Production designer Stuart Craig has been in the Harry Potter business since the beginning, taking on the challenge of creating vastly eclectic environments for each incoming director. With Deathly Hallows – Part 2, he concludes his master work – and, thankfully, he gave us a little insight on how he made it happen.
You said in a recent interview that you saw the dailies for Snape’s death scene and they brought you to tears. Can you talk about that scene? Does it differ from the book?
Craig: Well he’s just so good. I’m not an actor. I’m sure it’d be much more interesting to talk to an actor about this, but even on dailies, his death is extremely moving.
We did actually, with J.K. Rowling’s permission, make a departure there. Snape dies in the Shrieking Shack in the book. It’s an interesting interior, but it didn’t have somehow the breadth and the romanticism that I think Snape’s death required. So we made something of the boathouse, which has always been there, beneath Hogwarts. It’s the boathouse that supposedly the first-year students on their arrival, they take boats, and everybody else goes around by road. So there’s always been a boathouse, but we decided to make something of it, expand it, explore it. It now has a real sense of place. He dies somewhere that is very atmospheric, looking out over the lake and the mountains across the lake, the school in flames above. It’s exposed and influenced by the atmospherics of all those things. So I think it’s a suitable setting for a magnificent death, really.
How do you find ways to create opportunities for those more intimate moments in sets that are so vast and so epic?
Craig: But I think we have small sets as well. The boathouse I just described isn’t particularly vast. Internally, it’s not a huge space at all. It’s just, as I say, the landscape around it and the atmospherics—the fire, the cloud, the mist on the lake—it is a suitably intimate scene given the context of it. And I think we would be very mindful of that. If it were an intimate scene, we would make sure that the setting was appropriate.
What was it like designing the destruction of Hogwarts in the last film? Obviously, you know, that’s a very iconic piece, and it’s symbolizing the finality of the film and the end of the series. Did you have any emotional ties to it?
Craig:As you do in films, for reasons I cannot explain, you do things in the wrong order always. So it isn’t as final as you may believe it is. In other words, you don’t build a nice, pristine set, shoot it in good condition, and then ruin it and it’s gone forever. It’s not like that. For some reason, in movie schedules, you always end up building it ruined first because it’s harder, and then you make it good again.
And that’s exactly what we’ve done, in fact. We are building it ruined, and then making it good, and then making it ruined again, and it’s all to do with actors’ availability. And the buildings have expanded so much that we’ve filled the stages here, going to Pinewood, renting stages at Pinewood. Then once you’ve rented them and built on them, you can’t just leave them sitting there forever and ever as you do here. You have to shoot them out and finish with them. So, not as devastating as you may think. But I walked past a set here the other day that I was particularly fond of, I suppose. [I was] pleased with Malfoy Manor—the interior, two large sets—and I guess two thirds of them are gone. I’ve seen hundreds of sets built and pulled down, but I was a little disturbed by that.
