What the actors knew or what we thought they knew

[Carol]

potioncat wrote:
> 
> > I recall Robbie Coltrane saying that JKR had given him some background information. I remember in the interview he was joking that he wouldn't dare reveal what the information was. 
>  
> > But now that it's over...what could JKR have told RC that would be such a big secret? There wasn't any surprise about Hagrid. 
> 
> 
> zanooda:
> 
> I have no idea what JKR could have told him. What, that Hagrid was half-giant? This big secret didn't play out in the movie at all. That Hagrid will carry "dead" Harry out of the forest? I don't see how this information could change anything in the way the actor played the character. I believe that the only actors who needed "the talk" were Rickman and Gambon.
> 
Carol responds:

Did she talk to Michael Gambon? I don't recall reading or hearing about it. But I seem to recall reading somewhere that Robbie Coltrane wanted to be reassured that Hagrid survived the series.

BTW, there's an entertaining BBC interview with Robbie Coltrane that you can view here. I didn't catch all of it because of the British accents, but Coltrane doesn't give anything away. He talks about special effects and Quidditch and playing a Half-Giant who sometimes has to hold back his impulses to violence (not a side of Hagrid that I was aware of, unless you count not knowing his own strength).

Here's the link if anyone is interested:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8uXdThjmNU

zanooda wrote:

<snip> I also remember JKR saying that Cuaron wanted to make Hagrid much taller than he is, and that she was very surprised to hear it, because Columbus wanted a taller Hagrid as well, at first. I guess both of them took JKR's description of Hagrid (almost twice as tall and five times as wide as a normal man) way too seriously :-).

Carol responds:

Interesting! I think she must have expected even the most literal-minded child readers to realize that she was exaggerating--hands the size of dustbin lids, for example, yet Harry at age thirteen or so can easily reach his elbow, so he can't be more than, say, ten feet tall (probably less since he can ride a train). Madame Maxime is treated the same way--feet the size of a child's sled. Both of them would have to be bigger than Grawp for those descriptions to be literally true. (And Dudley would have to be a freak of nature to be as wide as he is tall and take up an entire half of a dining room table.)

If the filmmakers took those descriptions literally, they must have missed the unreliable narrator (Harry's misinterpretations presented as fact) altogether!

Carol, supposing that such ambiguities and exaggerations aren't a normal feature of screenplays, which may be why the directors (and screenwriter?) took them at face value in the books
>