Potter turns to the dark side

Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe in Goblet of Fire.

10 April 2012

As Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry prepares for a new term, Harry Potter must be feeling the strain. The pressures on the fourth movie in the multi-million dollar franchise are greater than ever.

Not only does the film industry hope that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire will rally this year's flagging box office, but JK Rowling's magical universe has to survive an overhaul by British director Mike Newell.

Goblet of Fire is considered the best of the six Potter books so far, with a blacker, more grown-up tone and epic scope. The series began with Harry aged 11; now he's 14 and for the first time faces the big issues of love and death.

It is not surprising that the new themes demanded a new director, but what is astonishing is that Newell is the first British director on what is, after all, a very British franchise. The 63-year-old film-maker - who put the parochial charm into Four Weddings and a Funeral and the darkness into Donnie Brasco - is determined to shake things up a bit.

"There was no kind of orthodoxy," he says, prising himself away from the edit suite where he is frantically trimming the movie down to a still lengthy two hours and 40 minutes.

"Having watched the first three films, I found myself moving further and further away from them. It's not as if you suddenly paint everything pink - you are there to put a famous novel on the screen - but we are dealing with more adult themes here. These kids are growing up, you can't turn the clock back."

When Newell was approached to pick up where Potter directors (American Chris Columbus and Mexican Alfonso Cuaron) left off, at first he was noncommittal. He was developing an adaptation of John le Carré's The Constant Gardener. However, he passed on that project (to Fernando Meirelles) as soon as he'd read Rowling's 636-page novel.

"I realised you could make a good thriller out of it," Newell explains. "It was about adolescence, and was going to be full of difficulty for these young people. It was a very frightening story, so you have to use the visual rules of a horror movie. Above all, though, there was this classic thriller like North by Northwest, where Harry Potter is Cary Grant caught up in the machinations of the bad guy."

For the non-Rowling devotees, the Goblet of Fire goes something like this: the Triwizard Tournament has come to Hogwarts. It's a centennial magical sports day between competing wizard schools and Harry has been set up to take part in the perilous set of events - you know, dragon baiting, underwater rescues, a deadly maze. The series of challenges will trap him in a confrontation with his dread nemesis, Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes, in his first Potter, transmogrified into a cackling, half-dead ghoul).

With Rowling's blessing, Newell trimmed away the fat of the story to get to its kernel: a powerful combination of the trials of adolescence and the very real threats of Voldemort's conniving menace. So far, so appealing. But the dark departure has rattled the censors.

Goblet of Fire is the first in the series to carry a 12A rating. The parental-guidance certification of the earlier films barred almost no one from seeing them. This time around, in UK cinemas, no one under 12 will be admitted unless accompanied by an adult, with the emphasis on the movie's unsuitability for the very young.

First reports from an early screening in the States (where it received a tougher PG-13 rating) cite a giant man-eating snake, a near drowning, creepy spiders crawling on children, an implied murder and a graveyard battle and torture scene between Harry and Voldemort.

We'll have to wait until 18 November, when the film opens, to judge whether the certification is more than nannying oversensitivity. But it seems as though, in Fiennes, Newell has found a terrifying new villain. The actor and director became friends when they began work together on The Constant Gardener.

As well as the darkest, Goblet of Fire also looks to be the most epic, requiring more special effects (1,600 shots) than ever to embody the tournament's panoply of spectacles - a technical challenge that was entirely new to Newell. "To be frank, people didn't calculate on the depth of my ignorance," he admits.

"But you can't just give them story, you've got to give them decoration as well. It has to be kind of like an Indian movie where everything happens: it's a romance, a thriller, a variety show, an entertainment."

Newell is a pragmatic, well-spoken man. There is a very proper Englishness to him, probably formed by his boarding years at St Albans School in the Fifties (alongside Stephen Hawking and lyricist Tim Rice).

This is something he is conscious of bringing to Goblet of Fire. The previous films lacked the essential "anarchy" of his own experiences and grounding in, as he puts it, the rich British literature of school stories, from Tom Brown's School Days to Jennings.

"I rewrote two or three scenes in order to do things I felt all British schools did and I hadn't seen in these movies. There are these various dynamics going on between pupils and teachers that are a little jagged. People get whacked around a lot - I know you're not supposed to, but it happens - and we added fighting and stuff I remembered from my own school."

Newell went on to Cambridge, and then joined Granada Television as a trainee. He made a name for himself in 1985 with Dance with a Stranger (his star, Miranda Richardson, also features for the first time in the new Harry Potter, as irrepressible reporter Reeta Skeeter).

After Goblet of Fire he will direct an adaptation of Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. "This has been exhausting," he says of the year-long production required to create a Potter movie. "But, in the end, I follow what excites me - a story."

Newell's cast, like earlier Potters, reads as a Who's Who of British acting - Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, David Tennant, Robbie Coltrane, Eric Sykes among them.

But at the centre of the film are the three friends, returning for their fourth episode: Harry (played by 16-year-old Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint, 17) and Hermione (Emma Watson, 15). The fact that they are young teenagers playing adolescents adds to the frisson of awakening sexuality that the story demands.

Hormones are pinging around the dormitories of Hogwarts like snooker balls, and this time, the young wizard has to get his head around the strange magic of girls, fellow pupil Cho Chang (newcomer Katie Leung, 18) in particular. While he stresses over how to ask her to the Yule Ball, Ron is struggling with his changing attitude to Hermione. "There is a sexual jealousy just under the surface," says Newell. "It starts off funny, but it becomes mean and nasty and absolutely true to what I remember of early adolescence."

Newell called upon his young actors to come in before filming began for some acting workshops - to break down barriers, as the director puts it, to loosen up. "Harry is now a more conscious hero," he says. "We have to understand his interior processes. You are not going to get through this story unless these kids really act. We couldn't just rely on them being cute."

He is aware how much this film needs to be a hit. And, without the young viewers, he is, ironically, relying on those unpredictable teenagers to consider it cool enough to watch. Still, you don't sign up for a film of this magnitude without a good idea of what you are stepping into.

"I thought there were two things that could happen," Newell says, that English pragmatism always to hand. "Either you make the first Harry Potter flop, in which case you should probably retire to an Outer Hebridean island. Or, it is OK. But if you think in those terms you shouldn't begin."

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