HBO's Harry Potter Series: Reading the Tea Leaves

0:05 Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. Now, have you been watching the growing, I suppose they're like tidbits and trail to get our appetites whetted for the new Harry Potter TV series, which HBO are creating with Warner Brothers, which will be coming out on Christmas Day? As someone who raised children during the initial run of the Harry Potter books and films, remembering the huge excitement that came with each publication of each book, plus the excitement of going to see the films as a family, I've been watching this with interest.

0:58 In some ways, it's It seems very near, very quick for me that they have decided to do this. But then I'm reminded it's actually 25 years. Well, not since the last one, but since the first one came out as a film. So that's a quarter of a century. So you can see why the decision has been made to do this. There is clearly a financial reason. It's going to be a winner. It's one of those properties which everybody will, well, not everybody, but a lot of people will go to because they already know it. It's similar in that way to... doing a Spider-Man film or a Lord of the Rings, you can assure a certain following.

1:43 So what are the tea leaves telling us in Divination? Well, I think the latest trailer, which came out just a few days ago, is interesting because it seems to me there's an interesting shift. I don't know. The other things I'd been seeing about it felt like it was pretty similar to the original film. So that raised the question of why do it? I think there is a big tonal shift, which I've noticed, which is it does feel as though because they have a lot of money to spend on this, they can afford to move out of that feeling of it being in a studio and it feels like it's more in a natural world.

2:27 So you'll have much more of a sense of the real muggle world, which you only glimpse from time to time in the films and the natural quality. world around Hogwarts will feel like, a bit more like it did in the first film when they were doing a lot of location filming. For all sorts of reasons, later in the series, they moved into studios where things were more controlled, like, for example, the forest, the old forest, as far as I can remember, was pretty much always a studio set, but it certainly felt like it. So I'm looking forward to seeing this step into actually making it feel as real as the world you imagine when you're reading the books.

3:12 The other thing I've noticed, which I welcome, is that the children seem, from the little glimpses we're getting, to be from the get-go, acting more like children, more natural. There was a definite time of getting used to the craft of acting, which the original three actors, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, and of course, Harry Potter himself, Daniel Radcliffe, So the new team of actors, that's Dominic McLoughlin, who is our Harry Potter, Arabella Stanton, Hermione Granger.

3:53 She also plays the voice of the younger Hermione Granger in the full cast editions. So I feel as though I'm already quite used to her. And then Alistair Stout as Ron Weasley. By the way, his surname, Stout, seems such a Weasley name. You can see him already in the Wizarding World. Anyway, it seems fun that they are able to relax together more like children rather than delivering lines. I think that maybe they're choosing the best bits, but that is perhaps as a result of lessons learned. They saw what it took to get... the three in the cast who actually worked really well together, and they did.

4:33 But admittedly, they all say that when they were first on the set of the first film way back at the beginning of the 2000s, they were all learning their craft. And it seems as though there's been some good, I suppose, training and relaxation techniques going on on set. Perhaps there's also the fact that they're now... setting it up so the young people are living together in a school situation. So there'll be a very interesting, make a good book, wouldn't it? The kind of school within the magic school, the real school and the magic school dynamics going on, which I'm sure will come out in the making of and later exposes.

5:18 Anyway, I'm really hoping that Dominic Arabella and Alistair are... able to grow up, secure and learn their craft, but they seem to be making a good start and let's hope the press leaves them alone and let them just be actors. Anyway, so I'm encouraged by the way the But there is something really interesting going on as well, isn't there? Which is, if you remember, those of you who are around, when we were following the books and the films, we didn't know what was going to happen to Snape. You may have had your pet theories. You didn't know what was going to happen to Fred and George Weasley.

6:00 You knew that some people might die because J.K. Rowling didn't shy away from killing off characters like Cedric Diggory. But you didn't know who. This time, the full story arc is complete. We know what's going to happen. And I saw an interview with David Heyman on the Harry Potter podcast run by HBO. But he points out that it's a very different experience this time. Even when he was making... David Heyman is the producer. He's also the man behind such things as Paddington. I think he's also involved somewhere in James Bond, so that guy is getting around quite a bit.

6:42 But he is an extremely good and sound British producer with a real good grasp of Britishness of the piece. Anyway, he was saying that knowing that the fate of the characters means it's a very different experience for him. And of course, the audience, the grown-up audience, will know as well. So they're going to have to think how that changes performances and the choice of how they show performance. Snape as they go along. Snape is played by Papa Esedew, who of course is a black actor.

7:25 So it's going to already be a good sort of shift away from what you think of the wonderful Alan Rickman. I think that's a good choice because whereas some other actors seem to be physically within a similar level. group. So for example, I would say that Nick Frost as Rubis Hagrid isn't a million miles away from Robbie Coltrane, another very beloved actor who has left us. I think it's a good idea to shift Snape character because I think it will add a new, more youthful Snape that we're going Anyway, I'm sort of okay with all of that because I think you need to shake it out.

8:12 But I'd actually be in favor, this is really what I'm talking about here, in favor of big changes happening. Because otherwise, you might as well just go and watch the original films. Clearly, the visuals follow the same whimsy of the films, the kind of world that Chris Columbus established for the first film, which has followed through the various iterations of directors. But what they seem to have done this time is they know that they have a very big budget. So everything is expanded. The details are bigger. It reminds me a bit more of the design ethic that Peter Jackson brought to the Lord of the Rings film, that places now are contiguous.

8:56 They connect to each other. Diagon Alley has less of a set feel. Yeah. It feels more of a street in London, the back streets of London somewhere. So I think that will be very pleasing. Of course, it is all part of this big money-making machine that is now Harry Potter, because many of you will have gone to the various Harry Potter worlds. So there is a weird connection going on where that experience of people walking down streets that are pretending to be Diagon Alley, it feeds into what goes into the film and the film will feed back into that, no doubt, in future. And on that theme.

9:38 There is creatures being brought into this particular world that are from the video game aspect of Harry Potter that aren't in the books. So the J.K. Rowling world, the wizarding world has expanded into, well, obviously it's also a Broadway show. So there is this thing where other factors are feeding into how they make the choices linked to the whole big world IP universe that they have, which is fascinating to watch happening. The big question that this asks really is, when you've got something pretty decent already, so you've got, is it eight films?

10:25 Yeah, it is, isn't it? Because the last one's in two. When you've got eight decent films and you've got good performances, not too bad CGI, I know they can always improve it. What is the point of remaking within this quarter of a century? Well, everybody still can watch with enjoyment the films. Now, everybody is saying that It's allowing other parts of the book to come in. So you can expand to things like Peeves, the poltergeist, spend longer with Harry in the muggle world when he goes to a school. You can see that in one of the trailers, so an ordinary school.

11:08 All those things are They can play around with making it feel more like a period piece, so leaning into the early 90s setting. There's lots of fun things they can do, but do you actually need to do it? It's the same sort of question you will get when someone says, oh, let's remake the Lord of the Rings films. And lots of people will say, no, they can't. You know, Peter Jackson did such a great job. They shouldn't do it again. Here we've got an example of the same studios, same people being involved in making something, repainting it on a bigger canvas. So whether or not it turns out to be a good idea, it will certainly be financially a good idea.

11:51 But whether or not the actual content is good is going to be down to the writing. And the creator of this particular iteration is Francesca Gardner, who is acting as the showrunner. And she's also working with John Brown, another showrunner. And it seems that John Brown was elevated to a co-showrunner so that poor old Francesca Gardner could actually have some help managing the workload.

12:34 So... for season two, there'll be two of them, which follows, doesn't it? Because if they're trying to do a story in pacing it with the children growing up, they can't take 18 months off between seasons. They've got to keep on going or else their actors will age out. So obviously they can go on a little bit longer than the... They can catch up with their ages and still be... have a few years to play with in hand, but still, they can't leave it for too long. So that's why we've got a second writer as a showrunner, entering the frame for the second season.

13:14 So it's got these two writers behind it. Just the line-up is that eight episodes are written by Francesca and John is involved on one. And the director is Mark Milod. So these are people who have come from the world of television. I believe they've worked on Succession. So you need to have a television writer as opposed to a film writer in order to control the story arcs. It's a huge challenge. I mean, J.K. Rowling has basically done the job for you in many ways. She has shown you what the...

13:56 seven book story arc is, but she also has provided story arcs within each book. So that has made their job a lot easier having that behind them, but still within that, they have to make selection of which ones they follow, which were, cause still even within what seems a much more expansive nine episode season, even within that, is still going to be things that they can't show. That's why you'll never really get rid of books because books have so much more nuance in them that just can't be shown on the screen.

14:36 The choice of those two writers is encouraging. I really am rooting for them. I hope that they make a big success of it. But when I was thinking about, well, what do I feel about this? Am I going to sit there and watch it again? Yes, of course I am. just to see what they've done. It's like watching someone produce a puzzle and solving it, the puzzle, or playing chess. Chess is the same game. The structure is the same game, but it's played in so many different ways. So you don't say, oh, I've seen Hamlet once, I'm never going to go and see it again. You want to go and see it again with somebody else interpreting it.

15:18 So I think, you know, that's what's happening here. And it reminded me of some of the returns to big IPs that I've seen. So the one big success is, for me, was Star Trek. So the reboot has gone the other way. So if you think about it, it started with... The TV series, there were films that spun out of the TV series, but they were already later versions of the crew had already existed. And so the original, and then the next generation and so on. So the other way round, the TV series led to films.

16:01 But then you had the reboot films, which were directed by J.J. Abrams, which did the origin story with Chris Pine as Captain Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock and Simon Pegg as Scotty and Zoe Saldana as Uhura. And of course, Carl Urban as McCoy, also probably best known to this audience as Aema. I thought those really worked. There was a gloss and a flash to that reimagining, particularly, I mean, literally, because one of J.J. Abrams, a little t-shirt.

16:50 ticks or these lens flares he uses all the time can get a bit annoying but it did suit the star trek world so if you think of the original sort of early color tv version they did their best with the technology they had with them but actually seeing that reimagined in what to us is the current state of how we imagine sci-fi was fresh and fitted the material But particularly pleasing was that they had picked up the development of the relationships, the Kirk-Spock antagonism friendship, the cynical McCoy, the sort of chirpy, joking Scotty.

17:42 They sort of worked out what everyone liked about those characters and they were able to synthesize and sort of crystallize what made those work and put them into the film. Of course, giving Uhura more of an active role rather than the sort of limited role that her predecessor was given. And so I really enjoyed seeing those and I wasn't at all worried that they had gone back maybe more than 25 years had passed. It felt the right timing to retell those stories. I'd quite like them to do a bit more. I really enjoyed those films. Whereas another IP that went back to revisit itself was the Star Wars one.

18:25 And I found the later trilogies very disappointing. The the ones that are episodes one, two, and three, they were digging out new stories, but the writing was famously quite terrible. The one which I'm really thinking about is episode, where are we, seven, which was Star Wars Episode VII, The Force Awakens, which came out in 2015 with Daisy Ridley as Rey. The problem I had with that was as I was sitting there watching it, I realized that they were doing the first film.

19:11 I mean, the original film number, uh, the original Star Wars, Luke Skywalker, but just making Rey into Luke. So much so that you had pretty much the same end moves with destroying the Death Star. And I couldn't believe it. I thought, this is such... unimaginative storytelling. You've got so many wonderful possibilities here, but you've decided to retread what you knew worked without admitting to it. So it is more honest in the Harry Potter reboot series that we know they're telling the same story.

19:56 And it's only when Star Wars goes away from trying to play its greatest hits that it gets for me interesting again. So like Andor, for example, that kind of storytelling is saying, well, what else can we do with this? Of course, with Harry Potter, they have tried the what else can we do with this? And they tried it with the Fantastic Beasts sort of franchise, which hasn't quite worked. And the mistake I think they made there is they took it away from children. I think Harry Potter needs to stay in the hands of children and teenagers to work in the same way as Star Trek needs to stay in the hands of children.

20:42 ship's crew in the same way as Star Wars needs to stay in the hands of the rebellion, but it needs to do new things with those stories. So the question that I suppose I'm pondering is, what would happen if, and I'm sure this conversation is happening somewhere, what would happen if there was a TV series of Lord of the Rings? So we've got three excellent films, We've got two interstitial, we've got this Andy Serkis one, which is the hunt for Gollum.

21:25 We've got the one that's might be fitting in between. Leaving the Shire and Arriving at Bree, that one, which is mainly Tom Bombadil and Barrow rights, with some connection to what happens afterwards. And potentially another film after that, after the events at the end, the sort of what happens after the credits. So that might be the way it's being handled. But I bet someone there is thinking, let's make a TV series of it. And Harry Potter have done this by keeping it within the hands of the same creative team.

22:10 Star Trek did it by finding... a new generation of director to take it on. And I guess the question would be, what would be the most worth it? It could be that these extra films are going to do the same job, that you'll be able to sit there and imagine, well, you would start with The Hobbit. You would start watching it like a TV series and you could segment it up that way, I guess. But there's going to be somebody wanting to do it. And it'll be fascinating to see what happens in the next 10 years on that front.

22:54 I think the weight would be for it to stay in the sort of Peter Jackson world because he has created so much of what we expect it to look like. But you never know. We'll see what happens next. I suppose the big question is, would it be fun to watch? Would we learn anything new? So going back to Harry Potter, I think I am excited by the series, excited to see what they do with it. And I'm certainly wishing them all luck because it'd be fun to have some new entry into the big fantasy IPs that really gets global success.

23:36 Because something like that means there is more money, more investment coming into creating other things. other stories. So let's hope that means it is a success. Anyway, thank you very much for listening. Thanks for listening to MythMakers Podcast. Brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses, In Person Stays in Oxford, plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favourite podcasts worldwide.