The video below summarizes the interview nicely, but you can read the whole thing over on the Guardian website. Spoiler warning: the article contains a lot of detail about the contents of The Casual Vacancy. We’ve included some highlight quotes below.

Famous people who appear incredibly controlling are generally one of two things: monstrous megalomaniacs, or unusually sane souls insulating themselves from insane circumstances. There is seldom much middle ground, and I find out where Rowling belongs when her publicist calls an hour before we’re due to meet. I fear the worst. Is there going to be some ludicrous last-minute cloak-and-dagger demand?
 
No, it’s just that Rowling has been stuck in her office for ages and fancies a change of scene. Could we meet round the corner instead? I find them in the lobby of a modest hotel. Surely we’re not going to talk here, in earshot of every passing guest?
 
But Rowling is completely relaxed about this arrangement. Warm and animated, quick to laugh, she chatters so freely that her publicist gets jumpy and tells her to lower her voice. “Am I speaking too loud?” She doesn’t look a bit concerned. “Well, I can’t get passionate and whisper!” When I tell her I loved the book, her arms shoot up in celebration. “Oh my God! I’m so happy! That’s so amazing to hear. Thank you so much! You’ve made me incredibly happy. Oh my God!” Anyone listening would take her for a debut author, meeting her first ever fan.

“Obviously I need to be in some form of vehicle to have a decent idea,” she laughs. Having dreamed up Potter on a train, “This time I was on a plane. And I thought: local election! And I just knew. I had that totally physical response you get to an idea that you know will work. It’s a rush of adrenaline, it’s chemical. I had it with Harry Potter and I had it with this. So that’s how I know.”

There has been a horribly familiar change of atmosphere [since the 2010 election], it feels to me a lot like it did in the early 90s, where there’s been a bit of redistribution of benefits and suddenly lone-parent families are that little bit worse off. But it’s not a ‘little bit’ when you’re in that situation. Even a tenner a week can make such a vast, vast difference. So, yeah, it does feel familiar. Though I started writing this five years ago when we didn’t have a coalition government, so it’s become maybe more relevant as I’ve written.”

Like so many British novels, The Casual Vacancy is inescapably about class. “We’re a phenomenally snobby society,” Rowling nods, “and it’s such a rich seam. The middle class is so funny, it’s the class I know best, and it’s the class where you find the most pretension, so that’s what makes the middle classes so funny.” The book is so funny I was halfway through before noticing that every character is, to a varying degree, monstrous.

Rowling grew up near the Forest of Dean in a community not unlike Pagford. “And this was very much me vividly remembering what it was like to be a teenager, and it wasn’t a particularly happy time in my life. In fact, you couldn’t give me anything to make me go back to being a teenager. Never. No, I hated it.”

Her mother, a school lab technician, was diagnosed with MS when Rowling was 15. “But it wasn’t just that – although that did colour it a lot. I just don’t think I was very good at being young.”

She’d had therapy when at “rock bottom” while writing the first Potter. “And I had to do it again when my life was changing so suddenly – and it really helped. I’m a big fan of it, it helped me a lot.” Her other salvation came with her second husband, Neil Murray, a doctor she married in 2001 and with whom she has a son of nine and a daughter aged seven. “When I met Neil, it felt as if he stepped inside everything with me. He changed my life. But, prior to that, to be alone with it all, with a small child, was…” She searches for the word, and opts for understatement. “Difficult.”

Sudden wealth was not a straightforward joy. “You don’t expect the kind of problems it brings with it. I am so grateful for what happened that this should not be taken in any way as a whine, but you don’t expect the pressure of it, in the sense of being bombarded by requests. I felt that I had to solve everyone’s problems. I was hit by this tsunami of demands. I felt overwhelmed. And I was really worried that I would mess up.”

Advertisers were forever offering fortunes to use Potter characters, and McDonald’s wanted to sell Harry Potter Happy Meals, but all to no avail. “I just hate meetings. Though it’s true that once you’ve made a lot of money people around you might be full of ideas about ways to make lots more money and might be disappointed that you don’t want to seize every opportunity to do so.”

Has her accountant ever suggested Jimmy Carr-style tax avoidance schemes? She looks appalled. “No! God, no, he’s not that kind of accountant. No. No one’s ever put that kind of thing to me – but then, they wouldn’t, they just wouldn’t. I do take a pretty dim view of those things. I actually chose my accountant because he said to me, ‘You have to make a fundamental decision. You have to choose whether you organise your money around your life or your life around your money.’”

The endless rumours that The Casual Vacancy would be a crime thriller just made her laugh. “It was all started by Ian Rankin. Ian and I did once have a conversation in which he rightly said the Potter novels are in the main whodunnits, so we were talking about that, and that led to him telling everyone that I was writing a crime novel, which was never the case.”

Whodunnits are her literary guilty pleasure – “I love a good Dorothy L Sayers” – but then again, she doesn’t really feel guilty about that: “There’s no shame in a Dorothy.” She hasn’t read Fifty Shades Of Grey, “because I promised my editor I wouldn’t.” She doesn’t look as if she feels she’s missing out. “Not wildly,” she agrees drily.

Her emotional world is now, she thinks, finally reconciled to her external reality. “In the end you reach a very healthy point, I think, where you disconnect. You really do. And I am there. And it’s been glorious for five years, it’s been thrilling, the sheer freedom. I am the freest author in the world. I can do whatever the hell I like. My bills are paid – we all know I can pay my bills – I was under contract to no one, and the feeling of having all of these characters in my head and knowing that no one else knew a damned thing about them was amazing. It was just blissful. Pagford was mine, just mine, for five years. I loved that. I wrote this novel as exactly what I wanted to write. And I loved it.”

She swears she doesn’t care how well the book sells. “I’m not being snotty about that, but I feel quite disconnected from that sort of expectation.” There may be no commercial ambition left, but still perhaps an artistic point to prove? Some critics were always sniffy about Potter’s literary merit – “In an arbitrarily chosen single page of the first Harry Potter book,” despaired Harold Bloom, “I count seven clichés” – and I wonder if Rowling wrote The Casual Vacancy with those critics in mind. “No, I truly didn’t sit down and think, right, now it’s time to prove I can…” She breaks off and sighs. “I don’t think I physically could write a novel for that reason.”

To write such an ambitious book without ambition was neither a contradiction for Rowling, nor even a choice. “I just needed to write this book. I like it a lot, I’m proud of it, and that counts for me.” She did consider publishing under a pseudonym. “But in some ways I think it’s braver to do it like this. And, to an extent, you know what? The worst that can happen is that everyone says, ‘Well, that was dreadful, she should have stuck to writing for kids’ and I can take that. So, yeah, I’ll put it out there, and if everyone says, ‘Well, that’s shockingly bad – back to wizards with you’, then obviously I won’t be throwing a party. But I will live. I will live.”

I don’t doubt her, but her certainty has the faint zeal of a convert, so I ask how she can be sure. “Because I’m not the person I was a few years ago. I’m not. I’m happier”

Have a read of that right here. Click the image for a larger version:

Dan: Your Harry Potter character, Bellatrix Lestrange, is one of the scariest characters in the books. But I think it’s fair to say that she is very playful and quite sexy as well.

Helena: When they sent the part, I thought, What am I going to do here? Because, actually, on the page, she wasn’t all there, so I thought, Well, you’ve got to be noticed. And Bellatrix-kids were terrified of her. So I think, Okay, I’ve got to be scary. But then also, if you’re with the kdis, you want to have fun being naughty.

Dan: Do you think you take inspiration from kids a lot? Because I do. They’re very  honest in how they act and  how thye are in the world.

Helena: Oh yeah. They are. And I also think there’s a lot of Peter Pan about me anyway. I never really wanted to grow up. I grew up really young. I moved out when I was 13- that’s when I started acting. Dad  was really ill-he was pretty much paralyzed- so there was a part of me that felt like I had to become responsible.

Helena plays Dr. Julia Hoffman in the upcoming film Dark Shadows, which stars herself, Johnny Depp, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Dark Shadows opens on May 11th.

You read the entire interview here and thanks goes out to MuggleNet for the news!

Firstly Dan Dark, Managing Director of Leavesden Studios, was at a roundtable interview attended by Hypable.com, who of course discussed the Tour, including when they began planning it and protecting the old sets in anticipation of it, the quality of the staff, and return value for fans.

We started making the Harry Potter films in 1999. During the making it was clear that we had something special on our hands, and You see for yourselves the incredible talent that goes into these things. I would say we began to develop some ideas for the tour in 2005/2006, and we were still making the films, so we really protected all of the sets and props because we were never quite sure about what we wanted to bring back. And as we were drawing to the end of making the Potter films in late 2010, we brought all of the production people and back in from making the films to recreate everything. We turned this around in 16-18 months, that’s an incredibly short time. This sort of thing would normally take years, and that’s a real testament to the talent of these guys.

Everybody that has been through this facility has commented on how incredible the staff are, and we’re really proud of that, the staff is really proud of that, how they are perceived. And I think that’s relatively unique in the UK, where sometimes we’re a bit cynical about the level of quality of service, and I’m really proud to say that our guys were able to do that. Pride is something that really comes through, and I firmly believe that this is something that the UK should stand up and be extremely proud about.

You have to ask the fans that. When we see the reactions… what I find the most incredible to watch is the reactions of the people coming into the facilities. It’s quite spectacular! It warms your heart to see them. So that’s not for us to answer that question, it’s for the visitors. I’ve walked through this facility so many times, and I still see something new. So the repeatability is frankly endless.

Secondly, producers David Heyman and David Barron took part in this lengthy chat about the Harry Potter films and the Studio Tour.

 
And we also have this short interview with David Yates via LeakyNews in which he talks about his upcoming project Your Voice in My Head, which he hopes to cast Emma Watson in. In particular he discusses the huge potential he believes Emma has as an actress.

 
And in the following interview, David again speaks about Emma and Your Voice in My Head, as well as the prospects for the Doctor Who movie that he is set to direct at some point in the future.

 
Hypable also managed to talk with David Yates about the Dumbledore funeral scene in Half-Blood Prince. Yates notes that they tried to make it work, but it never made it past the script and no footage was ever captured.

It’s a beautiful picture. That scene was in and out, and in and out again… it was a rhythmic thing, it felt weirdly book-ended. So you would read the script and you’d get to Dumbledore’s death, and it felt climactic and moving. And then we went to the Great Hall and this austerity… it sort of felt weirdly complete. And then you got to this grand funeral, and it felt less about the man and more about the pomp of the ceremony, and it felt oddly less connected. So just rhythmically it felt wrong. But I love that scene, it’s a beautiful scene in the book, but it felt wrong in the movie.

They got a sneaky picture of this beautiful concept art for the scene:

The following quote is from David Heyman and is a sweet story in which he describes the support that Tom Felton gave to Emma Watson when she was struggling to deal with fame:

There was a time on the third film where Emma was really uncomfortable with her celebrity and what it meant. And Tom was absolutely brilliant; we were filming Hagrid’s lesson with the Hippogriff, and Tom and Emma were really friendly, and Tom really encouraged Emma to engage with the fans in the way that she hadn’t. It was like she needed someone, a friend, to go on that [journey] with her. They were all looking out for each other.

And finally, on the red carpet at the Studio Tour Luna actress and die-hard Harry Potter fan Evanna Lynch talked about JK Rowling’s new book and the future of the Harry Potter fandom.

Below we have a selection of photos of the stars via Mugglenet and Snitchseeker (see more in our gallery), and after this we have some great interviews with Evanna, Tom and Rupert courtesy of TheHPFan.

Yesterday, a press event took place in front of the Great Hall doors with Rupert Grint, Tom Felton, Evanna Lynch, Warwick Davis, David Heyman, David Barron, David Yates as well as the two main bosses of the studio. They answered several questions about: the sets, their memories from them, the impact Leavesden Studios has on the British film industry, other franchises trying to emulate the success of Harry Potter, and more.

Following Deathly Hallows Part 2′s Visual Effects win at the Baftas and ahead of the Oscars (where Harry Potter is in nominated in the same category), VFX supervisor Tim Burke has been doing a few interviews, including one very lengthy one with Studio Daily.

Tim talks about the differences between the effects on DH2 compared with the previous films, discusses working with several small VFX companies in London for different aspects of the film, gives some insight into the creation of a digital Hogwarts as opposed to using miniatures, talks a bit about 3D, the Gringotts ‘roller coaster’ and the CG giants and spiders and the dragon, mentions last-minute changes to the death of Voldemort and also describes his favourite shots from the last film.

Read several excerpts of that interview below or check out the whole thing here.

In what way did this film have the best effects of the series?

It was more of a spectacle. It was the final chapter of the saga, the death of Voldemort, the battles. We’d never been able to create sequences on that scale before. Before, the films had been fairly contained. This gave us an epic sense of the world around Hogwarts rather than inside Hogwarts.

Do you think people have discounted the “magic” effects through the years? 

I think so, sometimes. Also, some people think we were doing the same thing over and over again. Talking paintings. Wand effects. So, I think perhaps there was a sense with some people that we were doing the same thing every time. Hopefully, the last film showed a bigger world no one had seen before, and brought so many CG characters and creatures into the storytelling. The visual effects were more obvious without being live action with magical effects on top.

Did it help to work with the same studios you had worked with before? 

Having the luxury of working on several films together in the same series does help. You build up relationships, learn the strengths and weaknesses of different studios. These were mostly Soho-based shows. We were able to use the best visual effects supervisors and artists at the key vendors and build a team to deliver the caliber of work everyone expected.

Why was Hogwarts always a digital set this time? 

It was a big change, a big decision that we made before starting the film. We were still working on the sixth film [Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince] and in discussions with the director and producers. All we had was the book. No script. We realized how much a part of the film and the story the school had become. David [Yates] wanted the freedom to fly the camera outside the school, inside the windows, explore the school as part of the developing battle.

Having worked with miniatures in the past, one big 24th-scale and bespoke models at different scales for key areas, we knew it would be a daunting task to build all those miniatures and nest them into wider shots. Double Negative had technology that we had used successfully on Half-Blood Prince to rebuild the whole of London. It was time to throw away the model.

We could previs, design the resolution we need to build, then plot and plan the school build at different resolutions to do everything David [Yates] wanted. He could move the camera from the mountain into the window to a camera move on a stage set. We had all that architecture.

Did you know you’d be designing shots at the last minute? 

There were certain areas of the film unresolved and because of the virtual environments, [David Yates] realized we could recreate shots quickly. The key thing that changed was the death of Voldemort. That happened after we had locked cuts. We had done some screenings and realized we needed a more epic ending. So we redesigned the sequence and thankfully with the digital assets we could recreate the environment. We projected some elements of Ralph Fiennes onto geometry of him and added those to the shots, and for a couple shots had to use a full CG Voldemort. It happened way past the 11th hour. The shoot had finished 12 months earlier, so it was long past the point of pick-up shots. We had to take materials from other shots and recreate him.

Did you design the “roller coaster” sequence through the Gringotts bank with stereo 3D in mind? 

When we shot the film, we didn’t yet have the decision about stereo. We were shooting sequences and didn’t know it would be post-converted. But we designed that sequence in previs to be as much of a roller coaster ride as we could. When we knew the film would be in stereo, we knew certain shots could be delivered by visual effects, and that was one. We had shot the actors on a motion-based gimbal. We extracted those elements and re-projected them onto geometry. The environment was all 3D so we could re-design the shots to push the stereo roller-coaster ride experience and make the audience become a participant in the ride. That was great fun. We did several other sequences where we took over, about 200 shots, and rather than having a post conversion, delivered full 3D shots.

Which shots in the film are your favorites? 

Funnily enough, I think the sequence of the shield forming and the destruction of the shield. Even though they weren’t perhaps the most complicated, they were some of the most beautiful. As Voldemort arrived with his army on the hillside, the teachers went into the areas of the courtyard and created a magical shield that enveloped and protected the school. We art-directed the shots at Double Negative and they are elegant.

It took a long time to create the magical shield. Then Voldemort bombarded the school and destroyed the shield. We wanted to give that an epic scale. We referenced the Hindenburg airship disaster, when it went up in flames, to get the scale of the flames and burning materials. That was the reference for pieces of cloth-like fire that dropped down onto the school. It was magical – not in a Harry Potter sense. It was beautiful and shocking at the same time. Those shots were completely CG and had a big design aspect, which is rewarding.

Of course, all the fighting action sequences were great fun. Getting the giants to work by using live-action actors and changing their faces with CG helped us not to have to create full CG characters. We used scaling and oversized people. MPC changed their faces so they didn’t look human.

And I’m not forgetting the dragon that D-Neg created. We had to emphasize and feel sorry for this 60-foot dragon through pure performance. We found reference from badly treated real animals and translated that body language into our character. He was trapped. Unable to fly. Partially blind. And he had been down there his whole life. It was important to emphasize that so you wanted him to escape and when he did, he flew with majesty and pride. That was a lovely story to roll into the character of the dragon.

Did you have other CG characters in the film? 

We had the dementors again – Rising Sun did those. Framestore did the giant spiders. That has a sweet backstory. Andy Kind, the supervisor who did the spiders, was the one at Mill Film who had worked with me on the spiders on the second film nine years back. Mill Film closed down, so those spiders no longer existed. He rebuilt them by referencing footage from that film.

How does it feel to be away from the world of Harry Potter now? 

It’s really difficult trying to give you sensible information. It feels like a long time ago. It was quite an interesting challenge to come back into the real world. So it’s nice having these awards ceremonies. It brings it back. It was such a great experience, and we were so sad when it was finished. This is a nice timely reminder of what we were involved in.

 
Thanks to Magical-Menagerie.com for the tip on this.

Ahead of next week’s Oscars, Vanity Fair has been publishing a series of articles examining the ‘most visually enticing’ nominees. This week they looked at Stuart Craig’s fantastic work with the production design for the Harry Potter series, and spoke to him about the Hogwarts exterior, the Room of Requirement, Gringotts, Diagon Alley, the Boathouse for Snape’s death and more. You can read some excerpts below or read the whole thing at this link.

“In the early days, every time you saw the exterior of Hogwarts, it was a big miniature, a physical miniature,” Craig says. “In the final film, for the battle, our first miniature was scanned and that became the basis of a new digital model. It was retextured in fantastic detail so that the camera could get into it much, much closer.”

“The consequence of filming real locations was that we were obliged to incorporate the locations into the model of Hogwarts. Often real places are disappointing. They’re not of your choosing. So, the skyline of Hogwarts was not as I would have wished in the early films, and I really did care about that—I was struggling with that,” he says. “As time went on and the books required a new space that we’d never seen before, like the Astronomy Tower that Dumbledore dies from, then I would grab that opportunity with both hands to change and improve the skyline of Hogwarts. I felt happy about it in the end, and most happy about it in its ruined state, actually.”

Stuart says sets sometimes need to be more ‘theatrical, operatic’ than the descriptions in the book. Talking about the only major location change, Snape’s death in the boathouse:

“We did ask Jo Rowling if we might [change] that. She absolutely agreed that we could,” he says. Craig made the boathouse of “90 percent glass, and the reason for that was that it seemed magical that Hogwarts was on fire above it—or big sections of it—and there was a sense of the flame from the fire above being reflected in the glass, also reflected in the water, which in turn reflected in the glass.” The team wanted to give Rickman “a suitable place to die. Alan appreciated it, actually, and said so very kindly afterwards,” Craig says.

On ‘exaggeration’ for the Room of Requirement:

“The fact that they were looking for a tiara—this tiny little jewel of an object—in something so massive and complicated just made the task all the more impossible.” And to create that effect, Craig relied on good old-fashioned elbow grease: “We [modeled] it first with little blocks of Styrofoam and composed this kind of mountainscape, and then we made another model with dolls’ furniture, and then finally replicated it full size.” To prepare for the scene, fellow Oscar nominee and set decorator Stephenie McMillan had been buying furniture for months upon months.

About the Gringotts set:

For Gringotts Wizarding Bank, “everything conspired to make the goblins look very small, and to make the bank look—as banks do—very dignified and solid and important,” Craig says. That meant lots of imposing pillars, which actually are “just paper”—as was the marble floor. “We had quite a considerable marble-making factory,” he says, laughing. As for the chandeliers, he says, “they were 16 feet from top to bottom. We made the bottom half physically and then the top half was put in as a C.G. addition. So it wasn’t just whole sets that got extended; it was individual things, like chandeliers, that got extended by visual effects.”

Finally, Craig mentions a change made to the Diagon Alley set to improve it for visitors on the WB Studio Tour, opening next month:

Ironically, in the aftermath of the films, some of the sets that were rendered in C.G.I. have had to be physically re-created. For instance, for the Warner Bros. studio tour in London, Craig says, “Diagon Alley had a green screen at both ends in the later films. On the studio tour, to see Diagon Alley with a green screen at the end is pretty disappointing, and so we have painted a backing in forced perspective, so that at least looking one way down the street, the illusion is complete.”