Sirius/Oldman's tatoos & hair

[torillgrnhaug]

-
> I'd have liked the hair longer too, but I'm not going to worry
> overmuch about it. The waist-length tangle Sirius is shown wearing in
> PoA looks better (not better, obviously, but you know what I mean)
> seen with the mental eye than on screen, where it might just look
> corny. When filming FotR the make-up team had some difficulty with
> Gandalf's beard and eyebrows, he's described in the books as having
> eyebrows so bushy they peek out from under the rim of his hat. It
> looked stupid on screen, so they were downsized.
> 
> Is there an expert on hair growth in the audience, BTW? I recall
> having read somewhere that hair doesn't grow as fast on males as on
> females and that it won't grow as long.
> 
> Alshain

Seems we have got a lot of expert answers of hair growth by now, that
says Sirius' hair  could definitely have grown to elbow lenght during
his 12 prison years, as Rowling describes it. (But wy do we need to
have things realistically confirmed - that is kind of an odd thing to
demand, since the Potter books are not at all realistic!) 

But I agree with you Alshain, about the difference between telling a
story with images instead of words. That has been my main point always
in defending the films against nitpickers who want the books to be
treated as scripts for the films. Thank you for reminding me. What we
need is an image of someone haunted and wan, forever marked by the
experience of 12 years in the most horrible prison on earth. The
written description of the mat of tangled elbow length hair gives that
idea, but it probably wouldn't carry the same meaning on the screen.
Maybe it would only make him look mad, which is not what we want. And
the main thing will always be the acting, not the looks. 

Torill