Referendum on the Director

[frantyck]

--- In HPFGU-Movie at y..., "cindysphynx" <cindysphynx at h...> wrote:
If you were the producer of PoA and GoF, 
> and the only information you had to go on was his work in PS/SS, 
> would you hire Columbus for PoA, GoF, both, or neither?


Dump him, not only because he wasn't perfect, but because someone 
else will get a chance to refashion the series. While you're about 
it, lose Kloves as well.

Movies are film (!), books are books. They're different media, and I 
hope another director will be able to do a more interpretive job 
than Columbus did.

What I found particularly irksome in the movie, apart from the 
patchy acting and characterisation, was that the sets were *too* 
good. What kind of dim praise for a film is it if the finest 
comments refer to the sets?

I don't want someone to micro-imagine sets for me, I'd rather be 
given a sense of the developing relationships, shown as more than 
neat symbolic moments "worth a thousand words." No thanks. Too easy. 
Spend time on the actors and their interaction, not on deciding the 
colour of the wrapping paper inside a wand box. Or that jarring 
scene in Hogwarts when they see the vertiginous entrance hall for 
the first time, with those staircases going upward into infinity 
like some Escher lithograph. There's a limit to willing surrender to 
unreality, and it is called reality. How can actors do their best in 
overwhelming surroundings?

You need a slightly megalomaniacal director to impose his vision and 
be ruthless in holding the film together. Forget whether it sticks 
absolutely to the books.

If the director is a nice, tortured soul, so much the better. The HP 
books are not good-natured and happy. We know that. Happy moments 
are almost stolen, as it were, from the looming threat of Voldemort 
and other horrors, and just the sheer harshness and loneliness of a 
world in which Hogwarts is a fragile safe haven, and in which you 
can't expect much help from other than your closest partners.