Authors: David Nolan
As the final touches were being made to the very
two-dimensional
version of
Deathly Hallows
, Emma returned to America and to Brown. But she still had work to do: there was a new film to promote as well as voice recording for the second
Deathly Hallows
to be done. The end of Potter was proving to be a slower one than Emma was expecting. It was, in her words, a ‘gradual goodbye’ and her feelings about her ‘release’ were mixed to say the least. ‘I go through periods where it feels fine, easy, and I’m busy at school,’ she said. ‘Then there are days when I feel really lost, because it was just so structured and I had people telling me where I needed to be, what they wanted me to do. My whole life was on a schedule, on a call sheet, every day, and, being at university, you decide when you eat, where you go, if you work, if you don’t. No one cares and it’s all down to you.
‘So, yeah, I had days where I feel “Oof”, but it was always going to be an adjustment, and I feel lucky that I
kept going with school and that I have that kind of infrastructure to fall back on. It feels nice to be able to take a bit of a break. Making these two films back to back was exhausting, I mean really exhausting. I was hanging in rags when we finished shooting.’
The British press got their first up-close glance at the new-look Emma Watson on 10 November 2010 – not at a Potter premiere but at a film-industry event in central London. The party at Claridge’s was to celebrate ambitious plans to rejuvenate Leavesden Studios, the spiritual home of the Harry Potter franchise. Warner Brothers had announced their decision to buy the site earlier in the year. Despite the billions generated by the Potter films and the fact that new films had been attracted to the studios thanks to their success, the former aircraft factory had seen better days. As part of the £100 million renovations, two new soundstages would be built to preserve the sets – so lovingly made by designer Stuart Craig – that had been used in the Potter saga. Tantalisingly for Potter fans, it was also announced that
behind-the-scenes
tours of the soundstages were planned to start in 2012. That news went down very well with the huge online community of fans worldwide.
Barry Meyer, chairman of Warner Brothers, told the
Watford Observer
– the studios’ local paper – that the revamp would create hundreds of jobs. ‘We are going to have one of the largest, most technologically advanced film production studios in all of Europe. We’ve been around for 85 years so we are not in this for the short term. Any ideas of that should be dispelled by the fact
that we’ve just invested a substantial amount of money in buying the studio.’
The Claridge’s event was attended by all the young Potter stars, but all eyes – and cameras – were on Emma. This may have been because of the striking black dress she wore. It may have been because of the fact that, despite the swanky surroundings, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grant decided to turn up in T-shirts and jeans. But it was mainly to do with the fact that she looked like a movie star and they didn’t – and she had ‘The Haircut’ and was giving it its first red-carpet outing. She wore a striking, one-sleeved black cocktail dress from the new Vionnet collection with a pearl-encrusted necklace and a red poppy pin at the waist to mark Remembrance Day.
‘The three of us have spent the last ten years of our lives at Leavesden Studios,’ Daniel told reporters. ‘To suddenly see it as the centre of all this attention is amazing. It’s an amazing resource in this country for tens of thousands of incredibly talented writers and producers, filmmakers and actors. Warner Brothers has done a huge amount to release that talent into the world.’
Emma added that she’d had ‘the time of my life making films at Leavesden Studios’.
As the Claridge’s party continued, fans began to camp out – literally erect tents in Leicester Square – in preparation for the premiere of
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
. Good thing they had come prepared, as, once again, the British weather unleashed its worst on a Potter premiere.
Emma didn’t disappoint the waiting photographers,
wearing a black-lace minidress designed by Rafael Lopez. The ultra-short, see-though, feathered outfit – costing around £4,000 – was topped off with earrings by Solange Azagury-Partridge and black heels by Charlotte Olympia. There was one other fashion item that Emma brought into play: sticky tape to stop the tiny dress falling open at the back. There would be no wardrobe malfunctions this time around. There were other stars there that night, but only one person grabbed the headlines the following day: E
MMA
W
ATSON STUNS IN BLACK LACE DRESS AT
H
ARRY
P
OTTER PREMIERE
, said the
Daily Mail
.
The
Daily Telegraph
’s fashion pages agreed: ‘A stunning Emma Watson bewitched fans at the premiere of the penultimate Harry Potter film,
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
, in London last night. Arriving at Leicester Square to greet an army of fans, the 20-year-old actress left little to the imagination in a revealing minidress by Spanish-born designer Rafael Lopez. If there was only one message intended by “that dress”, it’s that Emma Watson, in all her grown-up, drop-dead-gorgeous fashionista glory, has arrived.’
The fashion blitz was intensified for the New York premiere. Emma wore a floor-length black dress especially designed for her. ‘I asked Calvin Klein Collection if they would make a dress for me because I love their stuff, and they did,’ she told reporters outside the Alice Tully Hall in Manhattan. Emma’s fashion sense even seemed to rub off a little on her co-stars; Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint – not normally known for grabbing the headlines with what they wore – were kitted out in Dolce and Gabbana suits.
Emma’s ‘date’ for the premiere was her brother Alex. Musician George Craig was nowhere to be seen. ‘I hate to disappoint everyone,’ she told
Vogue
, ‘but we’re not dating. He’s in England, I’m in America … There is no one at the moment.’
Questions for Emma also centred on ‘The Haircut’ – journalists wanted to know if even more dramatic transformations were to follow. ‘The hair is as dramatic as it goes,’ she said. ‘I think I’d have to shave it to get any more dramatic. I’m loving it, I don’t really miss it [her old hairstyle]. I’m not going to lie. I can wash my head, in a basin, in a sink. Takes me, like, five minutes to get ready. It’s great.’
Sex and the City
star Sarah Jessica Parker attended the event with husband Matthew Broderick – Emma’s co-star in
The Tale of Despereaux
– and son James, and Emma spent time chatting to the youngster. ‘Her son is a big Harry Potter fan,’ Emma said. ‘We’ve spoken on a number of occasions. She’s a big fashion icon of mine.’
Things had definitely changed since her first Potter premiere nine years earlier. Emma gave fashion writers a lot to fill their columns with while promoting the film in New York. As she dashed from one TV show to another, she donned a dazzling array of outfits: a Burberry trench coat with studded sleeves one minute, then a grey Carven outfit, next an ink-blot Dion Lee minidress. Her fashion sense was news on both sides of the Atlantic: E
MMA
W
ATSON’S
N
EW
Y
ORK FASHION SHOW:
H
ARRY
P
OTTER STAR BRINGS HER SWEET STYLE TO THE
B
IG
A
PPLE
, said the
Daily Mail
.
The fashion journalists were happy – but what about the
film reviewers? The first part of the
Deathly Hallows
saga has something for everyone: chases, wand shoot-outs, young men in lacy bras, house-elf murder and topless snogging. ‘This is the last Harry Potter story and I really wanted to do it justice and go out with a bang,’ Emma said. ‘And I was blown away – it was above and beyond all of my expectations.’
Ron and Hermione have to make huge sacrifices to be with Harry and help him fulfil his destiny and continue the work of Dumbledore. Emma explained the thrust of the plot to ITV1’s Ben Shephard: ‘Voldemort has split his soul into seven different pieces and he’s hidden these pieces in seven different objects, which have personal meaning to him. So the only way to defeat Voldemort is to destroy each and every one of these “Horcruxes”.’
The three must go on the road as outlaws, but not without leaving behind the worlds they are used to – that includes Hogwarts and, in Hermione’s case, her family. This key early scene clearly resonated with Emma: ‘The film opens with Hermione wiping her parents’ memories [of her] and leaving their house,’ she told
Empire
. ‘You don’t read that in the book – you just know she does it. That’s a scene that Steve [Kloves, scriptwriter] and Dave [Yates, director] wrote for the film, which I was happy about because you see the sacrifice that Hermione and Ron make to be Harry’s friend. You see Ron’s home and Harry’s. But you never really get a sense of Hermione’s life outside Hogwarts, outside that friendship, and it’s important.
‘She’s not just going off to school for another year. You’re choosing between family and friends; it’s pretty
brutal. They offer her a cup of tea, completely unaware that anything’s about to happen, and then I cast a spell that wipes their memories of me. There’re photos all around the room, actual childhood pictures of me, and they just dissolve. It’s horrible. And then I have to shut the door and walk out alone.’
Unfortunately, the other key non-Rowling scene – the sequence between Harry and Hermione as they dance to the Nick Cave song ‘O Children’ – just doesn’t work. Well intentioned though it is at reinforcing the friendship between the two, it’s an awkward and unhelpful watch. It generated a few stifled giggles at some showings.
But there is one sequence in
Deathly Hallows
that definitely does work – and that stands alone among the entire Potter series:
The Tale of the Three Brothers
. This striking shadow-puppet-style animation was directed by Swiss-born Ben Hibon and in this ‘film within a film’ is narrated by Emma.
The story is of three brothers who think they’ve cheated death after using magic to cross a river, and the sequence explains the existence of three magical objects – a wand, a stone and a cloak – that make up the Deathly Hallows. It acts as a self-contained morality play and the three-minute sequence can be happily watched on its own – it’s also beautifully told by Emma. Director David Yates explained, ‘It started with Stuart Craig [production designer on the Potter films] who came up with these wonderful puppet images – shadow puppets. And then we found this wonderful chap called Ben Hibon. He’s a really gifted animator whose work we loved and we wanted to develop
that shadow-puppet idea with him and he went away and supervised that whole thing for us and did an absolutely beautiful job. He’s a very clever man.’
The sequence not only leaves you wanting more, it also solidifies
Deathly Hallows
as the film that asks the most of Emma – she runs, she jumps, she’s tortured and she leads the puzzle-solving from the front. It certainly seemed to be a view shared by the man who had put Emma through so much during filming – director David Yates: ‘I think she’s
ignited
. I think something happened during the filming of
Part 1
. She’s always been quite clever and she’s always been very thoughtful about how she approaches the acting that she does and she was like that on Five and on Six. She’s actually really an intensely bright person. But what I think happened on this one is she started to appreciate how she could tap into an emotional level and tune into things, which most great actors do. They just tap into the stuff inside and she started to do that and it was really exciting when she did.’
Emma agreed: ‘Parts of my personality have slipped into Hermione, and lots of her personality I’m sure unconsciously have affected me. I think this Hermione is the closest to my personality. David [Yates] wanted a really honest performance. Earlier on I think I played, like, a parody of myself. She was just this big personality – she’s developed into something much more human.’
By this stage in the series, film reviewers were in an unusual position: no matter how damning the critical reaction to the film was, it was unlikely to affect its commercial performance. Even the most hard-hearted
critic seemed largely to hold up their hands and surrender. ‘
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
is easily the best movie in the series, if only because it’s the one movie with the most narrative thrust,’ said
Premiere
. ‘The entire movie is one long chase sequence, as Harry and his friends slowly become adults under the grimmest of circumstances. The movie is grittier and darker than past episodes, which is a welcome tonal shift. Along the way, the movie provides a number of superb set pieces including Harry’s adopted family of friends serving themselves up as bait during a thrilling escape scene. There is an equally thrilling break-in of the Ministry of Magic where our heroes magically make themselves look like middle-aged slobs. A hallucinatory sequence where Harry and Hermione embrace sans clothes will probably be remembered as a moment of sexual awakening for millions. There’s also a lovely animated scene that tells a folk tale essential to the story.’
The
Daily Telegraph
observed, ‘J. K. Rowling’s plot hands the film a gift: it transfers the trio from the stifling environment of Hogwarts to a bigger, broader world. Watching Harry, Hermione and Ron on Shaftesbury Avenue, in the Dartford Tunnel, on cliff tops and deserted beaches makes them more insecure and vulnerable, recalling the children they were in the first films. They buttress a likeable trio of actors now on the cusp of adulthood. Watson and Grint especially are extended as never before: Hermione, once a faintly unappealing little swot, emerges as a bright, brave, resourceful young woman.’
This being a Potter film, though, the praise could never be universal: ‘The lead actors do things they’ve never done before – Radcliffe and Watson share a topless clinch (no wand-flashing, thankfully), while Grint has to play jealousy and paranoia,’ said
Empire
. ‘But there’s no real sense of weight to the breaking of this fellowship. And an invented-for-the-movie scene in which Harry and Hermione enjoy a dance inside their tent is both baffling and cringey. What should feel fresh and urgent, a
cross-country
chase flick, is bogged down for long stretches by a curse of
Excrucius Overplottio
. J. K. Rowling had the luxury of hundreds of pages to explain it all; delivered as movie exposition, it makes you yearn for the
chuck-a-ring-in-a-volcano
simplicity of
The Lord of the Rings
.’