Emma Watson (4 page)

Philosopher’s Stone
has a lot of unglamorous leg work to do: it has the job of introducing the characters and setting the scene for the next ten years’ worth of films, even though no one knew for sure that the series would run that far. That job is done efficiently and there are enough
set-piece
moments to stay with the viewer. Not to mention a parade of British acting talent, all here to prop up any misgivings the viewer may have about the young performers: Maggie Smith, John Hurt, John Cleese, Alan Rickman and, in particular, Richard Harris, whom Emma would later describe as the ‘perfect’ Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts.

Harris had enjoyed – some might say encouraged – a public persona built around his hellraising exploits since his breakthrough film
This Sporting Life
in 1963. An international star in the 1970s, he had gone into
semi-retirement
in the 1980s before making a return in 1992 in Clint Eastwood’s
Unforgiven
. Since then, up to his death in 2002, his career had enjoyed something of an Indian summer, as he picked and chose roles that took his fancy.
Initially, the idea of playing Dumbledore wasn’t one of them. ‘I didn’t want to do the pictures,’ Harris would later explain to journalist Prairie Miller. ‘I never read the books, and I never will read the books. It’s not my kind of reading. But the script was super. So I said OK, I’ll do it.’

A key factor in Harris’s decision was his 11-year-old granddaughter: ‘She read in the papers that all the actors in the world were queuing up to do it, but that Richard Harris won’t do it. Typical Harris, they said. Anyway, she rang me up and told me that, if I didn’t go and play Dumbledore in the movie, she’d never speak to me again. And, since it meant an awful lot to her, I said OK, I’ll do it.’

It’s believed that Harris signed up to all of the planned films and took on the role for free, in exchange for a percentage of the profits – a ‘Potter Pension’, as it became known. But he seemed strangely pessimistic about the chances of seeing the job through: ‘I’ll keep doing it as long as I enjoy it, my health holds out and they still want me, but the chances of all three of those factors remaining constant are pretty slim.’

Dame Maggie Smith took a similarly pragmatic approach to accepting the role of shape-shifting Professor Minerva McGonagall. ‘I look on the part as a sort of pension,’ she later told the London
Evening Standard
. She had already performed with one of the film’s young stars. ‘Dan I’d worked with before: we did
David Copperfield
on television. He was so enchanting. I was so thrilled when he got the part.’

As Harry, Daniel Radcliffe looks as if he’s stepped
straight from the front cover of J. K. Rowling’s first edition, but his acting hardly leaps from the screen. He
reacts
more than he acts, but he’s at his best when sharing the screen with Robbie Coltrane’s Hagrid. Rupert Grint’s performing style can at best be described as ‘broad’.

One of the best aspects of the film, though, is that we get to meet Hermione Granger for the first time. As Hermione, Emma Watson is charming and only gently annoying – not as teeth-grating as the Granger sketched out in J. K. Rowling’s book and certainly not as ‘mental’ and ‘scary’ as Ron Weasley describes her. One of the most persistent questions Emma would be asked about her onscreen counterpart for the next decade was: are you and Hermione alike? ‘We’re both very stubborn, determined, loyal, academic feminists,’ she later told the
Daily Telegraph
. Good answer. Spoken like a true Watson.

It’s on board the Hogwarts Express that we get our first ever glimpse of Emma Watson on screen. She appears at the carriage door of the compartment where Harry and Ron are demolishing a mountain of sweets. Daniel Radcliffe later pinpointed that moment as the key starting point of the three young performers’ relationship. ‘We bonded just like our characters,’ he said. ‘We all really like each other. The train-compartment scenes were the most fun, because it was just me, Rupert and Emma, surrounded by sweets, just laughing and joking the whole time.’

In the scene – unlike the two boys – Hermione Granger is already in her school uniform. Emma speaks her lines with crystal-clear received pronunciation as she mends Harry’s glasses by magic and puts Ron firmly in his place.
‘Hermione always has some snooty lines for Ron,’ she explained to the BBC’s
Newsround
. ‘He gets the worst of it, really.’

For her cinematic debut, Emma is on screen for barely 90 seconds, but it’s she whom you remember from the encounter, rather than Grint or Radcliffe. ‘Oh, my God, that scene feels like a lifetime ago,’ Watson would recall in a 2010 interview with the
New Zealand Herald
. ‘At the very beginning, when everything was new, I was just full of wonder and amazement because it was such an exciting time in my life. But now I feel weirdly disconnected from that – it feels like another person, because it was so long ago. It’s so hard to even remember back to then.’

As Hermione, Emma wears her hair much darker and bushier than her own – it had extensions and had been ‘boofed up’, in her words, to achieve that unruly Granger look. An early attempt during filming to replicate Hermione’s rather buck-toothed appearance with the aid of false teeth was abandoned, as Emma found it difficult to speak in them. Despite this, a little light dentistry was required during production. ‘I lost a front tooth on the first film,’ she remembered during an interview with the
Sunday Times
. ‘They had to put a fake one in my mouth every day to hide the gap.’

Whether she is zapping fellow pupil Neville Longbottom, or saving Harry and Ron from the clutches of snakelike, writhing tree roots, Emma does a sterling job of bringing Hermione Granger to life. ‘Hermione’s got some really good lines,’ she told
Entertainment Weekly
in 2001, clearly relishing the part she’d fought so hard to win. ‘One
of them is, “I’m going to bed, before either of you come up with another clever idea to get us killed – or, worse, expelled!” I like her because she’s really bossy and nerdy and all that kind of stuff. It makes her funny even though she doesn’t realise it. She’s a total bookworm and will do anything to get top marks. I mean, I enjoy school, but I’m not obsessed with school.’

One of the book’s key characters is Hogwarts itself. We get our first look at the towers and turrets of the wizarding school as the pupils approach it by boat at night. ‘I think the best thing which I was looking forward to seeing from the book was just the outlook from the whole of the school,’ Emma explained to the children’s channel CBBC. ‘Because it describes in the book coming over in a boat across the river to Hogwarts and just the first view … that took us ages. We had to keep going aahh, wow, oooh – a bit like watching fireworks going off.’

Few people would argue with the sumptuous nature of the sets: production designer Stuart Craig – an Oscar winner for films such as
Gandhi
and
The English Patient
– would be a mainstay of the entire Potter series.

Emma’s most complex scene was her encounter with a giant-sized troll in a Hogwarts toilet. To film the complex and destructive sequence, she had to ‘eat dust for a week’. She had to dodge the crushing blows of the troll’s club as porcelain and wood crashed all around her. ‘I had to do lots and lots and lots and lots of stunts, which I think is one of the reasons I enjoyed it, but one of the reasons it was so hard as well. They had six cubicles and they had to put a safety mat underneath it. I had to climb on to six cubicles
and I kept banging my head. I was darting under sinks to make sure the troll didn’t hit me. I had to do loads of running through legs and scrambling around the place and the really annoying thing was that they haven’t used all of the stunts which I did, which was really annoying – not good enough!’

On 4 November 2001, London’s Leicester Square was turned into a Potteresque wonderland to mark the world premiere of the film. Five thousand children dressed in homemade hats and wizardly robes turned out to see the stars arrive at the Odeon cinema. Security was tight – it was barely eight weeks since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York’s Twin Towers and there had even been concern that the premiere might be cancelled. ‘This is a very positive film about friendship, loyalty and bravery and good winning over evil,’ director Chris Columbus pointedly told reporters as he arrived. ‘I hope it will provide a lift to anyone that watches it, especially in these times.’

As ever with movie premieres, an array of
celebrities du jour
were on hand to attend the first showing: Sting, Ben Stiller and Cher were there along with celebrity kids such as Brooklyn Beckham, though it’s not clear how much of the film the two-year-old actually understood.

J. K. Rowling made a rare and rather brief appearance and took the opportunity to step out in public for the first time with her new boyfriend, Edinburgh GP and anaesthetist Dr Neil Murray. The press took great delight in highlighting Murray’s Potteresque appearance with his
dark hair and glasses. He and Rowling would marry within the following eight weeks. Before going inside the cinema, Rowling made it clear that the premiere taking place in London was her doing. ‘I wanted a British cast and a British setting, because it is a British story,’ Rowling told the army of reporters camped outside the cinema. ‘And we have all that. I wanted the movie to have its world premiere right here, in Britain. And here we are. I still can’t believe all this has happened. For a person like me, this is not a run-of-the-mill kind of night.’

Dressed in purple, Emma brought little brother Alex along to the London premiere, even letting him muscle in on some of the red-carpet interviews. She also took the opportunity to yell a hello to her grandparents via the massed ranks of cameras. Emma admitted to reporters that she was feeling ‘a bit shaky’ about the premiere. ‘I’m so nervous I feel like I’m going to be sick,’ she said.

Daniel Radcliffe sounded fairly tense, too: ‘I’m almost numb with nerves and that’s never happened before. My face and my stomach are buzzing. I woke up at 3am, 4am and 6am, and, although I’m very nervous, I’m also extremely excited and happy today.’

After the premiere, the question was: would the critics be as excited and happy about the film? It has to be said that reviewers weren’t overwhelmingly in favour of it. The main failing they highlighted seemed to centre on the movie’s slavish adherence to the source book. Emma was keen to knock this criticism back. ‘I think it’s really, really important to stay truthful to the books because they’re fantastic books,’ she told the Scholastic Books website.
‘Chris [Columbus] is working really close with J. K. Rowling, and I think that’s what makes the films so great – the fact that we work with the author, who has all of the images and inspirations in her head.’

The other chief criticism was that the film was just too long for children to sit through. This concern, too, was batted back. ‘Fans would have been crushed if we’d left too much out,’ director Columbus told
Time
magazine. ‘My mantra has been [that] kids are reading a 700-page book. They can sit through a two-and-a-half-hour movie.’

The
Guardian
was typical of those in favour of the film: ‘This richly accomplished entertainment spectacular, the quickest, zappiest two and a half hours you’ll spend in the cinema. Emma Watson is the magnificent Hermione: imperious, impetuous but heart-breakingly loyal in the tradition of the subordinate Enid Blyton girl.’

The normally rather highbrow
Time
Out
agreed, breaking out a considerable amount of exclamation marks to make its point: ‘What a feast for children! Long, and engrossing. Kids will love it! Wizard!’

But not all reviewers were quite so enthusiastic. ‘A lack of imagination pervades the movie because it so slavishly follows the book,’ said the
New York Times
. ‘The filmmakers, the producers and the studio seem panicked by anything that might feel like a departure from the book – which already feels film-ready – so
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
never takes on a life of its own.’

But even reviewers who didn’t care for the movie still found space to praise Emma’s performance. ‘Ms Watson has the sass and smarts to suggest she might cast a spell of
her own on Harry in the coming years and, one supposes, sequels,’ the paper said in the same November article.

‘I got thrown in the deep end on the first one, but the Harry Potter films have been a pretty amazing acting school,’ Emma told the
Daily Telegraph
when asked about that first role. ‘When I got the part, the only thing I had apparently was some natural acting ability. I didn’t know anything about making a film, and there was so much technically I had to learn and understand.’

Despite her lack of experience, it appeared that Emma Watson had indeed ‘stepped up’ to the role. ‘When I got the part,’ Emma later confessed to the
Sunday Times
, ‘People were like, “Why you?” And I just remember seeing a L’Oréal advert, and coming out with an American accent, “Because I’m worth it.” That was my answer then. My answer now is … I don’t know. I just really
got
her.’

Emma’s ability to ‘get’ Hermione would get only the shortest of breaks: filming on the second instalment of the Potter series was just weeks away. But she was playing her cards close to her chest as far as any further films was concerned. ‘I’m starting the second one in December and I’m not sure about the rest yet,’ she told Jonathan Ross. ‘I’m taking it one film at a time.’

Already, with her every answer, Emma Watson was proving herself to be the model professional. At the end of her interview with Ross, she shook him by the hand and told the presenter, ‘Really nice to meet you.’ This was borne out even further when Emma and her two young co-stars were sent on a US charm offensive on the
chat-show
circuit.

Emma fitted every preconceived idea of what a well-brought-up English girl should look and sound like as she answered the same set of questions over and over again on a series of TV studio sofas. What magic power would you like? ‘I would make myself invisible so I could sneak into concerts and be near rock stars,’ she said. What was the best part of filming? ‘Probably meeting all the new people. It was amazing to meet all the great co-stars we act with.’ Do you have a crush on Daniel or Rupert? ‘No.’ She answered them all – as if she were being asked for the first time – with charm and good grace.