FOUR YEARS AT HOGWARTS
By Peter N. Chumo II
Here's an excerpt of the interview that appeared in Creative Screenwriting Magazine.
WRITING FOR THE ACTORS
Talk to Steve Kloves for even a little while and you will discover that the one constant joy of the work is writing for the three young stars - Daniel Radcliffe as Harry, Rupert Grint as Ron, and Emma Watson as Hermione. After seeing what they did in Sorcerer's Stone, "it invigorated me to write for them. I think I know what Emma can do, I think I know what Dan can do, I think I know where Dan can be funny and where it's forcing it. It has less to do with Dan than it does with Harry. Harry can be funny in a certain kind of moment. You don't want him to carry the joke. Hermione is funny in her obsessiveness, and Emma can handle that very, very well. And Rupert is a kind of genius. I really believe that. I think Rupert is someone who has made lines hysterical that, honestly, I don't think are that funny."
At the same time, Kloves feels a certain protectiveness for his characters and Ron is a good example of where Kloves fought to give a character more dimension. Acknowledging "that there will always be a tendency to default to Ron being funny," Kloves has believed "for a couple of movies that Ron nees to evolve and show some spine," which he does in Goblet of Fire. Kloves appealed to Newell, who agreed that Ron not be "just the trembling sidekick."
For Hermione, who has long been his favorite character, Kloves wrote a line in Prisoner of Azkaban that he knew would work. He recalls the sequence in which Harry and Hermione go back in time to try and save gamekeeper Hagrid's beloved hippogriff, Buckbeak, as well as harry's godfather, Sirius Black, from execution. Two innocent lives are hanging in the balance, but Kloves works in a comic line to ease the tension; Hermione, seeing the back of herself, exclaim, "Does my hair really look like that?" Kloves "knew that Emma would kill that line. Up till now she's driven the scene for two minutes. It just makes her a real girl, I knew Emma would do it well because Emma is a real girl. Underneath it all, there's fragility, and that's the kind of stuff you love to write for an actor. Everytime I saw it with an audience, people laughed because they recognized the truth of it."
ADAPTING THE BOOKS, ADAPTING TO DIFFERENT DIRECTORIAL STYLES
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Newell's strengths are the revealing character moments. "Sometimes I think he doesn't realize how gifted he is at that," Kloves notes. He cites a key moment in Goblet of Fire, which also highlights one of the more serious themes in the story - Ron's jealousy that Harry's inheritance allows him things that Ron's poor family cannot afford (and, in more general terms, the way Ron is often in Harry's shadow). It is a class rift that should not be overplayed but that Kloves feels is effective in giving the relationship some subtext, in which "what's being said doesn't necessarily reflect what's going on." The moment occurs on the train, and Newell plays it very subtly; so subtly, in fact, that "at first I thought it's too subtle. But it doesn't matter because it's not a plot moment, so people will either pick it up or not." When Ron orders a couple of items off the trolley and realizes he has only enough money for one, Harry offers to pay, to which Ron responds, "'No, no, it's all right.' But it's not accented at all. You'll miss it in a second if you're no twatching for it. But its character-consistent, which is nice. Ron doesn't want Harry paying his way. Rupert turns away, doesn't even make an issue of it. That's a sign of maturity on Ron's part, which is, 'Let's not even talk about it.'"