Potter Flies The Flag

With just two months before the first Harry Potter movie is released in the UK, the mammoth Warner Bros publicity machine that has slumbered over the past year is now awakening and moving into action. Hence this week's Entertainment Weekly article which goes into great depth about the making of the movie here in Britain. For the first time we hear about the fight to have Harry filmed in the UK. The fight began back in 1999 when two British film officials flew to put the case for the UK before Warner Bros. According to the magazine, they gave a promise to change the UK's child labour laws - such was the desire to have the movie filmed here. 'Harry Potter is something that's weirdly about us - it's culturally British,' Steve Norris - head of the British Film Commission - tells the magazine. '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.' The British influence extended to the very look of the movie, according to its director Chris Columbus, who took his inspiration for the look of the movie from two very English films. 'The inspiration was really from two David Lean pictures: Great Expectations and Oliver Twist,' he explains. The world of the muggles (or non-Wizards to the scant few of you who haven't read the books) would take on the darkness and edge of Expectations while the scenes in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry would be in fabulous Technicolor. 'When we entered Magicland - which is how we altways referred to Hogwarts,' says Columbus, 'I wanted each frame to be filled with a sense of wonder.'