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To bring a story like "Harry Potter" from the page to the screen...
...the starting point is your original novel, written by you, J.K. Rowling.
The script is based on that novel, but it is written by the screenwriter...
...Steve Kloves.
How did you work together to produce the final script?
Because it must be very, very different...
...writing a book as compared to writing a film.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I just steal her best stuff.
That's basically it. And I don't sue.
What's always been great about Jo is that, from the beginning...
...she gave me tremendous elbow room.
But when you're in the middle of a series like this...
...it's important that I talk to Jo along the way and ask her...
Beyond advice on certain sequences, but just, "Am I on the right path?"
Jo's maddening in the sense she will not tell me what's going to happen...
...but say if I'm on the wrong path. - I've given you more than anyone else...
...which I shouldn't say, or they'll kidnap and torture him. We need him.
But I've told Steve probably more than I've told anyone else...
...because he needs to know.
It's annoying of me when he says, "Should we cut that?"...
...or, "I wanted to do this"...
...and I say, "No, because in book 6, something will happen...
...and you'll need that in, or that will contradict something that happens"...
...and I can feel him on the end of the e-mail, saying, "Tell me why".
So I have told him things, but he's good at guessing.
He's guessed more shrewdly than anyone else, I think.
How frustrating is it for you, working in the dark...
...with some of these issues, Steve?
It's frustrating because you like to know...
When you're writing a character you like to know where they're going.
I'd tell you if you were dying.
- That's nice to know. - You don't need to know at the moment.
I am dying, hopefully it's just gonna take a while.
I think... It's frustrating just that...
Again, it comes down to the details, and the magic of those details.
You know, just reading the books is such a wonderful experience.
There are so many rich details in the books.
Can you tell us how you decide what goes in and what stays out?
I will sometimes ask Jo. I will say, "This detail...
...you seem to have cast a bit more light on this in this scene than other details".
Sometimes I'm wrong, but often she'll say, "No, that's going to play out".
There's one thing in "Chamber" that Jo indicated will play later in the series.
The hardest thing for me is I'm writing a story to which I do not know the end.
I'm not gonna lie to you, that's been the case sometimes in my own originals.
- I was gonna say. - I assume I will find an end.
With this, I'm writing a story over a decade, in a sense.
I keep waiting, keep hoping that Jo will slip up and actually tell me something.
In this movie, we've seen the kids develop from the first film.
Can you tell us about the relationship between Harry, Ron and Hermione...
...and how that is developing film by film?
Well, I think it is developing in the films as it does in the books...
...which is to say that they're much stronger together than apart.
They're much more aware, in the second film, of their particular strengths.
So they're more effective.
The children are able to do more complex things. For example, the Polyjuice Potion.
And also, Chris, in the second film...
...has kind of foreshadowed what I don't do until the fourth book...
...which is that you get hints of certain feelings between the three of them...
...that belong to a sort of slightly more mature person.
- Steve? - I think you're seeing in "Chamber"...
...that magic's becoming a bit second nature to them. At least simple magic is.
That, basically, a little bit of knowledge will get you into a lot of trouble.
I think that's what we're seeing in the second one.
They're getting more mature, but they're still...
It's a dangerous kind of knowledge.
How do you feel about what the kids were like in this movie?
The first thing you notice when you watch the movie is that...
...Harry and Ron's voices have dropped two octaves, which is bizarre.
They're not these cute moppet-heads running around. Children will grow.
Steve, Hermione is a character who you've said is one of your favorites.
Does that make her easier to write?
I like writing all three, but I've always loved writing Hermione.
Because I just... She's a tremendous character for a lot of reasons for a writer.
She can carry exposition in a wonderful way...
...because you just assume she read it in a book.
- Lf I need to tell the audience... - Right, I find that all the time.
If you need to tell your readers something...
...there are only two characters you can put it convincingly...
...into their dialogue.
One is Hermione, the other's Dumbledore.
In both cases, you accept it's plausible that they have...
Dumbledore knows everything, but that Hermione has read it somewhere.
- So she's handy. - Yeah, she's really handy.
She's also just, I think, tremendously entertaining.
There's something about her fierce intellect...
...coupled with a complete lack of understanding...
...of how she affects people that I just find charming and irresistible to write.
- Does Dumbledore speak for you? - Yes. Dumbledore often speaks for me.
How do you see Dumbledore, Steve?
Dumbledore is a fascinating character, because I think...
...he obviously imparts great wisdom that comes from experience...
...but I've always felt that Dumbledore bears such a tremendous dark burden...
...and he knows secrets.
He bears the weight of the future of the wizard world, which is being challenged.
The only way that he can keep that at bay, the darkness...
...is to be whimsical and humorous.
I think it's a really interesting thing. He's a character of so many layers.
When he does say something, that "it is our choices and not our abilities"...
...coming from him, it doesn't feel like a sermon...
...it just feels like an absolute truth.
It goes down easy, and I like that about him.
That's what I like about the books.
I've always thought that Jo's writing is deceptively profound...
...which is that you never feel there are messages in there.
There's a lot of things being dealt with in a very clever way...
...and they're never pretentious, the books.
I think it's why kids love reading them.
You say that you don't set out to put particular messages in each book...
...but do you think it's important to have the right messages when they emerge?
Obviously it, in the wizard world, passes for racism.
That's deeply entrenched in the whole plot, you know.
There's this issue going on...
...about the bad side advocating a kind of genocide...
...to exterminate what they see as these "half-blood" people.
So that was obviously very conscious, but other messages do grow organically.
But I've never set out to teach anyone anything.
It's been more of an expression of my views and feelings...
...than sitting down and deciding, "What is today's message?"
I do think... Although I never sat down consciously and thought about this...
I do think, judging even from my daughter...
...that children respond much better to that than to "thought for the day".
What was the most important difference in doing the story...
...for "Chamber of Secrets" as opposed to the first film?
We had more contact on the first film, but we needed more contact on it...
...because we were establishing a relationship that's lasted two years...
...and is gonna last hopefully longer, so that was really about getting to know...
...what we needed from each other.
So it's a good sign that we had less contact on "Chamber", because I think...
...there's a lot of trust there. I was very prickly when I met Steve...
...because I knew they'd chosen this American guy.
Even though he wrote and directed one of my favorite films...
... "Fabulous Baker Boys", I still thought, "Well, you know, he's American".
I was most worried about meeting Steve. He was the writer.
He was going to be ripping apart my baby.
It turns out I really like him, so that worked.
How do you communicate? How does all that work? And how often?
- Varies to what we're doing at the time. - Owls.
Owls mainly, obviously, bit of Floo powder.
How does this film differ from the first?
I think it was...
It is, I think we would both say, an easier book to transfer into a film, isn't it?
The first one is episodic. You have individual adventures. It changes more.
When we were working on the script to "Philosopher's Stone", that came up a lot...
...that you have these sort of discrete adventures.
And "Chamber" is a more linear structure...
...so it was easier to translate to screen, I think, wasn't it?
- I thought it was gonna be easier... - Than it actually turned out to be.
You do have that Tom Riddle moment where Tom explains it all...
...and that's always challenging in a movie.
Also, what makes "Chamber" interesting is that things are occurring...
...that you don't really quite understand until Tom explains them at the end...
...so you've got to work toward that moment and hope you hold the audience.
There's no question, it had more of a sort of...
It just had more of a tight plot to sort of play out.
What were the biggest challenges for you in this film?
The challenge is keeping it from being four hours, because I like everything.
What I honestly think is magical about what Jo does is the details.
And so my first drafts are always chock-full of details.
The things I respond to sometimes are hard to put in proportion.
I was really interested in the whole Mudblood thread.
That became an interesting emotional thing for me to write in the script.
I don't know that it's still there in the way that I saw it entirely.
You want to give some of those things weight in some way...
...so that becomes the challenge. But it's mainly compression.
Jo, were there any bits of "Chamber of Secrets"...
...that didn't reflect the way that you originally saw it in your mind?
It's interesting what Steve says about the Mudblood theme, because I agree...
...but there's always pressure of time and space with a film.
That is a stronger theme in the book.
And yet it is present in the film, but for me...
...when I look back on that book, that's the time in the overall series...
...where the issue of pure-blood becomes very important.
So maybe more weight to that.
- What stands out most in this film? - It was scary.
I've always thought people underestimate how scary the book is.
In fact, it's the book I've got the most complaints about, bizarrely.
Possibly because people got upset at "Chamber" and didn't read the rest, so...
That's certainly translated to the screen. Couple of really frightening moments.
The visual effects are a huge part of bringing the magic to life.
In this film, we have Dobby, the pixies, Fawkes, the basilisk.
- What do you make of the effects? - Dobby's wonderful.
Dobby's really good, and the Mandrakes, superb. I love the Mandrakes.
Is that a big challenge for you, Steve, getting those scenes right?
It's easy, because I just write and dream it, and then someone else has to do it.
I'm amazed when you see something like the Mandrakes...
...which is essentially puppetry.
Which part of "Chamber of Secrets" were you most excited to see on-screen?
I was most worried about the spiders...
...because you see these old sci-fi movies...
...where you have giant spiders. They're always hysterically funny, never scary.
It's easy to write a scene like that in a novel and make it scary...
...but when I started thinking about how we were going to see that...
It is extremely frightening, the most frightening large spiders I've ever seen.
I had the same concern.
As I wrote, I was thinking, "How are we going to do this?"
You've got Aragog saying, "Who goes there?" basically.
You know, this giant spider. You're saying, "This is just gonna be hysterical".
- I'm laughing as I'm writing it. - We've had that problem a lot.
One thing you learn about movies is the thing you're most worried about often...
...is not a problem. And the thing you don't worry about is a disaster.
So... I've found that all...
It's funny, you're talking about the scares in the movie.
I know the thing that terrified my son the most in the first movie...
...was opening the book, and the book screaming.
I think it was something he could identify with.
He could take a book, open it, and there might be a face in there, screaming.
- He wasn't scared by the other things. - But I think I write...
Those are the sort of details I write, because that would scare me.
I read all the time, and just to open something and have it shriek at me...
One thing I thought was well done...
...in the film, "Chamber of Secrets", was the diary.
Now, the diary to me is a very scary object, a really frightening object.
This manipulative little book, the temptation, particularly for a young girl...
...to pour out her heart to a diary, which I was never prone to, but my sister was.
The power of something that answers you back.
At the time that I wrote that, I'd never been in an Internet chat room...
...but I've since thought it's very similar...
...typing your deepest thoughts into the ether...
...and getting answers back, and you don't know who's answering.
That was always a scary image to me in the book...
...and I thought it worked well in the film.
You could understand, when he started writing...
...to see these things coming back to him, the power of that.
- That secret friend in your pocket. - I loved that in the book.
I thought that was great...
...that someone's writing back to you that you don't know who they are.
There's something inherently ominous in that, but the fact that they know...
They know the secret you want to know, and they're inviting you.
It's like a finger beckoning you, but into the past.
I always thought that was an incredibly interesting concept.
How different has it been working on the script for the next movie...
..."Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban"?
Well, we've just started.
I mean, I honestly think it's gone as well as any of the others. And I think it's...
I mean, personally, I feel it's gonna be the best movie.
Yeah, I think so too.
We're at a better place than we've ever been on the script...
...and we're months from starting shooting...
...so I think it's the best place we've been.
- I think 3 could really be interesting. - Yeah. I agree.
Where does 3 stand in your list of favorites, book-wise?
I know it's very corny to say, but it's like choosing between your children.
It really is.
But I have a very soft spot for 3, because of...
...a couple of the characters who crop up there for the first time:
Lupin and Black. Obviously very important characters.
I'm really fond of them.
So far, you've had two very successful collaborations on "Harry Potter".
What are your hopes for the future of the "Harry Potter" series?
I hope Steve keeps writing the scripts, because I'm used to him now, you know.
Just keep being faithful to the books.
From my point of view, I'm bound to say that, aren't I?
J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves, author and scriptwriter.
We're looking forward to the results of your future collaborations.
- Thank you very much. - Thank you.