Newell puts the Brit back in Harry Potter

Eye on the core story
“Goblet of Fire” pits Harry against older student sorcerers in a wizardry competition that turns out to have a darker purpose.

It was that core story — Newell calls it the “scaffolding” — on which he kept his focus in condensing the huge book to a 2½-hour movie, retaining only frills and baubles that would connect to the main plot.

“He talked about it having a central spine with these little offshoots, I guess you’d call them nerve-endings, coming off it,” Radcliffe said. “These little other strands that he kept reiterating, in which every scene had to push that central spine.”

Co-star Brendan Gleeson — who plays Hogwarts’ new defense-against-the-black-arts teacher, Mad-Eye Moody — said Newell has great rapport with child actors, treating them as insistently as he does adults when trying to shape their performances.

“He never patronizes them. He can be quite idiosyncratic,” said Gleeson, who previously worked with Newell on another film with children in the leads, the 1992 Irish fable “Into the West.” “Kids don’t get spared things either, whether they’re going fantastically well or there’s a glitch. There’s a great humanity in the way he deals with kids, and they respond to it.”

Making peace with CGI
Newell grew up a film fan but was more preoccupied with live theater, working as a stagehand, prop maker and bit player in an amateur theater his parents ran. Those early experiences led Newell to study theater in college.

He expected to take the theater up for a living but moved into television instead as the medium was blossoming in the early 1960s and hungry for new talent.

By 21, Newell was directing documentary segments on such odd little subjects “as the biggest rhubarb stick in Yorkshire,” he said. “Wonderful, hard-hitting stuff.”

Newell moved into television drama, then scored his first film success in the late 1970s with “The Man in the Iron Mask,” made for British TV but released theatrically overseas.

Though he doubts he ever would take on a big visual-effects film again, Newell said he is no longer a skeptic on computer-generated imagery and would gladly use the technology on upcoming projects, which include a Western and an adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

“What I feel now is that I’ve learned a lesson for the future, and if I want to make a city in Venezuela for ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ and can only find half a city, then CGI will fill in for me,” Newell said. “If I want to do a story about the building of the Victorian railways, then CGI will be my greatest friend.

“It’s a technique which I have now really learned and had an enormously steep learning curve and fantastic on-the-job training. I’m kind of a convert. I don’t want to do it all like that, but I think simply it’s a technique like any other. It’s like having lights to shoot at night.”

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