Interview with David Heyman, Steve Kloves, Mark Radcliffe, Alfonso Cuaron, and Jo Rowling

Interesting facts and notes

Stuart Craig: This was a map of the world. This drawing is Jo Rowling's drawing, that she executed in just a few minutes. As you see, it has all the principle ingredients. The Dark Forest is here, the Whomping Willow, the Quidditch Pitch, Hogwarts Castle itself. The Black Lake is there, the perimeter road, Hogsmeade Village. She had a very, very exact and precise understanding of her world and her creation. She knew exactly the relationship between all of the elements, she was able to give it to us - and that became our Bible.

Alfonso Cuaron: We needed a place where the kids could see the execution of Buckbeak, and we thought about having a graveyard. And we consulted Jo about it and she said "No, the graveyard is not there," and I said "Why?" And then she gave me the whole explanation of why the graveyard cannot b there, because it's in a different place of the castle. Because it's going to play...and she knows her thing, she knows exactly what's going to happen later. And once I remember having little people in some storyboards, playing some keyboards and an organ in the Great Hall. And Jo said "No, there are no little people in this universe." I said "Yes, it's like..." she says, "Yes, lovely image, but they don't make sense in this universe."

Jo Rowling: Alfonso had good intuition about what would and wouldn't work. He's put things in the film that, without knowing it, foreshadow things that are going to happen in the final two books. So I really got goosebumps when I saw a couple of those things, and I thought people are going to look back on the film and think those were put in deliberately as clues.

Steve Kloves: Jo wants the movies to be faithful to the books, on the other hand, she realizes that they're completely different mediums. To be entirely faithful, these movies would be sixteen hours long.