The Many Fathers of Harry Potter

    Despite being a Harry Potter fan for most of my life, I didn’t make it to "Harry Potter Land" at Universal until November of 2019.

    Some relatives invited me on a SoCal theme park tour, a trip which also saw my last visit to Disneyland before the shutdown. And when you and a bunch of other twenty-somethings are walking through a recreation of Hogwarts for the first time, you inevitably start playing this game where you call out every artifact on display and try to trace it back to whatever movie or even specific moment the mise en scene is trying to invoke:

    

    There’s the greenhouse from "Chamber of Secrets." Now they’re playing the “Secrets of the Castle” track from "Prisoner of Azkaban." Here we are loading in the Room of Requirement from "Order of the Phoenix." From start to finish, the attraction, like the franchise from which it spawned, is just one giant nostalgia parade.

    See, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter opened in California in 2016 after the Orlando version premiered in 2010. The last films were almost finished filming at this point, and so the theme park recreation of the world had basically the entire film franchise to draw upon. Though the promise of a “Harry Potter Land” is a singular, unified vision of the universe millions have come to love, what we get with a multi-faceted series is a creative splicing of a half-dozen or so visions of a franchise as it passed hands creatively over the span of ten years.

       Among the many forms of film adaptation, taking a popular book or series and bringing it to the big screen is already perhaps the most trying. The process entails standardizing not only how a character or space appears physically on a screen, but also how they perform certain functions--the way an actor reads certain lines or performs certain actions. This gives viewers a common point of reference for discussing their chosen text, but there remains a trade-off with adaptation--it's no longer totally up in the air exactly what Hogwarts looks like.

    If you were, like me, among the second wave of Potter fans who came to the books as the movies were being made, by the time you finally got around to reading "Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone," you were probably already imagining baby Daniel Radcliffe performing Harry's actions as described on the page because that's who Harry was. The director gets to push the override button on basically every creative decision the reader is making in their head.

    A lot of adaptation discourse, at least in popular fandom, almost always centers around "what changes did they make to the story?" which falls more under the purview of the film's writer. (Though while we're here, we'll also give a shout-out to Steve Kloves, who wrote the screenplay for seven of the eight films.) But the director is more closely involved with building the common reference point for all the future consumers of the text.

    Part of the director's job is knowing how to speak the language of film to create an experience that will carry the meaning of the text to the audience. Good directors know how to find subtle but creative ways to reinforce or color the intended meaning of a scene or a moment in how they arrange the elements onscreen. An episode where Harry has to recall a memory powerful enough to repel a dementor, for example, might put Harry in the same frame as a candle, this small but bright flicker of light, and trust audiences to make the connection. 

   But the director also gets charge over cultivating the aesthetic features of the film, things like tone, atmosphere, or voice--all those intangible things that the audience is very much responding to. (And you might be thinking ... in a workforce as large as a major film production crew, are you really suggesting that the film director is the only artist whose emotional investment is important to the project? To that I say, congratulations on closing in on the most central critique of auteur theory, and maybe we'll unpack that maelstrom some other day.)

   This concept of authorship is especially fascinating with the Harry Potter films because the saga is split among four different directors, each with his own style and philosophy. Ownership of the story is being shared between not just the novelist and the director, but the novelist and four different filmmakers. The films Columbus made in 2001 and 2002 are not the films David Yates made from 2007 to 2011. The Harry Potter films are like one long song with each verse written by a different composer. You had all sorts of cooks in this kitchen defining what the Harry Potter films were, not just what actor plays what character, but the emotional and thematic underpinning of Harry's eight-part journey to heroism and self-discovery.

   Maybe as you were watching these films growing up you started to notice how each of the films felt different from one another--and not just because of things like the Whomping Willow looking different between movies 2 and 3--and maybe that made the films sort of disconnected. A part of this is because directing the Harry Potter saga was kind of a team effort. Indeed, one of the great "what-ifs" of Hollywood history is what the Harry Potter film franchise would have looked like under the paintbrush of a single filmmaker, as seen with something like Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings series. I think we would have gotten at least a franchise that at least felt more even.

    But I also don't want to type the Harry Potter experiment as a bad thing. Harry Potter was, after all, the first film franchise to cover such a large span of time with entries popping out basically every year, and so Hollywood got to try some new things. Marvel, by comparison, does a lot to standardize the look and feel of every one of their films in order to make all thirty of their movies feel like parts of the same whole, and that sometimes means curtailing the individual quirks of the individual directors ... which sometimes makes for unhappy directors.

    Today, I'm choosing to look at this pastiche as a fascinating case study, an opportunity to celebrate how Harry's story was allowed to take on different tones and flavors across phases and seasons the way many of our own histories have. With this genealogy of the "Harry Potter" films, we’ll track the series’ development across its span of ten years and four directors. Because the question of adapting a story isn't as straightforward as "what chapters did they cut to fit in the runtime?" The question of filmmaking and the use of film language is a much greater part of the equation. How did each director paint the films, and what imprints did they each leave on the series?

Chris Columbus (Movies 1+2)

When your archetypal Potterhead thinks "Harry Potter," they almost certainly think of Chris Columbus' Harry Potter. They think of the celesta solo in "Hedwig's theme," they think of Nearly Headless Nick's head swiveling off its hinge, they think of "She needs to sort out her priorities," etc. ... Columbus' "Harry Potter" is a capitol in the world of nostalgia.

Columbus' heyday was in the late 80s and 90s with family romps like Home Alone, Adventures in Baby-sitting, and Mrs. Doubtfire. You catch glimpses of their influence especially in the scenes at Privet Drive. But even Columbus' films were second-string to the Spielberg adventure films of that age (E.T., Hook, etc.), and you can see the first two Potter films chasing that same aesthetic and emotional hotspot.

A lot of central tentpoles of the Harry Potter mythology would be standardized under the Columbus administration. The main cast, the design for Hogwarts, etc. a lot of what makes Harry Potter “Harry Potter” came from this guy. We have Columbus to thank not just for earning the trust of the movie-going public--for even making Harry Potter films the event that they are--but also for securing many of the series’ most essential ingredients.

        The film’s main cast, most of whom would be here through the final films, were especially important to nail down. On casting Daniel Radcliffe in the lead role, producer David Heyman reported “We wanted someone who could combine a sense of wonder and curiosity, the sense of having lived a life, having experienced pain; an old soul in a child’s body.”

Columbus has described taking a “golden storybook” approach to designing Harry’s wizarding world:

    " For the color palette, we talked about Oliver! and The Godfather, which have a sort of rich, almost Technicolor quality to them. When we entered Magicland--which is how we always referred to Hogwarts--I wanted each frame to be filled with a sense of wonder."

     Oliver! in particular makes sense as a guiding star for these movies. As with much of contemporary children's fiction, Harry Potter owes a lot to the Charles Dickens novel. And you can see that movie's influence through the landscape Columbus creates. It's there in the soundscape, the production design, the way every room feels like it's being lit by a fireplace. More than any of the other films, those first two feel very much like they take place in not just another world, but another time. 

    Columbus’ films will naturally be described as “nostalgic” by basically anyone who’s seen a Harry Potter film simply because of the very special place it holds in millennial pop culture. But the design of these films feels very deliberately escapist in a way I wouldn’t describe the later movies. Later Quidditch games, for example, are filmed much more in line with how you’d expect to see a regular high school sports game in any other kind of movie—there’s rock music and everything. 

   But these first movies sort of exist outside of time. We can naturally intuit that this isn’t exactly a period piece, but we also don’t see the Dursleys like tuning in for FRIENDS during dinner or doing much of anything that grounds it in our real world. Columbus films his movies with a very consistent operatic dressing, and that's a huge part of why their nostalgic covering is so enveloping. 

    The common critique against Columbus’ Potter films (and most of his films) is that they can feel somewhat storebought, and this is what holds his films back. I have a mixed response to this. I really enjoy just how unhinged Cuaron’s movie gets, and we'll get to that in a second, but Columbus' directing style puts the emphasis on the subject of the movies, not the filmmaking itself. There’s a very obvious way to film something like the first reveal shot of Hogwarts from across the lake, for example, and Columbus is good at intuiting what that is. He doesn't experiment with the macaroni recipe on Thanksgiving. 

I also hear a lot of fan attribute the series’ success to the decision to its close adherence to Rowling’s original text. That approach tends to earn favor with an adaptation’s target demographic, but as I explain in my essay on the Percy Jackson movies, an adaptation’s artistic merit has a lot more to do with its internal coherence within its new medium and context than its fidelity to its source material.

         When tracking a director’s influence on adapting a pre-existing text like a novel, it actually helps to key in on scenes or elements that don’t impart plot information supplied by the original text. Even small scenes can reveal a great deal about the story the director wants to tell.

        Take Harry’s first night in the castle, for example. After Harry enters Gryffindor Tower but before he begins his classwork, we get a brief scene where we just see Harry perched by the window and stroking Hedwig while everyone else sleeps. Columbus’ brief insert explores little in the way of plot mechanics or worldbuilding, but it's still one of the most essential anchors not just of this particular movie, but of the franchise as whole.

    Here’s a boy who’s never felt wanted in his life suddenly finding himself in this new place that accepts oddballs just like him. The film offers Harry this quiet moment with no one to chastise or rebuke him. Though the lighting is a tranquil blue, there’s a simmering warmth on his face, just short of a smile. Like he can’t quite decide if he feels at home in this place but is hoping he will. Harry in this moment is every audience member finding a moment’s reprieve in the walls of Hogwarts.

There's no concern here with plot information. No exposition. No clever trick to embed worldbuilding. This is just moving images on a screen creating a recognizably human experience. It’s little scenes like this that certify that these are films, obeying the rules of a particular artform, not just vessels for plot information inherited from some other medium, and they are essential for fostering that feeling of closeness between the viewer and the story. Yes, you want to keep the pacing moving, but audiences also need moments within a story where they are bonding with the characters and the story outside of any plot imperative.

         Columbus started out wanting to helm the whole series by himself, but that proved to be too large a commitment. Producing the first two Harry Potter films on top of each other was a marathon and sprint put together. He shared, “I hadn't seen my own kids for supper in the week for about two and a half years. I have four children and I have to give them some time now.” And so the torch was passed onto Alfonso Cuaron.

    Alfonso Cuaron (Movie 3)

         “Prisoner of Azkaban” marked the first time the franchise changed directing hands. David Heyman described this transition saying, "One thing that's very important is the producer has to be guardian of Jo's vision but give the director freedom to make the film he wants. You have to allow them to bring their own vision to it." Cuaron mostly respects the foundations laid by Columbus and his team from the first two movies. But Cuaron adds his own handprints onto Hogwarts.

       Some of those additions involved painting over what the last guy did: in the last two films, the kids had a fairly straightforward shot from the castle grounds to Hagrid's Cabin, but apparently it was relocated over the summer to the base of a small hill, where it will stay for the rest of the series. We also see the Hogwarts kids out of their uniform more often than we did in the first two movies, inviting a sort of weekend vibe to many of their interactions.

    A number of set pieces introduced by Cuaron became mainstays throughout the rest of the series. Cuaron introduced the bridge over the ravine where Lupin and Harry have their first one-on-one talk. We’ll see this same bridge come up again like in the final film where it becomes the stage for a deadly encounter between Neville and the Snatchers, itself a feature unique to the films. This movie also saw Michael Gambon replace Richard Harris as Professor Dumbledore, which was of course less Cuaron’s personal preferences than the simple reality of Harris passing away shortly before production on the third movie began, and Gambon would continue to embody Dumbledore for the entirety of the film series.

         But more than any specific sets or casting choices, what really sets Cuaron’s film apart is Cuaron’s unique directing voice. Again, filmmakers have their own style and own approach to their art, and Cuaron’s style is very different than Columbus’.

         As one reference point, look at the way Cuaron builds suspense in his Potter film versus the way Columbus did in his films. When Harry hears the basilisk’s voice in the walls, the camera starts to hover over Harry as though taking on the perspective of the spectral voice in the walls, all while keeping a claustrophobically tight frame around Harry’s face. The scene is underscored with a creeping motif, and the lighting grows a little less saturated. Columbus generates tension by drenching the scene with the suggested presence of an unseen, ghostly entity.

    Compare that to a similar scene in "Prisoner of Azkaban" when Harry is menaced by the The Grim. There’s no music in this scene, at least at the start. Cuaron makes the situation seem direr not by making everything less colorful but by drowning it all in shadows. There’s also a lot of build-up in this moment by having the structures in the playground stir and creak as though responding to an unseen evil before we finally see the vague outline of The Grim. In both scenes, the intent is roughly the same, but these are fundamentally different experiences.

    Arguably the best thing about Cuaron’s directing style is that he does not discount the importance of small incidental episodes. Even in a narrative with a tight sequence of events, he includes a lot of moments that don’t directly affect the direction of the narrative or offer specific plot information.

    A lot of turning points that get only a few paragraphs of description in the text (Aunt Marge’s ballooning, the dementors’ attack at the lake, etc.) become full 3-act concertos onscreen. Cuaron had to ask Steve Kloves to specify in the screenplay that the buttons on Marge’s coat would burst from her neck and hit Dudley in the face (twice). The film also devotes an entire scene where Harry wrestles with the Monstrous Book of Monsters, a minor feature of the book that played no real part in the main storyline and resolved no plot points. Why spend two minutes of the film’s precious runtime focusing on Harry’s war against his homework when we could use that time explaining the Marauder’s Map connection to Harry’s dad?

         Probably for the same reason that he devoted an entire scene to Harry’s first flight on Buckbeak. In the book, their little adventure takes Harry more or less one lap around Hagrid’s cabin. The movie expands on that in a two-minute sequence which takes Harry all around the castle and over the lake.

    Like Harry’s little midnight reflection in the first film, this scene moves past merely spouting plot information and jumps straight to the heart of what we want from these movies: the vicarious thrill of living in a fantastical, magical world you can only get in film. The world in which Harry lives is bizarre and fascinating, and Cuaron makes it his mission to explore all of its nooks and crannies. He almost treats each story arc like a musical number, and he’s not afraid to give each of them strong and even varying flavors, be it humorous, frightening, or inspirational. As the books being adapted grow larger and their spiderwebs more intricate, future directors will have to work harder to attain anywhere near this degree of ease and grace.

    Again, there's a lot more to adaptation than lifting as many lines and chapters as you can from the book onto the screenplay for the actors to recite. Adaptation is also about knowing how to convey an experience using the tools and signposts unique to film as a medium, and most of these tools do not involve actors sitting around telling the audience things.

    Long before spoken word was a part of the film's repertoire, you saw talented filmmakers making the most of the film experience with only the creative use of imagery. F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans sees a husband and wife go through a deep and profound transformation as a couple, and the only way to communicate that is through what plays out visually onscreen. And with only a few title cards to exposit, it falls mostly on the images to describe not only the literal plot actions, but the deep emotional undercurrents that this entails.

         Of all the Harry Potter directors, Cuaron has probably the strongest instincts for visual storytelling and the creative application of film language. The boggart lesson, for example, opens as we zoom in on the reflection in the wardrobe only to pass through the window of the mirror and into the “real world.” At the end of the scene, we repeat this trick as we pass once again through the reflection. Bookending the scene like this frames the entire episode like Harry's looking glass thought experiment. This kind of arthouse filmmaking feels out of place among other blockbusters, but here? It's just part of the magic.

    There are also individual moments—like in the Whomping Willow blitz when the frame pauses for a second as Harry realizes Hermione's about to drag him along for the ride—that feel like they belong in a Bugs Bunny short. Goodness, the entire Knight Bus sequence belongs in a Bugs Bunny short.      

         Then sometimes Cuaron goes the opposite direction and makes his film feel more grounded. Cuaron’s love for long takes, a shot uninterrupted by your usual back-forth-jumps, would become defining characteristics in his later films, but it’s a really fascinating choice for this type of film. The breakfast scene in The Leaky Cauldron, for example, is done in mostly one long shot that just tracks Harry as he moves through the inn: the moment the Weasleys start swarming around Harry at the table and all through Harry’s “why would I go looking for someone who wants to kill me?” is captured without interruption, an entire arc uttered in one breath.

Children of Men (2006)

        One of the biggest advantages of a long-take is an added sense of realism. By not cutting away to a different camera angle you create the illusion that you are there in the world of the film, not viewing it through a mediating third-party like a video screen. It’s easy to see why Cuaron would use this feature in a film like Roma or Children of Men. Both are gritty films that deliberately resist the glossy Hollywood aesthetic. But what incentive is there to make someplace like Hogwarts feel “grounded”?

Could it be that as we and the audience are getting older we’re starting to lose some of the magic? Not the “Wingardium Leviosa” magic, but the “You’re a wizard, Harry,” magic.

         This will signal a trend that will carry through the rest of the series. We’ll see the magical world of Hogwarts become less and less mysterious as the characters and audience mature. This is a double-edged sword. This kind of thing invites a certain legitimacy to your children's series competing against a larger ecosystem of "adult movies," but we’ll also see Hogwarts become a little less bright, a little less colorful. We may even start to take Hogwarts for granted. 

Mike Newell (Movie 4)

         Like Columbus before him, Cuaron found his time on Potter gratifying but exhausting. Pre-production for the fourth film came right on the heels of post-production of the third. And so, Cuaron let newcomer Mike Newell take over the reins. Newell actually had a surprisingly robust resume before Potter with films like Four Weddings and a Funeral and Donnie Brasco, as well as a handful of low-key films.

         But Newell is the hardest director to write about because he only contributed one film to the series, and his flavor isn’t as distinct as Cuaron’s. The most defining features of Newell’s outing have as much to do with the external factors influencing the movies as much as Newell’s own style, which falls in line closely with most other fantasy/adventure blockbusters courting teenagers at the time.

     But before we get into that, I actually want to start this section by discussing film language and how that kind of thing helps in adaptation. As we talked about previously, a good filmmaker knows how to use the semiotics of film to give their movie style and flavor--to create an emotional experience for film. But this kind of thing can also come in handy when you have to squash 800 pages of story into a little over two hours of film and don't have the time for the characters to exposit everything out loud. A lot of times, it's a lot more efficient to just communicate an idea visually.

    Even a more slow-paced, dialogue-heavy film like Taste of Cherry uses shorthand to communicate the interior life of its disillusioned main character. Though the vast majority of the action takes place within the protagonist's taxi car and the conversations he has with his passengers, the camera often places us outside the vehicle watching it from high up, embedding the car in this vast landscape of arid desert, imparting the desolation and isolation he feels inside. There's also one particularly charged moment where we see a stream of sand falling from a construction vehicle which covers his shadow in an endless flow, a sort of visual metaphor depicting his feeling of buried in dryness. The mindful arrangement of film language can wind up saying a lot more than just expository dialogue.

    I bring this up again here because using shorthand to impart information will be an increasing concern as these adaptations continue; the last four books are basically double the size of those first two but still have to negotiate the same general runtime. 

    We don't, for example, have time for the characters to comment on who this Cedric guy is and why Harry would be so obviously disadvantaged if he were somehow forced to compete with him. We know from the books that he is a few years ahead of Harry in school, that he is the seeker on a rival Quidditch team and Harry actually lost a match to him the previous year, and that all the girls in Hogwarts have a crush on him. It's basically impossible to communicate that all in a matter of seconds, but you can still help uninitiated viewers get a sense of who he is in how he is presented onscreen without needing to deliver that information verbally.

    The first time we see Cedric, he is dropping from a tree branch, which sets him up as this almost Errol Flynn type who always lands on his feet. When company has gone through the Portkey, Harry and his pals hit the ground with a very distinct thud!, reinforcing their status as relatively newcomers in this magical world. Cedric, meanwhile, is shown with the adults gracefully descending to the earth, aligning him with the guys who know the ropes. As an added measure, we literally get Cedric extending Harry a hand to help him up, affirming that this dude is not only in a position to assist others, he's also basically a good guy. Even if you don't have the context supplied by the books, you get the sense of what he's about without requiring literal spoken explanation. 

    As for what this all means for Mike Newell ...

    There’s only a four year gap between the release of “Sorcerer’s Stone” and “Goblet of Fire,” the same gap between JJ Abrams’ two Star Trek films, but the filmmaking here seemed to travel decades. We’ve moved away from the world of E.T. and The Goonies and more into the realm of The Mummy or Pirates of the Caribbean. Visual effects had taken a huge jump in the four years since the film series started. We’ll start seeing more and larger set-pieces rendered with CGI. In "Goblet of Fire," that means the Hungarian Horntail and the entire underwater world.

    A lot of these set pieces, well, they lend themselves to that same kind of whimsy that Columbus’ films were so good at. But the film is chasing a new demographic. I’m not casting that as a negative, necessarily, but I feel like it’s worth remarking upon just the same. I also don’t think the Columbus’ method would have worked for every chapter of the film. I don’t think the dragon showdown, for example, would have been aided by playing the Quidditch theme from the earlier movies. Newell dials in on a vibe that befits the sports movie composition of the story without distancing itself from the epic fantasticality that we’re all here for.

    Newell's film introduced a very adolescent sensibility to the series, and this is arguably his biggest contribution to the franchise. Teenage angst finds its way into the wizarding world, moping on the ballroom steps after prom night doesn't go the way we wanted it to. Yates will run with this during his films, especially "Half-Blood Prince," but it was under Newell's purview that Hogwarts started to feel more like a high school.

        I want to quickly compare the filming of a scene like Harry’s first stroll through Diagon Alley in "Sorcerer’s Stone" to Harry passing through the wizarding campground in "Goblet of Fire" because this more than anything reveals what has really changed about the Harry Potter world four years in.

    In that first movie, Harry’s just a kid walking through the world’s greatest candy shop. The film captured this with a lot of wide shots that still just can’t seem to contain all the wonder and splendor of this world, even with Williams’ rich score dominating the scene. 

    Four years later, there’s still a sense of excitement, but not necessarily of wonder. Harry and the audience are both a little more grown-up. A little more familiar with this magic. There’s no Christmas-style music underscoring this walk through the camp, just some ambient noise, the excitement of the crowd before the big game.

         Speaking of music, it’s worth bringing up that “Goblet of Fire” also marked the first time that the series would change composers. John Williams opted not to return for this film, handing off the torch to Patrick Doyle. A smarter man than me would take on this same challenge tracking the series’ evolution through its composers, but I would point out that while “Hedwig’s Theme” will cameo in every film, the voice of John Williams will continue to fade out as the kids mature.

         Consider this. If the target audience for the first book published in 1997 was an eight-year-old, that eight-year-old would have been twelve when the first movie hit cinemas, sixteen for the fourth movie, and twenty-two for the final film. "Goblet of Fire" marks the first PG13 film within the series. The filmmaking recognizes that the movies are growing up and the audience with it. "Goblet of Fire" marks the end of Harry’s innocence as he for the first time sees death firsthand and watches his parents’ killer return into his life. Harry’s not a kid anymore. We're not kids anymore.

David Yates (Movies 5-8)

     The opening shots of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” use a bright color palette and lighting scheme as Harry sulks on a playground, this space literally designed as a safe haven for children. Then suddenly everything is washed out as dark grays and blues take over the lighting as a stormy overcast envelops the scene.

    It’s a significant moment within the visual language of the whole series. Up until now, the series was carried by its lightness and whimsy. At the start of this new chapter in the franchise, a dark cloud is cast over Harry, a cloud that won’t thin until the final stretch of the series and never disappears entirely.

       Of all the Harry Potter directors, Yates’ origins were the most obscure. He’d made a career directing shorts and TV episodes and movies, and his biggest project was a 2005 TV film “The Girl in the Café.” Producer David Heyman said of the decision to hire Yates,

“Actors in David’s television projects give their best performance, often of their career. It’s important to keep pushing the actors, particularly the young ones on each ‘Potter’ film. This is a political film, not with a capital P, but it’s about teen rebellion and the abuse of power. David has made films in the U.K. about politics without being heavy-handed.”

        Because Yates helmed the entire last half of the franchise, he got to codify a lot of key elements of the series. He would oversee the casting of a lot of major characters like Evanna Lynch as Luna Lovegood and Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange, as well as the designing of significant locations like The Ministry of Magic and The Grimmauld Place. Yates would get a larger bite of the pie than any other director, and so in a lot of ways, he did more to standardize the "Harry Potter" story than arguably even Columbus.

    "Half Blood Prince" was also the first Harry Potter movie since "Chamber of Secrets" to be helmed by a returning director. Yates is a lot more comfortable in his sophomore outing, and it shows in how organic this film feels. While, in my opinion, "Prisoner of Azkaban" has the best directing style of the films, "Half Blood Prince" is the best overall directed.

       The way Yates introduces Ron and Hermione at the Weasley’s house with each character peering over the edge of the banister with each chime of Hedwig’s hoot, it feels so confidently musical. It’s like something you would see from The Sound of Music that feels very in touch with the whimsy of the first movies, a homage to a simpler time in Harry’s life, a time that is rapidly slipping away.

The Edge of Seventeen (2016)

    A part of the reason why these films feel different to me has to do with the way that they don't work as hard to repel the feeling of the muggle world. We see things like characters getting on the subway or eating at fast food joints, but even time spent in the Wizarding World feels less escapist than it did back in 2001. The castle backdrop is the same, but the interior space starts to feel more analogous to contemporary teen films.

    Yet I’m still always surprised when I go back to these latter films and see pieces of the Columbus years sprinkled into the storm cloud. You see it in central set pieces, like Fred and George’s firework coup, but more essential is how it weaves in and out in small moments, like the library books magically sliding into place as Hermione hands them up in movie six.

    And I’m also surprised at times at just how at home the films can feel in this overcast. The Quidditch scene in “Half-Blood Prince” carries a breezy tone underscored by the "Dumbledore's Army" theme. And there’s something in that which feels mature. Well-adapted. These chapters of Harry’s story accept that things are getting heavier, but they refuse to wallow in it. Even when things are going bad, or even when they get dumb, life goes on. 

    And things do get bad. Yates' films have the snow-white owl of childhood innocence flying straight through the storm cloud of adulthood. Explaining his own directorial vision, Yates shared,

“There’s a certain fabric there that you’re working with, but I knew where I wanted to take it. As I was working on ... 'Half-Blood Prince,' I knew where I wanted to take the franchise: I wanted it to grow up, basically. I wanted to pull it away from fantasy filmmaking, where protagonists bounce out of the way of a spell and say, ‘Well that was a bit scary.’

"I wanted to take it to a place where the audience ultimately, in ... 'Hallows,' absolutely feel the profundity of what it means to risk everything for a cause. So in that sense you can take the fabric that exists, and you can start to pull it into that universe."

   Yates' films will start to embrace an aesthetic more in line with a war movie: There’ll be a flash of light, something explodes, there’s a cloud of dust, someone screams, rinse, and repeat. This makes sense given both the content of the books he’s adapting and the maturing audience who are suddenly watching movies like Glory and Saving Private Ryan.

    Other prominent influences include the likes of French poetic realism and early noir film, movie styles that responded to the world's prevailing sense of hopelessness. From this side of a Dark Lord coming back to life, this perspective starts to feel very accessible.

    Just look at the hyper-stylized lighting in movie six--the desaturated color scheme, the way that even in relatively carefree scenes, half of the image is always engulfed in shadow. In something like The Third Man, this style is meant to portray the state of mind of the main character as he uncovers his best friend's willful involvement in a medicine scam with widespread, devastating consequences. Movies like this were themselves the world's way of parsing through the darkness and depravity within the human condition unearthed by the events of WWII.

    In a similar manner, Yates' movies are presenting this central question in visual form: In a world that grows more threatening by the hour, how does a beacon of childhood goodness like Hogwarts stand against the storm? Writer Maaz Khan captured the phenomenon in his analysis of the cinematography of the sixth Harry Potter film. He writes:

“Every scene you see of Hogwarts in the Half-Blood Prince is a fading memory. Where the first two films were filmed without any depth because there was barely any worry, the last few films are now capturing the beauty of the magic in Harry’s world as it slowly fades away. Bruno [the director of photography] shoots Hogwarts like it’s a candle; its flame is burning out, and the kids are taking one last moment to look back at it.”

     Anytime I talk about Yates' films--particularly the last two--I'm really forced to confront a few things. In a lot of ways, they make for the least enjoyable viewings, and they kind of end my Harry Potter rewatches on something of a low note.

    This isn't because I feel like they are poorly made movies. It's just that watching the "Deathly Hallows" movies, I often feel like I am watching a completely separate series that happens to feature the same actors and some of the same locations, which makes it really weird to evaluate these movies as the crowning achievements of this specific saga. The creeping changes in tone across ten years of movies makes the final experience seem dissonant.

    There are artistic motivations to this, to be sure. Harry is living in an entirely different world than he was at the start of this all. That golden Columbus-brand magic feels inaccessible in a world under the shadow of Voldemort. This is especially the case in "Deathly Hallows 1" where we are spending so much time away from familiar locations. A part of this, I'm sure, was also motivated by the market. Again, the target audience has been aging alongside these actors. There is special incentive to keep these movies relevant to that audience, and a part of that entails distancing itself from the more childlike aesthetic of those earlier movies.

    But the movies never quite overcome the jump for me, even in moments where those signposts of the earlier movies are available, as in "Deathly Hallows 2" which takes place mostly in Hogwarts. There are a couple of moments in the final movie where they'll even play the John Williams score for nostalgia, and it honestly borders on jarring. This is a different kind of dissonant than The Whomping Willow looking different between movies 2 and 3. The signposts are the same, but the context is totally different. Trying to have it both ways just makes the Harry Potter experience feel somewhat unresolved in my mind, and I've spent more time than I care to admit wondering what it would have looked like if Yates had wanted to make his films more consistent with the flavor of the first movies.

    I especially want to discuss how the films play out Voldemort's defeat at the end of Deathly Hallows pt. 2 because it highlights how the story the director was filming is different than the story Rowling was writing. In the book, Voldemort’s demise is met with cheers and laughing and group hugs. It’s a very big-feelings moment in the book, but that’s not how they play it in the movie.

        The film moves straight from Voldemort dissolving "Infinity-War" style into the post-battle briefing in the Great Hall. No one’s cheering or laughing. Even when Harry sees Ron and Hermione holding hands, he reacts with a sort of polite nod of the head, and the three of them head outside for a victory pose. 

This isn’t the Columbus-brand, Home Alone style happy ending with familial embraces and swells of sentimental music and children tossing their hats in the air. We started this seven-year story-arc with a very Roald Dahl-like whimsy, but the closing shots of this timeline are more reminiscent of a Clint Eastwood pic.

         I’m choosing to examine this shift in tone as a deliberate creative choice, not an inevitability. Again, if you look at the books, even as they grow more mature, the darkness doesn’t entirely supplant the light in the same way it does in the movies. Peeves the Poltergeist, for example, is here through the last book singing about how “old Voldy’s gone moldy.”

    The last shot of this timeline has our starring trio posing against the ruined outline of their childhood home. The shot holds, as though they’re waiting for Hedwig’s theme to start playing. But it doesn’t. It won’t. It's like the film is making a statement: even when we win the fight against darkness, the cost is always childhood innocence.

         But there’s an addendum to this statement.

         The 19 Years Later epilogue on the films shows grown-up Harry sending his own children off to Hogwarts to have their own adventure. It’s this ending, not the one taking place in Hogwarts proper that gives the audience the teary-eyed closure they would expect for a franchise that defined their childhood.

         When Harry, Ron, and Hermione pose against the battered remains of Hogwarts, they've eliminated the threat, but they haven’t won back anything. They’re not kids anymore. That part of their life was stolen from them by 2,000 pages of trauma. They’ll never really get it back. But when Harry and friends say goodbye to their kids, and John Williams’ “Leaving Hogwarts” starts to play, we understand what they’ve won.

    The magic may be gone for them, but they’ve saved it for the next generation, and through their diligence, they've proven its fortitude. Hogwarts is still standing, still opening its arms for all the lost orphans who need to find their destinies. Harry, and anyone else who has taken this journey with him, has graduated from a recipient of childhood magic to a guardian of it.

Our Harry Potter

 There’s one directorial decision in particular that really makes the case for both movie adaptations as a whole and these movie adaptations specifically.

    It comes with Harry’s first heart-to-heart with Sirius in “Prisoner of Azkaban,” the one right before the werewolf incident where Sirius asks Harry if he would like to come and live with him. In the book, this interaction happens while Harry and company are climbing out of the tunnel, but the movie restages it in a very specific way. Something happens in Cuaron’s film that doesn’t happen in the book. It's an almost incidental change, but it never fails to bring tears to my eyes.

         Right after they’ve surfaced out of the roots of the Whomping Willow, Sirius sees the skyline of Hogwarts castle, and the sight of it has this almost magnetic effect on him. The majesty of the castle, his memories of finding home in those walls, it all just makes him need to catch a better view of it. Just as Harry joins him by his side, Sirius remarks, “I remember the first time I walked through those doors.”

    We know exactly what he means.

         There are two reasons why this framing clicks: one, the film’s function as an innately visual medium, one that communicates primarily through images on a screen as opposed to words on a page; two, the emotional attachment we have built toward this specific image. This is the same reason why I had to snap a picture with my phone as soon as I got a good view of the castle at Universal. Four different authors filming it at four different angles, yet we all feel the same thing when castle comes into view.

    Our own childhoods behave in a similar way. They have their own moods, phases, and flavors all shaped by the colors and textures of our environment at the time, as though we are the main characters in a movie staged by an unseen director whose vision changes from season to season.

    One of the reasons we love returning to the media we engaged with as children is that these texts are fixed, perfectly preserved just as we remembered them back when we were five. Stepping into these time capsules helps us imagine that we can return to that innocence.

      My friends who know that I'm a film critic (they're usually the same group that know I'm big into things like Disney and Harry Potter) often ask me whether I think this kind of nostalgic dalliance is okay or even healthy. After I direct this crowd to either my Roger Rabbit/Detective Pikachu comparison or my take on the Disney Remakes, I usually gave a slight variation of the same answer: remembering what it was like to be a kid becomes a vice when you start trying to return to a world where memorizing all the spells in Harry Potter was your only concern. It becomes a boon insomuch as it helps you realign with those childhood ideals--when you remember what it was like the first time you understood what it meant when Dumbledore told Harry that it is our choices, not our abilities, that determine our destiny.

  

    Because we're forgetting the last author of Harry Potter's story--the audience. We're ultimately the ones who decide whether Harry Potter grows up.

            --The Professor