David Yates Takes Harry Potter to His Darkest Hour

Conjuring up Deathly Hallows during the earlier films' productions:

David Yates: I was so focused, it was a bit like climbing a mountain. You look at each footfall as you go. The prep time on Hallows 1 & 2 was really tight. Order of the Phoenix, I had months and months to prepare it. I was sort of rigorous. I would go to the office everyday and we would storyboard, storyboard, storyboard. It was such careful preparation. By the time we got to Hallows, it was sort of like three or four months – finishing six and starting seven Part 1. It was really tight.

Actually, that was liberating in a way because I knew the world, people knew how I thought, I worked with the actors quite a lot – so it had more of a spontaneity of sorts, on the floor. It was less tightly controlled than the first movie and the second movie. We didn’t have the time to rigorously prepare how I like to prepare, but in a way, because I knew the world, I knew the guys, we had a slightly different dynamic in the way we worked, and that was interesting and quite helpful.

Working with the new, gritty look of Deathly Hallows:

David Yates: I really wanted it to feel a bit edgier and more modern. I wanted it to feel more... not at all fantasy. I said to [Director of Photography] Eduardo Serra at the beginning, 'just make it feel real.’ I wanted this one to feel real. The second one comes back to Hogwarts at the end...it’s a big fantasy film. It’s got dragons and giants and spiders and we go full circle – back to the roots of the series.

But I wanted this one to be...they’re away from Hogwarts, away from this magical place. I wanted it to feel like a harsh, edgy world. I quite like the look of it; it’s punchy, quite grainy, and it was a fun thing to do. Those little changes keep the series more interesting for me, because I couldn’t do the same look. I love what Bruno [Delbonnel] did in six, that very romantic, lyrical thing. But I needed to do something else, and Eduardo’s challenge was to light Part 1 differently than Part 2 – Part 1 needs to feel edgy and punchy, Part 2 is an opera. It’s big, lush, full of reds. So we had to switch heads every few days because we shot out of sequence.

Insight that only J. K. Rowling could provide:

David Yates: I’m sure the Davids [Heyman and Barron] have told you, but she revealed that Dumbledore was gay, during a reading for Half-Blood Prince, which was a shock to us all. And I didn’t tell Michael Gambon because I just knew it would change his performance in a profound way. He would come up to me occasionally and say, 'Is it true? Am I gay?’ That was a big revelation we didn’t really know about.

Jo...I think her characters are so clear in the book, so rich that everybody feels they know them already and we don’t really talk too much about that. We had a really good conversation last week about two scenes in [Deathly Hallows] Part 2 which I’m looking at now and she was incredible helpful. We talked about what she originally intended with these scenes when she wrote them in the book – I’m editing them at the moment – and she was great. She sort of just goes right to the heart of what the scene should be about. Generally, I don’t need to phone her up – she’s really at a graceful distance. She reads the script in the beginning and she turns up for the premiere. She’s been really helpful.

Jump ahead to:

The evolution of Deathly Hallows' intimate dance scene

Yes, more about that steamy kissing scene

Deciding on Deathly Hallows' beginning and end