Newell puts the Brit back in Harry Potter

updated 2:18 p.m. ET Nov. 21, 2005

LOS ANGELES - Mike Newell loved the magic of the “Harry Potter” stories. He was not quite sold on the magic that went into making the “Harry Potter” movies, though.

Newell, the director behind such character-driven tales as “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Enchanted April” and “Donnie Brasco,” went into “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” worried he might get gobbled up by a visual-effects beast that could choke the human drama.

The first British director to oversee a “Harry Potter” film, Newell said he fought hard to keep the extravagant computer-generated imagery in its place, namely, in service of the story and not just a collection of pretty pictures for their own sake.

“I was daunted, and I was also ill-tempered,” Newell, 63, told The Associated Press. “Because I felt very strongly that the tail wagged the dog, and that the special effects had on earlier films been the event. ...

“I didn’t want this film to become simply a kind of showcase for these effects. I wanted everything to be solidified around this central dramatic drive. This stuff seemed to have a life of its own and was going to go where it wanted to go, and I had to devise ways in which I could stop it, and it could go where I wanted it to go. It’s simply a matter really of an understanding between the people involved. So often, those people do glorious work. It’s just that it isn’t connected to the main film. It somehow stands aside from it. I hope we avoided that on this.”

A human face on a spectacular story
Newell succeeded in balancing story and visuals. The film has all the dazzling fireworks of its three predecessors, while putting the most human face yet on the bedeviling challenges of growing up the world’s most famous boy wizard.

“Goblet of Fire” is adapted from the fourth book in the fantasy series by J.K. Rowling, the first of the books to hit epic proportions, topping 750 pages.

MOVIES From Hermione Granger to Lord Voldemort, meet the students, creatures and teachers.

No longer the full wide-eyed innocents of their early days at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and chums Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) cope with more adult threats from the magical world and the jealousies and rivalries that come with puberty.

Much as he admires the first two “Harry Potter” flicks crafted by U.S. filmmaker Chris Columbus and the one made by Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron, Newell felt he brought the one thing his predecessors lacked: Intimate knowledge about the quirks of a British education.

“It wasn’t possible for them to get that right. They’d never been to such a school,” Newell said. “English schools are very, very eccentric. They’re not like any other. I know they’ve changed now, but when I was in school in the ’50s, I was beaten with a cane, a rattan cane, as thick as my little finger.

“And that was a very common occurrence, and so they were kind of dangerous and violent places, but they also were very funny and anarchic places. I wanted to get the sense of the school as a character, having a character, so that the kind of crazinesses that she, Jo (Rowling) is so good at, I wanted to find an organization into which that kind of stuff could fit and bring the two things together. Bring the individuals and the institution together. So I think that’s something I could bring in a major way to the table.”

To that end, Newell rewrote a scene to add a glint of schoolboy mischievousness and the corporal punishment it provokes, in which dour Professor Snape (Alan Rickman) bonks Harry and Ron in the head with a book for goofing off during a study period.

Radcliffe notes it was the first time the filmmakers had slipped something into one of the movies that was not in the book.

Before filming began, Radcliffe watched a number of Newell films, including “Dance With a Stranger” and “Pushing Tin.” Radcliffe also familiarized himself with Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” after Newell mentioned the similarities he saw between the innocent hero of that movie (Cary Grant) and his puppetmaster nemesis (James Mason) and Harry and his mortal enemy, Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes).

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