselor, to talk about her experience of dealing with people who’d witnessed horrible things, because in the previous film he’d seen Cedric Diggory get killed. And Dan listened to this woman, this lovely, lovely lady, talked for several hours about how traumatising certain events can be for people, and what happens to them, after they witness these things. And he asked some really bright questions. And they really responded to taking their journeys and stories within the film, taking it that seriously. And really sort of thinking about it, deeply, and they loved that. And it made them work really hard. And that’s not to say that the film isn’t playful, and eccentric, and all the other things… hopefully all the other lovely Potter films have achieved. We wanted to do all of that, but they’re getting older and the characters are older, and Michael had started us off on this wonderful journey of something that felt richer and darker. It was just a process we felt we had to do.

Q : The film has raised interesting political questions about law and order and about threats of terrorism, whether real or not. in developing the project, were you cognizant of connections between this story and the Muggle world, that we all live in?
DY : It’s always nice to have a bit of politics, with a small ‘p’, I think. But you are inevitably affected by what’s going on, a little bit, but we weren’t really aiming to do anything too clever, in that direction, to be perfectly honest, we just wanted to make a really entertaining, witty film. But there are some interesting things in Jo’s work, I mean one of the most interesting things is the kind of educational parable, this notion that is what is the best education and how do you deliver the best education to kids? In this country, for example, in the UK, our administration, the Labour government have introduced all these measures and tests for teachers, they spend more time getting assessed and assessing than they do teaching, or that’s how some of them feel. And so there are things that Jo’s introduced in the books, which I think are good to put in a mainstream, popular film, and good for kids to see, and experience, so it was nice to have a sprinkling of some of that, Muggle parallel stuff, actually, because I think it makes the experience a bit richer. I feel, anyway, it makes it feel a bit more relevant. But you don’t want to hang the whole film on that, I think.
DH : As you said, it’s politics with a small ‘p’, but I think there is, clearly, in the books, the threat of Nazism, racism, and this feeling that Hogwarts… again, I think this is one of the reasons why I was drawn to David to be the director for this… I thought he would handle this sense of resistance movement, Word War II, French Resistance movement, which is, in a way, what Dumbledore’s Army is… really well, and I think that history literally does often repeat itself, and the book and the film does have echoes of what’s going on, today, but alas, it also has what’s gone on for many years past.

Q : Mr Yates, you’ve signed on for Half-Blood Prince, can you talk about how that came about?
DY : Well, we just had such a nice time, making this film, and it just seemed… I just felt like it was really fun… it’s a very difficult world to leave…I mean, you’ll have to ask David, because David was instrumental in asking me back…
DH : These are marathons… and we’ve been very pleased with the directors we’ve had… Alfonso Cuaron was asked back, for the fourth, and Mike Newell for the fifth, but they didn’t have the stamina, and that’s no disrespect for them, they are tough… they are big, there are so many component parts, they’re sun, but I think everybody… all the directors would say it has been a good experience, and it has been a fantastic world to be part of… but David did have the fortitude, and the strength to carry on, and I think he does such a great job, and the kids had such a connection with him, and one of the most important things is for the kids to keep being challenged… and to keep it fresh… and David kept it fresh, right up until the very last day of shooting. And, each of them, whispered in my ear, it would be great if David came back… now, they don’t have director approval, they don’t have anything like that, but their enthusiasm spoke volumes, of the experience they had working with him. And for me it’s been a dream experience, working with David and with Michael, you know it’s such an open and collaborative place, and yet you know you have a leader, someone who is leading you to… pushing you to make the very best film possible… and is as determined as we all are, to make a great film. Someone mentioned about the audience… I know this sounds very strange… but the audience… it’s not really… it’s all about the audience… but for us it’s not about the audience when we’re making the film, in the sense you’re making the best film you can… we’re… huge Harry Potter fans, we are more critical… we know everything that’s not right… every… breath of these films… I do… Davis does… and we love Harry Potter… we love it… with passion… and so, for us, it’s about making the very best film you can… if we make the best film, we’ll be pleased… and if we’re pleased, the audience will be pleased… and I know David’s standards are just about as high as they could be, so to me it was an obvious thing, it was exciting, and I know that he’ll make a great film.
DY : I found it very hard, leaving the world, having had such a brilliant time, and also knowing that the next one’s going to be very different to this one. I’m very, very proud of this film, and what we’ve achieved, and I think it’s… and the next one’s a very different rhythm, and will be very different for the kids, as well… and it’s almost like making another movie, a different movie, you know? I couldn’t bear to kind of leave it…
DH : Because in a way, like he says, they are sequels, each book has the same set of characters, but… they explore such different things. A similar world, the characters are growing up, as Michael said, when he came to write it, it was a different Harry, that he was writing, or Harry at a different stage. And that’s why, I mean David talked about my enthusiasm being that of a fifteen-year-old, it’s because each one is different, and it’s very… it’s not difficult to be enthusiastic about this world.
MG : Just to add to that, it really does start with David. From the very first day, he created an environment in which both David and I felt completely protected and safe to try anything, and he’s the one who really creates this incredibly warm, familial and inviting work atmosphere, and everything starts with that and he’s been an amazing steward of these stories, and he’s an encyclopedic recourse on the films, and, you know, sometimes you don’t… a producer, you don’t want in the room, but David you always want in the room.
DH : Most of the time.
MG : But I mean, he’s an incredible resource, because it comes from a fundamental, in his bones, love of the books, and the stories, and it’s just fierce, the determination to protect them. I mean, any Potter problem, he’s come across before, he’s just an incredibly creative and inventive… in a way that sometimes isn’t the case, and David was always there, with a great idea, or an unexpected solution, and supportive of risks that David and I wanted to take, and flexible and collegial and we can’t ask for more than that.