David Yates talks about directing Harry Potter 7 Part 2
On your first day on the set did you ever imagine you'd be there 6 years later?
No, you literally take it one week at a time. And it was exhilarating. I walked onto the set and someone had build this wonderful dark forest, which was spectacular and mad. And I had this guy in a green suit on a big pole to play someone and I just loved it. And the one thing that shocked me was how long everything was taking to shoot. Because I was used in television to shoot very quickly. I just turning everything around, like lightning, was very complex. And it would take two hours to turn everything around. The big shift for me was suddenly going: ok, I'm not gonna shoot 4 minutes a day. I'm gonna shoot a minute a day. Or maybe even 30 seconds a day. So that was the hard thing. That's a very different rhythm creatively. And I didn't ever on the first day imagined being there six years and a bit later. That was like... It was about halfway through making Order of the Phoenix I used to turn to my editor, Mark. I said Mark, I know this sounds mad, but do you think we should just stay and do the rest? And he said we'd better finish this one first. And fortunately after the first one they said, look, would you like to stay? And I said, yeah, I'd love to.
Was it heartbreaking to destroy Hogwarts whilst making this film?
It's a really strange thing, because you would think it would be heartbreaking. But when I was working with Stuart Craig and we were looking at the model. And we were working on which bits to break and which bits to blow up. We were like two nine-year-old kids. Because it's actually quite fun. And it's not a real works. And when you've worked in it for that long, just creatively you wanna change it all the time. So it was actually kind of cool blowing it up in a way. And I think even some of the actors rather than coming in and going "Oh my God, this is horrible". Some of the actors where actually just bemused to begin with, but then thought "This is quite cool". So it wasn't heartbreaking. It was actually quite fun.
David Yates also talks about the scale of the action, the lasting legacy of Harry Potter and if he's looking forward to something smaller now.
