Sirius Black! The Dementors! Shocking plot twists! Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban director Alfonso Cuaron takes Abbie Bernstein behind the scenes of the boy wizard’s most exciting adventure yet…

When two-time Harry Potter movie director Chris Columbus announced that he wouldn’t be helming the boy wizard’s third big-screen adventure, not even Professor Dumbledore could have predicted that his successor would be Alfonso Cuaron. But while the likes of Steven Spielberg, Kenneth Branagh and Guillermo Del Toro were all very publicly linked to the project, Del Toro’s decision to pass on the project left the stage clear for the 42-year-old Mexican director of the 1995 children’s film A Little Princess and the coming-of-age Spanish language drama Y Tu Mama Tambien to bring Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to the big screen.

Based on J.K. Rowling’s beloved novel, The Prisoner of Azkaban sees Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and his friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) fighting for their lives after the convicted murderer Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) escapes the Azkaban prison for wizards.

In a break from putting the finishing touches to the movie, Cuaron talked to Dreamwatch about what cinemagoers can expect from Harry’s latest adventure and revealed his thoughts on the Harry Potter phenomenon…

When you signed up to direct Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, did you have any concerns about how you could realise your vision for the film while remaining true to the previous instalments in the franchise?

I originally thought that it was going to be very hard. I talked about it with my friend Guillermo Del Toro, and he was championing me to do this. He said, “If you do it, serve the material. Don’t fight to do an Alfonso Cuaron movie – just serve the material. And by serving the material, you may make your best movie ever.”

From that standpoint, it then became very interesting, because serving the material was actually a sweet challenge rather than a difficult challenge. The material meant – before anything else – the book, and secondly it meant the position of this film in the franchise of Harry Potter. I didn’t want people to watch this movie and feel that they are in an alien world. It has to be recognisable as a Harry Potter movie.

At the same time, I wanted to have fun adding some elements of my own. The great thing about that was I felt so comfortable with that universe, because I loved it. I was Harry Potter-ignorant when this movie was offered to me, but when I read the material I thought it was great. Then when I went to the sets, I saw what [production designer] Stuart Craig had done and saw what he could add to the universe that he had already created. The same went for the costumes and the cast. I think that I was blessed to have great source material and a universe that was very eloquently created by Chris Columbus and Stuart Craig.

To what extent did your work on A Little Princess help you when it came to making The Prisoner of Azkaban?

That helped a lot in the sense of it being a film that J.K. Rowling, [producer] David Heyman and Warner liked. It also proved that I could work with kids.

Did Chris Columbus offer you any advice?

While I was prepping Azkaban, Chris was finishing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. So he was very present in terms of all of our story meetings and the big creative decisions. The same went for [producers] David Heyman and Mark Radcliffe and actually the studio executives – it was a very pleasant experience. We were seeing exactly the same film, and it was one of the most liberating experiences I’ve ever had making a film.

I’m not saying that there were not disagreements about details. But sometimes when you learn to listen, you find yourself saying, “Wow! You know what? This other idea’s really better.” In a movie like this, it’s so vast in terms of the different departments that you really need to be able to collaborate with everybody.

How did you find working with the film’s three young stars?

Something that I learned on A Little Princess was the amazing emotional understanding that kids have when they are interacting with make-believe. They’re not just making pretty faces – they actually go into real places. They have the understanding that it can be a game and you can make-believe that your character is in a lot of pain, but you still have control of the make-believe.

I was just so lucky that I got to work with these three kids at this time. They had made a couple of movies already so they had the technical experience, but now they want to take themselves seriously as actors, and so they put themselves in my hands and they were very raw and eager and willing and courageous. I asked them to write a first-person biography of the characters they were playing, but to immerse them in their own experiences and their own emotions. They delivered these amazing essays – they were really beautiful; very honest, bare and courageous – and they became amazing tools to work with. I think they gave them a bigger emotional understanding of the characters, and sometimes they just provided a short cut to talk with the actors.

One of the things that I really love about the previous films is the casting. I felt very comfortable working with the returning cast. If I had cast all the characters from the start, I would have chosen the actors that were already cast for the roles. I also felt lucky to be a part of the casting of the new characters.

What do you think the additions to the franchise’s cast – like Gary Oldman and David Thewlis – have brought to the film?

In a way, David Thewlis [as Professor Lupin] and Gary Oldman [as Sirius Black] create the emotional skeleton of the film, between the two of them. They provide two different colours. Emma Thompson is funny, eccentric and ultimately scary as Professor Trelawney. And Timothy Spall is the most disgusting Pettigrew that you’ve ever thought about!

We decided from the start that in order for the magic to spring more naturally, we really wanted to emotionally ground the style of the performances. All the actors – not just the grown-ups, but the kids too – got into the tone of it.

Michael Gambon [who replaces the late Richard Harris as Professor Dumbledore] is such a mischievous and great actor. He’s fantastic. I didn’t have the luck to meet Richard Harris, because he died as I was starting on the movie. It was very sad. Dumbledore was actually one of the last characters that we cast. I was involved in casting Michael Gambon, and I’m very, very, very happy with the decision.

The Prisoner of Azkaban is easily the biggest production you’ve worked on. Have you enjoyed the actual process of making the movie?

I have to say I loved the physicality of the shoot. We fell really far behind schedule in Scotland and that was tough for the studio, but they behaved amazingly. Every single day, I was standing in those mountains with everyone waiting for the rain to stop, and everybody would just be smiling. It was so peaceful. The shoot fell behind, but the studio was amazing, they were just really supportive, and we got what we needed from them.

Working on this film, I was a part of a big machine that runs very smoothly. The problem with this machinery is, once it starts running it doesn’t stop. At the beginning it’s a pleasure, because you don’t have to put it together like an independent film. It’s already there and moving very smoothly. So you start to speed up and start running and then you realise that your scarf’s got attached to the machinery. If you don’t run at the same pace, you’re going to be strangled! You’re shooting as you’re editing and doing the visual effects – you’re doing everything at the same time. That was the toughest thing.

What was your approach to the film’s computer-generated imagery?

I wanted to do a character-driven piece with cool visual effects, rather than a visual effects movie with some characters running around. So the first thing I did was subordinate the visual effects totally to the story and the universe. I also really tried to make everything look as real and as organic to the universe as possible.

Originally, I didn’t want to do CG, because I was suspicious about the computer-generated stuff. I wanted to use more old-fashioned things, like split screens and puppets. So we designed the Dementors [Azkaban’s sinister guards] first. We made puppets of the Dementors and then Basil Twist, a puppeteer that I have always admired and who does underwater puppeteering, came in to supervise how the Dementors should look and move. It turned out to be logistically impossible to shoot the Dementors against a green screen under water with puppeteers, so we decided to go with CG, but then the wise men at ILM took our filmed Dementor tests in the water as a reference for motion. When the Dementors are underwater, they float and move very eerily. We also experimented with shooting them in slow motion and playing the footage backwards.

The hippogriff is part bird and part horse. At the beginning, the conceptual artists kept on working on bones and checking with veterinarians, biologists and anatomists about bones and stuff. They were trying to understand the logistical workings of a creature that is impossible, because the joints of a bird are not compatible at all with the way that a horse walks. For a long while we were immersed in the anatomical aspects, and then we started creating the design. It’s amazing how the design took on such an organic motion.

How pleased are you with the film?

I’m absolutely thrilled. I think that audiences are going to find new elements in the movie, and I hope that after they do, [director] Mike Newell elevates them into new places again with the fourth film [Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire]. That’s what I find so exciting with Harry Potter – it’s refreshed with each movie.

This article originally appeared in Dreamwatch Issue 118 (July 2004).