As the film widely regarded as The Best Harry Potter Movie hits its two-decade anniversary, Total Film chats to visionary director Alfonso Cuarón and franchise producer David Heyman about rolling the dice to take the series in a deeper, darker direction…
It was not very aware of Potter’s universe and I was surprised to be offered it, coming from Y tu mamá también,’ recalls director Alfonso Cuarón, who’s talking to Total Film 20 years on from the release of his one and only dip into J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World, with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The third movie in the Potter franchise, it was, at the time, by some distance the best in the series – and the critical consensus did not alter once the dust settled on the five movies that followed.
‘I was confused because it was completely not on my radar,’ Cuarón continues. ‘I speak often with Guillermo [del Toro], and a couple of days after, I said, “You know, they offered me this Harry Potter film, but it’s really weird they offer me this.” He said, “Wait, wait, wait, you said you haven’t read Harry Potter?” I said, “I don’t think it’s for me.” In very florid lexicon, in Spanish, he said, “You are an arrogant asshole.”’
‘I’d seen Y tu mamá también, which I loved, and I oddly thought he’d be the perfect director for the third Potter,’ remembers David Heyman, who in 1999 bought the rights to Rowling’s first four novels and went on to produce all eight Potter movies and the three Fantastic Beasts prequels that came after. He grins into the Zoom camera. ‘That’s not what some might think. Can you imagine what some thought Harry, Ron and Hermione would get up to, having seen Y tu mamá también?’ It’s a fair point – Cuarón’s Mexican road movie about two 17-year-old guys and a 28-year-old woman enjoying uninhibited sex was full of action, and we don’t mean quidditch. ‘Y tu mamá was about the last moments of being a teenager, and Azkaban was about the first moments of being a teenager,’ Heyman notes.
‘I felt he could make the show feel, in a way, more contemporary. And just bring his cinematic wizardry.’ Now, with Children of Men and Gravity on his CV, Cuarón seems like a more obvious choice than he did in the early noughties. Back then, the director had made only Mexican romcom Sólo con tu pareja, A Little Princess (which both Heyman and Rowling adored), Great Expectations starring Ethan Hawke, and Y tu mamá también, meaning he was untested on a film of Azkaban’s scale. Surely Warner Bros. wouldn’t entrust their golden goose to Cuarón? The first two movies, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, had together rung up almost $1.9bn at the worldwide box office – the kind of prize you’d employ three-headed dog Fluffy to protect. Th
