Harry Potter Gets Roughed Up!
Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix director, David Yates, share a brief moment together on the set of the film.
This week’s Newsweek features an article on David Yates and how he feels about working on the 5th installment of the film series. Here’s an excerpt from the Newsweek interview:
Mention the name of the new “Harry Potter” director and the near-universal response is, “Who?” After creating a $3.5 billion franchise with a string of high-profile filmmakers—Chris Columbus, Alfonso Cuarón and Mike Newell—Warner Bros. hired David Yates to take the reins for “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” which will be released next summer. Yates is unknown here, but he’s been building an impressive résumé in his native Britain. His movie “Sex Traffic,” about women forced into international prostitution, was widely praised. In 2004 he won a British Directors’ Guild award for the TV series “State of Play,” a political thriller. And his last film, HBO’s “The Girl in the Café,” is a romance set at the G8 economic summit (yes, really), and earned an Emmy this year. “He’s one of the most exciting directors coming out of this country at the moment,” says longtime “Potter” producer David Heyman. Fair enough. But what’s a guy who makes gritty, hyperreal socially conscious films doing in the “Harry Potter” universe? “Well,” Heyman says, “this movie is bit of a revolution.”
“There’s a really interesting principle at the heart of this story,” says Yates, in an exclusive NEWSWEEK interview. “The ministry is this bureaucratic authoritarian regime trying to impose a fundamental doctrine on this liberal wacky school. The ministry isn’t very good at accepting the beauty of differences. Everything has to fit in a box, and if it doesn’t fit, it must be removed. The wonderful thing this story tells kids is that it’s OK to be different.”
Yates has pushed all the actors, in particular Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry, to deepen their performances this time around. “I’ve stretched Dan quite a bit. He’s a very intuitive person, very bright, quite sensitive,” he says. “I’m just helping him wake those things up. You can see his determination and ambition, and he can switch things on a sixpence, so I can’t wait for people to see what he’s achieving.”
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will be out nationwide on July 13, 2007!
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