McAllister, J.F.O. and Chu, Jeff. “A Feiticeira Tímida”. Time Magazine, 23 de junho de 2003. Nem mesmo uma década atrás ela era desconhecida e pobre, uma mãe solteira vivendo da assistência social e que, às vezes,...
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Rowling, Joanne Kathleen. “Fighting In A Battle That Will Never Be Won” (PrÃncipe de Asturias Prize acceptance speech), 25 October 2003.
It was a big surprise and an even greater honour for me when I knew I had received the PrÃncipe de Asturias Prize of Concord. Indeed, I didn’t intend to teach or preach to children. In fact, I think that, except for some rare exceptions, fiction literature works for children lose interest when the author is more focused in teaching morals to their readers than in captivating them with his or her tale.
Nevertheless, I’ve always believed that Harry Potter books are highly moral. I wanted to portray the ambiguity of a society where intolerance, cruelty, hypocrisy and corruption are frequent, so I could better show how heroic it can be, no matter what your age is, fighting in a battle that will never be won. I also wanted to reflect the fact that life between 11 and 17 years old can be hard and confusing, even if one has a magic wand.
I started to write 32 years ago and I’ve never wanted to be anything else other than a writer. When I was a child I got lost in my books, which were something essential for me, and my appreciation for them has grown with time. Children need tales because they need to test their imagination, to try by themselves other people’s ideas, to live other lives, to send their minds to places where their bodies aren’t mature enough to go yet. There is no movie, TV show, computer game or videogame that can emulate the magic that exists when the imagination of a reader meets with that of the author to create and unique and private world.
The PrÃncipe de Asturias Prize means very much for me, for it celebrates the aspect of my books I’m most proud of: the fact that so many children, coming from so different circumstances and conditions, have chosen to follow Harry through his five years at Hogwarts so far. That’s why I will donate the money of this prize to the Developing Countries Fund of the International Reading Association, which promotes literacy worldwide.
consulte Mais informaçãoJones, Malcolm (com Jac Chebatoris, Nayelli Gonzalez e Andrew Phillips). “Algo sobre Harry”. Newsweek, 14 de julho de 2003. O mais recente episódio de Hogwarts de J.K. Rowling é mais sombrio, intenso, longo — e vale cada...
consulte Mais informaçãoByatt, A.S. “Harry Potter e o adulto infantil”. New York Times, 11 de julho de 2003. Qual é o segredo do sucesso explosivo e mundial dos livros de Harry Potter? Por que eles satisfazem as crianças e – uma...
consulte Mais informaçãoDavies, Hugh. “O ataque a Harry Potter inicia uma guerra de palavras que fez as penas literárias voarem quando a vencedora do prêmio Booker sugere que falta mágica ao último campeão de vendas”. The Daily Telegraph...
consulte Mais informaçãoTaylor, Charles. “A.S. Byatt e o cálice da aspereza”. Salon, 8 de julho de 2003. A recente resenha da autora no New York Times mostra que ela não entende por que muitos de nós amamos Harry Potter. Deve ser porque é...
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Ronnie
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Newsweek, 30 June 2003.
J.K. Rowling has this thing she does where her head dips down an inch or two into her shoulders and her hands twist the air in front of her, as if she’s wringing agony out of the air itself. And that’s what she does when you ask her what she thinks of her new book, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.” “At the moment I’m at the stage when you can only see faults,” she says, her hands going in time with her voice. “I rang my sister and said, ‘The book’s dreadful, it’s just dreadful.’ She just laughed. I said, ‘This is not funny. It is not funny that the book’s dreadful.’ And she said, ‘You’ve said this on every single book.’ I said, ‘But this time I really, really mean it. It’s just dreadful.’ And she said, ‘Yep, you said that on every single book.’ So she was no help at all.” Not to pick a fight in the first paragraph or anything, but we’re with the sister all the way on this.
On the other hand, who wouldn’t second-guess themselves if their four previous novels about the world’s most famous boy wizard had sold more than 190 million copies worldwide in eight years and been translated into 55 languages? The last installment in the saga, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” sold 3 million copies the first weekend it was released in 2000, making it the fastest-selling book in history. The only book that stands a good chance of beating the record is “The Order of the Phoenix.” Amazon.com had more than a million pre-orders, and between midnight last Friday, when the book went on sale, and Monday, Barnes & Noble expected to sell a mil- lion copies.
When books did go on sale at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, bookstores reopened to thousands of costumed Harrys or just kids in pajamas who couldn’t wait an extra minute for their books. These scenes in bookstores were reminiscent of the midnight-madness sales for “Goblet of Fire” in 2000, but many of this year’s celebrations were much more elaborate. The Magic Tree Bookstore in Oak Park, Ill., talked the town into transforming an entire commercial block into the wizard street of Diagon Alley. Thousands of people turned out, including Bonnie and Vann Smith and their daughter, Bridget, 14, who came all the way from Mountain Home, Ark. Bridget said she’s read each of the four previous novels 11 times, and planned to read the new book to her parents on the drive home – “if I don’t finish it tonight.” In New York’s Times Square, people lined up around the block at Toys “R” Us to get a book, including Courtney Sadowsky, 28, of Howell, N.J., who said, “I already read the first Harry Potter book to my infant daughter of 7 months.” She plans to do the same with the rest of the series. Standing in a line around the block to buy a book at 2 a.m. is not everyone’s idea of quality time. Let’s hear it for Miami’s Books & Books: if you reserved a book, it promised doorstep delivery by dawn Saturday.
The week before “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” went on sale was, if anything, even more frenzied. Bowing to Rowling’s wishes, her British and American publishers did their best to keep the book locked up until the sale date, so that not one child, and certainly not one critic, got hold of a copy ahead of anyone else. The immediate beneficiaries of this policy were English bookies, who ran odds on which character would die in the new book, with Hagrid the gamekeeper the favorite at 7-2, followed by Sirius Black at 4-1 and Professors McGonagall and Dumbledore at 5-1. All week long, lucky shoppers kept finding books that had mysteriously landed on store shelves – in a Wal-Mart in Canada, in a health-food store in Brooklyn. (Ours came from a public library.) Scholastic, which spent more than $US3 million promoting the new book, was so adamant about not revealing the contents to anyone before the debut date that the National Braille Press said it couldn’t get access to the manuscript to produce a Braille version before the weekend. Very few authors get that kind of support from their publishers. But with all of publishing in the doldrums for two years (even Scholastic laid off 4 percent of its staff recently), which publisher wouldn’t jump to accommodate the creator of “Harry Potter”?
Not that Rowling is a prima donna. She doesn’t even like to complain. Her life, she wants you to know, is well beyond OK: “Only someone whose been as broke as I was could appreciate how happy I am. I appreciate every day not having to worry about money.” The 37-year-old author’s got a new husband, Dr. Neil Murray, a general practitioner whom she met through mutual friends and married the day after Christmas in 2001. They have a new baby, David Gor – don Rowling Murray, born in March. And she’s going to guest-star on “The Simpsons” next fall. Three years ago the Queen of England made Rowling an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. (And as long as we’re talking about the queen, Rowling is reportedly the richer of the two, although she denies that’s she’s worth anywhere near the rumored $US468 million.) When she gave NEWSWEEK a rare interview at her home in Edinburgh (there’s another house in the Scottish countryside and another in London), she acted like a celebrity only once: she kept us waiting. But that was so she could feed the baby and put him down for a nap.
The happy-ending address of the real-life Cinderella – the single mother who nine years ago was scribbling away in Edinburgh coffee shops while her baby daughter slept – is a rambling two-story Victorian stone house with some faded hydrangeas beside the front stoop. It sits in a tree-lined upper-middle-class neighborhood full of doctors and lawyers and politicians, and it’s not, Rowling points out, in the poshest part of town. There’s a freestanding office on the property where two assistants handle the thousand pieces of mail she gets a week. Rowling herself spends at least one day a week answering letters. There are no fancy cars in the drive, unless you count her husband’s Mini Cooper (oddest piece of Rowling trivia: she doesn’t know how to drive). Her daughter, Jessica, from her first marriage, still attends a public school. The only piece of evidence that you’re anywhere near rich-and-famous territory is the lock on the gate. Butch, the resident Jack Russell terrier, is much too friendly to frighten intruders.
When Rowling does get David down for his nap and comes strolling across the gravel drive to the office, she seems tall and gangly in jeans and a red shirt and not shy so much as preoccupied. But when she sits down and begins to talk, she crafts every answer with a true storyteller’s knack for detail and narrative.
Right off, you can’t help asking if fame doesn’t have its price – doesn’t it get harder and harder just to go for a walk? “No, no,” she replies, slowly and evenly. “I can honestly say there is nowhere I would avoid.” But then her hands start doing that twisting thing on the table. “Well, that’s not true. There is one thing I would avoid: I no longer write in cafes, I can’t do that anymore. And I know people might think, ‘Well, very small price to pay.’ But to me it’s a real privation, because it was the way I worked best. Very occasionally, as a treat, I take my notebook and go off to places that I’m not known to write in, and I write there. Last year I thought I’d been very clever: I went to the National Portrait Gallery’s cafe. I thought, ‘Well, no one will care, obviously, because they’ll all be interested in what they’ve just seen.’ Two days later the Edinburgh Evening News printed, ‘J. K. Rowling spotted in the National Portrait Gallery Cafe writing away. Is this Book 5?” Yes, it was Book 5, but now I can’t write there, you bastards.” That concludes the complaining portion of the interview.
Rowling’s first four books came out one right after another with hardly a year apart. By the time the fourth appeared, the strain of the pace was beginning to show. “Goblet of Fire” was compulsively readable, like a 734-page action sequence, but the writing was much sloppier than the prose in the earlier installments. “Order of the Phoenix,” in contrast, never goes out of control. She tells her story with her characteristic gift for pacing and surprise. Everything we’ve taken for granted – starting with the absolute power of Dumbledore, Harry’s headmaster at Hogwarts – is called into question. And that makes things much more frightening, both for Harry and for the reader, as evil Lord Voldemort consolidates his power, infecting even the Ministry of Magic with his malign designs.
“Phoenix” is the most atmospheric of all the Potter books. And since it seems that Edinburgh has a castle on every corner, you wonder how much Rowling has drawn on her surroundings. Not in the slightest, she claims. “I could live anywhere and produce it word for word the same. But I do think being British is very important. Because we do have a motley, mongrel folklore here, and I was interested in it and collected it. And then got the idea for Harry.”
Rowling makes no apology for having kept her readers waiting. “I wanted to know what it was like to write without having the pressure of the deadline. And it was wonderful. I had been writing very intensely, since ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ [the first book]. By ‘Goblet,’ I was writing 10 hours a day. And that’s just getting stupid. Because I have a daughter. I really wanted to see her before she turned 18 and left home and never spoke to me.” The extra time paid off in a very long, but never windy, chronicle where every page produces examples of Rowling’s astonishing inventiveness. Best new touch? A quill pen that Harry is forced to use in detention. As he writes “I must not tell lies,” the words are carved into the back of his hand. “Phoenix” is one of the best books in the series. How good is it? I peeked ahead to find out how it ended. So sue me. I peeked ahead in “Bleak House,” too. Only a really good book can make you do that.
Yes, a major character dies, but no giving away the ending here. In place of a spoiler, let’s pause for a message from the author: “I know that a certain number of my fans are going to be pretty upset with me by the end of the book. I really apologize to them. But it had to be so. And I am sorry because I know what it’s like to lose someone, albeit a fictional person, that you were quite attached to.” And yes, the plot gets darker in “Phoenix,” a point Rowling thinks is so obvious by now it’s hardly worth mentioning. “I’m surprised that people are surprised that the series is getting darker, because the first book started with a murder. And although you didn’t see the murder happen, that for me was an announcement that these things would continue within the series.” But she’s not blind to the fact that very young children will want to read these books, and that they will be disturbed: “I was always ambivalent when people told me that they’d read the first book to their 6-year-old, because I knew what was coming. And I have to say even with the first book, that is a scary ending.”
Perhaps the biggest surprise in “Phoenix” is that Harry, now 15, is finally acting like a moody, misunderstood teenager. “I’ve said all along that I want Harry to grow up in a realistic way, which means hormonal impulses, and it means a whole bunch of adolescent angst and anger, actually. Harry’s a lot more angry in Book 5, which I think is entirely right, given what he’s been through. It’s about time he got angry about how life has dealt him.” But isn’t it inappropriate for a 9-year-old to read about those things? “I don’t think so. They will be 14 themselves. There is no harm in them knowing what 14-year-olds may sometimes feel like. My daughter is 9, and I know that she can cope with Book 5 because I’m reading it to her at the moment. She’s coping.” She’s also, to her mother’s mild dismay, begun dictating plot points. “She’s told me unequivocally who I’m not to kill. And I’ve said, ‘Well, I already know who’s going to die, so now is not the time to come to me and tell me I mustn’t kill X, Y and Zed, because their fates are now preordained.’ And she doesn’t like hearing that at all. Not at all.”
Few authors are so passionately protective of their creations as Rowling, so it’s fun to listen to her put a subtle but very diplomatic distance between her work and the two movies derived from it so far. She likes the looks of the movies: “Chris Columbus [director of the first two films] was eager for me to tell him exactly what I saw in terms of sets particularly. And when I walked into the Great Hall of Hogwarts where they’d built it on a studio set outside London, that was absolutely like walking into the inside of my own head.” She was crazy about the scenes of Quidditch: “Quidditch really lived up to my expectations. That was phenomenal.” And she’s wild about Alfonso Cuaron, who’s directing the third movie, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” Rowling points out that one of the reasons she sold film rights to Warner Bros. was that they’d done such a good job with “The Little Princess,” a Cuaron film. But that, she implies, is quite enough gushing for one day, because the next thing she says is, “Obviously, I prefer books. I’m a writer. That’s always going to be so. The thing about film is that everyone sees the – same thing, and that’s what will always make it substandard to the novel. Readers have to work with me to create a new Hogwarts every single time every book is read.”
When it comes to the merchandising of Harry Potter, however – the action figures, robes and vibrating broomsticks – Rowling makes it plain that she never set out to write “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Commerce.” There have been moments, she admits, “where I regretted selling film rights. Just moments.” While Warner Bros. has given her a lot of say in the way the stories are developed for film, “the one thing that I did not have the power to do was say no to merchandising. And I would have done if I could have. But you have to be realistic about this. These are very, very expensive films to make. And no film company in the world is going to make them faithfully to the books and not merchandise because they’ve got to get their money back somehow.”
Of course, it’s tough to imagine anyone in the Potter universe not making his money back. When you ask her to explain the popularity of her books, she wisely says she has no clue and advises you to go ask her readers. But she certainly knows who she is and what she wants from life. Toward the end of the interview, her face takes on that preoccupied look again, and her answers dwindle down to yeses and nos. But then her husband brings the baby over to the office for a visit, and she lights right up. Watching her cuddle her newborn, you remember what she’d said when asked if there were any parallels between having a baby and producing a book. “Yes, there are parallels,” she replied. “The difference is that I just look at David and think that he’s absolutely perfect, whereas you look at the finished book and you think, ‘Oh, damn it, I should have changed that.’ You’re never happy. Whereas with a baby, you’re happy. If you’ve got a perfect baby, you’re just grateful.” Those of us under Harry Potter’s magic spell are more reluctant to criticize Rowling’s literary creation. But we know all about being grateful.
With Jac Chebatoris, Nayelli Gonzalez and Andrew Phillips in New York and Karen Springen in Chicago
©2003 Newsweek, Inc.
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Pituh 2 e Miss Granger
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Fry, Stephen, interviewer: J.K. Rowling at the Royal Albert Hall, 26 June 2003.
Transcription by MSN.com
Harry Potter and the Magic of the Internet
JK Rowling Webcast on MSN featuring your questions on text and video from around the world June 26th 2003
The webcast was produced by MSN with Bloomsbury, Clear Channel and Initial an Endemol Company with BT Broadband in the UK and Scholastic in the US.
The webcast started with some pre-recorded interviews from outside the venue with children who had been waiting all morning. JK Rowling arrived to huge cheers.
JK Rowling paused to sign autographs while the crowds were being entertained by magicians and jugglers and even a tea-lady on stilts. Inside the Hall they sang a version of the Hogwarts School Song.
At 4.09 exactly we cut live to the show happening inside the Royal Albert Hall. The stage set is a common room at Hogwarts with a fireplace surrounded by framed pictures and a huge moon suspended from the ceiling.
There are giant screens on either side of the stage for video questions filmed by MSN from around the world.
Assistant Caretaker: J K Rowling is here everybody! She’s in the building! Ooh! Ooh! I’m so excited. I’m very, very excited. Hey! Hold on, hold on! I bet some of you are literally bursting with excitement. Oh no! Not literally, not literally – I’ve got enough mess to clear up. Hey! I’ve got to get moving. Let’s get this place ship-shape, she’ll be here.
FX: Eerie noise.
Ooh someone’s coming. Come on you guys look lively, smarten up because She’ll be here soon. I’d better poke the fire. There we go. Ooh! Hey that noise you just heard means there’s a magic portal opening up and we have Muggles from all over the world joining us. Hello, welcome to our show. You’re in for a big, big treat. Oh yes you are!
In a moment we shall meet “She who shall be named†with “He who shall ask the questions†and his name is…he is a marvellous Muggle, called Stephen Fry, who you will know is the voice of the Harry Potter books and he’s here, yes, right now!
Enjoy the show everybody! Goodbye!
FX: Explosion and puff of smoke as Stephen Fry comes out of the fireplace.
Stephen Fry: Oh dear me. Hello! Hello there! Hello, am I in the right place? It’s a long time since I’ve used floo powder and I sometimes end up in the wrong place. Is this the Royal Albert Hall?
Audience: YESSSSS!
Stephen Fry: Good. Now most of you might know why we are here. Have you see an assistant caretaker anywhere? He was supposed to be welcoming me here. With any luck he might have been fired. We are here to meet the most famous and the most popular writer in the whole wide world!
Audience: Cheers
Stephen Fry: Now I have to ask you a question. Are you ready to meet her?
Audience: YESSSS!
Stephen Fry: In that case, let me welcome onto this stage boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen J K ROWLING
Audience: Very very loud CHEERS!
JK Rowling: Hello. Oh Wow!
Stephen Fry: How about that?
JK Rowling: That’s amazing.
Stephen Fry: Shall we go and sit down. There are some questions to ask you. You pop there. Now, as you may know everybody, we are webcasting around the planet and many people have lots of questions to ask
JK Rowling: Good good
Stephen Fry: I have one to start with… what am I going to call you?
JK Rowling: Jo
Stephen Fry: Jo?
JK Rowling: Yes
Stephen Fry: Can we settle a really important question? How do you pronounce your last name?
JK Rowling: It is Rowling – as in rolling pin.
Stephen Fry: Rolling! You now all have to say after me, the word “rolling†boys and girls, 1…2…3…
Audience: ROLLING!
Stephen Fry: If you hear anybody in the future say JK “Row-elling†you have my permission to hit them on the head – not with a copy of the Order of the Phoenix because that would be cruel
JK Rowling: That would kill them )
Stephen Fry: No use something smaller than the last book – like a fridge.
JK Rowling (laughs)
Stephen Fry: We’ve got lots of questions to get through so let’s hear our first question which is from a young man not too far away. He’s in Stevenage in Hertfordshire and his name is James Williams.
What kind of books did you read when you were a child? Did it inspire you to become a writer?
JK Rowling: That’s a very good question, a very intelligent question. I would read absolutely anything at all. My favourite writers were E. Nesbit… I liked C.S. Lewis, and I used to read adult writers as well. I would read absolutely anything: the backs of cereal packets – anything.
Stephen Fry: Are you one of those people that can’t eat breakfast cereal without reading the packet?
JK Rowling: I am indeed one of those people.
Stephen Fry: I’m the same. I go mad if I have to eat cereal and there’s no packet anywhere )
One of the things I suppose a lot of people always like to know about writers, is the very basic question of what your average writing day is like. Now I’m sure there’s no average writing day. It’s a silly question or may sound silly to you, but people always love to know them… like: Do you use computer or do you write with a pen? Do you drink coffee or tea? Do you listen to music when you write? Those sorts of things. Can you give us a rough example of a day?
JK Rowling: My favourite way to write used to be to go to cafes. I used to love doing that because I find being surrounded by people, even though I can’t talk to them while I’m writing, is very helpful. Being a writer is a very, very lonely job obviously, but these days I can’t write in cafes because too many people come up to me and say “Are you that woman that writes that Harry Potter� So I write at home now – and I write much more on the computer than I used do
Stephen Fry: Do you listen to music when you’re writing?
JK Rowling: I never listen to music when I’m writing – I find music much too distracting
Stephen Fry: Do you drink tea or coffee?
JK Rowling: I drink both of them – in excessive quantities
Stephen Fry: Just to be really dull. Do you start very early and write till very late? Is it regular?
JK Rowling: I start after I have taken my daughter to school and I keep writing till I’m so hungry I can’t focus on the computer any more – then I go and have sandwich then write till Jessica comes home from school then sometimes I’ll do a bit in the evening.
Stephen Fry: and after about a year or so …
JK Rowling: and after a year or so you finally think “Ooh I’ve finished the bookâ€
Stephen Fry: Do you print it out as you go along and read it on paper?
JK Rowling: I do, yes – waste a lot of paper
Stephen Fry: Good well. Those are the details out of the way
Question from Anna Beatrice de Curia Pierera, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil
On video: “Did you find it harder to write now that the whole world is eagerly waiting for the launching of the new Harry Potter book in the series?â€
JK Rowling: Umm, I don’t think I did find it harder to write but it can get a little bit scary being published these days. Look where we are! The first reading I ever did; there were two people who’d wandered into the basement of Waterstone’s (UK Book Store) by mistake and were too polite to leave when they saw someone was going a reading and they had to get all the staff in the shop downstairs to bulk out the crowd a bit. I was terrified. I was shaking so badly.
Stephen Fry: Now when you go to a book shop to do a signing people dress up – don’t they…
JK Rowling: They do. Best one I ever saw was one woman in America who dressed up as the fat lady in pink dress and she’d hung a picture frame around herself. She looked fabulous.
Stephen Fry: How wonderful! Particularly in America where they’re more perhaps theatrical than we are about these things – you get boys dressed as Harry and girls as Hermione?
JK Rowling: Many boys dressed as Harry. Lately I’ve noticed people like dressing up as Draco a lot more, which I’m finding a little bit worrying. You’re all getting far too fond of Draco )
Stephen Fry: The dark forces are rising Jo )
JK Rowling: The dark forces are indeed rising!
Stephen Fry: There’s no question about it! Now to Manchester where there is a question from Jess Wilde:
On video: “What advice would you give to any kids who want to become authors?â€
Stephen Fry: Now Jess is of course is a name you like…
JK Rowling: My daughter is called Jessica. I always say the same thing – which is to read as much you possibly can. Nothing will help you as much as reading. Then you’ll go through a phase and imitate your favourite authors and that’s fine – that’s a learning experience too and you are also going to have to accept that you’re going to hate a lot of things you write before you find you like something.
Stephen Fry: There seem to be lots of popular children’s authors around at the moment. Philip Pullman…do you like him?
JK Rowling: Philip Pullman is fantastic. David Almond, Jacqueline Wilson.
Stephen Fry: Lemony Snicket. I like that – I wish I were called Lemony Snicket.
JK Rowling: What a name- I would love to be called Lemony Snicket.
Stephen Fry: Almost better than being called Mundungus.
JK Rowling: Almost…. You know what Mundungus means? Mundungus is an old word for tobacco because, Mundungus’s always smelling of his pipe and other various unsavoury things so that’s why he called Mundungus.
Stephen Fry: I didn’t know that. There we’ve learnt…
Stephen Fry: Now let’s go 6000 miles to Lily Rodseth in Seattle USA.
Video: Which character do you miss most when you finish writing a book?
JK Rowling: I really miss all of them but I suppose I’m going to have to say Harry because you know he is my hero and there’s a lot of me in Harry.
Stephen Fry: People ask me in the reading of them who my favourite character is and I always say Harry. You didn’t choose to make ‘Anyone else’ and the Philosophers Stone or ‘Anyone Else’ and the Chamber of Secrets – its Harry’s story and Harry’s growth as a person.
JK Rowling: It’s Harry’s journey. Harry is the eyes through which you see the world so he’s crucial to the story.
Stephen Fry: Can you remind us how it all popped into your head, almost fully formed?
JK Rowling: I was on a train going from Manchester to London, looking out of window at cows and I just thought “boy doesn’t know he’s a wizard goes off to wizard schoolâ€. I have no idea where it came from. The idea were just floating along the train and looking for someone and my mind was vacant enough and so it decided to zoom in there.
Stephen Fry: You played with the idea in your head?
JK Rowling: Exactly. From that moment I thought “Why doesn’t he know he’s a wizard?†It was as though the story was just there for me to discover. His parents are dead he needs to find out they’re wizards and on we went from there.
Stephen Fry: And the names I have to mention the names, you mentioned Mundungus being tobacco…. A lot of the names have very particular meanings; Albus Dumbledore is on the side of light his name means “white†in Latin. Alba was an old name for Britain.
JK Rowling: It also means wisdom in Latin.
Stephen Fry: Yes, “Alb†– What about Malfoy? What does that mean?
JK Rowling: Malfoy is a made-up name but you could say it was old French for bad faith. It really suits him.
Stephen Fry: Bad Faith…Malfoy…perfect isn’t it. I’m sure the boys and girls nave noticed that the Hogwarts School motto is Latin and what is it?
JK Rowling: Well, you’re one of the few people I’ve met who knew what it meant “Never tickle a sleeping dragonâ€.
Stephen Fry: There never tickle a sleeping dragon, probably the wisest advice you will ever hear. Its good advice
Stephen Fry: It’s like the magic equivalent of “let sleeping dogs lieâ€
JK Rowling: Exactly!
Question from Neil Sierra Sidney Australia
Video: “Have you ever considered writing a book about Harry 5 or 10 years later – after he’s left Hogwarts?â€
JK Rowling: I get asked this question about whether I’m going to write about Harry when he’s grown up. I always say “You’ll have to wait and see whether he survives to be a grown upâ€
Stephen Fry: Uhn..that’s a frightening thought…isn’t it my goodness!
JK Rowling: Sorry. I’m not saying he won’t but I don’t want to give anything away at this point.
Stephen Fry: He is growing up of course and it’s intriguing about reading these books to watch him and his friends – age. Which do you think he’d fine the more difficult – to fight Voldemort – You’ve got to be able to say it or he’ll have too much power over you to fight Voldemort – or to kiss Cho?
JK Rowling: People who’ve read the Order of the Phoenix will have a fairly shrewd idea of what the answer might be…
Stephen Fry: Were not going to give away too much about the book because not everyone can read that fast. I could read a few telephone directories in a week but not that book. Another thing about the ageing (of the characters growing up) I feel. If you look back now at the first and second books, they almost seem innocent by comparison – they had monsters, they had real villains, everything now is more complicated isn’t it …
JK Rowling: Yes, very much so.
Stephen Fry: They are. Everything is more complicated now as Harry gets older. When he entered the wizard-ing world after a horrible time at the Dursleys he expected Wonderland. He almost immediately he wandered into Draco Malfoy and found out that some wizards are racists. Slowly but surely he found out many people in power in the wizarding world are just as nasty and corrupt as in our world.
JK Rowling: That’s because it’s about human nature and people with less pure motives have wands too. A lot of time is trying to legislate for them.
Stephen Fry: Exactly, politicians and journalists. It’s also true in the real world. People say we haven’t got a magic wand to cure all ills of the world but what you show is that even if you have got a magic wand it doesn’t cure all the ills.
Another question now from Daniel Joseph, Croydon (UK)
Video “How do you decide what the baddies would be like?â€
JK Rowling: This is going to sound awful but I’ve met enough people I didn’t like in my life to have a fairly shrewd idea of what I want baddies to be like. I think from letters I get from people your age that nearly all of you here knows a Draco Malfoy and girls will almost certainly know a Pansy Parkinson. We all grow up with those sort of people and certainly as adults we’ve all have met people like Lucius Malfoy and some of the other characters.
Stephen Fry: Malfoy, Goyle and Crabbe are almost irredeemably bad – certainly there’s almost nothing attractive about about Goyle and Crabbe, repulsive – Malfoy is reasonably stylish…
JK Rowling: Malfoy is certainly stylish in the film –
Stephen Fry: Yes, and even in the books there is a certain flair. Most characters like Snape are hard to love but there is a sort of ambiguity – you can’t quite decide – something sad about him – lonely and it’s fascinating when you think he’s going to be the evil one a party from Voldemort obviously in the first book then slowly you get this idea he’s not so bad after all.
JK Rowling: Yes but you shouldn’t think him too nice. It is worth keeping an eye on old Severus definitely!
Stephen Fry: Why does Dumbledore …(simplifies) one of the most awful things in the world when we are young, is injustice – when something’s unfair it makes us so angry. One of the things is I get upset on Harry’s behalf about how people tell lies about him. We know he’s brave and actually saved the magical world on numerous occasions, yet he has to start all over again in each book and do all over again and prove himself again. Dumbledore knows how good he is and how bad the fathers of Deatheaters, Crabbe and Goyle are.
JK Rowling: I don’t want to say too much but Dumbledore is a very wise man who knows that Harry is going to have to learn a few hard lessons to prepare him for what may be coming in his life. He allows Harry to get into what he wouldn’t allow another pupil to do and he also unwillingly permits Harry to confront things he’d rather protect him from. As people who’ve read the Order of The Phoenix will know; Dumbledore has had to step back from Harry to teach him some of life’s harder lessons.
Stephen Fry: You have to push you’re beloved chickens out of the nest so they can fly
Q from Hong Kong – China Korea International School
Video: “Do you believe in magic?â€
Stephen Fry: Well there’s a good question, do you believe in magic?
JK Rowling: I’m sorry to say, because often when I answer this question I get a groan, that I don’t believe in magic.
Groan from the audience
JK Rowling: I really don’t in magic the way that it appears in book. I could be slightly corny and say I do believe in other kinds of magic; the magic of the imagination for example, and love, but magic as in waving a wand – no. I’d love to believe in it but I’m afraid I can’t.
Stephen Fry: But it doesn’t matter that it sounds corny … it’s desperately important that the way Harry solves all his problems is really through his courage, his friendship, and his loyalty and stoutness of heart.
JK Rowling: “Stoutness of heart†– is a very good phrase!â€
Harry is not a good enough wizard yet to even attempt to take on Voldemort as wizard to wizard. He’s escaped him three, four times if you count the encounter with Tom Riddle. He keeps doing it because there is one thing that Voldemort doesn’t understand and that’s the power that keeps Harry going. And we all know what that power is.
Stephen Fry: Exactly right we now have Natasha Rye, Suffolk
Video “If you could have any magical power for one day what would you have and how would you use it?â€
JK Rowling: If I could have a power, I would have the power of invisibility and, it is a little bit sad, but I’d probably sneak off to a café and write all day.
Stephen Fry: I’m just thinking of all the wicked things I would do if I were invisible and they wouldn’t include writing!
JK Rowling I’ve just been asked, on my way here I was asked for the first time when book 6 will be ready so I think you’ll agree I’d better get working soon.
Stephen Fry: It can’t be soon enough for any of us.
Q from Paris, France: Antoine De Dan (in French)
Video: “If you looked into the Mirror of Erised what do you think you would see?â€
Stephen Fry: The Mirror of Erised is as everyone knows …what is Erised spelt backwards?
Audience: Desire!
Stephen Fry: Desire spelt backwards.
JK Rowling – Very good. I would, at the moment, probably see myself very much as I am because one of the most wonderful things that could possibly have happened has happened and I’ve had another child – myself and family. I’d also like to see what Harry sees – my mother alive again. There’d be room over my shoulder to see a scientist inventing a cigarette that would be healthy, that would be lovely and I can think of a particular journalist being boiled in oil.
Stephen Fry: If your first book had been a reasonable success and your second book ok too so a few people would have heard your name, and they might have just done well enough, do you think the stories would have developed in different ways? Has some element of the huge and unparalleled fame and success you’ve had, has given you different view of the world and affected the way the books developed?
JK Rowling Mmmm yes that had entered the story. I think that I always thought Harry would feel the pressure of his position both as famous wizard – as in the first book when he enters, you do see that when he walked into the Leaky Cauldron for the first time and he’s stunned that people have been talking about him for eleven years without his knowledge – and I always knew he would meet someone from the Daily Prophet. I think it would be foolish to pretend I don’t write Rita Skeeter with a little more enjoyment these days. I try and avoid reading about myself..
And now here is a question from Amit Ben David from Roshon Israel
Video “What music does Harry Potter listen to?â€
JK Rowling That’s a very good question. Well..He has recently heard the wizard super group the Weird Sisters who came to the Yule Ball who had an odd assortment of instruments: bagpipes, cello, and the electric guitar of course so I’d have to say they are his favourite group.
Stephen Fry: Is there no Wizard Rap or House or Hip Hop in the wizard world?
JK Rowling That would have got to be too complicated. He’s sticking with the Weird Sisters and you can make of them what you will.
Stephen Fry: What about you?
JK Rowling: What music do I like? – lots of different things. The Beatles were my favourites. This is the nearest I’ll ever get to being a Beatle – hearing you all shouting. It was really very nice.
Stephen Fry: This lot makes more noise than a Beatles audience don’t you?
Audience YESSSSSS!
Question from a place you know very well indeed, Edinburgh from Janine Kerr
Video: “If you were a teacher at Hogwarts, what subject would you teach?â€
Stephen Fry: You’ve been a teacher of course.
JK Rowling: I’ve been a teacher. I would probably teach Charms. I see Charms as a slightly lighter subject than transfiguration which is very hard work. With Charms there would be a little more leeway for a little more personal creativity – transfiguration you have to get it exactly right, transfiguration is more scientific. My daughter would be much better at transfiguration, she’s very scientific.
Stephen Fry: What did you teach?
JK Rowling: French.
Stephen Fry: Do you still read and talk French?
JK Rowling: Very rarely. I don’t have a lot of time to read in French these days because I’m a mother! and free time is spent writing, and then reading a bit in English.
Stephen Fry: Where were you at school?
JK Rowling: In the Forest of Dean – that’s why Hagrid has that accent; He comes from The Forest of Dean.
Audience: Question from Natasha Morrison – competition winner in audience
JK Rowling: Hello Natasha!
Natasha: “How did you think of Quidditch because it’s so unlike any other sport I’ve heard of?â€
JK Rowling: Right well, if you want to create a game like Quidditch – what you have to do is have an enormous argument with your then boyfriend, you walk out of house, you sit down in pub and you invent Quidditch. I don’t really know what the connection is between the row and Quidditch except that Quidditch is quite a violent game and maybe in my deepest, darkest soul I’d like to have seen him hit by a ‘bludger’.
Stephen Fry: Do you ever play the computer games?
JK Rowling: I don’t but my daughter plays it – she’s very good. I can’t work Playstations. I’m no good at these things.
Stephen Fry: I never got past throwing the gnomes over the hedges which is level a half never mind level one…so…hello?
Caretaker: Hello Master Muggle. Question from the Muggle machine
Stephen Fry: Of course with everybody watching we’re getting a lot of questions emailed in. Matt is not from a real boy or girl this is from you isn’t it?
Caretaker: No… No ! ..How can you tell?
Stephen Fry: None of the nice boys and girls would want to know if wizards could make farts smell really bad, nor do they want to know what type of underpants Harry Potter wears, or which smells worse Unicorn poo or Dragon pee? You’re a disgrace! Don’t come back until you have a real question…Ridiculous!
JK Rowling: Dragon Pee (smells worse) (laughter)
We still have time to take questions from around the world so keep emailing and Mr Emulsion will bring them in…
Question from Jackson Long in audience competition winner
Jackson: “Professor Snape has always wanted to be Defence Against Dark Arts teacher. In book 5 he still hasn’t got the job. Why does Prof Dumbedore not allow him to be Defence Against The Dark Arts teacher?â€
JK Rowling: That is an excellent question and the reason is that I have to be careful what I say here. To answer it fully would give a lot away about the remaining two books.
When Prof Dumbledore took Prof Snape onto the staff and Prof Snape said “I’d like to be Prof of Defence Against the Dark Arts please†and Prof Dumbledore felt it might bring out the worst in Snape so said “I think we’ll get you to teach Potions and see how you get along thereâ€.
Stephen Fry: Now, Snape, we talked about him a little before, there’s something about letter “sâ€, isn’t there especially with that â€n†with it, you can’t help saying it without sneering or snarling… Snarl, sneer…
JK Rowling: Snake! I could have very easily called him, Snicket instead but it’s a funnier, kinder word so I didn’t.
Stephen Fry: Or sneeze is pleasant and of course and the Founder of the House (at Hogwarts) was Salazar Slytherin – another snaky thing. Snakes feature a lot – is a Parselmouth a real thing or did you make that up?
JK Rowling: Parselmouth is an old word for someone who has a problem with the mouth, like a hare lip.
Stephen Fry: So it is a real word again – very clever. Order of the Phoenix is 766 pages long – that’s a big book by any standards and as I’ve got to sit in front of a microphone and read it all out every word, I’m a bit cross with you. On the other hand it’s extraordinarily good value. You could have written eight books with the words you’ve done in these first five. Did you know it was going to be this long?
JK Rowling: No… I didn’t, I will say this. I had to put in some things because of what’s coming in books 6 and 7 and I didn’t want anyone to say to me “what a cheat you never gave us cluesâ€. If I didn’t mention things in Order of the Phoenix I think you’ve said “well, you sprang that on usâ€! Whereas I want you to be able to guess if you’ve got your wits about you.
Stephen Fry: To set up surprises..
Stephen Fry: Yes, there are few surprises coming.
Stephen Fry: You are pretty cruel to Harry – he gets such misery heaped on him, you pile on all the injustices, betrayals…against him.
JK Rowling: I do – I think he has the hardest time in this book although there are some scary things coming for Harry. In this book no-one believes him and also he’s a teenager. To have these two burdens in life at once is quite horrible. But from now on at least everyone knows he’s telling the truth. Whatever he has to face in the coming books he doesn’t have to deal with people being so distrustful of him.
Stephen Fry: Are we going to meet Hermione’s parents?
JK Rowling: We’ve seen them briefly but they’re dentists so they’re not that interesting.
Stephen Fry: (Laughter) You’ll be getting so many letters of complaints from dentists
JK Rowling: I love dentists really – I should never have been rude! I take that back– imagine next time I’m having my fillings done. )
Stephen Fry: It is another one of the most horrible and brilliant inventions of the books is this snobbery this idea of purebloods and mudbloods and this idea of mingling, mixed breeding which is a reflection of some of the things like racism and intolerance that we have in our world. Is that deliberate or did it come to you in a flash again or did it just suddenly…
JK Rowling: That was deliberate it was always there from the beginning as you saw with Draco – even from first book with Draco Harry discovers him first being rude about Muggles. I was also playing with that when I created Professor Lupin having a contagious disease so people are frightened of him. I really liked him as a character but he also has his failing though he’s a nice man and a wonderful teacher – in fact he’s the one time I’ve written a teacher… the kind of teacher I’d have loved to have had. McGonagall is a good teacher but scary at times. Lupin’s failing is he likes to be liked. That’s where he slips up – he’s been disliked so often he’s always pleased to have friends so cuts them an awful lot of slack.
Stephen Fry: Very true…very true we’re not going to go into the business who dies because not everyone has read the book but did it did cause a stir when you admitted it caused you some distress Do you feel emotional about a lot of the characters you write?
JK Rowling: I do. What I was trying to do with the death in this book was that I wanted to show how very arbitrary and sudden death is. This is a death with no big deathbed scene – it happens almost accidentally. It’s one of the cruel things about death and we’re now in a war situation where that does happen. That’s how it happens – one minute you are talking to your friend and the next minute he is gone, so shocking and inexplicable – one minute they are there but now where did they go? I found it upsetting to write because I knew what it would mean to Harry. [Edited]
Stephen Fry. Luna Lovegood lets talk about Luna Lovegood ……….
JK Rowling: Yes! I don’t know where she came from but I really like Luna – really fun to write. She’s slightly out of step in many ways but she’s the anti-Hermione. Hermione’s so logical and inflexible in so many ways and Luna is likely to believe 10 impossible things before breakfast…
Stephen Fry: Now to go back to one of the most infuriating characters you’ve ever written, Umbridge.
JK Rowling: She’s horrible isn’t she? I’m glad you hate her because I really loathe Umbridge.
Stephen Fry: She is the worst. (To Caretaker) Have we got a real one from the Muggle world?
Internet question from Jessica Wells, originally from Australia now living in London.
Email: “Harry saw his parents die so why hasn’t he been able to see the Thestrals before?â€
JK Rowling: I knew I was going to get that one…that is an excellent question. And here is the truth. At the end of Goblet of Fire we sent Harry home more depressed than he had ever been leaving Howarts. I knew that Thestrals were coming, and I can prove that because they’re in the book I’d produced for Comic Relief (UK) “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Themâ€.
These are lucky Black Winged Horses. However, if Harry had seen them and it had not been explained then it would cheat the reader. So, to explain that to myself, I decided you had to have seen the death and allowed it to sink in a bit… slowly…these creatures became solid in front of you. So that’s how I’m going to sneak past that one.
Stephen Fry: Absolutely, I mean if you can’t write new characters in new books that would be a bit hard on you. Can you explain in words of not more that two syllables, What is Arithmancy?
JK Rowling: Well your guess is as good as mine Stephen. Arithmancy is predicting the future using numbers. I’ve decided there’s a bit of numerology in there as well but how you do it I really don’t know.
Stephen Fry: Well that’s very honest of you thank goodness for that. This seems to be all the time we have for questions but I’m pleased to say this is far from the end of the show because very shortly Jo’s going to be reading from her new book
But just before, if there’s anyone here in the RAH in London or around the big blue world who doesn’t know what happened in the first 4 books – I don’t think there can be anybody, but somebody might have had their memory modified by a peculiar charm for example, we’re going to steal offstage while some experts tell you the story so far – see you in a bit.
Children on video clips tell the story do far…
In the beginning: Lord Voldemort tried to kill Harry Potter when he was a young baby, he came around and he killed his parents…he tried to kill Harry, but he just escaped with a scar because his mum loved him a lot. Albus Dumbledore left Harry as a baby on the doorstep of The Dursleys who are Harry’s only living relatives. There’s aunt Petunia Uncle Vernon and their son Dudley.
And his mum was really rude and looked like a horse a bit, Harry was 11 when he just found out he was a wizard.
Hagrid took Harry to Diagon Alley to buy all his Wizard goods and that, like his wand. The wand chooses the owner like the owner can’t choose the wand. So, he was given a few wands to flick about. He got one with a Phoenix feather and it (The Phoenix) had only ever given one other feather to someone and that was to Lord Voldemort, on the train you can get all kinds of different and unusual flavoured sweets (they are magical and can taste like anything) e.g. like bogey flavour.
To get Hogarts you need to get the train at King’s Cross Station is platform 9 and ¾’s.
At Hogwarts they teach all kinds of Magic Like Charms, Defense Against The Dark Arts, Potions err…Spells. There is a “Sorting Hat†that puts them into Houses (These are like Domes or Fraternity/Sorority Houses). There is Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff.
The school game is Quidditch – four balls released from the centre, 7 people on broomsticks – snitch caught – game over. Then suddenly Muggle born children (those born from a one non-magical parent) are getting petrified – frozen, all over Hogwarts, There are all sorts of rumours about the Chamber of Secrets. In the Chamber is a big snake called a Basilisk which roams the school and kills Mudbloods. A Mudblood is a really disgusting name for someone who is a Muggle born.
A Muggle is someone who can’t do magic, for instance, the Dursleys. Lord Voldemort, or as I call him Vorldy, he used to call himself Tom Marvolo the real given him by his dad but he just re-arranged the letters.
Sirius Black, a notorious wizard accused of killing 13 people with one single curse, escapes from Azkaban (Prison), but actually it had been another wizard, Pettigrew who had framed him. Pettigrew used his wand behind his back and blew up a street and cut of his finger and joined the sewer rats.
He had been hiding for 12 years as a rat with Ron (Harry’s best friend) to escape from Sirius Black. Pettigrew escapes back to Voldemort and Sirius escapes on a big black winged thing to live happily ever after.
This year at Hogwarts the Quidditch tournament isn’t taking place instead there is the Triwizard tournament. The three champions have already been picked but The Goblet sparks up again and Harry’s name comes out of it
They get to the trophy at the end of the maze, Cedric and Harry decide to take it at the same time and they get transported to the location where Lord Voldemort is. So at the end of the book we have Lord Voldemort where all his followers were back in action and ready to wreak havoc!
Harry Potter watch out Voldemort is after youâ€
The story continues….
JKR comes back onstage…
JK Rowling: You can imagine how scary it is to read in front of Stephen Fry and I did say – “wouldn’t it be better if he did itâ€, but they decided I should do it so – sorry about that.
I need to explain to you what I’m going to read. If you have got your book with you and you’d like to read along, as I know some people like to do, I’m reading from page 583 (of the Bloomsbury edition).
It was quite hard to find a bit that doesn’t give too much away if you haven’t finished the book. But this bit is where Harry has to talk about what he might do after Hogwarts, and he has a bit of career advice from Professor McGonagall. As you may remember from the 4th book, “Goblet of Fireâ€, Harry decided it would be quite interesting to be an Auror which means to work at The Ministry of Magic to catch Dark Wizards. So he’s come along thinking he might do that and this is what happens.
During this reading you might get a hint of what might stand in his way of becoming an Auror apart from The Ministry’s current attitude toward to him, he needs a qualification that can be quite difficult to get… so here we go….
To read this section in full get your copy of the latest adventure, “Harry Potter and the Order of The Phoenix”
Description: In the section read by JK Rowling, Harry says he would like to work as an Auror with the Ministry of Magic when he leaves Hogwarts.
Professor McGonagall points out that the Ministry of Magic only take on the very best and are so strict that they hadn’t even taken anyone in the “past 3 yearsâ€.
The Professor sets out the challenges sternly and identifies exactly what subjects Harry will need to study for this final two years. He’ll need “a minimum of 5 NEWTs,†and nothing under “exceeds expectation†grades in everything. After that it will all be about “character and aptitudeâ€.
However, it is clear Harry will have to study very hard just to be accepted into the classes even at Hogwarts itself! Defence Against The Dark Arts, Transfiguration, OWLs, Charms and Potions all set very high entry requirements.
During the meeting tension rises as Prof Umbridge interrupts Prof McGonagall again and again to undermine Harry’s confidence, pointing up how unlikely Harry will ever have good enough grades.
The Professors disagree and an argument breaks out over Dumbledore! It is clear Harry has many, many obstacles to overcome…
CHEERS
Boys and Girls, Ladies and Gentlemen, just one more time we should thank this remarkable woman who has given so many millions of people such deep, lasting and eternal pleasure… JK Rowling!
CHEERS and APPLAUSE!
Source: http://www.msn.co.uk/liveevents/harrypotter/transcript/Default.asp?Ath=f
consulte Mais informaçãoGibbs, Nancy [entre outros colaboradores]. “A verdadeira magia de Harry Potter”. Time, 23 de junho de 2003. No mesmo dia de verão em que Catie Hoch, de 6 anos, bateu seu recorde pessoal de pular corda – 100 pulos...
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Naty Granger
Revisão:
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Treneman, Ann. “I’m not writing for the money: It’s for me and out of loyalty to fans,” The Times (London), June 20, 2003
At one minute past midnight, the fifth Harry Potter book will hit the bookshops. In an exclusive interview, J. K. Rowling tells Ann Treneman how she has finally come to terms with celebrity, and how marriage and her children have made her happier than she has ever been.
JOANNE KATHLEEN ROWLING is a happy woman these days, and it shows. She greets me at the top of the staircase at her home, babe in arms. His name is David and he is round and soft and cooing. We all go into the front room and there, on the shelf, is the other baby in her life: a 1kg doorstop that is the fifth book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
“It is big. Very big,†she says. “I didn’t dare do a word count.â€
So how big is big? After all, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth book, was 636 pages.
Joanne peeks at the last page. “It is 766 pages. When I finished it, I thought, Oh my God it’s bigger than Goblet. I knew already it was but I thought, well maybe it’s slightly bigger and then I spoke to my editor at Bloomsbury and she said, ‘You know how long it is, obviously?’ And I said, no, I don’t actually. And it was a quarter of a million words.†Her voice goes almost to a whisper. “I nearly died.â€
Don’t you have an editor who cuts things, I ask rather abruptly.
She laughs and takes on an actor’s voice: “Don’t you have an editor? Does anyone ever try to stop you!†She reverts to her normal voice. “Yeah. Of course they do. But they truly felt that the information contained in the book was necessary.â€
This is the third time I have interviewed J.K. Rowling. The first was in 1997, after the publication of the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. She was a rising star with no idea of the galaxy into which she and Harry would soon soar. “I never dreamt this would happen,†she said then, when sales reached 30,000. “My realistic side had allowed myself to think that I might get one good review. That was my idea of a peak. So everything else really has been like stepping into Wonderland for me.â€
Wonderland indeed. Three years later, in May 2000, we met in an Edinburgh hotel room. She had just finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and was quick and funny and nervous, smoking five Marlboro Lights in two hours and talking like a machine-gun at full rattle. At that time she had sold 30 million copies, a film was coming out and merchandising deals were brewing. Her wealth was estimated at £15 million but her life, which revolved around her daughter and writing and friends, had none of the gloss that money can bring.
Fast forward three years. Rowling has now sold almost 200 million books and is worth an estimated £280 million. She is wealthier than the Queen and is listed as the 122nd richest person (and the ninth richest woman) in Britain. Some people would revel in these facts, flashing them about like a diamond in sunlight. I doubted Rowling would: the last time we met she .denied she was famous and said her only major purchase had been an aquamarine ring that she called her “No One Is Grinding Me Down†ring.
I was curious to meet her again and see how she had changed. It is true that I had not seen Joanne showing off her lovely dining table in the pages of Hello! magazine or anything like that, but you never know: money and fame can corrupt as much as power. Facts are few. She is 37 now and married Dr Neil Murray, an anaesthetist, 18 months ago. Jessica, her daughter from an earlier marriage, is almost 10, and David was born in March. The family has houses in Edinburgh, Perthshire and London.
Her main home is in Edinburgh and that is where we meet. For some reason I had decided that she might be a minimalist – a hangover, or so my logic went, from the days of poverty. Wrong. Her home is vibrant with colour and patterns, and the front room busy with books and photographs. It is not a showcase but a lived-in family home. Apparently there is a dog somewhere in the house. Certainly there is a baby in the room who provides a gurgling backing track for the interview.
J.K. Rowling looks terrific. She gave up smoking three years ago and, as she is breastfeeding, has even had to forego the Nicorette. She explains this as she reaches for a pack of Wrigley’s and advises me to buy shares in the company. The interview, as events tend to be when tiny babies are involved, is the result of meticulous planning. She spent all weekend wondering how she was going to get the baby fed and changed and herself presentable “with all my buttons done up properly†at the correct time.
It takes one minute to see that she has changed. Definitely. She is more relaxed, her edges rounded off. The machine gun has been replaced by a lower and softer voice, though her chuckle-laugh is the same. I say that she seems different, calmer.
“I’m loads calmer. Yes. Loads. I think I’m loads happier now, which would make me calmer.â€
Well, I say, you weren’t the last time we met.
“But you saw me probably during the worst time. The last time you interviewed me was not a happy time. Writing Book Four was an absolute nightmare. I literally lost the plot halfway through. My own deadline was totally unrealistic. That was my fault because I didn’t tell anyone. I just ploughed on, as I tend to do in life, and then I realised I had really got myself into hot water. I had to write like fury to make the deadline and it half killed me and I really was, oh, burnt out at the end of it. Really burnt out. And the idea of going straight into another Harry Potter book filled me with dread and horror. And that was the first time I had ever felt like that. I had been writing Harry for 10 years come 2000 and that was the first time I ever thought, Oh God, I don’t want to keep going.â€
Rowling, who had the idea for the seven-book Harry Potter series on a delayed train to Manchester in 1990, had not taken a break since she began writing in earnest as a broke single mum. She wrote mostly in cafés then. When she finished one book she began the next immediately, sometimes on the same day. And so, fresh from producing Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth book, she felt immense pressure to start the next.
It was not the first time she had felt the strain of the deadlines. “The first thing that I did when I finished Prisoner of Azkaban was to discuss repaying the advance for the next book.†I look shocked at this. “Yes, you can imagine. People were a little bit shaken, I think. I said: I want to give the money back and then I will be free to finish in my own time rather than have to produce it for next year.â€
And now, after Book Four, she again told her editor that she couldn’t make such a tight timescale for the next book. “Because I knew I couldn’t do it. Well, I probably could have done it. Because I do work hard. I COULD have done it, but the book would have been lousy and I would have then collapsed completely and said: That’s it, no more. I can’t do it any more. So, I said this to them.†Her publishers told her to produce the book at her own pace.
She had a break from Harry but kept on writing because, as she says, “I have to writeâ€. She wouldn’t say much about what she was writing, except that it was “totally for me†and a story. Like a novel? “Yes,†she says. It is unfinished.
The break lasted the best part of a year. “I was also really conscious – and I didn’t need anyone to tell me this – that I needed to stop and I needed to try to come to terms with what had happened to me. I had to really try to cope with what had happened because I wasn’t coping. I wasn’t coping at all. For a long time people would say to me, ‘What is it like to be famous?’ and I would say ‘I am not famous’. Now this was patently untrue. It was the only way that I could cope with it, by being in so much denial that I was virtually blind at times.
“I always felt like I was racing to catch up with the situation. So I could cope now with the fact that I was being doorstepped but I couldn’t cope with the fact that they were now going after my private life. I was always several steps behind. I couldn’t grasp what had happened. And I don’t think many people could have done. The thing got so huge.â€
She is always asked why Harry Potter has been so successful. “And I cannot answer that question. I can’t. It sounds coy. It sounds disingenuous. I never think of it like that. I think it would be dangerous for me to think about it like that, to sit down and analyse it, to decide why. It would be an exercise in navel gazing. It would also possibly lead me to deduce that I was doing certain things right and maybe certain things I should drop and if you start writing like that…â€
From your head and not your heart, I say.
“Exactly. Then I think you are lost. And I would certainly be lost if I stopped enjoying it. And ultimately I need to do this. I mean, what is the point? I could have stopped writing four years ago and we would have been fine financially. So I’m not writing for the money. I could really do without the fame. The only point is to satisfy myself now and out of loyalty to the fans.†And Harry too, I say.
“Absolutely. When I say for me, it is for Harry … being true to what I know will be his end.â€
How would you describe your feelings about fame?
“I never wanted it and I never expected it and certainly didn’t work for it and I see it as something that I have to get through, really. It does have nice aspects but for me, personally, probably the negative outweighs the positive. And we are talking here about being famous as opposed to having the money because the money has obviously relieved me of an enormous amount of worry and it has made my children secure in the sense that I do know they will have enough to eat and so on. And that is what the money means to me.â€
Yes, I say, but you are way beyond that.
“Absolutely. It went way beyond that.â€
Is it odd?
“Yes, it is very odd. And you feel guilty about it. A friend of mine said to me the other day, ‘But I would just go in a shop and I’d just say I will have one of those, one of those and one of those in every colour. Why don’t you do that?’ But the fact is that once you can do that, you don’t really want to do that. The amount of stuff you actually want to buy, when you can, shrinks a lot. Whereas when I was completely broke, I would have bought anything.â€
So you wanted to acquire things, then?
“Yes. Because I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I mean, a new tea towel, I could get quite excited about. You think I’m joking!â€
What do you mean about feeling guilty?
“It just seems, well, this came to me through doing the thing that I love doing most. So I suppose I feel that I haven’t suffered enough pain for it.â€
I say that is not how it works.
“I know. I know. We all know it doesn’t work like that. The world is completely screwed up. When David was born I had a company sending me free Babygros. I found it quite upsetting and I actually got quite tearful at one point. I remember Jessica, if someone had given me free Babygros then, that would have been a very big deal. That would have made my whole week. It is just very unfair, isn’t it?â€
Rowling says she loves to write, has to write, happy or sad, but that it is far easier if she is happy. The new book has been written during the happiest period of her life. She had already started work on it before her marriage on Boxing Day, 2001. I say it must have been thrilling to meet someone new. “It was incredible. I always wanted to have more children and I had reached the point where I thought, OK, I’ve been so lucky. I’ve got the books. I’ve got Jessie. I cannot complain and then this has been just amazing.â€
Is it true, I ask, that you meet someone when you aren’t looking for them?
“Yes. Definitely. I did not expect to meet anyone, actually. I thought the baggage was too much and it is a truism that when you do get famous, it’s not that I didn’t meet anyone, it’s that I didn’t meet anyone I wanted to have a relationship with, much less marry. Of course, you do meet people but it tends to be those who are very keen to approach you and maybe not those you would really want to meet.â€
She says it is fortunate for both her and her husband that their careers are so divergent. “The night we met he told me he had read the first ten pages of Philosopher’s Stone on a late-night shift at the hospital and he thought it was quite good. And I thought that was fantastic. He hadn’t read the books. He didn’t really have a very clear idea of who I was. It meant that we could get to know each other in quite a normal way. I think he’s up to speed now, poor bloke. At the time he didn’t really have any idea about it all.â€
She wrote most of the new book in Edinburgh and some in Perthshire. She no longer writes in cafés because people watch her and it makes her self-conscious. At home she writes all morning in her office, which is the size of single bedroom and the smallest room in the house, until she gets hungry, about 12.30pm usually. She breaks for a sandwich, then goes back to the computer until Jessie comes home from school (she has not had a nanny since becoming a two-parent family). They walk the dog, a Jack Russell. She makes tea. Neil comes home. Depending on how tired she is, she may write more in the evening.
One day a week is spent doing “charity stuffâ€. She has a charitable trust and is the patron of several groups, including one for single parents and the Multiple Sclerosis Society Scotland (her mother died of the disease in 1990 at the age of 45). I say that I believe she gives quite a lot of money away anonymously and she stares at the carpet, lips pressed.
Rowling became pregnant mid-book and knew she wanted to finish before the baby came. “I was getting bigger and bigger and bigger and then, just before Christmas, I realised I had finished the book and it was the most amazing thing. An incredible thing. It actually really took me by surprise. I was writing the last chapter, rewriting bits of it as you do, and then I wrote myself to the end of a paragraph and thought: Oh my God, I’ve finished the book! I couldn’t believe I’d done it.â€
I make some comment about how long it is and she says: “It’s hysterical. They went in one day from saying, ‘She’s got writer’s block’ to saying, ‘She’s been self-indulgent’. And I thought, well, what a difference 24 hours makes.â€
The “they†in that sentence is the press. She resents the idea that it has been reported that she had writer’s block almost as much as she resents the pressure of a deadline. She admits to being “too thin-skinnedâ€. “But that is who I am and I couldn’t do the books if I weren’t who I am.†She was genuinely distressed by the accusations, levelled by the American writer Nancy Stouffer, that she was a plagiarist and she celebrated when a New York court ruled last year that she was innocent. She is fierce about protecting Jessica’s privacy, never using her in publicity or going with her to film premieres. She rarely talks about her, although, when I ask why she bought the London house, she laughs and says she had been staying at Claridge’s and “my daughter was getting a bit too used to room serviceâ€.
It is easy to forget, sitting in this warm and light-filled room, about the darker side of Potter mania. But it is out there. Some people are obsessed with the idea that her books are teaching children about evil and magic and believe Rowling is a witch of some kind. “I found death threats to myself on the net,†she says, describing how she was looking for something when she found herself on a Potter-hater site. “And then halfway through this message board I found, well, people being advised to shoot me, basically. Which was not a nice thing to find. It is bizarre.†She sighs. “But what can you do?â€
“Fame is a very odd and very isolating experience,†she says. “And I know some people crave it. A lot of people crave it. I find that very hard to understand. Really. It is incredibly isolating and it puts a great strain on your relationships.†Most of her friends have been doorstepped and offered money by newspapers for their story and that makes Rowling feel guilty.
Her views on some journalists are embodied in Rita Skeeter, a character who, when last seen, had become a beetle and was trapped in a jar. “I have a fascination for Rita and I have grudging respect,†says Rowling. “She has the rhino hide that I would quite like to have but haven’t. And you’ve got to admire her tenacity and ingenuity. But I wouldn’t like to meet her.â€
It is difficult to do an interview on a book that I have not been allowed to read. She sympathises, but neither does she give much away. “This book is a bit of a departure. Harry is very angry. Very angry. And he’s angry for most of the book. But I think that is fair enough given what has happened to him and that he hasn’t been given an awful lot of information. So it’s not a very gentle tale. And there is a nasty death in it as well. Nasty because it is someone I care about as a character.â€
She adds: “This time it is someone I consider to be a main character.†She cried when she wrote the death scene, as she did twice when writing Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Harry now “is very much in puberty, having as easy a time of it as I did.†And that was? “What I was, I wasn’t sure and I don’t think anyone else was either! I just think it is a very confusing time. Yes, he’s very confused in a boy way. He doesn’t understand how girls’ minds work.†I say that, at age 15, boys don’t normally say anything at all. She laughs and says Hermione is more than happy to fill in all those silences with her advice.
“This time Harry really, for the first time, does have a relationship of sorts. The emphasis very much on the ‘of sorts’. That was really fun to write, actually. I think you will find it painful. You should find it painful, it is painful, but it was such fun to write. Poor Harry! What I put him through.â€
She has already started to write Book Six. “I started it when I was pregnant. That was a different situation because I knew I didn’t have to so that immediately meant that I wanted to! You know, the absolute reverse of Goblet of Fire. And I’m also in a very lovely position. Contractually, I don’t even have to write any more books at all. So no one can possibly write that I have missed a deadline because I actually don’t have a contractual deadline for Six and Seven.â€
So you have freedom, I say.
“I do have freedom. I want to spend some time with David because I didn’t have him to hand him over to a battalion of nannies. But I do really want to do Six and Seven.â€
Surely, I say, Six will be shorter. And she agrees. “Seven, on the other hand, will probably be massive …it has been such a massive part of my life now. I can see myself being really scared to let go of it. I will probably reach the end of Seven and think, I’ll just tweak it a bit more, I will just tweak it a bit more. The fact that I will have finished will be extraordinary.â€
But isn’t the last chapter of Seven already written? Yes, she says, it’s hidden away. In a secret place? “Guarded by trolls.â€
Doesn’t anyone know?
“I’ve told no one. Literally no one. If you ever hear anyone claim that they know what happens in the end, they are absolutely lying. I’ve never told anyone.â€
Maybe if you got drunk …
“I would never tell anyone. I just know I wouldn’t. You couldn’t get me drunk enough!â€
It is time to go. David has exhausted his mobiles and swings and we have talked for one and a half hours. This interview is very different from the previous one, and it seems to me that in the past three years Joanne Rowling has grown up. She has faced her personal demons about fame, money and insecurity. She has balance in her life and now, in addition to everything else, freedom. It is a heady mix, certainly a Wonderland, but she will tread softly there. “I am the kind of person who expects Mr Catastrophe to be lurking around the corner because he often has been. “I try to strike a balance between being very grateful for what has happened – because I am so hugely grateful for it – and I am terrified of hubris because I think it could all go wrong tomorrow.â€
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: *Celeste Morrigan*
Revisão: {patylda}
*OK Categorias e Conteúdo
Couric, Katie. Interview with J.K. Rowling. Dateline NBC, 20 June 2003
The battlements may look like Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, but it’s really the ancient Edinburgh (Ediborough) Castle. We’re in Scotland, home of J.K. Rowling, author of the story that has won the world over: Harry Potter. Her books about the boy wizard have sold more than 200 million copies and made Rowling richer than the Queen of England. In just a few hours, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix†goes on sale, many booksellers will open their doors at midnight, hoping the fifth tale in the series flies out faster than a Nimbus 2000. Fans have waited three long years since the last installment. So, what took so long? In an exclusive interview J.K. Rowling dispels some myths and spills some secrets about her magical, mysterious world.
Calling all muggles—that’s “Potter-speak†for the non- wizards among us. IT’S THE MOST eagerly anticipated children’s book of all time, and midnight tonight is the witching hour. “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix†continues the saga of the boy wizard with the lightning bolt scar — and readers of all ages have been dying to know what happens next.
Boy Fan: “I think that Voldemort is gonna come back.â€
Man Fan: “There’s probably going to be some tragedy somewhere amongst it…â€
Woman Fan: “…and romance…â€
Man Fan: “…and romance, yea.â€
Girl Fan: “I think Voldemort might die, and Harry Potter might become the head of the school.â€
I wonder what Professor Dumbledore would say about that? Deeper secrets, darker powers, stronger magic.†So we decided to go straight to the source — the author who’s cast this spell over us mere muggles: J.K. aka Jo Rowling.
JKR reads passage from book:
Dumbledore lowered his hands and surveyed Harry through his half-moon glasses.
“It is time,†he said, “for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago, Harry. Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything.
Katie Couric: “Dun, dun, dunnnn…â€
Rowling: “…Dun, dun, duuuuh… ha, haâ€
As titillating as that one line from the new book was, I was counting on a little more 411. Clearly, I felt it was my mission to get Rowling to start spilling her Bertie Botts Beans.
Katie Couric: “Can you tell me a little bit about this book, or will you have to kill me?â€
Rowling: â€[laughter] I will have to kill you. But, you know, if you’re prepared to take that risk.â€
Stay tuned, because she does give us some clues later on, but there’s good reason why Jo Rowling so closely guards her chamber of secrets. In the last few months, fake chapters have shown up on the Internet and a British printing company employee was caught trying to sell stolen book pages. Keeping the secrets is crucial to the multi-million dollar marketing campaign. So there was concern the cauldron could be leaky. But of course, being a skilled journalist, I was able to craft my questions so carefully, she had no choice but to blab.
Couric: “Can you just tell me basically what happens to Harry in this book? That’s a specific question.â€
Rowling: “Yeah, that was very scalpel-sharp. He has a really hard time in this book, I would say.â€
Couric: “Is he going through puberty?â€
Rowling: “Yes he is. He’s angrier.â€
Couric: “Zits, does he have zits?â€
Rowling: “No he doesn’t. I see Harry as someone who has great skin. That’s the one thing he’s got going for him, thank God. I mean, spots on top of everything else would be too horrible for him. And he, yes, he does have certain adolescent, um, rights of passage happen to him.â€
Couric: “Any snogging with Hermione?â€
Rowling: (slight frown) “Hermione and Harry! Do you think so?â€
Couric: “No I’m kidding.
Rowling: “Ron and Hermione, I would say, have more potential (or did she say “tensionâ€) there†(A/N: I know this is a crucial sentence, but I had some trouble understanding her here— she mumbles the sentence a little. This is my best interpretation! Either way, R/H shippers around the world are grinning!)
Couric: We should probably explain that snogging means kissing.â€
Rowling: “Yeah.â€
Couric: “Lest people think they were shagging!â€
Rowling: “Lest people think you’re talking about something completely inappropriate.â€
The story of how JK Rowling brought Harry Potter to life has become a legend itself. She used to walk her daughter Jessica down this street in her stroller until she fell asleep, then duck into Nicolson’s Cafe and write while the baby slept. Back then, she was a single mum living on welfare. But now, five years and five books later, she’s remarried, has a new baby boy, and her estimated fortune is worth $500 million. Oh, and by the way, Nicholson’s Café, well that’s now a Chinese Restaurant.
Rowling: “It is true. I really was that broke and I know what it feels like to be that broke and to live through it and not to know it’s about to change. That’s the crucial thing. I couldn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel, and every day I’m grateful that we’ve got food in the fridge now and that I don’t have to worry about the bills and that I know I can afford Jessie’s clothes and it’s… yes, I’m grateful for that every day.â€
Couric: “Is there anything you miss now that you are so well known Jo and so wealthy and such a celebrity?â€
Rowling: “Yeah I miss the anonymity. Completely miss it.â€
Here in Europe, she’s more recognizable than she is in the States, and there are times when Rowling wishes she could wrap herself up in one of those invisibility cloaks.
Couric: “What kinds of things do they say to you, like if you’re out at the market or taking a walk, or…â€
Rowling: “Normally, they start with, ‘It is you isn’t it?’ I think I don’t look that distinctive, so very often if you’re at the supermarket you’ll start off near the apples and then you see someone’s kind of thinking, ‘hmmm might be her’ and then you’re halfway along and you’re by the yogurts and they’re thinking, ‘Yeah it is her,’ and they’ve got a kid with her and the kids going, ‘It is mum, it is mum, it is her.’ And then you get to the toilet roll always and you’re just reaching out for your favorite brand and then they come up to you, always.â€
Couric: “When you’re getting Tampax have you had that?â€
Rowling: “Always. Yes that did happen the other day. I was standing there with this box in my hand — yes of course I’ll sign autographs. May I put this down first?â€
Couric: “Better than Kaopectate or something like that.â€
Rowling: “Slightly.â€
Still, the 37-year-old author says Scotland does afford her more anonymity than her native England. She moved here in 1994, after her first marriage to a Portuguese journalist fell apart.
Couric: “Do you ever hear from your first husband? I bet he’s going, (slaps forehead) ‘What was I thinking?’â€
Rowling: “Yeah, a really big no comment on that one.â€
Her second marriage in 2001 to a Scottish doctor named Neil Murray (who looks like a grown up you-know-who), was followed this past March by the birth of their first child, David.
Couric: “Does he have glasses and a little scar on his forehead?â€
Rowling: “Well you see that’s why we called him David, because we had to find a name that didn’t rhyme with Harry, I hadn’t used in the books, had absolutely no mythological or magical connection, didn’t mean ‘he who must not be named’ in Hebrew, you know.â€
Meanwhile, Rowling’s money keeps, well, rolling in. The first four Harry Potter novels continue to fly off the shelves in 200 countries, in 55 different languages. And the phenomenon’s leapt off the pages and onto the silver screen. The first two “Harry Potter†feature films have grossed a combined $1.8 billion worldwide. But after writing four mega-selling books in a lightning-fast five years, some wondered if the long wait for book number five meant Rowling was losing her magic touch.
Couric: “Endless rumors and speculation about this book.â€
Rowling: “About why?â€
Couric: “It took three years to write. (JKR: “hmm, hmmâ€) People said you had writer’s block, (JKR: “yeaâ€) that you weren’t interested in Harry anymore (JKR:â€yeaâ€), that you were distracted by your family (JKR:â€yeaâ€) and your wealth.â€
Rowling: “Yeah, yeah.â€(laughs)
Couric: “So settle it once and for all, what did take so long?â€
Rowling: “Ah, well just the writing of it, it’s a long book, and that’s just how long it took to write. And I said to my publishers, I didn’t want a deadline this time because I knew I just needed to take some time. So it’s not true that I had writer’s block and as far as, you know, being distracted by other stuff, I mean I think I really would have been distracted before now. You know, I’ve been writing Harry through something like three changes of country, a marriage, a divorce, you know, birth of a daughter, unemployment, employment. I mean, I don’t think getting some money is going to knock me off track now.â€
“Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix†rises from the ashes at a whopping 896 pages. But even before its release, book five’s been worth its weight in Gringotts’ gold, setting records for the largest pre-ordered book in history.
Rowling: “There is a lot in this book. If I can only say that I’ve had to lay certain clues in book five. Some clues are resolved, some things are resolved in book five and there’s information in there that you really do need to know otherwise people will feel cheated when certain outcomes happen.â€
Couric: “You said when the last book came out that the death of one character was quote, ‘the beginning of the deaths.’ Yikes!â€
Rowling: “Yeah, that’s nice, isn’t it. There’s going to be a blood bath [laughter].â€
Couric: “Warm and fuzzy.What does that mean?â€
Rowling: “It’s a war. Essentially a war has broken out again and when I say the beginning of the deaths, I mean the deaths that are meaningful, I suppose, to the reader. In this book, what I consider to be a major character dies. It was awful to write. It was absolutely awful. And literally, well I did, I cried after doing it, and then, er, walked into the kitchen afterwards in tears. And Neil said to me, ‘What’s the matter?’ And I said, ‘Well I’ve just killed the person that I’m going to kill.’ And he doesn’t know who it is. And Neil said, ‘Well, don’t do it then.’ Which showed he completely didn’t understand that you need to be very unpleasant and vicious to your characters to write heart-warming children’s books. (KC: laughs) He’s a doctor, he just doesn’t get it. He’s you know, more into saving people than killing them.â€
But Rowling’s ruthlessness has come under fire. Some parents have criticized her for over-emphasizing dark themes such as death. And some religious groups have gone as far as saying the novels are potentially harmful and promote occultism.
Rowling: “I think that’s utter garbage. I absolutely do not believe in the occult, practice the occult. I’ve never… I’ve met literally thousands of children now. Not one of them has said to me you’ve really turned me on to the occult, not one of them. Now I’m convinced that if that’s what my books were doing, I would by now have met one child who would have come up to me, covered in pentagrams and said, ‘Can we you know, go and sacrifice a goat later together, will you do that with me?’ It’s never happened, funnily enough.â€
Couric: “You find it very annoying, I can tell.â€
Rowling: “Well occasionally I do, just occasionally I do. Because I am being accused of something quite horrible. So of course I’ve got to defend myself.â€
Couric: “What do you believe in? I’m just curious about your belief system — God, heaven?â€
Rowling: “Well, I do believe in God.â€
Couric: “You do?â€
Rowling: “Yeah, which I’ve said before, but that just seems to annoy them even more For some reason. I don’t think they want me on their side at all.â€
Rowling also dispelled the rumor there would be more than the seven Harry Potter books she’s promised. (JKR: “I don’t know where that rumor came from.â€) And true to form, she says she won’t accept a deadline for writing the last two. But one thing is for sure — now that the word “muggle†has been added to the Oxford Dictionary, Jo Rowling’s assured of literary immortality.
Couric: “That gives you a feeling about a) what kind of impact you’ve had, and b) how enduring people think these books will be, because as far as I know, they don’t take a lot of words out of the dictionary.â€
Rowling: (laughing) “That would be so embarrassing, wouldn’t it? It’s like being melted down at Madam Tussauds. I always thing that’s the ultimate humiliation. That’s why I wouldn’t really want to be in Madame Tussaud’s, because the day comes when they melt you down to make you into someone else.â€
Couric: “It does? Oh no, I’m in there.â€
Rowling: (covers mouth with hand) “OH!â€
Couric: “That’s OK, that’s OK.â€
Rowling: “Well, some people they keep.â€
The third Harry Potter movie, “The Prisoner of Azkaban,†just finished filming in Scotland, for release in 2004.
Tradução: Rö. Granger
Revisão:Adriana Snape
*OK Categorias e Conteúdo
Paxman, Jeremy, interviewer. “JK’s OOTP interview,” BBC Newsnight, 19 June 2003.
There are books, and there is Harry Potter.
They’re the biggest phenomenon in the history of modern publishing. 200 million copies, about a boy who discovers he’s a world-famous wizard.
They’re sold in over 200 countries, and translated into over fifty languages. Beyond the books is an industry – films, dolls, games and merchandise making hundreds of millions pounds a year.
All this from an idea which wandered into the mind of the then pretty penniless JK Rowling as she sat on a train. She imagined his story as a series of seven books, each spanning a year at the Hogwarts School for Witches and Wizards.
The fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, goes on sale in 28 and a half hours. It is confidently expected to have the biggest print run in history.
The author of this phenomenon lives in Edinburgh.
(Jeremy and JK Rowling sitting at table, looking at a copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – in the office of JK Rowling in Edinburgh)
JEREMY PAXMAN: So this is it?
JK ROWLING: This is it.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Are we allowed to look inside it?
JK ROWLING: Hmmmm. Yes a bit. You can have a look there….yes so, that’s it.
JEREMY PAXMAN: How many pages?
JK ROWLING: 766 …. All with writer’s block, which I think you’ll agree is a bit of an achievement.
JEREMY PAXMAN: But do you find the whole secrecy issue, the need for secrecy, a bit ridiculous?
JK ROWLING: No.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Why not?
JK ROWLING: No not at all. Well, a lot of it comes from me.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Really?
JK ROWLING: Yeah definitely. I mean, of course one could be cynical, and I’m sure you would be disposed to be so and say it was a marketing ploy, but I don’t want the kids to know what’s coming. Because that’s part of the excitement of the story, and having – you know – sweated blood to create all my red herrings and lay all my clues…. to me it’s not a …this is my ….this is my….I was going to say this is my life, it’s not my life, but it is a very important part of my life.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Has it come at a price this success and fame?
JK ROWLING: The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous. You know, my fantasy of being a famous writer, and again there’s a slight disconnect with reality which happens a lot with me. I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. Being able to sit at home in the parsonage and your books would be very famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales’s secretary. You know I didn’t think they’d rake through my bins, I didn’t expect to be photographed on the beach through long lenses. I never dreamt it would impact my daughter’s life negatively, which at times it has. It would be churlish to say there’s nothing good about being famous; to have a total stranger walk up to you as you’re walking around Safeways, and say a number of nice things that they might say about your work … I mean of course you walk on with a bit more spring in your step. That’s a very, very nice thing to happen. I just wish they wouldn’t approach me when I’m buying you know…
JEREMY PAXMAN: Loo roll?
JK ROWLING: Items of a questionable nature, exactly. Always, always. Never when you’re in the fresh fruit and veg section. Never.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Do you think success has changed you?
JK ROWLING: Yes.
JEREMY PAXMAN: In what way?
JK ROWLING: I don’t feel like quite such a waste of space anymore.
JEREMY PAXMAN: You didn’t really feel a waste of space?
JK ROWLING: I totally felt a waste of space. I was lousy. Yeah I did, yeah . And now I feel that, it turns out there was one thing I was good at, and I’d always expected I could tell a story, and I suppose it’s rather sad that I needed confirmation by being published.
JEREMY PAXMAN: And what about the money? A lot of people when they suddenly make a lot of money, feel guilty about it. Do you feel guilt?
JK ROWLING: Yes I do feel guilty about it. Definitely I feel guilty.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Why?
JK ROWLING: When it first happened I didn’t immediately become very rich. The biggest jump for me was the American advance which was enough for me to buy a house, not outright, but you know we’d been renting until then. And I didn’t feel guilty, I felt scared at that point. Because I thought I mustn’t blow this: I’ve got some money, I mustn’t do anything stupid with it. And then yeah, yeah, I felt guilty. Yeah I did. I mean at least I could see cause and effect. I knew I had worked quite hard for quite a long time. Of course the rewards were completely disproportionate but I could see how I got there so that made it easier to rationalise.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Let’s talk a little bit about the next book. Harry and Ron and Hermione are all going to be older. How are they going to change?
JK ROWLING: Quite a lot because I find it quite sinister, the way that, looking back at the Famous Five books for example, I think 21 adventures or 20 or something, they never had a hormonal impulse – except that Anne was sometimes told that she would make someone a good little wife whenever she unlaid the picnic things.
JEREMY PAXMAN: But that’s the usual pattern of children’s books isn’t it? Swallows and Amazons is the same isn’t it? The children never age. But your….
JK ROWLING: And it reaches its apotheosis in Peter Pan obviously, where it is quite explicit, and I find that very sinister. I had a very forthright letter from a woman who had heard me say that Harry was going to have his first date or something and she said “Please don’t do that, that’s awful. I want these books to be a world where my children can escape to.” She literally said “free from hurt and fear” and I’m thinking “Have you read the books? What are you talking about free from hurt and fear? Harry goes through absolute hell every time he returns to school.” So I think that a bit of snogging would alleviate matters.
JEREMY PAXMAN: So there will be some pairing up will there in this book?
JK ROWLING: Well in the fullness of time.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Unlikely pairings? Not Hermione and Draco Malfoy or anything like that?
JK ROWLING: I don’t really want to say as it will ruin all the fan sites. They have such fun with their theories … and it is fun, it is fun. And some of them even get quite close. No-one has ever – I have gone and looked at some of it and no-one’s ever … There is one thing that if anyone guessed I would be really annoyed as it is kind of the heart of it all. And it kind of explains everything and no-one’s quite got there but a couple of people have skirted it. So you know, I would be pretty miffed after thirteen or fourteen years of writing the books if someone just came along and said I think this will happen in book seven. Because it is too late, I couldn’t divert now, everything has been building up to it, and I’ve laid all my clues.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Is Harry going to become a bolshy teenager?
JK ROWLING: He’s a lot, lot, lot angrier in this book. He really is quite angry a lot of the time and I think justifiably so, look at what he has gone through. It is about time he started feeling a little bit miffed at the hand life has dealt him.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Well when you look at a lot of that marketing stuff, that merchandise, when you look at things like the Harry Potter Ice Pumpkin Slushie maker and all that junk.
JK ROWLING: Is that a real thing or have you made it up?
JEREMY PAXMAN: I’m serious. There’s a list of about 50 of these things. Harry Potter Embroidered Polo Shirts, the Late Night Ride Towel, Harry Potter and Ron Weasley alarm clock. I mean it goes on and on.
JK ROWLING: I knew about the alarm clock. How do I feel about it? Honestly, I think it’s pretty well known, if I could have stopped all merchandising I would have done. And twice a year I sit down with Warner Brothers and we have conversations about merchandising and I can only say you should have seen some of the stuff that was stopped: Moaning Myrtle lavatory seat alarms and worse.
JEREMY PAXMAN: I thought that sounded rather fun.
JK ROWLING: I knew you were gonna say that. It’s not fun. It was horrible, it was a horrible thing.
JEREMY PAXMAN: But you could have said “No, I’m not gonna have any merchandising”.
JK ROWLING: I don’t think I could at the time. Not at the time. I’m so bad with dates. It must have been about 1998-99, I started talking to Warner Brothers, and at that point I just didn’t have the power to stop them. That is the nature of the film world. Because they are very expensive films to make, and if they keep making them which is obviously not guaranteed, but if they do keep making them, they are going to get really even more expensive, and I mean I shudder to see what they say when they see Book Five. Because I think they are starting to feel I am writing stuff just to see if they can do it. Which of course I’m not. But I know there are headaches about the scale of the world that I’m writing.
JEREMY PAXMAN: But do you never worry that perhaps your legacy will be not this entire world that you created but lots of bits of plastic?
JK ROWLING: Do I worry honestly? Completely honestly. No. I don’t worry about it. I think the books will always be more important than the bits of plastic. And that’s…I really, really believe that, and maybe that sounds arrogant but that’s how I feel.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Do you even know, when it gets to the level you’re at. Do you even know what you are earning?
JK ROWLING: No…
JEREMY PAXMAN: Do you know what you earned last year?
JK ROWLING: No.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Well it’s tens of millions, I guess…
JK ROWLING: I met my accountant recently and I said “They say in the rich list that I am richer than the Queen, so that means you’ve embezzled quite a lot of money.” I mean I do know what ball park I’ve got. I mean I’m not that clueless. And I certainly have not got £280 million.
JEREMY PAXMAN: What is it roughly?
JK ROWLING: Would I tell you?
JEREMY PAXMAN: I don’t know. You can’t blame me for asking.
JK ROWLING: No I don’t blame you for asking
JEREMY PAXMAN: You mentioned in the previous books you finished one and immediately started the next. Have you started the sixth one?
JK ROWLING: Yeah.
JEREMY PAXMAN: How far are you into it?
JK ROWLING: Not that far because I had a baby. But yeah, I started it when I was still pregnant with David. And I actually did get some writing done the other day, and that’s not bad going considering he’s only ten weeks. So he’s pretty full time at the moment. But yeah I did a bit more the other day.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Are we going to discover in book 5, why Voldemort has such an animus against Harry’s parents?
JK ROWLING: Yes.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Can you give us a clue as to…
JK ROWLING: No. It’s not long now. Come on. Yes you do find that out in book 5.
JEREMY PAXMAN: What else are you willing to tell us about what’s in book 5?
JK ROWLING: Obviously a new Defence against the Dark Arts teacher.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Is that going to be a woman?
JK ROWLING: Yes. And it’s not Fleur which everyone on the internet speculates about. And it’s not …Who’s the other one they keep asking about? Mrs Figg. It’s not Mrs. Figg. I’ve read both of those.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Are we going to discover anything more about Snape ?
JK ROWLING: Yes.
JEREMY PAXMAN: And Harry’s mother? Did he have a crush on Harry’s mother or unrequited love or anything like that?
JK ROWLING: Hence his animosity to Harry?
JEREMY PAXMAN: Yes.
JK ROWLING: You speculate?
JEREMY PAXMAN: I speculate, yes, I’m just asking whether you can tell us.
JK ROWLING: No I can’t tell you. But you do find out a lot more about Snape and quite a lot more about him actually.
JEREMY PAXMAN: And is there going to be a death in this book?
JK ROWLING: Yes. A horrible, horrible
JEREMY PAXMAN: A horrible death of a significant figure.
JK ROWLING: Yeah. I went into the kitchen having done it….
JEREMY PAXMAN: What, killed this person?
JK ROWLING: Yeah. Well I had re-written the death, re-written it and that was it. It was definitive. And the person was definitely dead. And I walked into the kitchen crying and Neil said to me, “What on earth is wrong?” and I said, “Well, I’ve just killed the person”. Neil doesn’t know who the person is. But I said, “I’ve just killed the person. And he said, “Well, don’t do it then.” I thought, a doctor you know….and I said “Well it just doesn’t work like that. You are writing children’s books, you need to be a ruthless killer.”
JEREMY PAXMAN: Is it going to upset people?
JK ROWLING: Yes. It upset me. I always knew it was coming, but I managed to live in denial, and carry on with the character and not think about it.
JEREMY PAXMAN: So you know what is going to become of all the major characters over the span of the series?
JK ROWLING: Yeah..yeah.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Why stop when they grow up? Might be interesting to know what becomes of Harry as an adult.
JK ROWLING: How do you know he’ll still be alive?
JEREMY PAXMAN: Oh. At the end of book 7?
JK ROWLING: It would be one way to kill of the merchandising.
JEREMY PAXMAN: That really would be killing the Golden Goose wouldn’t it?
JK ROWLING: Yeah well. I’m supposed to be richer than the Queen what do I care?
(JK Rowling and Jeremy Paxman in the kitchen)
JK ROWLING: I’m happier now I would say than I’ve ever been in my life, yeah definitely…..
JEREMY PAXMAN: But that’s not just to do with writing of course….
JK ROWLING: No … but it does have a lot to do with that. I needed to take off the time between books four and five, and I really feel like I got to grips with a lot of things. I sort of put my head up and got a big lungful of air, and I looked around, and I saw what had happened, and I allowed myself time to deal with it a bit better. I think if you’d interviewed me four years ago, I don’t think I would have been nearly as relaxed.
JEREMY PAXMAN: There’s an element in which, a way in which you’ve become public property.
JK ROWLING: Yeah.
JEREMY PAXMAN: That you belong, because of what you’ve created, that people feel like you belong to them.
JK ROWLING: Yes that’s definitely true. I think we get a thousand letters a week to this office – come and open my fete, write a personal letter to my daughter, come to my son’s birthday party – you know what I mean. And in some ways that’s very touching , that they think, really that they think that I have the time.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Well if you don’t ask you don’t get.
JK ROWLING: I don’t blame them for trying, I absolutely don’t. Except for the woman who wrote to me and said would I please make her and her husband an annual payment because they hadn’t been to the theatre in 3 years – and as begging letters go that wasn’t a great angle.
JEREMY PAXMAN: As begging letters go…you must get loads…do you give a lot of money away?
JK ROWLING: Well …mmmmm. I give money away, that’s all I can say.
(JK Rowling and Jeremy Paxman at the table, looking at notes)
JK ROWLING: This must not be seen too closely. This is the plan for Order of the Phoenix. I have these grid things for every book – well I have about twelve grid things for every book. It’s just a way of reminding myself what has to happen in each chapter to advance us in the plot. And then you have all your sub-plots. It’s just a way of keeping track of what going on.
JEREMY PAXMAN: And these scraps of paper which you’ve filed elegantly in a carrier, they’re plot ideas or …
JK ROWLING: Well some of them are totally redundant now because its been written and I keep them out of sentimentality’s sake, I suppose. But some of it has backstory in it like this – in here is the history of the Death Eaters and I don’t know that I’ll ever actually need it – but at some point – which were once called something different – they were called the Knights of Walpurgis. I don’t know if I’ll need it. But I like knowing it. I like to keep that sort of stuff on hand.
JEREMY PAXMAN: What’s your preferred way of working? I mean lots of people sit down and say “I must churn out 600 words or a 1000 words a day”. Do you work like that ? How do you do it?
JK ROWLING: No, well it’s like painting a fence isn’t it?
JEREMY PAXMAN: No – well, some distinguished writers have written like that.
JK ROWLING: That’s how you do it …
JEREMY PAXMAN: No – “distinguished writers”, I said… Somerset Maugham used to write 600 words a day and he’d stop more or less whether he was mid-sentence.
JK ROWLING: No I couldn’t do that.
JEREMY PAXMAN: So what do you do? You sit down and keep going until you’re too exhausted to continue….
JK ROWLING: Yeah pretty much actually. It’s the flogged horse school of writing. The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day’s work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.
JEREMY PAXMAN: We know that you’ve written the ending.
JK ROWLING: I’ve written the final chapter of book seven.
JEREMY PAXMAN: So you know where you are going to get to. Do you know how you are going to get there?
JK ROWLING: Yes. Yes. I mean I allow a margin. It would be so boring if I really knew. It would be joining the dots, wouldn’t it? It’s not that well worked out. But it’s fairly well plotted. I mean it would be worrying if it weren’t at this stage, wouldn’t it, if I slid off book five and wondered what shall I write out in book six?. You know, it’s a complicated story so I need to know what I’m doing.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Do you ever wish you hadn’t started on it?
JK ROWLING: Yes. But not for the reasons you might expect. Sometimes, yeah, I’ve had very low moments when I thought “What the hell do I do this for?” But very rare. Very rare.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Why do you think that occasionally?
JK ROWLING: I haven’t thought it for a long time now, but it was while I was writing book four. I went through a very bad patch. The funny thing is that the press were writing that I had writer’s block with Phoenix.
JEREMY PAXMAN: That’s the next one.
JK ROWLING: Yes, the one that’s about to come out. And there was speculation that I was finding the pressure …well, it was funny because literally on consecutive days, either you’d have, either I was feeling the pressure too much and I was cracking up – or I was too happy being married. And that was stopping me writing. And you kind of couldn’t have both. But in fact, the Order of the Phoenix never gave me any trouble. It was quite a docile book to write. And then a lot of fun to write. Chamber of Secrets, I really did have writer’s block. Briefly, I think. It wasn’t a very serious case, it was only about five weeks. And compared to some people, what’s five weeks? Goblet of Fire, I was very unhappy towards the end of writing Goblet, and at the point where I realised I was fantasising that I would break an arm and therefore not be able to… I really mean this. I mean I was just a little way away from actually thinking “How can I break my arm so I can tell my publishers that I can’t physically do it?” and then that would give me more time. Because I committed to a totally unrealistic deadline. And I made the deadline But I really did make it by working round the clock really. I was so unhappy.
JEREMY PAXMAN: So you didn’t have writer’s block. The reason this book has been – what three years…. Three years since the last one isn’t it? Why has it taken so long?
JK ROWLING: Well it hasn’t.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Huh?
JK ROWLING: Well it hasn’t. The book didn’t take that long. I decided… What happened was, so Goblet of Fire, I was really in quite a state by the time that book was finished, and I mean at that point I really did feel a lot of things came together with Goblet of Fire. I mean the press attention had reached an hitherto unknown level, and I couldn’t work outside the house anymore, and just a hell of a lot of stuff was going on, you know. It was the fame thing. Do I still feel like that? No. But that’s because I took the time off. And I was still writing during those three years because I never stop writing. But I didn’t want to be published again. That was the big difference. So when I finished Goblet of Fire, I said to – there were only two publishers who had bought the next book – and I said to both of them, I want to repay my advance. And both of them, you could almost hear them having cardiac arrest on the end of the phone. “Why do you want to repay your advance?” And I said, because I don’t want to publish next year. I want to write this book in a more leisurely way and I want to take some time off. Because I had had … I finished Philosopher’s Stone, I literally started Chamber of Secrets that afternoon. I finished Chamber of Secrets, I started Prisoner of Azkaban the next day. And I finished Azkaban and I’d already started Goblet of Fire because they overlapped – so there was absolutely no let-up. And I knew I couldn’t do it. I just knew I couldn’t do it; my brain was going to short circuit if I tried to do that again. So they said “Well, how about we do still get the book when you finish it, but we don’t have a deadline?” So I said okay. So that’s how we worked it. So there was no deadline. So, just once and for all, and for the record, I didn’t miss the deadline. Because there was no deadline.
JEREMY PAXMAN: And you didn’t have writers block on that book?
JK ROWLING: No! I just produced a quarter of a million words. It’s quite hard to do with writer’s block.
JEREMY PAXMAN: That’s longer than the New Testament you know.
JK ROWLING: Oh God, stop it. With all these new facts that I didn’t know. Is it?
JEREMY PAXMAN: Yeah. By about 70,000 words or something.
JK ROWLING: Do you know the Christian fundamentalists will find a way to turn that into a reason to hate me as well. She’s more verbose than God.
(JK Rowling and Jeremy at table, looking at notes and books)
JEREMY PAXMAN: Has Book Five – that thing that’s the size of a house brick – it was originally much longer than that, was it?
JK ROWLING: No, actually it wasn’t . It’s about the size – originally I thought it would be slightly shorter than Goblet of Fire – and what is the phrase? The tale grew in the telling. It did. The thing is, I’ve got so much now, so much backstory to tell, but I really mean it this time. Six will not need to be that long. I had to move them around a lot in there, there’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in there.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Are you going to have a lot of loose ends to tie up in 7?
JK ROWLING: Oh god, I hope not. I’m aiming to tie it all up neatly in a nice big knot… that’s it , good night.
JEREMY PAXMAN: So that may not be particularly long either….
JK ROWLING: No, I think that will be long because I won’t want to let go. I’ll just keep writing. I’ll probably just start a completely new plot in book seven. It’s going to be very difficult to leave it . I mean, I do look forward to a post-Harry era in my life, because some of the things that go along with this are not that much fun, but at the same time, I dread leaving Harry… because I’ve been working on it over what I sincerely hope will prove to have been the most turbulent part of my life and that was the constant, and I worked on it so hard for so long – then it will be over and I think it’s going to leave a massive gap.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Do you know what you will go on to next after that?
JK ROWLING: Well, while I was in between, during the three years I’ve just had, I was writing something else for a while which was really great, it was good, and I might go back to that. I don’t know.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Is that an adult novel?
JK ROWLING: Mmmm. It’s just something completely different. It was very liberating to do it.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Be quite difficult for you though. You’d have to publish under a pseudonym wouldn’t you?
JK ROWLING: Exactly. But they’ll find out within seconds. I don’t underestimate the investigative powers of the press, but I don’t know what I’ll do. I mean, I know I will definitely still be writing. Will I publish? I don’t know. It’s what you said, of course you write to be published, because you write to share the story. But I do think back to what happened to AA Milne, and he of course tried to write adult novels, and was never reviewed without the mention of Tigger, Pooh and Piglet. And I would imagine that the same will happen with me. And that’s fine. God knows my shoulders are broad enough, I could cope with that. But I would like some time to have some normal life at the end of the series, and probably the best way to get that isn’t to publish immediately.
JEREMY PAXMAN: It’s not a bad thing to go to your grave with – having invented this entire world and made children want to read?
JK ROWLING: Oh God. No. Not at all. Of course I am immensely proud of Harry, and I’m never going to disown it, and I promise I am never, ever, ever going to apologise for it. Never. Because I am proud of it and I will defend Harry against all comers.
JEREMY PAXMAN: JK Rowling, thank you.
consulte Mais informaçãoMcginty, Stephen. “A História de J.K. Rowling”. The Scotsman, 16, 17 e 18 de junho de 2003. Antes de Harry Potter, antes dos romances, antes dos filmes, antes dos milhões e milhões de libras, existia uma garotinha...
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Bruno Radcliffe
Revisão: Adriana Snape
“JK on Simpsons, show to air at end of year.” BBC Newsround, updated 28 February 2003.
The episode of The Simpsons which JK Rowling will appear in is called The Regina Monologues, we can exclusively reveal.
In it the Simpson family visit the UK. It’s expected to air in the US in November or December of this year.
JK’s one of the world’s busiest authors and is constantly bombarded with TV requests. So why has she agreed to appear in The Simpsons, as we told you on Wednesday?
She’s been a fan of the show for years, and was especially pleased when the programme did a Potter spoof in 2000, with Bart and Lisa going to wizard school.
“I love The Simpsons because of the detail – there are so many layers and it works for kids and for adults.
“That’s one of the reasons I like it so much.” JK Rowling told us then.
“When I lived in Portugal, a group of us used to sprint to a cafe after work so we could watch The Simpsons.
“It was the highlight of our TV week – if only I had known one day that they’d be spoofing me!”
Huge fan
The Harry Potter Hallowe’en spoof was a great success. And Simpson’s creator Matt Groening is a huge fan of Harry Potter anyway. But now, he’s gone one step further letting JK playing herself.
When Newsround first told him a few years back that JK loved The Simpsons too and asked if he’d include some Potter references, he was very pleased. “Wow, I am honoured, my kids have devoured all of the books. No doubt we’ll do some Harry Potter references.”
That promise has now come true. J K Rowling has recorded her lines, but the animation takes a bit of time and has not yet been completed. There’s no word yet on when it’ll air in the UK.
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Salas Wulfric
Revisão: {patylda}
Ferguson, Brian. “JK Rowling’s fame spoils her cafe culture,” The Scotsman, 6 February 2003.
THE story of struggling single mother JK Rowling penning her first Harry Potter book in the warmth of an Edinburgh cafe has become part of the legend of her success.
But now the internationally famous author has revealed that she still wants to write in cafes – but cannot because of her fame.
The revelation from the notoriously private author in a scoop interview by Edinburgh schoolchildren may even explain why her latest book was so long in the writing and delayed. There had been speculation she was suffering from writer’s block.
Now the multi-millionaire has told how she longs to return to the kind of environment where she spent hours dreaming up storylines while her daughter Jessica slept in a push-chair.
In an the interview for an Edinburgh school’s magazine, the usually guarded Ms Rowling has revealed how she still sees a large cafe with a window seat as her “ideal writing space”.
But she has admitted it is now impossible for her to sit in cafes like Nicolson’s, in Nicolson Street, where Harry Potter was created, because of her fame.
In the interview for Broughton High’s magazine, the author also tells how she had suffered feelings of “general hopelessness” while writing the first book, how she worried that she would never finish it, and of the “indescribable” feeling of pride she felt when she saw it on sale for the first time.
Ms Rowling has denied basing any of the characters in the books on real people, except for herself, attacked people who have called for the books to be banned as “misguided”, and told how one of her remaining ambitions is learning to drive.
The school magazine’s team secured an interview with crime writer Ian Rankin for the same edition, and have also interviewed celebrities such as Gail Porter and dance music guru Moby in the past.
But they are remaining tight-lipped about how they managed to secure the JK Rowling scoop, saying only they were helped by a “go-between”.
The famously-guarded Ms Rowling, whose first Harry Potter book was published in 1997, has granted very few interviews over the last couple of years.
Three senior students working on the magazine – Nicola Nairn, Adam Knight and Jennifer Milne – worked on a list of questions which were sent via e-mail to the author.
She told the magazine: “My ideal writing space is a large cafe with a small corner table near a window overlooking an interesting street (for gazing out of in search of inspiration).
“It would serve very strong coffee and be non-smoking (because I’ve now given up for two years and don’t want to be tempted) and nobody would notice me at all. But I can’t write in cafes any more because I would get recognised a lot.”
In response to being asked if she felt like giving up writing the first book, she said: “Several times a feeling of general hopelessness would come over me and I’d wonder whether I wasn’t deluding myself. But this feeling never lasted longer than an evening.
“It was an indescribable feeling of pride (seeing the first book on the shelves), something close to the feeling I had when I saw my daughter for the first time.
Ms Rowling also revealed how the main female character in the books – Harry’s friend Hermione – is an “exaggerated” version of herself, but insists all the others are completely fictional.
Wendy Munro, head of media studies at the school, said students were completely responsible for writing, editing and designing The High magazine.
She said: ” Our contact vetted all the questions that we compiled, they were then sent on to her for approval and a week later was got all these replies.”
Nicola, 17, associate editor at the magazine, said: “We were so surprised to get the interview but it all turned out great.”
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução:
Revisão: Adriana Snape
“JK is Pottering about Internet,” BBC Newsround, February 2003.
JK ROWLING says the internet is a wizard way to spy on her fans.
The Harry Potter author goes into chatrooms without revealing her name to find out what they really think about her books.
She takes part and reads the anonymous confessions of her young readers.
Rowling, 37, has been at home in Edinburgh since son David was born last month.
Rowling said she diary that villain Tom Riddle uses in book two to lure Harry into the Chamber of Secrets is like an internet chatroom.
JK said: “When I wrote that, I had never been in an internet chat room. It is very similar – typing your deepest thoughts into the ether and getting answers back.
“You don’t know who is answering you.”
The idea came from a childhood diary her younger sister, Dianne, confided in.
Top websites dedicated to Harry Potter include www.harrypotter.warner bros.co.uk and www.magic-hogwarts.com.
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Frede_Potter
Revisão: Adriana Snape
Mzimba, Lizo, moderator. Interview with Steve Kloves and J.K. Rowling, February 2003.
Transcription: Eric of Mugglenet and Melissa of TLC
Lizo: Now, to bring a story like Harry Potter from the page to the screen, the starting point is your original novel, written by you of course, J.K. Rowling. And the script is based on that novel but is written by the screenwriter, of course you, Steve Kloves. Can you explain both how you worked together to produce the final script because it must be very very different writing a book as compared to writing a film.
Steve: Yeah, you know, I mean, I just… steal her best stuff, for the most part…
JKR: [Nodding] That’s basically it. And I don’t sue!
Steve: I think the thing…What’s always been great about Jo is that, from the beginning she gave me tremendous elbow room, but when you’re in the middle of a series like this it’s important that I talk to Jo along the way and ask her, beyond advice, just simple advice, and certain sequences and things, but just, ,”Am I on the right path?” and Jo’s always been good about, in that, she’s maddening in the sense that she will not tell me what’s going to happen but she will tell me if I’m going down the wrong path…
JKR: I’ve given you more than I’ve given anyone else which I probably shouldn’t probably say…on screen, or they’ll kidnap and torture him, and we need him. But yeah, I’ve told Steve probably more than I’ve told anyone else, because he needs to know. Because it’s incredibly annoying of me when he says “Well shall we cut that”, or “I wanted to do this” and I say, “Well no… because, you know, in book six, something will happen and you’ll need that in” or “that will contradict something that happens” and I can feel him on the end of the emails, you know, [does impression of frustrated Steve typing] “would you mind telling me why?” So I have told him things. But he’s very good at guessing. He’s guessed more shrewdly than anyone else, I think.
Lizo: How frustrating is it for you, working slightly in the dark with some of these issues, Steve?
Steve: Well it’s frustrating because, you like to know… when you’re writing a character, you want to know where they’re going…
JKR: I’d tell you if you were dying!
Steve: [laughing] That’s… that’s nice to know.
JKR: But you don’t need to know at the moment!
Steve: Well, you know, I am dying, hopefully it’s just gonna take a while! But I think it’s frustrating just, again, it comes down to the details and the magic of those details and I think just reading the books is just quite a wonderful experience.
Lizo: There are so many rich details in the books. Can you tell us how you decide what goes in and what stays out?
Steve: I will sometimes ask Jo. I will say, you know, this detail, you just seem to have cast just a bit more light on this in this scene than the other details. Sometimes I’m wrong, but often she’ll say “No, that is going to play.” There’s one thing in Chamber, actually, that Jo indicated will play later in the series. The hardest thing for me, honestly, is I’m writing a story to which I do not know the end. Which is, I’m not going to lie to you, has been the case sometimes in my own originals.
JKR: I was gonna say!
Steve: But I assume I will find an end. With this, it’s just I’m writing a story over a decade, and I keep waiting, you know, keep hoping that Jo will slip-up and actually tell me something.
Lizo: In this movie we’ve seen the kids develop from the first film, can you tell us about the relationship between Harry, Ron, and Hermione and how that is developing film by film?
JKR: Well I think it is developing in the films as it does in the books, which is to say that they are, they’re much stronger together than apart. They’re much more aware, in the second film, of their particular strengths. So they’re more effective, the children are able to do more complex things, for example the Polyjuice Potion. And also Chris in the second film has kind of foreshadowed what I don’t do until the fourth book, which is that you get hints of certain feelings between the three of them, that belong to a sort of slightly more mature person.
Lizo: Steve?
Steve: Yeah, I think you’re seeing in Chamber the magic’s becoming a bit second nature to them. At least simple magic is. And that basically it’s, you know, a little bit of knowledge will get you into a lot of trouble. And I think that’s what we’re seeing in the second one: is that they’re getting more mature but, it’s a dangerous kind of knowledge.
Lizo: How do you feel about what the kids were like in this movie?
Steve: Well the first thing that you notice when you watch the movie is that Harry and Ron’s voices have dropped about two octaves, which is just bizarre. Suddenly they’re not these cute little moppetheads running around. You know, children will grow.
Lizo: Steve, Hermione is a character that you have said is one of your favorites. Has that made her easier to write?
Steve: Yeah, I mean, I like writing all three, but I’ve always loved writing Hermione. Because, I just, one, she’s a tremendous character for a lot of reasons for a writer, which also is she can carry exposition in a wonderful way because you just assume she read it in a book. If I need to tell the audience something…
JKR: Absolutely right, I find that all the time in the book, if you need to tell your readers something just put it in her. There are only two characters that you can put it convincingly into their dialogue. One is Hermione, the other is Dumbledore. In both cases you accept, it’s plausible that they have, well Dumbledore knows pretty much everything anyway, but that Hermione has read it somewhere. So, she’s handy.
Steve: Yeah, she’s really handy. And she’s also just, I think, just tremendously entertaining. There’s something about her fierce intellect coupled with a complete lack of understanding of how she affects people sometimes that I just find charming and irresistible to write.
Lizo: Does Dumbledore speak for you?
JKR: Oh yes, very much so. Dumbledore often speaks for me.
Lizo: How do you see Dumbledore, Steve?
Steve: I think Dumbledore’s a fascinating character because I think he obviously sort of imparts great wisdom that comes from experience, but I’ve always felt that Dumbledore bears such a tremendous Dark burden, and he knows secrets and I think in many ways he bears the weight of the future of the wizard world, which is being challenged, and the only way that he can keep that at bay, the darkness, is to be whimsical and humorous. And I think that’s just a really interesting thing, I think he’s a character of so many layers and I think when he does say, that it is our choices and not our abilities. I just coming from him it doesn’t feel like a sermon, it doesn’t feel like a message, it just feels like an absolute truth and it goes down easy. And I like that about him. But that’s what I like about the books, I’ve always said that I thought that Jo’s writing is deceptively profound, which is that you never feel there are messages in there, but there’s a lot of things being dealt with in a very sort of clever way, and they’re never pretentious, the books, and I think that’s why kids love reading them.
Lizo: You say that you don’t set out to put particular messages in each book, they grow organically. But do you think that it’s important to have the right messages there when they do emerge?
JKR: Well obviously in the wizard world passes for racism, and that’s deeply entrenched in the whole plot, there’s this issue going on about the bad side really advocating a kind of genocide, to exterminate what they see as these half-blood people. So that was obviously very conscious, but the other messages do grow organically. But I’ve never, no I’ve never set out to teach anyone anything. It’s been more of an expression of my views and feelings than sitting down and deciding “What is today’s message?” And I do think that, although I never, again, sat down consciously and thought about this, I do think judging, even for my own daughter, that children respond to that than to “thought for the day.”
Lizo: What was the most important difference in doing the story for Chamber of Secrets as opposed to the first film?
JKR: Well we probably had a bit more contact on the first film, but we probably needed more contact on the first film because we were establishing a relationship that has lasted two years and is going to last hopefully longer, so that was really about getting to know what we needed from each other. So it’s probably a good sign that we had less contact on Chamber because I think there’s a lot of trust there. I was very prickly when I met Steve. Because I knew that they’d chosen this American guy, even though he wrote and directed one of my favorite films, The Fabulous Baker Boys, I still thought, “Well, you know, he’s American.” Not to be… I don’t know… He was just… I was most worried about meeting Steve. He was the writer, he was going to be ripping apart my baby. And it turns out I really like him, so that worked!
Lizo: How do you communicate, how does all that work, and how often?
JKR: Uh, it… it varies to what we’re doing at the time.
Steve: Owls.
JKR: Owls, mainly, obviously, a bit of Floo Powder. [laughs]
Lizo: How does this film differ from the first?
JKR: It is, I think we would both say an easier book to transfer into a film, isn’t it? The first one is episodic, you have individual adventures, it chops and changes more. I remember when we were working on the script of Philosopher’s Stone that was something that came up continually, wasn’t it, that you have these sort of discrete adventures. And Chamber is a more linear structure so it was easier to translate to screen, I think, wasn’t it?
Steve: Yeah, though I thought it was going to be easier than…
JKR: Than it actually turned out to be.
Steve: Because you do have that sort of Tom Riddle moment where Tom explains it all. And that’s always challenging in a movie. Also what’s interesting about, I think, what makes Chamber interesting is that things are occurring that you don’t really quite understand until Tom explains them at the end. So you’ve got to work toward that moment and hope you can hold the audience during that moment. But there’s no question, it had more of a sort of, it just more of a, tight plot to sort of play out.
Lizo: What were the biggest challenges for you in this film?
Steve: The challenge always for me is keeping it from being four hours. Because I like everything that, what I honestly think is magical about what Jo does is the details. And so my first drafts are always chock-full of details. I think for the thing for me is, the things I respond to sometimes are hard to sort of put in proportion. I mean, I was really interested in the whole Mudblood thread, so that became a very interesting emotional thing for me to write in the script. I don’t know that it’s still there in the way that I saw it entirely. But those, you want to give some of those things weight, in some ways, so that becomes a challenge always, but it’s mainly compression.
Lizo: Jo, were there any bits of Chamber of Secrets that didn’t reflect the way that you originally saw it in your mind?
JKR: It’s interesting what Steve says about the Mudblood theme because I would agree that there’s always the pressure of time and space with the film, that is a stronger theme in the book and yet it is present in the film but for me I suppose when I look back in the book or I think about that book that is the time in the overall entire series where the issue of pure blood becomes very important, so yeah, maybe more weight to that.
Lizo: What stands out most in this film?
JKR: It was scary, I’ve always thought Chamber of Secrets, people underestimate how scary the book is. And in fact it’s the book I’ve got the most complaints about, bizarrely. Possibly because people got upset at Chamber of Secrets and didn’t carry on reading the rest of the books, and I think that’s certainly translated to the screen, a couple of really frightening moments.
Lizo: The visual effects are a huge part of bringing the magic to life. In this film we have Dobby, we have the pixies, we have Fawkes, we have the basilisk. What do you make of the effects in this movie?
JKR: Dobby’s wonderful. Dobby’s really really good, and the Mandrakes…superb. I really love the Mandrakes.
Lizo: Is that a big challenge for you, Steve, getting the effects, getting those scenes right?
Steve: No, no, it’s easy for me because I just write it and dream it…
JKR: He just writes it, and watches them faint! [laughing.]
Steve: …and then someone else has to actually do it! But I’m amazed to see something like the Mandrakes, which is really, it’s essentially, puppetry.
Lizo: Which parts of Chamber of Secrets were you most excited to see on screen?
JKR: I was most worried about the spiders. Because you see these old sci-fi movies where they have spiders and they’re always hysterically funny, they’re never, never scary. And it’s easy to write a scene like that in a novel, and make it scary. But when I started thinking about how we were going to actually see that, in fact it was extremely frightening. They were the most frightening large spiders I’ve ever seen in my life.
Steve: I had the same concern, I just thought, as I was writing, I was thinking “How are we going to do this?” You’ve got Aragog saying “Who goes there?” basically, you know, this giant spider, and I was saying “This is just going to be hysterical,” sorry, I’m laughing as I’m writing it! I know I’m imagining it being…
JKR: We’ve had that problem a lot.
Steve: Yeah, well one thing that you learn about movies is that the thing that you’re more worried about often is the thing that’s not a problem. And the thing that you don’t worry about is a complete disaster. So I’ve found, it’s funny because you’re talking about the scares in the movie. I know the thing that terrified my son the most in the first movie was opening the book, and the book screaming. And I think it was because it was something he could identify with. Which is, he could take a book off the shelf, and open it, and there might be a face in there screaming. He wasn’t scared by the other things at all.
JKR: But I think I wrote that, those are the sort of details that I write because, that would scare me. I read all the time and to have to just open something and have it shriek at me. And one thing that I thought that was well done in the film, Chamber of Secrets, was the diary. Now, the diary to me is a very scary object, a really, really frightening object. This manipulative little book, the temptation particularly for a young girl to pour out her heart to a diary, which is never something I was prone to, but my sister was. The power of something that answers you back, and at the time that I wrote that I’d never been in an Internet chat room. But I’ve since thought “Well it’s very similar.” Just typing your deepest thoughts into the ether and getting answers back, and you don’t know who is answering you. And so that was always a very scary image to me, in the book, and I thought it worked very well in the film. You could understand when he started writing to see these things coming back to him, and the power of that, that secret friend in your pocket.
Steve: Yeah I’ve always loved that in the book. I thought that was just one of the great… that someone’s writing back to you that you do not know who they are and there is something inherently ominous in that, but the fact that they also know the secret you want to know and they’re inviting you, like a finger beckoning you into the past. I always thought that was an incredibly interesting concept.
Lizo: How different has it been working on the script for now the next movie Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban?
Steve: Well we’ve just started, I honestly think it’s going as well as any of the others. Personally I feel it’s going to be the best movie.
JKR: Yeah, I think so too.
Steve: I think that we’re at a better place than we’ve ever been on the script.
JKR: Mm-hm.
Steve: And we’re months from starting shooting so I think it’s the best place we’ve been. I think Three could be really, really be interesting.
JKR: Yeah, I agree.
Lizo: Where does Three stand on your list of favorites?
JKR: Oh, I know it’s very corny and all to say it, but it’s like choosing between your children. It really is. But I have a very soft spot for Three because of a couple of the characters who crop up there for the first time. Lupin and Black, obviously very important characters and yeah, I’m really fond of them.
Lizo: So far you’ve had two very successful collaborations on Harry Potter, what are your hopes for the future of the Harry Potter series?
JKR: Well, I hope Steve keeps writing the scripts, because I’m used to him now, you know. Just keep being faithful to the books, I suppose. From my point of view I’m bound to say that, aren’t I?
Lizo: J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves, author and the script writer, I’m sure we’re looking forward very much to the results of your future collaborations, thank you very much.
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