Written Interview: Steve Kloves (“Harry Potter”)
Geoff Boucher at The Hero Complex with this interview with screenwriter Steve Kloves. His movie credits include Racing with the Moon, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Wonder Boys, and then these:
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
If you’re counting, that means Kloves adapted every single Potter book except Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which was written by Michael Goldenberg.
Some excerpts from Boucher’s interview with Kloves:
Steve Kloves should smile when asked about his magical decade — after all, how many Hollywood writers see five of their scripts earn more than $4.7 billion at the box office? But instead Kloves lets out a gloomy sigh — this a man who worries that he has been a sorcerer’s apprentice for too long.
“If people like a ‘Harry Potter’ movie, it’s because of the book,” he said. “But if they don’t like it, then it’s my fault.”
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“The truth is ‘Potter’ was really strange for me, right from the beginning, it wasn’t the sort of thing I ever expected to be doing,” he said. “It was really, really nice in many ways but always a little odd…. I always saw myself writing movies that, you know, people don’t go see.”
Before Hogwarts, Kloves wrote the scripts for — and also directed — “The Fabulous Baker Boys” and “Flesh and Bone,” two films not exactly known for their special-effects budgets but highly regarded for their pulse and intellect. Those movies, though, put him on a short-list at Warner Bros. and one day he got a list of the studio’s available properties and he was intrigued by the short synopsis of a book about an orphaned boy wizard and his loyal friends.
“At that point, this was 1998, ‘Potter’ wasn’t that big a deal here in the States, and later one of my friends said to me, ‘If it had been on the cover of Time magazine before you signed up, you never would have done it,’” Kloves said. “And that’s absolutely the case.”
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If Kloves seems uncomfortable with a broad audience the reason is obvious. He has been “№1 Undesirable” to some fans of “Potter,” a fierce and global constituency that winces when Rowling’s thick books are pruned into brisk blockbusters. Kloves never expected to give a decade of his creative life to any film franchise and he certainly didn’t expect to reach a point in his career where a Utah woman would start a Facebook page called “I Blame Steve Kloves for Everything Wrong in the World.”
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In this newest film, Kloves has added a scene that presents a tender moment between Harry (Radcliffe) and his friend Hermione (Watson) that was never in the books. The young wizards, on the run from dark forces and their own despair, share a dance — there are layers of emotions, tension and shared history that charge the air as a forlorn song crackles from a small radio. Kloves fought for the sequence — and quickly won over the “Potter” brain trust that includes Rowling — but knows that many purists will attack him for it.
The intensity of the “Potter” franchise — eight films in a decade — made the job a smothering one. Trips to the London set and “the daily immersion” in the marathon spring made the father of two fret about his family. It all became too much and Kloves walked away between the fourth and fifth movie — or at least he tried to.
“It sounds glib but they asked me on the wrong day for my final answer,” Kloves said of declining “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” a script that instead went to Michael Goldenberg (“Contact”). The respite that Kloves expected never materialized, however, since his labors on the fourth film went six months longer than planned and lasted well after the cameras started rolling.
“The joke that was played on me was that it didn’t make any sense: I took a break but the ‘Potter’ work didn’t stop at all,” Kloves said.
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“It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, I get it. There was always something around that was cooler — the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movies or ‘Batman.’ But I’ll tell you this, after 10 years we’re still here. And the quality control never slipped. The movies are very special to a couple of generations of young people too, and I think that’s something to be proud of.”
All you HP fans, what do you think of the job the filmmakers did translating the books into movies?
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