Mike Newell is known for drawing great performances from large, diverse casts, be it the quirky gang of friends from Four Weddings and a Funeral or the free-spirited Wellesley girls of Mona Lisa Smile. "I'm much happier with that," says Newell, referring to working with ensemble casts. "I think I would feel rather nervous if I had only one or two big acts to take care of and the work was partly kind of sweeping the grass away from their feet as they went forward."
Who better, then, to take on the sprawling cast of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth film in the phenomenally successful film franchise based on J.K. Rowling's best-selling books? In Goblet, young wizard Harry Potter finds himself competing in the Triwizard Tournament, an exciting and dangerous magical competition featuring three of the wizarding world's most prestigious schools. In the meantime, Harry and best friends Ron and Hermione start to experience all the marks of teen angst, complete with hormones, crushes, and adolescent awkwardness.
Given that Potter's legions of die-hard fans are passionate about seeing the beloved characters and story lines from Rowling's books properly transferred to the screen, the project came with no small amount of baggage. "I was always worried about the passion of the fans," admits Newell. "We were shown the dialogue from a chatroom in which I think about six girls were chatting in terms of absolute outrage that we had changed the color of Hermione's ball dress from blue, as in the book, to pink, as in the film. So it's a factor, and I take it seriously-I'm not belittling that. Those guys are the audience."
Newell, who succeeds helmers Chris Columbus and Alfonso Cuarè´¸n on the franchise, says he thought constantly about what the fans would require. "I think I never really got to the end of my private discussion with myself about the authenticity of what I was going to do," he says. "What I said to myself was that the only way to get this into single-movie length-which I believed would be the only way of people really enjoying it-was if you had a spine to it."
He ultimately decided that the spine should involve Harry's nemesis, the evil wizard Voldemort, who poses a new threat in this installment. "It came to me that the spine absolutely had to be Voldemort and the kind of thriller that is, 'Will Voldemort get his powers back or not? Will he get Harry into his clutches or not?'" says Newell. "And what you have is classic thriller form: The bad guy knows everything in the beginning, and the good guy knows nothing at all. And then little by little by little, the plaster comes off the good guy's eyes until he realizes just what bad trouble he is in. That's a good clear shape, and you can hang a lot off that."
Fiery Casting
The Goblet of Fire features much of the cast from the first three films, including Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson as the central trio of Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Still, this particular Potter also introduces a number of new key characters. Newell, who was heavily involved in the casting process, hired his dear friend Mary Selway (Gosford Park, Vanity Fair) to serve as casting director, and massive open calls for many of the children's parts were held in England, where much of the film was shot. (Selway passed away in 2004.) "A lot of what [the casting people] did was to write to the drama teachers at the various schools with whom they had had good fortune before," says Newell. "But then, simply to cover the waterfront, just to make sure that they weren't going to lose out, they put advertisements in the various ethnic papers--so the Chinese papers carried our advertisement, the Bengali papers carried our advertisement, and so on. And out of the drama teachers came relatively few, [but] out of the newspaper advertisements came this great tide of people, which simply is a testament to the franchise, to Harry Potter. I don't think they would have been like that on any other project." Even the smallest parts, such as a young Hogwarts student who brings a package to Ron, drew huge crowds of hopefuls.
Many of the young actors who were hired, says Newell, had little or no acting background. For example Katie Leung, a young Scot, had no prior acting experience when she responded to the open call and beat out thousands of girls for the coveted part of Harry's love interest, Cho Chang. Bulgarian-born Stanislav Ianevski, who plays stoic Triwizard Tournament competitor Viktor Krum, was discovered when casting director Fiona Weir visited his British boarding school. "They're amazing," says Newell of his young actors. "When the casting directors first spoke to [Ianevski], he thought that...it was just some kind of practical joke, so he didn't turn up [at the audition]. It was only when they went to [his] school for the third time did he realize it was for real."
The fourth Potter also required several adult actors for major new roles--most notably Brendan Gleeson, who all but steals the film as grizzled Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher Mad-Eye Moody, and Ralph Fiennes as nefarious Lord Voldemort. Newell had both actors in mind from very early on.
"I hadn't worked with Ralph before, but he and I had come close to working together many times, and we knew one another pretty well," says Newell. "Ralph has at least two major sides to him, one of which is a kind of scatty kindness--a sort of sweetness about him. Oscar and Lucinda leaps to mind. But on the other hand, he also has the ability to be entirely cold and very disturbingly cold, because the way that he acts in these moments, you feel that there's something missing in him--he is truly a psychopath, there's something not there. I wanted somebody who didn't have a heart, so I was immediately led to Ralph, and of course that's what Spielberg saw [for] Schindler's List--I'm sure it was the same thing."
As for Gleeson, Newell worked with the actor in 1992's Into the West and has followed his career ever since. Two major qualities drew him to Gleeson for this particular role. "I wanted [Lee Marvin]; I wanted a big old drunken wreck of a gunfighter," he says. "[Gleeson is] actually young for that, but I'd worked with him before, and I reckoned he'd be able to get there, and I'd seen a John Boorman film about four years ago called The General where he plays a very big-deal criminal mastermind in Dublin in which he was just magnificent. And so in the end, those two things--the criminal and the kind of wrecked gunfighter--were the things that led me his way."
Class System
Newell seems to have a natural affinity for his actors and likes to invest time in preparing with them for a film. He held two weeks of acting school for the younger Potter cast members to help integrate the newcomers with the veterans. "I was very anxious, because 50 percent of the cast had done it before and 50 percent hadn't," he says. "And what I didn't want to happen, which indeed did happen to begin with, was that the nonregulars simply stood around with their mouths open in awe at the stellar qualities of the regulars. That wasn't something that the regular kids were inviting--all of them, and it really is true, it's remarkable, but all of them are very, very much not starry. But nonetheless, of course, the other kids took them for that. So what I had to do was to break down that barrier between them, so we had improvisations and we had games and we had dancing and we had competitions and bits and pieces of acting, but nothing to do with the script at all. By the end of two weeks, they just had kind of welded into a team, and there was no problem like that anymore."
Is this level of preparation something he likes to have on all his films? "I try to," he says. "If you don't do that kind of stuff, then really, what you want to do is to throw the whole of the first week away and start again, because it takes that long for people to lose their inhibitions and be able to properly trust their instincts and all that stuff that makes good onscreen acting. If you don't have it, then it makes life an awful lot more difficult. So I try each time for that."