This past week the new addition to the many magical pieces of J.K. Rowling’s legacy, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” held their NYC junket.
If you’re not familiar with the genius work of J.K. Rowling here is a bit of info to catch you up. She is the amazing author behind the entire Harry Potter series and that should be enough to have your jaw drop.
This movie is one of five additions that she plans to add to her wizarding world. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, directed by David Yates, is a drama fantasy meant to take place years before we are introduced to Harry Potter. It takes place in 1926 New York City when something mysterious is leaving a path of destruction in the streets and is near exposing the wizarding community. In the mist of the chaos young Newt Scamander, a Magizoologist, comes to NYC to capture any loose creatures. Disaster strikes when No-Maj (non magical human being) Jacob Kowalski accidentally releases some of Newt’s creatures. Newt and Jacob then band together with former Auror, Tina and her sister Queenie. The unlikely group face the odds as the search for the creatures end up being harder than they imagines while also being branded as fugitives.
We got the chance to sit down with director David Yates and producer David Heyman as they talk about working with J.K. Rowling, casting and more!
Don’t forget Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them comes out November 18!
I wanted to hear from your perspective how did you find out and when did you hear from Jo about this and were you excited to just dive back in again, because we’re going to have about four more I hear?
David Yates: I know. Well Dave sent me the script, he said, “Do you want to read it?” I said, “You bet.” I was in the South of France, I was in a place called Eze, which overlooks the Mediterranean, it’s the most beautiful place in the world, I would recommend it. That’s where I opened the first page, and it blew me away, it was so, even the first draft was so lyrical and whimsical and magical. Subsequently we went on to go through many drafts to get to the film that we presented to you guys this week. The big change I guess was the fact that we weren’t adapting books, we weren’t sort of bridging books, we weren’t sort of echoing what existed previously, we were going straight to the core face working with Jo. There’s something really intoxicating about that prospect, to be there with her as she pulled out this stuff. That was exciting, and it was nice to work with everybody that we’d been with before, so it was, yeah, it was a no-brainer, as they say.
What topic where you either most excited to explore in this movie or that you’re most excited to explore in the future ones?
David Yates: I adored Newt, his sort of nuttiness, the fact that he was the only Magizoologist in the world was really appealing. I just liked the idea that this was, it felt familiar in some ways, but very fresh in others, and I liked the sort of political aspect of the story, with a small P. The characters, I fell in love with, all the characters were delightful, fundamentally. It was all really fun.
Now what were some of the things that you had documented, but somehow did not make it in the final cut, but you still enjoyed documenting?
David Yates: Well we’ve got lots of stuff, they’ll be on a DVD at some point I believe. We were just talking about a beautiful scene with Jacob, and he hasn’t got his loan at the bank, and he comes back to his apartment, and his girlfriend, Mildred, is waiting. Mildred says, “Did you get your loan? Did you get your loan?” Jacob says, “No, I didn’t get my loan,” and she says, “Well, look, you’ve got to take this back,” and she takes her ring off, gives it to him, and she says, “I thought you were going to get a bakery,” and she walks off. It’s the most beautiful scene, tender and very funny, but in the movie, as we watched it, we just felt it was, you didn’t need a reason to fall in love with Jacob. Out of context, when you see it on the DVD, you’re going to go, “Why did you take that out?” It actually felt really that we were already there with Jacob, and there’s lots of scenes like that. There’s a great lovely song that we got Alison to write, an “Over the Morning” song, and she sings it with Katherine in front of the boys.
David Heyman: It’s a good song, it’s good song.
David Yates: Then as they sing it, the boys kind of slowly fall in love with them. We took that out, why did we do that! They’re all good scenes, but again, out of context-
There’s probably more-
David Yates: There’s more.
David Heyman: More that we cut out on this one than on any of the Potters. We’re not trying to fuel DVD sales, because I’m not sure how big DVD’s sales are these days, but more it’s just, it was really about the story and about the best way to tell this story. The film would have been lovely with them in, it would have been, but the scene, for example the old “Over the Morning” song is when they’re down, when they all go down into the case. At that point in the story there’s all this stuff going on outside, and they’ve got to go … and why are they taking a honeymoon to sing a song? We wanted to sort of propel the story into the next
This is also the first time you’ve worked in New York for the Potterverse. Can you speak about that experience?
David Yates: We came here with Stuart Craig, our production designer. We had a lovely couple of weeks going around and seeing what we wanted to feature. It’s lovely just coming to America that was the big, when the script arrived, that was what was most exciting. It was suddenly you were taking this world and Jo had conceived of this country shift and time shift, and all of that, and that made it all feel very vital. We considered filming here, but it was so much easier just to go back to England and create the world, the period world.
David Heyman: Even though the Woolworth Building is next door.
David Yates: It’s next door.
David Heyman: It’s hard to find 1926 New York and the scale or the breadth. We actually constructed huge portions of it in glamorous Leavesden, near Watford, and we used the magic of visual effects to extend it.
David Yates: To extend it. I walked past the Woolworth Building at lunchtime, I went for a walk to clear my head, and I was walking past it, looking at it, I thought, “Our Woolworth, our building is better than this one.” I thought, “Stuart’s done a better job.”
David Heyman: Stuart Craig, there’s a rather well-known library in England called the Bodleian, it’s in Oxford, and it’s one of the great libraries, five hundred years-old, it’s glorious. We filmed there in the first Harry Potter, and because for budgetary reasons in part, Stuart said, “Dammit, I could have built this better.” He has great humility, but he also, the ability to tailor things to our and his and David’s needs is one of the great freedoms you have when you build.
What did you kind of see specifically in Eddie Redmayne that made you convinced that he could lead a film like this?
David Yates: I love his Britishness, and he’s a pure Brit in many ways, and I love his shape, he’s got this lovely kind of very fine shape. When we were developing the movie I kept seeing because of the period, the ’20s I guess, these sort of Chaplinesque, Keatonesque figures in my head. I wanted to really enjoy the physicality of the characters in a way that felt very kind of iconic. Eddie’s shape is really beautiful, but primarily he’s a really gifted actor and he has enormous humanity. Everything I’ve seen him do practically, his humanity and his soul very present, and I love that. I think you immediately warm to him, and given that the character is so nutty and awkward, and a bit kind of cantankerous sometimes and socially not very adapt, we needed someone who could pull that off in a way that was very winning, and Eddie just seemed like the right choice. Yeah.
David Heyman: He fits very well into the 1926, he can fit into any time, but he sits well in period. When you think about what’s this person doing here?
What made you think to cast Johnny Depp?
David Yates: When you think of all the actors who are kind of fearless, who are real artists, who in their career have created characters that have become kind of iconic part of our culture, there’s a very short list. You think of an actor who’s going to sort of come to something like this with real ambition, a fierce ambition, and Johnny just felt like a really natural fit for that, and there’s a big pair of shoes to fill. We were all very excited about him coming aboard actually … I cast Eddie and Katherine, and we cast those actors because they were all brilliant at their roles. We cast Johnny on the same basis, the same rules applied, “Will he really do something really interesting with this character?” We believe he will.
One thing that I did read about Newt is that he has all theses beasts in the suitcase and somehow that sort of like licks his wounds, because ever since they mentioned that he was thrown out of Hogwarts, he seemed somehow emotionally incomplete. Now do you feel as of that little missing piece in Newt, is he going to find it somewhere in Hogwarts or could possibly find that in Hogwarts?
David Yates: Do you know what, it’s a really insightful [observation], there is a missing piece to Newt, and he does take refuge in the case with the beasts and all of that. I think, I don’t know if anything will ever put that piece back.
David Heyman: Life’s not like that.
David Yates: Life’s not quite like that, you’ll never quite fulfill a classic three act structure and come out feeling happy at the end.
Right.
David Yates: I think, Hogwarts kind of features a little bit going forward, but not necessarily to sort of make Newt complete.
We got a hint of Newt’s relationship with Anita going forward, and I was curious to know, as much as you can share, are we going to explore their relationship in more depth?
David Yates: Yes. Anita comes into the second movie, she’s a quite complicated woman. A little damaged and confused, and Newt is absolutely in love with her, so she has a kind of power over him. Yeah, she’s a kind of tragic figure in a way, so we will see a bit more of her in the second movie.
Zoë Kravitz will play that role.
David Yates: She’s great, she’s really wonderful. Yeah.
What was it like working with J.K. as she was adapting, obviously this is her first screenwriting credit, what was that process like with her?
David Yates: She was prolific, a real workaholic, and she is prolific and a real workaholic. Some screenwriters you work with, you take so much time, and you wait so long to get something, whereas Jo is unstoppable. Last week I was, I said to her, “We’re working on the second script to the movie,” and I said, “Let’s just take a pause, distill this story down to twelve pages, just the beats, the scaffolding, the architecture, just to give us all some perspective, a new perspective on where we’re going.” Three days later she sent a hundred and two pages. I was like, “Oh, stop.” That’s kind of Jo, she can’t stop pouring this material out. The biggest challenge was tonally getting everything right. Her first draft was quite young and innocent, so it was very whimsical and beautifully lyrical, and it was delightful, but very kind of, you sort of felt, it just felt very sort of young. You’re struggling to find this sort of what it was fundamentally about, and that was her exploring, and most, and so much of that still exists in the movie, it’s still there, it’s still present. Then the next chapter, a little too dark, but fundamentally once she found the story that she really wanted to tell passionately, which centers on Credence ultimately, and she flew. She admitted herself, it was a steep learning curve to kind of explore the screenplay, but she’s always ahead of us all. We give her notes and she gets it all very quickly, and then she, we’re all struggling to keep up.
David Heyman: David said sometimes it takes longer for him to write his notes, that for her to deliver the rewrite.
David Yates: It’s like you’re doing notes, “Whoa, there’s a new rewrite. Oh, great.” She’s phenomenal, and she’s open and she’s gracious, and she’s ambitious. When she was writing the first screenplay she said, “Oh, this is tough, doing this. I think I’ll only do one and I’ll arc out the story and someone else can write the second one.” When we got to the end of the process and she was really thrilled I think with where the screenplay ended up. Even though it was tough getting there, she said, “Right, I’m going to write the second one.” Then while she’s been writing the second one, she said, “You know what, I’m going to write five of these things.” She’s kind of like having, I think having found the process kind of challenging to begin with, and then she found her feet, and then she started to walk and then she started to run, and now she’s really sprinting, and we can’t stop her.
Did that take you by surprise, when she kind of like said about the five?
David Yates: It’s purely based on her, she’s writing the second screenplay, all these ideas keep coming about where the characters can go, how the story can arc out up to. Yeah, it took us by surprise.
David Heyman: A happy surprise.