Smart Talk on Harry Potter
No Trelawney in film adaptation of Half-Blood Prince. One wonders how they’ll do Harry’s learning that Snape was the snoop.
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{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
“One wonders how they’ll do Harry’s learning that Snape was the snoop.”
Oh, they’ll probably just cut any scene with that information in favor of one with Snape hitting someone over the head with a book!
I have read that fortunately Snape’s part is more ‘nuanced’ in film 6…
…..so he will probably only gently flick a book across Ron’s bonce!
*sigh* They do this with every movie, don’t they? Just when it seems they are going to get it right, they leave out something crucial. I’m now more worried than ever about Dobby and Kreacher for DH.
(But I personally liked Snape smacking them on the head with a book.
)
Pat
There are a lot of challenges in filming DH.
The biggest one, to my mind, is introducing the hallows plot line while keeping the horcrux plot line in the foreground and keepimg the two distinct. Not even two movies will help with that challenge, as both sets of magical devices would have to occur in both movies.
Another challenge is showing Harry’s internal struggles (hallows vs horcruxes; trust Dumbledore vs don’t trust him) on screen. And getting over the hanging about in tents lightly (i.e. without boring the audience).
Heretical as the thought may be to some, I think that they can do DH without Kreacher. Not without Dobby though – they need it as a marker for Harry’s resolution.
I am a little worried about Fiennes. I’m not sure how committed he is to HP, and might well get into other projects which would preclude him from signing up for HP.
I can see how they can do the film without Kreacher. Some other way could be used to reveal the information about Regulus. Perhaps it’s even better if they don’t use Kreacher since there’s been no character story development with him. No history, that is. We don’t know he betrayed Sirius or anything like that.
Including Dobby would be better, although we haven’t seen him since COS, so there’s also no big film story development with him either. If Dobby suddenly pops back into the movies in the scene at the Malfoy manor, it’s going to be awfully weird, disjointed & not very moving at all, since it’s been so long since we’ve had any contact with him, movie wise.
So, good luck to them. They’ve got quite the job making HBP & especially DH work. Perhaps more coherent & character driven versions will have to wait a few years for when the movies are remade or made into a tv series.
Maybe 30 years from now, somebody will come back and do the series more faithfully. I tend to think this is a byproduct of scriptwriters trying to write a movie as a book is being written — or in this case, pen a movie series while the source material is still being written. I can’t help but wonder how different the movies would have been if they hadn’t been produced virtually simultaneously with the book series.
Oh well…it will give us all something to think about and argue over when we see HBP — “What’d you think about the ‘revelation’ scene?”
revgeorge, you’re right that we haven’t seen Dobby since CoS, so there won’t be too much attachment to him.
Here is a compromise solution for weneedasacrificialelfwhomtheaudienceremembers dilemma.
The fate of Marvolo’s ring/ resurrection stone could be revealed at the end of HBP, through a flashback. I see that Tom Moorcroft will be playing Regulus Black in HBP, so it looks like there will be the opportunity to tie off that loose end. And given the bigger revelations to come, the question of who took Marvolo’s ring from the cave is not as important as it once seemed.
My more heretical suggestion is that for the purposes of the movie plot-line, the characters of Dobby and Kreacher could be combined. So it’s Kreacher who shows up Malfoy manor, and sacrifices himself for Harry and co. He is more recent in the audience’s memory. And for those of us who prefer anti-heroes, the death of a bitter elf redeemed through the power of love and decency is even more touching than the death of an innately decent elf who sacrifices himself to save his friends.
Did I say Marvolo’s ring? I meant, of course, Slytherin’s locket.
It’s that avatar. It’s confusing me.
Ah, but then you lose Kreacher leading the house elves in the final battle for Hogwarts, and I particularly liked that change in him.
You mentioned the ring, though you meant the locket, but about the ring. I’ve heard they aren’t including the Gaunts in HBP, so is Dumbledore just going to get the ring without any of the back story–which in the end is related to the Hallows.
They do have their work cut out for them. They either please the movie only audience and alienate the book lovers, or they somewhat please the book lovers and confuse the heck out of the movie only folks. Personally, I wish they’d realize that their biggest followers are those of us who have read the books at least once, so even those who don’t pour over ever detail will notice when they leave out some of the things that end up being crucial to the plot.
Pat
I think those are all good suggestions. It certainly will be interesting to see how they try to pull it off.
I agree with you, too, Dave, that trying to do the movies fairly contemporaneously with the books has been hard on the writers, perhaps even the actors as well to some extent.
I’m still a little miffed that all of Ron’s good lines always go to Hermione in the movies. I think Grint is a much better actor than Watson & he could pull off both serious Ron & comic relief Ron. Just my perception.
Yeah, the avatar’s are confusing. I do have four eyes in real life, if you count my glasses. And my canine teeth are a bit pronounced. But I don’t have that much hair, since I like to keep it short.
Eeyore - I have heard said or blogged that the Gaunts will be left out too, although I can’t seem to remember an ‘authoritative’ source for that. And it’s strange, because I do remember vividly that there was a closed casting for Merope together with the open calls for Lavender and Young Riddle. I remember so well, because at the time I thought that if it were an open call and I were British that I might have considered auditioning.
Pat, I suspect that the screenwriter does a lot of obsessing about what to leave in and what to omit. HP is not your usual Hollywood bastardization of the original. They’ve been respectful of the author’s suggestions – although I’d love to hear the complete story about that one day. And by and large they have been respectful towards the story, including the details.
That’s not to say that there haven’t been a few sacrifices.
I guess we’re all watching carefully to make sure that the sacrifices don’t go over the line of changing the substantial meaning of the story. I suspect, however, that we (the HP cognoscenti) draw that line at different places. For example, although I do see Grint as a competent actor, I see Hermione and Ron as comprising a single friend-unit, which speaks with two voices (smart/dumb, idealistic/practical, touchy-feely/sensible, serious/funny) So it doesn’t matter to me who says what. Same for Kreacher and Dobby, despite their different character arcs. The same for the Death Eaters,with the exception of Fenrir Greyback (wow, did JKR ever hit the mother-lode of creepy evil there!).
It’d be an interesting exercise to do. Think of HBP and DH as a life-boat. There’s only room for so many characters and plot lines before the whole thing is swamped. Which ones would you cut back on? Which ones would you omit entirely?
Interesting exercise. I’d have to think about the ones for HBP, but I really wouldn’t have missed Grawp in OP–the movie or the book. But too late–we already have Grawp.
And I was quite glad they just had Hagrid give a brief summary of his summer hunting the giants. That was a chapter that I sometimes skip altogether in re-reading–though I like the pun of Karkus’s name.)
I’ll have to think about the others.
I just looked at the cast list for HBP and there are no Gaunts listed, not even Merope. I do remember though that they talked about casting for that part. Perhaps they changed their minds when they decided to put in Regulus instead. Interesting, considering that all we had of him in the book were his mysterious intials on the note at the end. So there’s another change.
Well, we’ll see soon, I guess.
Pat
Pat,
We might be about to get a taste of what Dave and revgeorge, above, were discussing: seeing what the movie series would have looked like if the books weren’t being written contemporaneously (which is a word I’ve always wanted to use!).
The scriptwriter (Steve Kloves) was in a position to have read DH before he finished doing the screenplay for HBP. I suggested at the time that there would be some mad editing and revising going on in view of the revelations of DH (especially about Snape and Dumbledore).
Now imagine that Kloves is suddenly given all of the plot in HBP and DH, and has the freedom to move the details around to where they would have the most dramatic impact. Or where they would provide the most coherent narrative. Depending on if the script was still being revised when the decision to divide HBP into two was made, plot details could have been “chunked” so as to fall in one of three clusters: HBP, DH1 or DH2. I would not be too surprised to see that the order in which events are presented will be different in all three movies than in the two books.
Which is fair, I think. Books and movies don’t tell stories the same way.
But what to make of the missing Merope and her dreadful family, I don’t know. It seems like an essential detail to me: how Voldemort came to be the way he was. I suppose they could cover the content via the dialogue, but that’s not very convincing, especially in film.
Red Rocker said, “I suppose they could cover the content via the dialogue, but that’s not very convincing, especially in film.”
And if Gambon keeps up his uninspiring performance as Dumbledore.
But no matter how they do it, you’re right in that books & movies tell stories differently, so there’s always going to be some disconnect. It’s just how wide of a disconnect we’ll be talking about when they all come out.
It also works the reverse way, too. Try reading the novelization of the Star Wars trilogy, for instance. It just doesn’t really work, because in converting the medium of the films into a book a lot is lost in the translation.
For benefit of fellow gamer, Matthew, it can also be noted that when transferring a book or movie into a role-playing game, a lot can also be lost in translation, making the game hard to play or seem stilted or not true to the source material.
I loved the old Middle Earth Role playing game but it certainly lacked the Tolkienesque flavor at times. Decipher did a better job of capturing that flavor in their LOTR rpg but it was also hard to play. There’s always a trade off somewhere.
So, to connect it back to Potter, a movie that stays too close to the source material will come off as stilted or wooden, one of the complaints against the first two films. Although I did love them, especially COS. Or else they’re start straying too far from the source material & you’ll get a) either a picture bearing no resemblance to the book or b) a movie that seems disjointed & incoherent, like GOF. OOTP may have suffered from that a little bit, but I think mainly because there’s was so much stuff in the book that the plot line in the movie had to be cut down to bare bones.
I think that so far POA has come closest to having the right mix of staying close to the source material but also adapting it into a movie story. Despite the talking shrunken heads…
revgeorge,
That’s true. I liked MERP but eventually gave it up because I found it was too hard to keep from the main LOTR story.
I’ve read some Star Wars short stories and they worked pretty well for me. But I thought the Knights of the old Republic games were excellent, both in content and tone. Some of the best computer RPG’s ever developed.
My favorite is PoA as well. And I love PoA because of its story, pace and its look. Which has to be a combination of screenwriter, direction and cinematography
These are the screenwriter / director / cinematographer combos for HP 1-7
Steve Kloves / Chris Columbus / John Seale: PS
Steve Kloves/ Chris Columbus /Roger Pratt: CoS
Steve Kloves/ Alfonso Cuaron / Michael Seresin : PoA
Steve Kloves / Mike Newell / Roger Pratt : GoF
Michael Goldenberg / David Yates / Slawomir Idziak : OotP
Steve Kloves / David Yates /Bruno Delbonnel : HBP
Steve Kloves / David Yates / ? : DH1
Steve Kloves has done all but one screenplays. So while he’s done a pretty good job, he can’t be responsible for the variations in quality. I suspect it’s a combination of direction and cinematography. We’ll see what kind of look Delbonnel brings to the HBP.
Order is my favorite of the films, and I think writing played a role in that. I wasn’t thrilled with every choice, but I thought it was overall better than Kloves.
Cuaron/Seresin were geniuses at producing a beautiful visual film.