Undeathly Hallows ?.

[Carol]

--- In HPFGU-Movie at yahoogroups.com, "eggplant107" <eggplant107 at ...> wrote:
>
> If the second movie starts with the Gringgots bank caper (I never
> thought sweet little Harry Potter would turn out to be a bank
robber, but I am absolutely delighted he did) then the movie could
almost be made in real time. That was one hell of a day, there was
less than 24 hours between the bank robbery and Harry killing Voldemort.  
> 
> Fast fast fast, maybe a little too fast for a movie, or maybe not,
time will tell.

>
Carol responds:

Hi, Eggplant. I agree with you that Gringotts (or the preparations for
the robbery) is the place to start the film, but it would be more like
2.4 hours rather than 24, so the action would have to take place ten
times as fast, with most of the waiting removed. The Gringotts
sequence and the Snape memories (some of the eliminated, alas) could
be filmed in real-time, along with some of the battle sequences. I
think it will *feel* like real time, regardless, because of the rush
of events with no sense of days or seasons passing (no Whomping willow
shedding its leaves or shaking off snow, no Christmas decorations,
only one sunrise-to-sunrise "day." (For symbolic reasons, the battle
with Voldemort *must* be won as the sun rises on a new day for Harry,
Hogwarts, and the WW.)

I think that whatever exposition we get will occur as HRH and Griphook
prepare for the Gringotts break-in, as HRH encounter Neville and the
DA, and as Harry talks with Dead!Dumbledore in King's Cross. And I
think that the audience will actually appreciate those few breathers,
both because they need a brief break from action and suspense and
because they'll want to know as badly as Harry does what's going at
Hogwarts and how DD could "betray" Harry to his (seeming) death. I
think that the film audience will enjoy seeing the old twinkly
Dumbledore again, too. (They won't feel the anger toward him that many
readers do.)

At any rate, I expect that the second DH film will be the easiest film
to write a script for and to structure and edit because the sequence,
at least, is almost cut and dried and very little can be left out. The
dialogue would take about the same time to film (ignoring retakes and
all that) as it would take to read the dialogue in the book aloud. The
action might take less time to *show* than it would to film (though of
course the filmmakers have more leeway there. I suspect, for example,
that they'll actually show Lupin duelling Dolohov and being killed
(though they may not actually name Dolohov) instead of having Harry
see his body lying on a table.

Even the first half of DH, though lots of time passes when nothing is
happening, can be filmed more or less in a chronological sequence.
Except for the DE meeting, the excursions into Voldemort's mind, the
Kreacher flashback, and whatever they choose to include of the
Dumbledore mystery, the sequence is much more linear than in the other
books--Seven Potters to Weasleys' house to wedding to Tottenham Court
Road to 12 GP to the Mom and so forth, with no classes or homework or
detentions or DA meetings or snog sessions or subplots (other than the
 occasional references to Snape to keep him just below the surface of
our minds).

HBP, I think, must have been much harder to transform into a film. I'm
actually looking forward to it even more than I am to the two parts of
DH. I expect to see all sorts of references to the villainous Severus
Snape from viewers who aren't in on the secret. Or is it humanly
possible to have escaped all the references to DH, the book, and still
not know how it all ends?

Carol, who does know two young people (her own nieces!) who are still
wholly indifferent to the fates and motivations of JKR's characters
but hopes that they're in the minority