Emma Watson (8 page)

Of the trio, Emma was the most difficult to pin down in terms of her future plans. ‘I love art. I love being on stage, singing, dancing,’ she told
The Times
. ‘So even if I don’t end up acting, maybe I’ll try screenwriting, whatever gets thrown at me.’ One thing she was sure about: the
serious-minded
, career-driven path taken by her parents was something that held no interest for her. ‘I can’t really see myself in an office,’ she said.

I
n November 2004, the nature of Emma Watson’s fame came full circle. In London’s Oxford Street, thousands of children stood in the cold waiting for a glimpse of the teenage actress as she switched on this shopping Mecca’s Christmas lights. With a woolly scarf to keep her warm – purple, of course – Emma did the honours along with the athletes there to promote London’s bid for the 2012 Olympic Games and popera stars Il Divo. Emma was there essentially to plug the DVD release of
Prisoner of Azkaban.
The podium was festooned with images from the DVD cover and the lights had a Potter theme. She also took the trouble to tell the crowd she would really like a candy-floss machine for Christmas.

The event stirred memories of being in the same street eight years earlier, but that time Emma was in the crowd and it was her pop heroines who had been the guests
of honour. ‘I’ve wanted to do it ever since I was very young and I saw the Spice Girls do it,’ she told the BBC. ‘I love Oxford Street. I’ve come here most Christmases because I love the lights and all the beautiful displays in all the shops.’

For a teenager who talked constantly about the ‘girl power’ demonstrated by the character of Hermione Granger, it must have brought home how much things had changed, flicking the same switch the Spice Girls had done when she was just five. It clearly made a profound impact on her. Despite all the other astonishing experiences that had come her way, she would later describe the switch-on as the highlight of her year. ‘I will remember that for the rest of my life,’ she said.

Emma spent the winter taking in another new experience – skiing. It was something she’d wanted to do for some time, but, as with so many things in her young life, she was prevented from doing so because of contractual obligations to the Potter franchise. However, because of the way the next film had been scheduled, for the first time since she was nine, Emma had a temporary taste of freedom, as she explained to showbiz writer Maria Morreale: ‘The brilliant thing is that this year, because of the big enough gap between the third and the fourth [films], it would mean that if I did break my leg I’d be all right before we started filming again.’

A broken limb clearly wasn’t causing her any sleepless nights, but her forthcoming exams clearly were: ‘I looked at a GCSE book the other day and I was like, “Oh my God, I’m never going to pass!” It’s just like it goes on for
ever and ever and ever, and the amount of work is a bit like,
aagh
!’

To make things worse for her, the split-schooling schedule of between being educated on set and taking classes at Headington School was causing some confusion – she didn’t actually know what subjects she was taking. ‘I’m not actually really sure,’ she said. ‘I think you have to do maths; you have to do physics, chemistry, biology. I think you have to take English, and I think you have to take French. And then I’ve got stuff like Latin, Spanish, geography, history.’

After her holiday, Emma returned – with both legs thankfully intact – to start work on the next instalment of the franchise,
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
. J. K. Rowling’s book of the same name had been released in summer 2000 with a barrage of PR hoopla, including a full-size Hogwarts Express that took Rowling on a promotional tour of Britain.

In Book Four, Harry is given a series of seemingly impossible tasks to carry out as part of the Triwizard Tournament, a competition between wizarding schools that he has been entered into initially without his knowledge. Harry’s name is produced out of the Goblet of Fire, despite being too young to enter. He finally comes face to face with ‘He Who Must Not Be Named’, Lord Voldemort, during the final challenge, resulting in the murder of one of the key characters, Cedric Diggory. Much was made on the book’s release about this impending death, causing great concern among young readers that one of the main three characters was about to make a
violent exit. The story itself had been the most difficult for Rowling to conjure up. ‘Book Four nearly caused me a nervous breakdown,’ Rowling told the
Daily Mirror
. ‘I sailed straight into the writing of it, having just finished
Azkaban
. I had written what I thought at the time was half the book – it turns out now to have been about a third. And I realised there was this big hole in the middle of the plot and I had to go back and unpick and redo. That’s part of the reason it’s longer than I thought it was going to be. On Book Four I was working ten-hour days.’

Those ten-hour days produced a 636-page monster of a book – nearly 100 more in the US edition (because of typographical and design considerations). It was so big that the producers first investigated the possibility of splitting it into two films. ‘We went through the process of thinking about that, of thinking, Was there enough here for two films?’ producer David Heyman told
Empire
magazine. ‘Where would you break this if you were to do two films? Were there two coherent stories within it? We came to the conclusion that it would work very well as one film.’

The next problem was finding a new director. Alfonso Cuarón had decided that one film was enough. His replacement was Mike Newell, director of films such as
Four Weddings and Funeral, Dance with a Stranger
and
Donnie Brasco
. Newell would be the first British director of this most British of stories. ‘It was very daunting to start with,’ Newell later told the BBC. ‘The book is as big as a house brick and one is unsure how to attack it. Little by little you lose your terror of it.’

Producer David Heyman recalled, ‘I thought it would be nice to have a British director. This book is the funniest, or has the potential to be the funniest, and Mike had shown in
Four Weddings
a great sense of humour. There is also a thriller aspect to this, and, when you look at
Donnie Brasco
and the darkness of
Dance with a Stranger
, he has ability there. And he had worked with children. Those were the governing reasons.’

‘I have a lot of respect for Mike,’ Emma told the BBC’s
Newsround
when asked about the new director. ‘I genuinely think he’s brilliant. He’s so creative and he’s so passionate about making this the best film, and he won’t settle for anything else.’

With a new director came new techniques that the young performers had to adapt to. Mike Newell’s idea of breaking the ice among the young stars caused a few raised eyebrows – the director decided that wrestling was the best way forward. ‘I didn’t want them to think of me as an authority figure,’ he explained to journalists at a press conference to launch the finished film. ‘They had grown up to the point where they had a lot to give. So I had a fight with one of the Weasley twins in a bid to lose my dignity. They wouldn’t see me as an authority figure if I was rolling around in the dust with a 17-year-old!’

Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘write an essay about your character’ idea went out of the window and in came improvisational workshops. A ‘bonding week’ was organised so that new cast members could integrate with the existing young team. ‘Mike Newell brought all of the actors together and asked us to improvise love scenes,’ Emma later told
Bravo
. ‘I was
appalled. I was so humiliated, but then I saw that everyone else made a fool of themselves. Now I am not afraid to make a fool of myself.’

Among the new arrivals who were sent to make fools of themselves alongside Emma and friends was 18-year-old Robert Pattinson, a London-born model and actor who was just starting out on his career when he got the call about playing the role of Cedric Diggory. ‘I was shooting another film in South Africa during the entire period of the casting process for
Goblet of Fire
[the rather silly, made-for German-TV dragon-slayer ‘epic’
Sword of Xanten
]. The casting agent had contacted my agent about seeing me for Cedric. Basically, I was able to get a meeting with Mike Newell and two of the casting directors the day before I left for South Africa to shoot this other movie. It was before anyone else had been seen for the other parts, so it was quite a cool position to be in. They did the rest of the casting for it afterwards. Then, the day I returned from South Africa, I got the call-back and they told me in the audition that I had got the part.’

Pattinson’s first task was to muck in with the improvisational tasks that he and the other teen stars had been set. He was immediately impressed by Emma Watson: ‘Emma just
does it
,’ he later told the IESB movie website. ‘She’s an
actress
and she always has been. She’s just an incredibly intelligent young person. Very impressive.’

Pattinson’s worldwide fame with the
Twilight
films was still three years away, but Emma spotted that he was the total movie-star package from that first meeting during bonding week. ‘He was always very intelligent, nice,
talented, good-looking,’ she later explained to MTV. ‘He kinda had everything
there
.’

Daniel Radcliffe would later describe the atmosphere on set among the teenage actors at this time as ‘unbelievably horny’. He told
Esquire
magazine, ‘There was a period when we were the only boys and girls any of us knew. And so, you know, we were all unbelievably horny from about the third film to probably about the end of the fifth; then it all settled down. But, God, for a few years … There was never anybody I fancied that much in the cast, though the conspiracy theorists always like to say that me and Emma are dating. We know it’d be everything the fans ever wanted. I’m sorry, guys, it’s not happening. It’s just not. There’s something really incestuous about the idea of it.’

By way of response to Radcliffe’s comments, Emma pointed out that they were far from being the only boys she saw: there were plenty of them in and around Oxford. Radcliffe’s comments would be pounced upon as yet another hint or clue that there was something more than friendship between the young stars. ‘Dan Radcliffe is very charming, and very, very sweet,’ she said. ‘We’ve been handling this situation for six years now. Everyone has been going, “Are you and Dan together?” Because it doesn’t happen in the books, everyone is so desperate for it to happen in real life that any opportunity to come up with a story about it is taken.’

As ever, the pool of acting talent involved in the Potter world was deepened with yet more, established performers joining the team for the new film. Among them were Dublin-born actor Brendan Gleeson as new Defence
Against the Dark Arts teacher Alastor ‘Mad Eye’ Moody and Ralph Fiennes as Lord Voldemort. ‘Ralph Fiennes was certainly on my wish list from the first moment we started working on Potter,’ producer Heyman told
Premiere
magazine. ‘If it is ever not possible, generally it is to do with availability. These are long shoots, and sometimes we need actors for long periods of time and they have other commitments – they do theatre as well. We have been very lucky. I don’t think Ralph was a fan of the books in that sense. He is a thoughtful and considered man, he read and he thought and went through the part with Mike and after that meeting he was on board. They feel very comfortable with each other and how the interpretation of Voldemort should be. Then it was just about making a deal. That is a natural process.’

Fiennes had form in playing evil characters: the serial killer the Tooth Fairy in
Red Dragon
and Nazi commandant Amon Göth in Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust drama
Schindler’s List
. For
Goblet of Fire
what was required was total evil. ‘That was one of the blessings of a part like this, where you’re meant to be playing the distillation of evil, whatever that is. Which can be anything, so I got a lot of takes. I think the one thing, if anything, was a sort of question of unpredictability in him, so no one quite knows what he’s gonna do next or say next. Which I hope makes him slightly sort of dangerous.’

There was also the matter of making Fiennes look like an evil, noseless Dark Lord. ‘The shaved head, the weird translucent skin – we wanted it to be simple, with a simple
gown,’ Fiennes later told the TV show
Inside the Actors Studio
. ‘Then the question of the nose came up. I was a bit neurotic about whether it would work or not. When I saw it, I was very happy with it.’

Miranda Richardson was cast as another dangerous character, conniving journalist Rita Skeeter, the
Daily Prophet
’s most poisonous hack with a suspiciously inside track on all things Potter-related. Skeeter paints a picture of Hermione in her articles as a glorified wizard groupie: she is ‘plain but ambitious’.

Richardson had worked with Mike Newell before on
Dance with a Stranger
and
Enchanted April
. But there was one other role that Richardson had tackled that could have caused problems for her when she arrived on set. In 2003, Richardson had taken part in a Harry Potter spoof for Comic Relief called
Harry Potter and the Secret Chamberpot of Azerbaijan
. During the pitiless send-up, Jennifer Saunders played a ludicrously gurning Rupert Grint, Dawn French was an unfeasibly large-chested Daniel Radcliffe and Basil Brush was Dobby. Richardson was Emma Watson, over-enunciating her way through an interview. ‘A lot of people think I must be really like my character,’ lisps Richardson in a curly Hermione wig. ‘But I’m not. It’s different. That’s acting. Hermione’s certainly not like me.’

Cut to Richardson as Hermione – behaving
exactly
the same as Richardson as Emma.

When she turned up for her first day on set as Rita Skeeter, Richardson was worried that the young actress might have taken offence. ‘I was a bit nervous of Emma,’
Richardson told journalist Jeff Dawson in 2005. ‘I thought she might say, “I’m not like that!”’

Emma had the good grace not to make a scene; it could have been worse if the uncensored version of the Comic Relief sketch had gone out: “My last line was, “Are you looking at my Snitch?’” Richardson recalled. ‘But they wouldn’t let it go out on the air, and I was very sad about that.’

Filming for Movie Number Four took place at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, Beachy Head in East Sussex and Evanton near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands. As ever, Harry Potter headquarters at Leavesden Studios was a home from home. Along with existing sets featuring the Great Hall, the Quidditch stadium and the wizarding village of Hogsmeade, a major addition to the set was a giant water tank – believed to be the biggest in Europe – built especially for underwater fight sequences with the ‘merpeople’.