It may be a movie about a tyro wizard and his magical adventures, but bringing Harry Potter to the bit screen took real Muggle might, no hocus-pocus about it.

By Jeff Jensen and Daniel Fierman

It has been a site of worship for more than 1,300 years. William the Conqueror ordered its construction. The bones of King Edward II molder in its walls. Its Norman arches, candy-colored glass, and twisted stonework make visitors stop and gasp. Just stepping inside requires revising the small-minded scale of American history.

Yet despite nearly a millennium of being, Gloucester Cathedral has never seen a set of pilgrims quite like the ones about to descend upon it. They’re coming already, drawn by the film that was shot here less than a year ago, a movie based on a book that’s regarded with almost as much reverence the world over as the book that got the cathedral built in the first place. In fact, at this moment, a 13-year-old is standing slack-jawed below the thin turrets of its 225-foot tower. She wears a scarlet-and-gold jersey. It reads “Gryffindor Seeker.”

A fellow teen passes, sees her, and wrinkles her nose. “‘Arry Potter! ‘Arry Potter! ‘Arry Potter. That’s all anyone cares about here!”

Hate to tell you this, luv, but you’d better just get used to it. In fact, we’d all better get used to it. The hype. The magazine covers. The Coca-Cola cans. And oh, yeah — the movie: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, based on the 1997 novel by J.K. Rowling, the first installment in what Rowling has long promised will be a seven-volume hero’s journey through the tortured adolescence of her beloved boy wizard.

The fervently awaited adaptation — written by Steve Kloves (Wonder Boys), directed by Chris Columbus (Mrs. Doubtfire), and starring 11-year-old newcomer Daniel Radcliffe in the title (and utterly life-changing) role — will finally arrive in theaters Nov. 16. The film, which cost a reported $125 million, will carry not only the immense weight of fan anticipation, but the expensive expectations of Warner Bros. and corporate parent AOL Time Warner, which are betting on Harry Potter becoming once of those once-in-a-blue-moon, Batman-big franchise properties that can generate billions for years to come. (Did we mention that Entertainment Weekly is owned by said vast media machine?) And if that isn’t enough, it also comes saddled with the economic hopes of Harry Potter’s native England, which is counting on the movies to pump hundreds of millions of pounds into its film industry and even help reignite its tourism trade.

And to think Stone’s roll to the big screen began four years ago with a man who merely wanted to make a family film. In 1997, producer David Heyman (Juice, Ravenous) had justed returned to London after a stint in Hollywood, in search of a children’s book that would have wide appeal as a movie. After failing to set up his first choice — The Ogre Downstairs, by Diana Wynne Jones — his staff at Heyday Films found him another: a critically lauded best seller titled, in the U.K., Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. His assistant read the book and pushed it. ” ‘It’s a cool idea,’ ” Heyman recalls her saying. ” ‘It’s about a boy in wizarding school.’ ”

As any 8-year-old can tell you, it’s a bit more than that. Stone begins with Harry Potter as a 10-year-old orphan living with a cruel aunt and uncle who’ve long told him that his parents died shortly after his birth. In truth, Harry’s mum was a witch, his dad was a wizard, and both were murdered by a dark mage named Lord Voldemort. When the villain tried to kill Harry, too, he instantly vanished in a mysterious green flash that left Harry with a lightning bolt scar on his forehead.

Upon his 11th birthday, all this is revealed to him when he discovers he’s been admitted to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a 1,000-year-old institution located in a realm kept hidden fron non-magical folk (that’s “Muggles” to you). Once there, Potter is assigned to one of Hogwarts’ four houses (Gryffindor), makes friends with classmates Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, becomes the star “seeker” of his intramural Quidditch team (a soccer/rugby hybrid played in the air on broomsticks), and learns in true Luke Skywalker fashion that he’s destined for great things.

Heyman was immediately enchanted. It’s such a human, moving tale,” says Heyman. “Harry is such an ‘everybody.’ He comes from a damaged home. He’s not a great academic. Moreover, Hogwarts is a school that all of us would have wanted to go to. The book wasn’t sentimental. It has an edge. It was wickedly funny. It was fiercely imaginative. Those were all of the reasons that I liked it.”

Soon, Heyman was cultivating a relationship with Rowling, and after the U.K. publication in 1998 of Stone’s first sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Heyman pitched Potter to Warner Bros. Together, they reportedly optioned both books for a bargain-in-retrospect $700,000 and began hunting for a screenwriter. By that time, Pottermania was well established in Britain and primed to explode in the U.S. It was still flying far enough below the mainstream radar, however, to merit only this appraisal from Warner’s president of production, Lorenzo di Bonaventura: “These books have a terrific following in Great Britain.”

Enter Steve Kloves, best known as the writer-director of 1989’s The Fabulous Baker Boys. In early 1999, Kloves got a packet from Warner Bros. containing descriptions of books the studio had optioned that needed adapting. “I almost never read them,” says Kloves, Oscar nominated for his Wonder Boys script. “But there was this something called Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone…” Kloves loved it, laid claim to it, and was soon lunching with Heyman and studio execs.

By then he had become a blushing Potter fanboy. “I was probably the most nervous for any meeting I’ve ever had,” says Kloves of his first encounter with Rowling. “I was exicted to meet her, but I also didn’t want her to think I was going to be in the business of destroying her baby.”

Funny — that’s exactly what Rowling was thinking. “I was really ready to hate this Steve Kloves, actually — this was the man who was gonna butcher my baby,” says Rowling. “The first time I met him, he said to me, ‘You know who my favorite character is?’ And I thought, You’re gonna say Ron. But he said ‘Hermione.’ An I just kind of melted.” Says Kloves: “We ended up spending the day together, just talking. We hit it off.”

Kloves has described actually translating Rowling’s novel into a screenplay as a “b—-.” His struggle? Stone is the least plot-driven of the Potter novels; its function is to establish the world and core conflicts for the books that follow. Making his task more challenging was the promise to remain utterly faithful to the book. Kloves was helped along the way by Rowling, who would explain to him bits of Potter arcana like the different uses of dragon’s blood. “For me, she’s been like the greatest asset,” says Kloves, “because it’s like having the bible of the story at the other end of an E-mail or phone line.”

While Kloves worked, Heyman and Warner Bros. wrestled with where the movie would be shot. In 1999, two of Brtain’s top film industry officials flew to the U.S. to make England’s case. They came bearing gifts: assistance in securing locations, long-term use of the spacious soundstages of Leavesden Studios outside London, and a promise to try and revamp the country’s child labor laws (adding a small number of working hours per week and making the timing of on-set classes more flexible).

They also wanted some quid pro quos — including assurances that most of the money spent on making the Potter films would be spent in the U.K. But it wasn’t all about dollars to pounds; there was national pride. “Harry Potter is something that’s weirdly about us — it’s culturally British,” says Steve Norris, head of the British Film Commission. “The thought that it was going to be made anywhere but here sent shudders down everyone’s spine. It’s like taking Catcher in the Rye and trying to make it in Liverpool.” [Webmaster note: Catcher in the Rye, written in 1947 by author J.D. Salinger, is considered a mid-20th century American classic about teenage alienation after World War II. It also is very American through the language its narrator uses and experiences he undergoes.]

Finding a director for the film was equally fraught with politics — the Hollywood kind. Brad Silberling (Casper, City of Angels) was the first to express interest in the project. Then Steven Spielberg reportedly became intrigued after Silberling told him about Potter. Waner Bros. fixated on Spielberg (even though it could have meant sharing Potter revenues with DreamWorks) and waited for him as he finalized his Saving Private Ryan follow-up: Would it be Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, an adaptation of Memoirs of a Geisha, the unmade Stanley Kubrick project, A.I., or Potter?

By all accounts, Spielberg’s conversations about Potter with Heyman, Kloves, and Rowling were friendly, but rumors flew that Spielberg suggested ideas that alienated them, like a Toy Story-style computer animated film voiced by Haley Joel Osment, or a live-action film that incorporated elements from multiple books. Heyman insists Spielberg never pitched any of those ideas. “He had three other projects that he was considering,” he remembers, “And he wanted whichever one came together first.” In the end, the director decided to make A.I. with Osment instead. [Webmaster note: Spielberg then completed Minority Report with Cruise and is now in proproduction on Geisha. But he's talking about directing The Prisoner of Azkaban.]

With Spielberg out, Heyman, Warner Bros. President-COO Alan Horn and di Bonaventura invited A-listers to pitch their visions. By then there were suitors aplenty: Silberling, Rob Reiner, Wolfgang Petersen, Alan Parker, Terry Gilliam, Ivan Reitman, and Chris Columbus, who became a hardcore Potterphile the previous year thanks to his daughter, Eleanor.

During his nearly two-hour audition, Columbus described what his adaptation would look like. He wanted the real-world scenes to be bleak and dreary, but the non-Muggle sequences to be steeped in color, mood, and detail. “The inspiration really was from two David Lean pictures: Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. That sort of darkness, that sort of edge, that quality to the cinematography,” says Columbus. “For the color palette, we talked about Oliver! and The Godfather, which have a rich, almost Technicolor quality to them. When we entered Magicland — which is how we always referred to Hogwarts — I wanted each frame to be filled with a sense of wonder.”

The Home Alone director possessed one undeniable strength: success with child actors. He also had one undeniable weakness: He had never made a fantasy film like Harry Potter (unless you want to count Bicentennial Man). But Columbus cited two of his early screenplays — Gremlins and Young Sherlock Holmes — as proof that he could think in terms of “edgy action-adventure films.”

Ultimately, Columbus said all the right things. He wanted the cast to be completely British. He wanted to shoot each book as its own movie. And he loved the material. Says Heyman: “He wanted to be faithful to Jo [Rowling] and Jo’s books, and at that point, that was the most important thing to me.”

“People talk about passion for material all the time,” says Columbus. “When people go off and do Godzilla 3 they say, ‘Oh, I feel a lot of passion for this material,’ and you get kind of sick of reading it. But whatever it was that propelled me to go to film school, it was back, and in a big way. It was sort of like Paul Newman in The Verdict. This is the big trial. This is the big case. This was the film that I was destined to do, and that I had spent all those years directing and writing and preparing for.”

Given the significance Columbus attached to just getting the job (which he did in March 2000), it’s little wonder that he considers everything afterward a cakewalk: “The most pressure was waiting,” he says. “Once I got the word that I was going to direct the film, the pressure just sort of … left.”

But immediately he was under the gun. Warner Bros. wanted to start chiseling Stone by September. Relocating to England, the director began assembling a creative team and working with Kloves to hone the script. Rowling was involved as much as possible; in one of the director’s meetings with her, he is said to have asked her to draw him a map of her magical realm to help inform the production design. Rowling read every draft of the script and sat in on proproduction meetings. Yet, busy with writing and not wanting to add pressure to the proceedings, she rarely visited during shooting.

“They have been very gracious in allowing me a lot of input,” Rowling told EW last summer. “I have been open and blunt about what I would and wouldn’t want to see. Ultimately, the control is not mine. People don’t like it when a writer comes in and runs the show. That’s what they bought my book for: control.”

By the summer of 2000, Stone began nailing down its supporting cast of tony British talent: Maggie Smith as stern Professor McGonagall; Alan Rickman as shady Professor Snape; and Robbie Coltrane as the school’s lumbering, blundering groundskeeper Hagrid.

“I got the part because Rowling always thought I should be Hagrid,” says Coltrane. “They phoned and said, ‘You’re playing Hagrid, and we’re having no arguments about it.’ ” Coltrane was already a fan of the books, having read them to his son, and preapred by chatting up the author about Hagrid’s mysterious past. She told him and even disclosed some secrets that will be revealed in future novels. Care to share? “I’d rather be dead,” laughs Coltrane.

If only finding Harry were as easy. Columbus and Heyman auditioned thousands of age-appropriate British boys, but by July, still no Harry. Columbus was especially flummoxed, since he knew exactly who he wanted: Daniel Radcliffe, whom he had seen in a recent BBC production of David Copperfield. But his casting director [Webmaster: Susie Figgis] had told him Radcliffe’s protective parents wouldn’t allow it.

After another fruitless cattle call, the consternation reached a crescendo. “My casting director said to me, ‘You know, I’m so frustrated with you. I don’t know what you want!’ ” Columbus recalls. “And I picked up the copy of David Copperfield and said, ‘This is waht I want! This is the person I want to be in the film. It doesn’t get much easier or simpler than that!’ ” The following week, the casting director resigned.

Soon after, Heyman and Kloves went to see a play (Stones in his Pockets, by Marie Jones) and ran into Radcliffe and his parents. Heyman had heard Columbus rave about this boy, yet it didn’t hit Heyman until seeing him how right he was. The next morning, Heyman called Radcliffe’s father and made the plea again, only to learn that Radcliffe’s parents had been reconsidering. After a meeting over tea at the Radcliffe home in London, where Columbus assured that he would protect their son from the pressures to come, Harry Potter finally had its Harry Potter.

On Aug. 21, the announcement was made: Radcliffe was Potter, and newcomers Rupert Grint and Emma Watson were Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. Those who worked with Radcliffe offer nothing but praise. “A delightful and intelligent boy, full of fun,” says John Boorman, who directed him in The Tailor of Panama. “He got a good support system. If anyone can withstand [the pressures], it’s this boy.”

David Copperfield director Simon Curtis recalls a witty, charming talent who enjoyed playing pranks on the set and was not at all intimidated by costars like Ian McKellen, Bob Hoskins, and future Potter castmate Smith. Quips Curtis: “I’ll probably be best remembered as the man who discovered Daniel Radcliffe.”

The initial months of shooting proved a virtual Lonely Planet tour of the castles and cathedrals of the U.K. Gloucester Cathedral donated its famed, fan-vaulted cloisters as Hogwarts’ hallways. The towering 14th-century walls of Alnwick Castle became the school’s exterior, and its sprawling, flat greens the Quidditch pitch. The famed Norman cathedral at Durham found its chapter house lined with squat desks and blackboards filled with indecipherable runes to become McGonagall’s Transfiguration classroom.

And in London, Columbus tapped the Australian High Commission — located, appropriately enough, in the heart of the city’s financial district — to serve as Gringotts bank.

“Twenty dwarves came in each morning,” says a commission spokesperson of Gringotts’ goblin bank tellers (who included Verne Troyer, Austin Powers 2’s Mini-Me). “It took forever to put on the makeup, and they couldn’t eat once it was on. When shooting wrapped, they ordered, like, 100 pizzas for everyone.”

His A-to-Zed tour of England out of the way, Columbus settled into the high-security spot that the Potter franchise calls home: Leavesden Studios. The only production on the lot — which is currently controlled entirely by Warner Bros. — the shoot stretched deep into this spring. Coltrane got some tips on his character from two-time Oscar winner Maggie Smith: “[She said] ‘You have to play it very seriously,’ ” he recalls. “The kids were kind of frightened by her, and then they warmed up, because we all had a teacher like that.”

Apparently, Radcliffe, Grint and Watson — who alternated between four hours of camera work and three hours of schoolwork — shouldered the pressure with older-than-their-years aplomb. And if they weren’t acting or studying, they were, well, being kids. “They’d throw things at each other and play their Game Boys,” laughs Coltrane. “They liked to get the makeup people to give them gashes. Daniel got one to give him a black eye, and he came in the morning, and the other ones said, ‘OMIGOD! What happened?’ ”

“[Columbus] was wonderfully patient,” adds Coltrane. “He should be sainted. The trouble with children is that they don’t have the same emotional memory adults have. I’d have been like, C’MON, YOU LITTLE S—! I WANT TO SLEEP! I HAVEN’T SLEPT FOR FOUR WEEKS!! But he doesn’t. He just goes, ‘MmmmHmmm.’ It’s extraordinary how he gets performances out of them.”

The loosey-goosey stuff evaporated when the cameras rolled, and Radcliffe is said to have turned in an astonishingly mature performance. “He holds the film together. He’s in almost every frame,” says Columbus. “Dan is an 11-year-old with a 35-year-old heart. There [is] so much depth, so much going on behind his eyes, you realize: This is a kid who has lived a life. This is a kid who can appear haunted and troubled by his past. Yet he’s charming. That kind of maturity is hard to find in an 11-year-old.”

The one thing Radclife didn’t have was Harry’s brilliant green eyes, a problem rectified with contacts — though they often proved so irritating that Radcliffe went without them, and computer animation painted them in in postproduction. All told, blue screen and CGI played a massive role in Harry Potter: The film has 500 to 600 special effects shots, handled by a wide range of F/X houses. Industrial Ligh & Magic (A.I.) is resurrecting Lord Voldemort — who in this film, at least, won’t be played by an actor; Rhythm & Hues (Cats & Dogs) is raising Hagrid’s illegally bred pet dragon; and Sony Pictures Imageworks (Stuart Little) is staging Stone’s most technically complicated feat, the Quidditch scenes. [Webmaster note: Actually, an actor will play Voldemort: Richard Bremmer will appear in flashbacks to the tragedy of Harry's parents.]

And as these companies finish their shots, Columbus, will, ironically, have to decide whether to cut them. In the filmmakers’ zeal to get as much of Rowling’s book on screen as possible, a recent edit closed in at about four hours (the film has already received a PG rating). [NOTE: Columbus said in October 2001 the real edit is about 2 1/2 hours long. There is no 4-hour version.]

Coltrane thinks Columbus is in a no-win situation. “Children know every … single … thing,” says the actor, who has an 8-year-old Potter fan at home. “It becomes blazed in their memory. So they’re going to ask, ‘What about the bit where Mrs. Whatshername does the Doo-Dah?’ I don’t envy Chris.”

So, guys: which Doo-Dahs will make the final cut? “I can’t talk about that,” says Heyman. Though he adds: “There are certain things that will be a surprise that aren’t fuly evolved in the book. You think about Voldemort. You look at what happens in the end. It’s so deus ex machina. But hopefully we touched on all that is good.” Promises Columbus: People will not miss anything. We preserved 95 percent of the big moments.” [Webmaster note: "Deus ex machina" means "god from the machine" in Latin. This refers to ancient Greek plays, which many times ended with the main characters in danger, and a god would come down from "heaven" on a fancy piece of equipment (the "machine") and rescue them. Here Heyman refers the last-minute arrival of Dumbledore and his powerful magic when Quirrell/Voldemort are attacking Harry.]

At least he’s got a helluva DVD.

14 September 2001 Cover Story. Original article courtesy of Entertainment Weekly