EntertainmentMoviesFantasy MoviesHarry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban20 years on, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban director Alfonso Cuarón and producer David Heyman reflect on taking the series in a darker directionWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
EntertainmentMoviesFantasy MoviesHarry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban20 years on, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban director Alfonso Cuarón and producer David Heyman reflect on taking the series in a darker directionWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
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(Image credit: Warner Bros.)
This feature appears in the current issue ofTotal Film, which is available on shelves and digital newsstands now.
“I was confused because it was completely not on my radar,” Cuarón continues. “I speak often withGuillermo [del Toro], and a couple of days after, I said, ‘You know, they offered me this Harry Potter film, but it’s really weird they offer me this.’ He said, ‘Wait, wait, wait, you said you haven’t read Harry Potter?’ I said, “' don’t think it’s for me.' In very florid lexicon, in Spanish, he said, ‘You are an arrogant asshole.'”
“I’d seen Y tu mamá también, which I loved, and I oddly thought he’d be the perfect director for the third Potter,” remembers David Heyman, who in 1999 bought the rights to the first four novels and went on to produce all eight Potter movies and the three Fantastic Beasts prequels that came after. He grins into the Zoom camera. “That’s not what some might think. Can you imagine what some thought Harry, Ron and Hermione would get up to, having seen Y tu mamá también?” It’s a fair point – Cuarón’s Mexican road movie about two 17-year-old guys and a 28-year-old woman enjoying uninhibited sex was full of action, and we don’t mean quidditch. “Y tu mamá was about the last moments of being a teenager, and Azkaban was about the first moments of being a teenager,” Heyman notes. “I felt he could make the show feel, in a way, more contemporary. And just bring his cinematic wizardry.”
(Image credit: Warner Bros.)
Now, withChildren of MenandGravityon his CV, Cuarón seems like a more obvious choice than he did in the early noughties. Back then, the director had made only Mexican romcom Sólo con tu pareja, A Little Princess (which Heyman adored), Great Expectations starring Ethan Hawke, and Y tu mamá también, meaning he was untested on a film of Azkaban’s scale. Surely Warner Bros. wouldn’t entrust their golden goose to Cuarón?
The first two movies,Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s StoneandHarry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, had together rung up almost $1.9bn at the worldwide box office – the kind of prize you’d employ three-headed dog Fluffy to protect. That there was to be a change at all was only because Chris Columbus (Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire) wished to spend more time with his family. He would stay on as a producer, but had chosen to vacate the director’s chair.
Heyman flew to LA to meet with Alan F. Horn, President and COO of Warner Bros. Due diligence meant that there were several names under discussion – del Toro, Marc Forster, Callie Khouri, M. Night Shyamalan, and Kenneth Branagh, fresh from playing charismatic charlatan Gilderoy Lockhart in Chamber of Secrets, were all reportedly in the sorting hat – but it was Cuarón whose name was plucked out and announced to the world in July 2002. The franchise “needed to grow with the books”, stressed Heyman, and Prisoner of Azkaban represented the pivotal moment when Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson), and Ron (Rupert Grint) were to undergo their most terrifying encounter yet: puberty.
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Teenage kicks
(Image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)
“They were becoming more aware of the craft of acting and they wanted to go to the next stage,” says Cuarón, who was satisfied that they understood their characters given how perfectly the effort they put into their essays chimed with their on-screen personalities. “From the get-go we talked about how we wanted to ground everything, to make it about a normal human experience in this world. [We wanted to explore] the internal life of each one of these characters. They were incredibly intuitive about this, and very receptive.”
(Image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)
Another trick Cuarón employed was to bring in costume designer Jany Temime and together work on ensuring that each teen wore their school uniform to express their individuality. In the first two movies, the uniforms were, well, uniform, worn as a child would present themselves on the first day of school. In Azkaban, shirts are untucked, ties loosely knotted and sleeves rolled, while any time spent outside of lessons sees the kids ditch their uniforms for civvies.
(Image credit: Warner Bros.)
Also key was Cuarón’s decision to introduce location work to what had largely been a studio-bound franchise. Certainly, much of the 2003 shoot, which ran from 24 February to late November, was conducted at Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire, but the joyously crazed Knight Bus sequence was shot in Palmers Green and other areas of London, while Scottish locations provided the film’s natural scenery. As for the exhilarating scene in which Harry rides hippogriff Buckbeak, a visit to Virginia Water Lake in Surrey will have you scanning the sky for a swooping winged beast.
Incoming DoP Michael Seresin introduced a patina of silver and shadow to reflect the darkening emotions, and shot much of the action with wide-angled lenses to enable Cuarón to incorporate the characters’ body language, and to locate them in relation to Hogwarts. Columbus had favored close-ups, but Cuarón insists the evolution of style was for a concrete reason: “A child doesn’t have a sense of orientation. Places are places.”
Scare fare
Some sequences are genuinely scary, and most frightening of all is when the Dementors descend upon the Hogwarts Express from a grey, rain-lashed sky. Did Heyman and Cuarón ever fear that Azkaban was too dark? “You know, young people don’t like to be patronised,” Heyman says. “It’s more parents worrying about their children than children worrying about themselves. So this is edgy. It’s thrilling. And the kids, and adults, watching it are enthralled.”
“When I was at the set of the train, it reminded me so much of the Hitchcock films I had seen of the ’30s and ’40s,” says Cuarón, who worked with master puppeteer Basil Twist to map the movement of puppets performing underwater, in slow motion. The practical effects, though ultimately scrapped, provided creative direction for VFX house Industrial Light & Magic to invest the Dementors with the “metaphysical quality” that Cuarón desired. But back to Hitch… “I wanted to do something in that atmosphere. Like Hitchcock, it was more about the anticipation.”
All of these techniques and sequences were sewn together with as much skill as Cuarón brought to bear on stitching together the film’s time-travel sequence, in which Hermione uses the Time-Turner to save Buckbeak from execution, and more. For that shot, about a minute’s worth of action was filmed on Steadicam against bluescreen, and four minutes of background footage, shot separately, was then speeded up and composited behind the main action, while two other plates of background footage were tiled together as the camera turned. It was multiverse madness long before the MCU, and the result was dazzling.
The same with the movie, which opened in the UK on 31 May 2004 and scored the highest opening weekend at the box office in UK history – a record it kept untilSpectre’srelease in 2015. In the US and Canada, it enjoyed the third biggest opening weekend of all time, racking up a cool $93.7m. With a worldwide total of $795.6m, Prisoner of Azkaban was the second biggest movie of 2004, behind Shrek 2.
“Critics should ask children and Average Joes!” he laughs. “I’m grateful, but I have to say, if you ask fans and children, they have different views. But I was lucky that Azkaban is the most complex story. I saw it almost as a noir.”
Heyman, naturally, won’t choose between his babies. “They’re all my children and they each mark different points in my life,” he says. “I met my wife on the end of the second film, I brought my stepchildren onto the third film – Alfonso is my son’s godfather. The friendships that I made are so significant. I do think three is a very a special film, but I also think one, two, four, five, six, seven and eight are, too.”
Cuarón concludes with a contented sigh. “I was very generously asked if I wanted to stay in the series but I felt that Prisoner of Azkaban was such an incredible sense of discovery. I’d been learning every day and I didn’t want to stop learning. It’s such an incredible universe and I had such a beautiful time.”
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is out now in UK cinemas via a rerelease.
For more coming your way this year, check out our guide to theupcoming moviesyou should be watching out for.
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