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Revisão:
“Living with Harry Potter”
Interviewer: Stephen Fry
Source: BBC Radio4
Broadcast: December 10, 2005
Audio: Available from the QQQ [mp3; 13MB]
Context: This interview was recorded in the late summer of 2005 and broadcast as a Christmas special.
Transcription: Courtesy of Matthew at Veritaserum with corrections by Roonwit and Lisa Bunker
Stephen Fry: It was at Christmas five years ago that I had the strange experience of hearing myself on the radio all day long on Boxing Day as Radio4 broadcast the recording of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
It has been a privilege to be the voice of JK Rowling’s work over 6 books, 2,764 pages, and 100 hours and 55 minutes of recordings.
The characters are familiar friends – and enemies – for me, but like millions of others, I eagerly await each new installment.
I first met Jo nearly seven years ago when she came to the studio where I was recording the first book. She remains famously reticent, and like millions of Potter fans, I am fascinated to know what it’s like to live with Harry, where the inspiration for the books comes from, what she thinks of her critics, and what she will do when she finishes the final chapter.
So when Jo agreed to record a conversation with me, I jumped at the chance.
Jo, I suppose a good question to open with would be simply which character you find yourself identifying with most when you’re writing or when you’re reading what you’ve just written.
JK Rowling: Probably Harry, really, because I have to think myself into his head far more than any of the others, because everything is seen from his point of view. But there’s a little bit of me in most of the characters, I think. They say of writers that, um, I think it’s impossible not to put a little bit of yourself into any character, because you have to imagine their motivation.
SF: Did it occur to you when you were planning the books, hoping the first one would be published, that so many people who have never been inside a boarding school would relate to the very particular world of an English boarding school which Hogwarts represents?
JKR: Well, the truth is, I’ve never been inside one either, of course. I was comprehensive educated. But – it was essential for the plot that the children could be enclosed somewhere together overnight. This could not be a day school, because the adventure would fall down every second day if they went home and spoke to their parents, and then had to break back into school every week to wander around at night, so it had to be a boarding school. Which was also logical, because where would wizards educate their children? This is a place where there were going to be lots of noises, smells, flashing lights, and you would want to contain it somewhere fairly distant so that Muggles didn’t come across it all the time.
But I think that people recognize the reality of a lot of children being cloistered together, perhaps, more than they recognize the ambience of a boarding school. I’m not sure that I’m familiar with that, but I think am familiar with what children are like when they’re together.
SF: The thing is, you have created a world, it’s the sort of the definition of successful fiction, is to have a world that is somehow circumscribed by its own rules, its own ethics, its own cultural flavour, and smell and senses, and you’ve done this, and that’s why it’s very common to hear about children and adults dreaming that they are in Hogwarts, dreaming that they are side by side with Harry and Ron and Hermione and so on. And naturally, what comes as a result of this, too, is you get strange warning voices from people I always imagined with the steel-colored hair with a knitting needle stuck through it and a bun at the back, arguing that somehow this is dangerous…
JKR: Yes.
SF: …for people, and, aside from the whole business of whether or not magic is dangerous for people, which I think we can ignore because…
[Both laugh]
SF: …it seems to cover such wild shores of unreason.
JKR: It’s all part of that. Young ladies, two hundred years ago, weren’t allowed to read novels because it would inflame them and excite them and make them long for things that weren’t real. And I remember being very distressed to read, when I was quite young, about Virginia Woolf being told she mustn’t write because it would exacerbate her mental condition.
We need a place to escape to, whether as a writer or a reader, and obviously, the world that I’ve created is a particularly shining example of a world to which it is very pleasant to escape. That beautiful image in C.S. Lewis where there are the pools – the world between worlds – and you can jump into the different pools to access the different worlds. And that, for me, was always a metaphor for a library. I know Lewis wasn’t actually thinking that when he wrote it, of course…
SF: Yeah, he was writing Christian metaphors.
JKR: No, it was more Christian a metaphor for him, yeah. Of course, but to me, that was to jump into these different pools, to enter different worlds, what a beautiful place, and that, for me, is what literature should be. So whether you love Hogwarts or loathe it, I don’t think you can criticize it for being a world that people enjoy.
SF: No. Precisely. I mean, that is, that is why it, it exercises such a keen hold on all our imaginations, this.
JKR: I read an interview with you in which I was very flattered to see that you drew a parallel between that world and the world of Sherlock Holmes, and I found that a very flattering comparison that also resonated with me, because when I read the Holmes stories, it is, of course, it’s a world that never really existed. And yet, you can wholeheartedly believe it existed, and more importantly, you want it to have existed, don’t you?
SF: Exactly right.
JKR: So that’s why it’s such fabulously entertaining reading.
SF: Yeah. And why Sherlock Holmes, to this day, still gets letters to 221b Baker Street.
JKR: Exactly, yeah.
SF: And of course, it is a peculiarity that you will be accused of creating both a world in which children can luxuriate in an escapist fantasy and for creating a world that is frightening…
JKR: Mmm.
SF: …because it’s so full of wickedness and danger…
JKR: Mmm.
SF: …and that it could upset them. Now they can’t both be true.
[Both laugh]
SF: But I do think it is one of the advances in children’s literature that you have made with this remarkable series, is that you have not held back from the difficult and the frightening and the treacherous and the unjust and all the things that most exercise children’s minds.
JKR: I feel very strongly that there is a move to sanitize literature because we’re trying to protect children not from, necessarily, from the grisly facts of life, but from their own imaginations.
I remember being in America a few years ago and Halloween was approaching, and three television programmes in a row were talking about how to explain to children it wasn’t real. Now there’s a reason why we create these stories, and we have always created these stories, and the reason why we have had these pagan festivals, and the reason why even the church allows a certain amount of fear… we need to feel fear, and we need to confront that in an controlled environment. That’s a very important part of growing up, I think. And the child that has been protected from the dementors in fiction, I would argue, is much more likely to fall prey to them later in life in reality.
And also, what are we saying to children who do have scary and disturbing thoughts? We’re saying that’s wrong, that’s not natural, and it’s not something that’s intrinsic to the human condition. That they’re in some way odd or ill.
SF: Exactly.
JKR: That’s a very dangerous thing to tell a child.
SF: And guilt is the greatest trigger for aggression that man has. And if people grow up thinking they’re peculiar for having dark thoughts or being aware of the weirder side of the world and their lives, then that’s going to make them awful human beings, isn’t it?
JKR: [quietly] I totally agree.
SF: One of the jobs of writing, in a sense, is to show you that you’re not alone.
JKR: Yes, yes, it is, and certainly, I discovered I wasn’t alone through books, I think, arguably more than I did through friendships in my early days, ‘cause I was quite an introverted child, and it was through reading that I realized I wasn’t alone on all sorts of levels.
SF: Absolutely. And it’s a central anxiety, if you’d like, that the reader is always confronted with Harry, is that there is this extraordinary closeness he has to Voldemort – the one who must not be named, but must be named. And I think that as the series progresses and we feel “Gosh, it’s not long now – what is going to happen?” There’s a great deal of speculation, and I’m not asking you to come out with any answers here, but there’s a great deal of speculation as to how close this relationship is…
JKR: Mmm.
SF: … between the darkest wizard of them all and our hero, who saved the world.
JKR: Well, the question I was asked a lot early on was “Was Voldemort really Harry’s father?” And of course, that’s a Star Wars question…
SF: Exactly. Total Star Wars.
[Both laugh]
JKR: …really, isn’t it? And, no, he is not going to turn out to be Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. He is not, in a biological sense, related to him at all.
SF: Now, that’s a very good answer to have. I think that one of the current front-running endings – I’m not sure if you’re aware of this – as far as the betting goes, is that Harry will finally defeat Voldemort at the expense of all his own powers, and he will end by going into the world as an ordinary Muggle. [JKR gasps theatrically] Which is an extraordinary idea.
JKR: It’s a good ending.
SF: It is a good ending! You can borrow it if you like.
JKR: And be sued for plagiarism by about 13 million children.
SF: This is your problem, isn’t it? You’re not allowed to read anything…
JKR [chuckling]: No, I’m not.
SF: …written by anybody else, just on the off chance. Well, let’s think about the world that you’ve used, in terms of its tradition, if you like, from little cornish pixies to, you know, kelpies and, you know, mentions of particular types of plant, like mandragora and so on.
JKR: Mmm.
SF: These are all real and a lot of children will, of course, imagine you made them up completely.
JKR: I’ve taken horrible liberties with folklore and mythology, but I’m quite unashamed about that, because British folklore and British mythology is a totally bastard mythology. You know, we’ve been invaded by people, we’ve appropriated their gods, we’ve taken their mythical creatures, and we’ve soldered them all together to make, what I would say, is one of the richest folklores in the world, because it’s so varied. So I feel no compunction about borrowing from that freely, but adding a few things of my own.
SF: Absolutely.
JKR: But you’re right, yes, children, they know, obviously, they know that I didn’t invent unicorns, but I’ve had to explain frequently that I didn’t actually invent hippogriffs. Although a hippogriff is quite obscure, I went looking, because when I do use a creature that I know is a mythological entity, I like to find out as much as I can about it. I might not use it, but to make it as consistent as I feel is good for my plot. There’s very little on hippogriffs. I could read…
SF: It’s the map, isn’t it? It’s the “Here Be Hippogriffs.”
JKR: Exactly. “Here Be Hippogriffs,” yes.
SF: Like Heffalumps in Pooh.
JKR: But they don’t seem to have been closely observed by many medieval naturalists, so I could, I could take liberties.
[both laugh]
SF: I presume they are, as the name would imply, and this is to bring this onto your other love, which is language itself, at its most basic level of words and derivations that hippogriff is, of course, is a mixture of the idea…
JKR: Horse
SF: … of the Welsh “griffin” and the Greek for horse “hippo,”
JKR: That’s right.
SF: …which is a perfect example, as you say, of the bastardization of our English folklore, like our language.
JKR: Arcane. Like our language.
SF: It’s the perfect mixture.
JKR: Which is what makes our language so rich.
SF: Exactly.
JKR: Nobbily, and textured, and I love it.
SF: And even things like Mundungus have a meaning.
JKR: Mundungus.
SF: Isn’t that wonderful?
JKR: Isn’t that a fantastic word?
SF: And it means?
JKR: Foul-stinking tobacco, which really suits him.
SF: Exactly. Isn’t it perfect? Now do you actually trawl through books of rare words or OED [Oxford English Dictionary] or things, or are they just things that you somehow, you’ve got a good memory for words?
JKR: Um…I don’t really trawl books. They tend to be things I’ve collected or stumbled across in general reading. The exception was Gilderoy – Gilderoy Lockhart. The name Lockhart, well, I know it’s quite a well-known Scottish surname…
SF: Yeah.
JKR: …I found on a war memorial. I was looking for quite a glamorous, dashing sort of surname, and Lockhart caught my eye on this war memorial, and that was it. Couldn’t find a Christian name. And I was leafing through the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable one night. I was consciously looking for stuff, generally, that would be useful and I saw Gilderoy, who was actually a highway man, and a very good-looking rogue.
SF: Really?
JKR: And Gilderoy Lockhart, it just sounded perfect.
SF: It is a perfect, perfect…
JKR: Impressive, and yet, in the middle, quite hollow, of course.
SF: Indeed, as we know, he was.
JKR: As we know.
SF: So, to get down to the really important bit, which is me.
JKR: Yes, let’s, let’s do you. [Both laugh]
SF: I wondered if the way I’ve read the books has altered your writing of them?
JKR: I know that I’ve told you this before. There was a time when Jessica, my daughter, who’s now ten – she absolutely loves the tapes – and there was a time when I was writing Goblet of Fire in particular, where I would settle down to work in the evening, and I could hear you reading from her bedroom, which really was a mind-warping experience to be writing one book while listening to you reading Chamber or, you know, Azkaban.
SF: Yes.
JKR: It was bizarre, and I felt that I couldn’t escape Harry Potter. There was no escape. I could hear him, and I could see him, and I was writing about him.
SF: Yes. Certainly, I have to say, without just meaning to be flattering that the shapes, the phrasing, the balance of sentences does make the books a delight to read in that sense.
JKR: Well, that’s really kind, and that’s really good to hear.
SF: It really…sometimes writers have a marvelous sense of writing for the page and the words happen in that part of the brain that does it…
JKR: Yeah.
SF: …but really, the matter is terribly difficult.
JKR: See, I love writing dialogue.
SF: Yeah.
JKR: I really love writing dialogue.
SF: Yeah.
JKR: And when I hear you reading it, it gives me a whole new sense of pleasure, because I never read my work aloud. And yet hearing the dialogue spoken, and I always hear you speak it before I hear actors speak it – it’s very pleasurable, because I’ve always enjoyed writing it.
SF: Each time I do a new book, there’s a CD that the engineer at the sound studio produces with all the characters…
JKR: I remember, yes.
SF: It’s almost going to have to be a DVD next time. [laughs]
JKR: Oh sorry!
SF: It’s so that I could remind myself of what, you know, what Lavender sounded like, or what, you know…
JKR: Yeah.
SF: What, with a particular character.
JKR: Of course. Jessica wanted to know how you got Hermione’s voice. She thinks you’re so brilliant at doing Hermione and she doesn’t understand how someone with such a deep voice can do a girl’s voice, so I was to ask you.
SF: That’s an interesting question. I always loved the Scottish comedian Stanley Baxter. Do you remember him?
JKR: Oh yeah. [Laughs.]
SF: And I noticed from a very early age, when I was ten, that when he did a woman, he usually deepened his voice. So unlike trying to do a sort of falsetto, he would go, “Hello, I’m Faith Douche.†[JKR laughs] Or some strange character like that. And actually, for a lot of women that works well.
JKR: Yes.
SF: Not for young girls, but for grown-up women that works very well.
JKR: So softening the voice, really, more than…
SF: It’s a sort of softening, exactly.
JKR: I do remember being there to see you record, and you said to me, “It’s very hard to hiss something with no sibilant in it.†[Both laugh] Someone had hissed something like “don’t do that.†[SF laughs heartily.]That’s another influence you’ve had on me. Every time I want someone to be hissing, which Snape does quite a lot, I have to check there’s actually an “s†in it before I…
SF: Yes.
JKR: Before I make them do it.
SF: You’ve done it with Snape and all that’s around him. He’s got three s’s himself, and his house has got an “s,†and it’s got a Slytherin, it’s you know, the whole, the whole, herpetic, I believe is the adjective.
JKR: Yes, right.
SF: The whole snake-like work is done. Now, the question I’m sure you’re asked a lot, and that is for generations now, the ideal child’s hero is Harry Potter. But that didn’t exist when you were a child. Who was the one you went hunting with, the one you dreamt of being with?
JKR: Loads and loads.
SF: Loads.
JKR: I liked the heroine of The Little White Horse because she was quite plain, and I was plain, and most heroines are very beautiful.
SF: Yes
JKR: She was freckly, and had reddish hair, and I identified with her a lot.
SF: Eloise was a bit like that as well.
JKR: Yes, I love Eloise.
SF: I loved Eloise.
JKR: There were so many. I loved E. Nesbit. She is still, probably, the children’s writer with whom I most identify.
SF: Yes.
JKR: She wasn’t very sentimental.
SF: She wasn’t, was she?
JKR: And she loved a quirky detail. [SF laughs] So, um, yes, I thought she was very, very good. I think female writers generally are less sentimental about childhood than male writers, in my opinion.
SF: I think you’re absolutely right. It’s a strange thing, children’s fiction. There’s the boy’s adventure style…
JKR: Yes.
SF: Which, you know, is, I suppose, the greatest example of them is Treasure Island.
JKR: Yes.
SF: Which is just one of the most immaculately written books of any genre.
JKR: Which is, which is a wonderful book and which I also love, yes.
SF: It is a truly great book, isn’t it? Yeah. And that, really, has almost no females in it at all.
JKR: That’s right.
SF: But what you’ve done is you’ve written a boy’s adventure book, but…
JKR: But with girls. [laughs]
SF: …it is also a girl’s book. Which is actually extraordinary. And, you know, one perhaps shouldn’t over talk about the idea of gender in it. I remember seeing in a Martin Amis novel – I think it’s The Information – the characters have an enormous row talking about this very subject. You know, he actually leaves the dinner table because of talking about, you know, “Women read certain types of book and men read other types of book.†And that it will ever be thus.
JKR: Yes.
SF: But do you find… I expect you get more letters from women, from girls, simply because girls are better at writing letters you said. [laughs]
JKR: I have a theory. It was roughly fifty percent each, and my theory is that parents were so thrilled their sons were reading that they would prod them into writing to me in the hope that they would keep this enthusiasm going. And I occasionally had extraordinary letters from boys – very, very, very touching letters from boys. Arguably more touching, particularly when it’s a letter that’s written by someone who obviously doesn’t find writing very easy, telling me that it’s the first book they’ve ever read and they really like it.
SF: It’s a wonderful compliment.
JKR: Oh yes, it is.
SF: And an extraordinary thought, and it must make you slightly go all pink and…
JKR: It does make me go pink and wibbly. [Both laugh]
SF: Exactly, yes. “What good is a book,†said Alice, “without pictures and conversations†in Alice in Wonderland, which is always a book I think grown-ups actually like more than children, though.
JKR: I think so, too.
SF: But it’s a splendid comment and a very sophisticated one, which is why adults like Alice so much. I wondered if, simply the expense of the first edition of your first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, whether the issue of illustration had come up? And whether it was just, “Well, this is the biggest children’s novel we’ve ever published in terms of size…â€
JKR: Yes.
SF: Length. We’re not going to add to our expense by getting Quentin Blake or whoever.
JKR: No. But you’re absolutely right. That was precisely the argument. They also felt that illustrations might aim it a little bit at a younger audience than they were aiming for.
SF: Yes. I think it turned out to be quite right.
JKR: And they were right. The American edition, which is a very beautifully produced book, I must say, they have very small line drawings at the beginning of every chapter, which I like. It’s just a suggestion of what’s to come.
SF: Yes.
JKR: But it’s not full-blown, full-page.
SF: Color plates.
JKR: Exactly, color plates. Although, I used to love a color plate. I used to flick through to find them before I read the book.
SF: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. There was a smell to them, because the paper was shiny and different.
JKR: There was a very distinctive smell.
SF: Oh, and sometimes they were frightening.
JKR: Yes.
SF: You knew the one was coming that you didn’t quite like for some reason.
JKR: Yeah.
SF: I can still remember them all. It’s weird, isn’t it? While on the subject of America, you’re published there by Scholastic, I believe.
JKR: Scholastic, yep.
SF: I remember you telling me about your first signing queue in America and…
JKR: Oh, that was, yes.
SF: You would expect a few boys to come with a scar penciled clumsily on their foreheads, but you had…
JKR: There was…
SF: You had a woman in gilt.
JKR: That’s right.
SF: Tell us about her!
JKR: I had a woman who dressed up as the Fat Lady, complete with frame hung around her neck. That was extraordinary, and that was the closest I will ever get to being a pop star. [SF laughs] I walked through this door at the back of the store, and there were screams, literally screams and flash bulbs going off and I didn’t know where I was. I was completely disorientated. I think, as a defensive mechanism, when those events are over, I kind of shut down, and I think I have to shut down and think that that was a very odd anomaly. And then I have to return to my office and just convince myself that this is just my world.
SF: Yeah.
JKR: I find this a really difficult question to answer myself, and I wrote the characters, so I don’t see why you should find it any easier, really, but I’m going to ask. Is there any character with whom you identify particularly?
SF: The easy wisdom and slightly kind of twinkling…
JKR: Of Dumbledore.
SF: …quality of Dumbledore. I’ve always had this love of great teachers. With the first fictional character I [unintelligible] created was for a radio program, was an old Cambridge Don, Donald Trefusis.
JKR: I used to listen to Donald Trefusis, yeah.
SF: Do you remember an Archbishop of Canterbury called Ramsay, the last of the really sort of great and monumental primates of the Church of England? Which I don’t mean an ape, of course. [JKR laughs] And I remember seeing him being interviewed by a Malcolm Muggeridge type person who said, “Now, you’re going to be a very wise man.†He said, “Am I, am I, am I wise, I wonder, am I wise, am I?†[Both laugh] And the interviewer said, “Well, Your Grace, perhaps you could explain what you think wisdom is?†“Wisdom, wisdom. Mmm Mmm, wisdom. I think it’s the ability to cope.â€
JKR: Oh, is that…
SF: Which is a marvelous definition, you know. It is, and so right, I mean it comes, as you know, is the wisdom is the kingdom of wit, it is wit, witdom, wit-knowing, the German of knowing, wissenschaft and so on, and in wit is a marvelous…
JKR: See, you are Dumbledore, look. [SF laughs] A natural teacher.
SF: And that sense of being able to cope with things.
JKR: Yes.
SF: It’s not how much you know.
JKR: No.
SF: And you sense …
JKR: Something completely different.
SF: … that with that rather marvelous, occasionally rather tired, worn quality that Dumbledore has, because he’s experienced so much, and he can cope, but he would almost rather not be able to.
JKR: Absolutely. That’s exactly right. Dumbledore does express the regret that he has always had to be the one who knew, and who had the burden of knowing. And he would rather not know.
SF: But of all, of course, Harry Potter is the one, because he is the point of consciousness in the book. Harry is the one who is … undergoes all the tests and the ordeals by fire and all kinds of other things. And as with any hero, you measure yourself against him. And there are times when I think I would just run away, or I wouldn’t care. I’d wave my wand even though I’m not supposed to, you know.
JKR: My favorite comment about Harry, at the time of the first book…was it was a schoolboy, who was interviewed on television, and asked why he liked Harry – the character – so much, and he said, “He doesn’t seem to know what’s going on a lot of the time, and nor do I.†[SF laughs.]
SF: Oh, that’s so good! I suppose there are times when you – you know, I think I mentioned this to you when I first read The Order of the Phoenix – was, do you have to be so cruel to him?
JKR: Well, Phoenix, I would say, in self-defense – Harry had to, because of what I’m trying to say about Harry as a hero. Because he’s a very human hero, and this is, obviously, there’s a contrast, between him, as a very human hero, and Voldemort, who has deliberately dehumanized himself.
SF: Yes.
JKR: And Harry, therefore, did have to reach a point where he did almost break down, and say he didn’t want to play anymore, he didn’t want to be the hero anymore – and he’d lost too much. And he didn’t want to lose anything else. So that – Phoenix was the point at which I decided he would have his breakdown.
SF: Right.
JKR: And now he will rise from the ashes strengthened.
SF: It is such a primary energy, particularly with children, and we lose it, I suppose, at our peril, the outrage of injustice, which is one of the primary sort of motor forces in all the books, isn’t it?
JKR: The feeling of the twelve-year-old boy that they’ve been unfairly accused – the burning sense of outrage. You’re right, we shouldn’t lose that.
SF: Yes.
JKR: But we do, often.
SF: Yeah.
JKR: Adults do.
SF: Yeah. No, that’s quite right.
JKR: I think the thing that I find most extraordinary is – I don’t know how many characters I have in play now – how do you find voices for them?
SF: It’s not a simple thing to answer. I mean, so often they’re there and I hope that, generally speaking, I’ve…if not given exactly the voice you imagine, that it’s somewhere in that area. I mean, there are characters like Tonks which, for some reason, I just instinctively felt she had that slightly sort of Burnley, you know, Jane Horrocks sort of accent. [JKR laughs] And it just seemed to fit her exactly.
JKR: It does, yeah.
SF: And I think Celia, the producer, had the same idea in her head, that it should be that.
JKR: Mmhmm.
SF: And yet you did, there’s no kind of “put wood in th’ole…â€
JKR: No.
SF: And “baht ‘at” kind of Northern writing. It’s just something that’s there. And I’m sure it’s just as unconscious with you sometimes, that you’re writing a smallish character that uses a turn of phrase that makes me think, “Well, that sounds like a Cockney, or that’s an older character, or that’s a younger character.â€
JKR: Because you knew that Hagrid was West Country.
SF: Yes.
JKR: And that was the only thing I wanted to warn you before you started reading, and my plane was delayed. It was the first time we ever met. And I got there, and one of the first things you said to me was, “I’ve done Hagrid as a kind of Somerset.â€
SF: Yeah.
JKR: And I thought, “Oh, thank goodness for that,†because I’d thought, if you make him Glaswegian [SF laughs] you know, it would’ve had to…that was the only character I felt protective about accent-wise.
SF: Yes, yeah.
JKR: What I really enjoy about your reading is the accents aren’t intrusive. I don’t feel as though you’re in any sense giving a sort of virtuoso performance of “These are as many accents as I can do,†or different voices. You don’t form a big barrier between the listener and the story, I feel. Do you know?
SF: I know exactly…
JKR: Do you know what I mean?
SF: That’s precisely what I aim for is not to get in the way of it.
JKR: Yes.
SF: Is that for people not to hear the voice after a while. And you know how when you’re reading, sometimes you lose it and you’re find you having to go back and…
JKR: Yes.
SF: …because you’re aware of the letters and the words. And then you can read a whole chapter and not be aware of having turned over a page.
JKR: Mmhmm.
SF: I mean, you know, the print and the paper have not been there. And it should be the same with my voice when they’re listening, you know. The first paragraph or so, but then immediately their mind is the world of the Dursleys and of Hogwarts and the Knight Bus and everything else, and they don’t notice me doing it. And Celia, the producer and Helen are very good at making sure that I don’t over project a voice or mimic, you know, overdo something. And the only other problem is the pacing, you know…
JKR: Yeah.
SF: I think it’s so important to refresh a page.
JKR: Yes, yes.
SF: You know? Because otherwise you can get a bit lulled.
JKR: Mmhmm.
SF: And…but you mustn’t overdo that either.
JKR: So, I don’t feel I should almost push you that much further, but are there any scenes that you have particularly, or that you can remember, enjoying reading?
SF: Well, the, um…the whole creepy stuff at the climax of Order of the Phoenix, you know, in the bowels of the Ministry of Magic and so on. I love the fact that it was so frightening and scary and dramatic, and I loved, you know, building up the tension and so on of the strange glass orbs and what, what are they going to mean and then getting stuck behind doors.
JKR: There were a few children who’ve told me that they took it in much better when you read it to them than when they read it on the page, and I think that’s because with Phoenix, because people had had to wait three years for it, they raced through the book.
SF: They read too fast. They leapt ahead and they lost of the geography.
JKR: Really raced it. Exactly. And then I’ve had readers say to me, “I read it again, and there’s a lot more than I thought there was.†And that’s because you read it in about an afternoon, didn’t you? So listening to you, I think, has really, yes, given them a sense of where they are.
SF: Is it really true that you’ve got it all planned out?
JKR: Yes, it is really true.
SF: That’s astonishing.
JKR: Yes, I do know what’s going to happen in the end. And occasionally, I get cold shivers when someone guesses at something that’s very close, and then I panic and I think, “Oh, is it very obvious?” and then someone says something that’s so off the wall that I think, “No, it’s clearly not that obvious!”
SF: Good.
JKR: I always leave myself latitude to go on a little stroll off the path, but the path is what I’m essentially following. So much that happens in six relates to what happens in seven. And you really sort of skid off the end of six straight into seven. You know, it’s not the discreet adventure that the others have all been, even though you have the underlying theme of Harry faces Voldemort, in each case, and – you know better than anyone – there has been an adventure that has resolved itself.
SF: Yes, exactly.
JKR: Whereas in six, although there is an ending that could be seen as definitive in one sense, you very strongly feel the plot is not over this time and it will continue.
SF: Yeah.
JKR: It’s an odd feeling. For the first time I’m very aware that I’m finishing.
SF: The tape is in sight.
JKR: The end is in sight, yeah.
SF: It’s extraordinary.
JKR: Yes.
SF: You’ll always write because it’s a need you have. Do you imagine you will write for children next time you write something new?
JKR: Um…there is a…
SF: Would you write for the children who were children who are now adults? Who were your first generation?
JKR: Poor people, never escape me. Um…I don’t know. Truthfully, I don’t know. I am…there is another childrens’ book that is sort of mouldering in the cupboard that I quite like, which is for slightly younger children, I would say. But there are other things I’d like to write, too. But I think I’ll need to find a good pseudonym and do it all secretly.
SF: Yes.
JKR: Because I’m very frightened – you can imagine…
SF: Oh, absolutely
JKR: …of the unbearable hype…
SF: Yeah.
JKR: …that would attend a post-Harry Potter book…
SF: Yeah.
JKR: …and I’m not sure I look forward to that at all.
SF: Well, with that tantalizing glimpse into the future for Jo, and the lingering question as to whether we will recognize her post-Potter work, we parted, and I set off on 600 more pages of Harry. I can’t wait for book seven. Like many a fan, I want to know what happens in the end. But I don’t really want the end to come.
consulte Mais informaçãoAnelli, Melissa e Spartz, Emerson. “The-Leaky-Cauldron e MuggleNet entrevistam Joanne Kathleen Rowling”. The Leaky Cauldron, 16 de julho de 2005. AVISO: A totalidade desta entrevista está recheada de informações...
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: BLiNd [TheusPotter]
Revisão:
Interview with David Heyman, Steve Kloves, Mark Radcliffe, Alfonso Cuaron, and Jo Rowling,
Prisoner of Azkaban DVD “Extra,” November 23, 2004
David Heyman: The books lead us. I mean, we’re in a good position of having Jo Rowling provide us with fantastic sorts of material.
Steve Kloves: All you have to do is read the book to kind of, I think, sense the place. It’s, you know, tone and atmosphere — which I thought she’d done, and continues to do, so grand.
David Heyman: In the very first one, Jo came to the set when we were designing, coming up with the design, and had a look-through of them to make sure we weren’t wildly off.
Mark Radcliffe: Jo created this world, we wanted to stay true to it and organic to it, and that’s been our mission.
David Heyman: All that vision is born very much from the book. Part of the universe that first Chris, and now Alfonso, has built upon.
Alfonso Cuaron: From the get-go what I was aiming at was serving the material.
Jo Rowling: Out of the five books I’ve published, writing Azkaban was the easiest, and in some ways I think that shows. Although it’s the tricky part in some was, as Alfonso will really appreciate, and Steve Kloves, as the script writer, will really appreciate, because they’ve kind of had to negotiate the same ascent that I had to negotiate. At the same time, I felt I was really given space to do that, so I — so it was an enjoyable process.
Alfonso Cuaron: The moment that I read the book I-I just felt so connected. I … for me, everything was so clear how it should look as a film, and how it should be told as a film.
Steve Kloves: We tried to discover the best way to convey what Jo was expressing in the page, in movie terms. And um, that lead us to some interesting places.
Alfonso Cuaron: You deal with so many abstract concepts, like the time traveling. It is so … such an abstract thing, and it is so difficult, that even trying to explain it right now….
Jo Rowling: Yeah, it’s hard.
Alfonso Cuaron: …is hard.
Jo Rowling: It is hard, ‘cause you just go in circles.
Alfonso Cuaron: But then in the book, everything just makes perfect sense.
Jo Rowling: I loved watching that part of the film, I loved watching the time turner sequence. There was just enough humor in it, just enough nearness is … Dumbledore’s comment when they come back is just perfect.
David Heyman: When we got to Scotland to meet with Jo — one, I think it’s important for Jo to feel comfortable and two, I think that jo is a wonderful source of information and is incredibly generous with us.
Chris Columbus: I remember when she walked in the door, for some reason I expected to meet someone who was like seventy. Jo walked in, she was younger than I was, we liked the same films and we liked the same music, and it was just an immediate connection.
David Heyman: When she met Alfonso, he talked about his vision for the film, talked through many ideas.
Jo Rowling: Alfonso was mentioned very early on, and I was really enthusiastic about the idea — and I loved “Y Tu Mama Tambien.” Alfonso just obviously understands teenage boys backwards and everything, at 13 now.
Alfonso Cuaron: these kids were starting to take themselves seriously as actors, so they were willing to explore more emotional territories. I was so lucky that I had them so raw and so willing to go there.
Jo Rowling: I think all three of them give their best performance to date.
Alfonso Cuaron: Poor Malfoy….
Jo Rowling: He deserves it, though.
Alfonso Cuaron: ..he deserves it.
Jo Rowling: Tom took that punch really well.
Alfonso Cuaron: He, oh….
Jo Rowling: He really did a good job on that.
Alfonso Cuaron: Oh, they loved it. Emma was looking forward for that moment, and I remember Tom telling Emma, “Oh if you want to hit me, just hit me, just hit me.”
Jo Rowling: What a hero.
Alfonso Cuaron: The universe that you created … you know every corner of that place.
Stuart Craig: This was a map of the world. This drawing is Jo Rowling’s drawing, that she executed in just a few minutes. As you see, it has all the principle ingredients. The Dark Forest is here, the Whomping Willow, the Quidditch Pitch, Hogwarts Castle itself. The Black Lake is there, the perimeter road, Hogsmeade Village. She had a very, very exact and precise understanding of her world and her creation. She knew exactly the relationship between all of the elements, she was able to give it to us – and that became our Bible.
Alfonso Cuaron: We needed a place where the kids could see the execution of Buckbeak, and we thought about having a graveyard. And we consulted Jo about it and she said “No, the graveyard is not there,” and I said “Why?” And then she gave me the whole explanation of why the graveyard cannot b there, because it’s in a different place of the castle. Because it’s going to play…and she knows her thing, she knows exactly what’s going to happen later. And once I remember having little people in some storyboards, playing some keyboards and an organ in the Great Hall. And Jo said “No, there are no little people in this universe.” I said “Yes, it’s like…” she says, “Yes, lovely image, but they don’t make sense in this universe.”
Jo Rowling: I was really mean; I wouldn’t let him do it. That’s not fair, is it?
Alfonso Cuaron: She was just about trying as much as possible to serve the story and the spirit of the story, because that’s what is great of the book. Because the third book is, for me, so abstract and deals with so many abstract concepts – but at the same time, it’s in the frame of an adventure.
David Heyman: I think it’s very, very important that Alfonso Cuaron be allowed to make this his own film. It’s important that any director come into a situation like this and feel the freedom, feel empowered to make it their own, that’s how you’re going to get the best films.
Alfonso Cuaron: Pretty much all the decisions, all the visual decisions, were made as we were shooting and not in the cutting room. We made most of those decisions either in the storyboard or while we were blocking the scenes with the actors, working with the actors, and we decided how to approach the scene.
David Heyman: What he’s done is he’s built from the foundations of the books, built from the foundations of Chris Columbus, who captured the first two, but made them very much his own to serve the story.
Jo Rowling: Alfonso had good intuition about what would and wouldn’t work. He’s put things in the film that, without knowing it, foreshadow things that are going to happen in the final two books. So I really got goosebumps when I saw a couple of those things, and I thought people are going to look back on the film and think those were put in deliberately as clues.
Steve Kloves: Jo wants the movies to be faithful to the books, on the other hand, she realizes that they’re completely different mediums. To be entirely faithful, these movies would be sixteen hours long.
Alfonso Cuaron: In this film, the film was about a child trying to find his identity as a teenager. We found the theme, and then whatever stuck there we kept, and whatever didn’t … sorry. As long as we didn’t affect or contradict either the universe, or what is to come.
Chris Columbus: My biggest concern for the visual effects, I want to make absolutely certain that the visual effects would again move up a notch from the last film. First film, we were fairly rushed and the effects were never up to anyone’s standards. In the second film, we improved them greatly, and I wanted to take another leap in this film.
Alfonso Cuaron: We’re watching it and it’s like “Wow, that hippogriff, he looks great.” And we’re just praising the conceptual artists and the CG artists that put it together, then someone said “Yes, but don’t forget who imagined it in the first place.” And here she is.
Jo Rowling: I think it’s important to say I didn’t invent the hippogriff. I invented that hippogriff, but the creature the hippogriff, as you know, is in folklore and mythology, so that’s not my creation. But I really thought hard about this, because it could’ve been, in the book, it could’ve ben an absurdity. And indeed, it really could’ve been in the film as well, but I thought you made him a real creature.
Alfonso Cuaron: There are not that many graphical representations of hippogriff, and that is something with the story that is very interesting. There are sphinx, there are several sphinx, or you see creatures that are half bird and half cat, a lot of different things. But for hippogriff, it was actually hard to find….
Jo Rowling: I knew that ‘cause I went looking.
Alfonso Cuaron: You knew that, yeah.
Jo Rowling: I could hardly find any anywhere.
Alfonso Cuaron: No, I know.
Jo Rowling: So I thought it’s complete liberty to invent. I had a nightmare in my teens, in which I saw hooded, gliding figures. They could almost be figments of your imagination in a sort of tortured imagination, as indeed they are. But you know what I mean? They could be figments of a mentally ill mind. And um, that was the thing that I was expecting in the book. Harry’s particularly vulnerable to them, but he’s got a much worse post, so he would be. You know it’s not weakness, it’s just the fact that he’s faced more.
Chris Columbus: I think Alfonso came up with an amazing design for the dementors, because they truly are unlike anything you’ve ever seen. They are sort of a close cousin to maybe what we’ve all perceived as death over the years, and that’s very, very frightening.
Jo Rowling: I thought the shrunken head was very funny, I really liked that. It was all done really well, and it was a really funny idea. I mean, I’ve said to Steve Kloves many times “Dammit, I wish I could’ve written them up.” You know? But obviously that’s what you want. You want to be working with people who come up with great stuff, it’s great you know, when I’m looking around for all these little bits that are completely consistent with the world. But I, you know, there you go.
Chris Columbus: For me, one of the great memories was sitting in a room with Steve Kloves, Jo Rowling, and David Heyman, the producer. Just the four of us for several weeks discussing quidditch, talking about what it’s going to look like. That excitement, that sense of making something really special, was something I took with me through the making of the first film and the second film.
Steve Kloves: The overall process is incredibly open, and incredibly creative.
Jo Rowling: I think in this case, the book and the director were really made for each other. There’s a unity about the film, there’s a consistency..its tone, its feeling, that’s very, very enjoyable for me – and that’s not a very easy thing, for the author of the original material. I’m completely happy, what more can I say?
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Pituh 2 e Miss Granger
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*OK Categorias e Conteúdo
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 informaçãoTradução: Naty Granger
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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: Salas Wulfric
Revisão: Adriana Snape**
Goldwin, Clare. “J K Rowling on her Days of Poverty,” The Daily Mirror, June 2002
AT FIRST glance it’s a rags-to-riches tale that could have come straight from the imagination of JK Rowling herself.
A penniless writer lives in a freezing flat and nurses cups of coffee for hours at a time in a warm cafe, where she sits with her baby girl and writes the books that will one day make her fame and fortune.
This is the popular version of JK’s own life story but the truth of being a single parent was no romantic fairy story for the Harry Potter author.
This will become apparent when Bloomsbury publishes Magic – a collection of short stories sold to raise money for the National Council For One Parent Families’ Magic Million Appeal.
The book, to be published next month, is co-edited by Chancellor Gordon Brown’s wife, Sarah, who is also patron of the NCOPF, and novelist Gil McNeil.
They persuaded 18 of Britain’s most acclaimed writers – including Sue Townsend, Fay Weldon, Jo Harris, Arabella Weir, Meera Syal and Ben Okri – to contribute a story for free.
Jo Rowling is the charity’s ambassador and has written the foreword.
In it, Jo gives her most searingly honest account yet of the poverty and humiliation she faced bringing up her daughter alone.
Thanks to Harry Potter, Jo, 36, is now a multi-millionaire who can cater for her daughter’s every need.
But the indignities she endured as a lone parent still burn strong.
“I remember reaching the supermarket checkout, counting out the money in coppers, finding out I was two pence short of a tin of baked beans and feeling I had to pretend I had mislaid a £10 note for the benefit of the bored girl at the till,” says Jo.
“Similarly unappreciated acting skills were required for my forays into Mothercare, where I would pretend to be examining clothes I could not afford for my daughter.
“All the time I would be edging ever closer to the baby-changing room where they offered a small supply of free nappies.
“I hated dressing my longed-for child from charity shops.
“I hated relying on the kindness of relatives when it came to her new shoes.
“I tried furiously hard not to feel jealous of other children’s beautifully decorated, well-stocked bedrooms when we went to friends’ houses to play.”
Jo had moved to Portugal to teach English in 1991 and met a Portuguese television journalist. They married in October 1992 but Jo left with her baby the following year.
“My story starts in 1993, when my marriage ended,” Jo explains in the forward. “I was living abroad and in full-time employment when I gave birth to my daughter.”
LEAVING her ex-husband meant leaving her job and returning to Britain with two suitcases full of possessions.
“I knew perfectly well that I was walking into poverty,” she adds, “but I truly believed that it would be a matter of months before I was back on my feet.
“I had enough money saved to put down a deposit on a rented flat and buy a high chair, cot and other essentials.
“When my savings were gone, I settled down to life on slightly less than £70 a week.
“Poverty, as I soon found out, is a lot like childbirth – you know that it’s going to hurt before it happens but you’ll never know how much until you’ve experienced it.
“Some articles written about me have come close to romanticising the time I spent on Income Support, because the well-worn cliche of the writer starving in the garret is so much more picturesque than the bitter reality of living in poverty with a child.
“The endless little humiliations of life on benefits – and remember that six out of 10 families headed by a lone parent live in poverty – receive very little media coverage unless they are followed by what seems to be a swift and Cinderella-like reversal of fortune.”
As Jo was to discover, finding work and looking after a small child at the same time was an almost impossible juggling act.
“I wanted to work part-time,” she explains. “When I asked my health visitor about the possibility of a couple of afternoons’ state childcare a week she explained, very kindly, that places for babies were reserved for those who were deemed ‘at risk’.
“Her exact words were: ‘You’re coping too well’.
“I was allowed to earn a maximum of £15 a week before my Income Support and Housing Benefit was docked.
“Full-time private childcare was so exorbitant that I would need to find a full-time job paying well above the national average. I had to decide whether my baby would rather be handed over to somebody else for most of her waking hours, or be cared for by her mother in far from luxurious surroundings.
“I chose the latter option, though constantly feeling I had to justify my choice at length whenever anybody asked me that nasty question: ‘So what do you do?’ The honest answer to that question was that I worried continually – I devoted hours to writing a book I doubted would ever be published, I tried hard to hold on to the hope that our financial situation would improve.
“And when I was not too exhausted to feel strong emotion, I was swamped with anger at the portrayal of single mothers by certain politicians and newspapers as feckless teenagers in search of the Holy Grail – the council flat – when 97 per cent of us had long since left our teens.”
Eventually, Jo was able to train as a teacher after a friend lent her the money for childcare. And she explains she believes there is no reason to be ashamed of being a single parent. “The sub-text of much of the vilification of lone parents is that couple families are intrinsically superior yet, during my time as a school teacher, I met a number of disruptive, damaged children whose home contained two parents.
“There are those who still believe head-count defines a ‘real’ family, who believe that marriage is the only ‘right’ context in which to have children. But I have never felt the remotest shame about being a single parent.
“I have the temerity to be rather proud of the period when I did three jobs single-handedly – the unpaid work of two parents and the salaried job as a teacher.
“There is a wealth of evidence to suggest that it is not single-parenthood but poverty that causes some children to do less well than others.
“When you take poverty out of the equation, children from one-parent families can do just as well as children from couple families.”
Jo has not forgotten how far she has come from the time when she was unable to afford a tin of baked beans and prayed for fine weather to avoid a big gas bill.
“I am fully aware, every single day, of how lucky I am,” she writes.
“I am lucky because I do not have to worry about my daughter’s financial security any more, because what used to be Benefit day comes around and there’s still food in the fridge and the bills are paid.
“I had a talent that I could exercise without financial outlay. But anyone thinking of using me as an example of how single parents can break out of the poverty trap might as well point at Oprah Winfrey and declare that there is no more racism in America.
“People just like me are facing the same obstacles to a full realisation of their potential every day and their children are missing opportunities alongside them.
“They are not asking for hand-outs, they are not scheming for council flats, they are simply asking for the support they need to break free of life on benefits and support their own children.”
Jo became a patron for the NCOPF two years ago and has donated £500,000 to the charity.
SHE says: “The National Council For One Parent Families is neither anti-marriage nor a propagandist for ‘going it alone’.
“It exists to help parents bringing up children alone, for example, in the aftermath of a relationship breakdown or the death of a partner, when children are faced with a new kind of family and one parent is left coping with the work of two – often on a considerably reduced income.
“It provides invaluable advice and practical support on a wide range of issues affecting lone parents and their children – and I am very proud to be associated with it.”
As Jo explains in the foreword, her involvement came about in an appropriate way for a single mother.
“Andy Keen Downs, the charity’s deputy director, came to see me and sat down in my habitually untidy kitchen, pulled a sheaf of notes from his briefcase and embarked on what I’m quite sure would have been a marvellously persuasive, well-constructed and beautifully delivered speech.
“‘Andy,’ I interrupted, in that harassed voice by which lone parents can often be identified, ‘you’d like me to be a patron, wouldn’t you?’
“‘OK, I’ll do it but could we please discuss the details on the way to school, because sports day starts in five minutes.’
“And so we discussed the National Council For One Parent Families while watching the egg and spoon races.
“It was a highly fitting start, I felt, for my association with a charity that is devoted to helping those parents whose lives are a constant balancing act.
“But I didn’t need to hear Andy’s well-rehearsed persuasive arguments on sports day. I had already made up my mind that it was time to put my money where my mouth had been ever since I experienced the reality of single-parenthood in Britain.
“I want to offer my very deepest thanks to, not only the authors of this book, but to everybody, who, through buying this book, contributes to our appeal.”
The proceeds from the sale of the book will go towards the charity’s Magic Million Appeal, whose funds will help maintain the broad range of services offered to lone parents who want to pull themselves out of the poverty trap while bringing up happy, well-adjusted children.
“You are offering hope to families who are too often scapegoated rather than supported,” Jo concludes, “families who could do with a lot less Dursleyish stigmatism and a little more magic in their lives.”
Magic, edited by Sarah Brown and Gil McNeil, is priced at £6.99. For every edition sold, £1 will go to the Magic Million Appeal, which aims to raise £1million to fund better information services for lone parents.
consulte Mais informaçãoBallard, Nigel. “Entrevista para BBCi Bristol”. BBCi Bristol, 12 de novembro de 2001. Nigel Ballard: Na preparação para a publicação de sua mais recente história, Harry Potter e o Cálice de Fogo, mais de cinco...
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Miss Granger
Revisão:
Cagle, Jess. “The First Look At Harry,” Time November 05, 2001.
Robbie Coltrane is anxious. “I’ve had visions of being chased by millions of children who thought I got it wrong,” says Coltrane, the Scottish comic who plays the giant groundskeeper, Hagrid, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. “They’re chasing me up Fifth Avenue. ‘There’s the guy who ruined Hagrid! Let’s get him!'”
Memo to Coltrane: I have seen Harry Potter, and there’s no reason for you to hire bodyguards. When the film opens on Nov. 16, lovers of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series who have worried about what Hollywood had in store for the sacred text will be relieved to see that Coltrane’s Hagrid bears an impressive resemblance to the gentle giant Rowling described in the first volume: He’s a lovable lug–funny and slightly sad–with “long tangles of bushy black hair and…hands the size of trash can lids.” And just as he does in the book, he makes his entrance on a flying motorcycle, with a baby in his “vast, muscular arms.” Harry has arrived, and he has arrived in good health.
I flew to London and saw the film two weeks ago, before any critics (including TIME’s) were allowed to see and review it. Now it can be told: with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone–the first film in what Warner Bros. hopes will be a long and profitable franchise–director Chris Columbus has bravely gone toe to toe with the imaginations of readers who have purchased 100 million Potter books and made the boy wizard one of the most beloved figures in literary history. (The author, once a struggling single mom in Edinburgh, Scotland, has become an international celebrity since Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, as the book is known in Britain, was published there four years ago.) The big-screen adaptation is a film of such eye-popping grandeur, dazzling special effects and sumptuous production values that you may not notice right away that supporting characters like Peeves, a troublesome ghost, and Piers, a troublesome boy, have been given the heave-ho.
But these visuals serve what is essentially a greatest-hits compilation of the book itself, from the snake that winks at Harry in the zoo to the owls that swoop through his school, Hogwarts, dropping mail on the magically gifted boys and girls; from Hogwarts’ Great Hall with its soaring night-sky ceiling to the cavernous vaults and Munchkin-size goblins working in Gringotts bank (keep an eye out for Verne Troyer, who played Mini-Me in the 1999 Austin Powers sequel); from the wizard’s version of chess, in which queens and knights come alive and beat each other senseless, to the Quidditch field, where young witches and wizards on broomsticks fly through the air playing a magical hybrid of basketball and soccer; from Hagrid’s baby dragon to the 12-ft.-tall mountain troll (both computer generated), who wreaks havoc in the girls’ rest room; from the teetering magic shops of Diagon Alley to the secret Track 9 3/4, where students board the train to Hogwarts.
“Fans would have been crushed if we had left too much out,” says Columbus, whose adaptation runs a whopping 143 minutes. “My mantra has been, Kids are reading a 700-page book. They can sit through a 2 1/2-hour movie.” The book he is referring to is Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, fourth in the series, which was published last year (at 734 pages, to be exact) and currently holds the record as the fastest-selling book in history–at least until the fifth Potter, which is expected in 2002. Says Columbus: “Instead of trying to overtake the readers’ imagination, we’ve just given them the best possible version of the book, which means steeping it in reality…I wanted kids to feel that if they actually took that train, Hogwarts would be waiting for them.” Indeed, from the moth-eaten tapestry of the dormitory common room to the well-worn Sorting Hat, which divides the first-year Hogwarts students into houses by reading their minds (as in the book, it speaks to the students and assigns Harry to Gryffindor house, but it does not sing), Sorcerer’s Stone does have a dusty verite.
Lest we burden Sorcerer’s Stone with expectations too great, however, we must note that it is not a perfect movie. Critics will certainly point out that the book is a more transporting piece of entertainment. (The movie assumes a sometimes too-heavy load in its ambitious attempt to bring all the novel’s most memorable elements to the screen.) And child actors often require some patience on the part of viewers. Sorcerer’s Stone marks the movie debut of Rupert Grint, 13, and Emma Watson, 11, who play Harry’s friends Ron and Hermione. Daniel Radcliffe, the 12-year-old who already has a number of websites devoted to him, thanks to his role as the title character, starred in the BBC’s 1999 production of David Copperfield and this year’s spy flick The Tailor of Panama. What British producer David Heyman calls a “brutal” search for the right Harry ended only weeks before the film went into production in September 2000. “He had to embody so many qualities–vulnerability and strength, an inner life,” says Heyman, who secured the movie rights for Warner Bros. for the bargain price of $700,000 before the books became a global phenomenon. (Tanya Seghatchian, a development executive in Heyman’s company, read the first book after it was published in Britain and was moved to tears by the scene in which the orphaned Harry sees his dead parents for the first time in the Mirror of Erised–“Desire” spelled backward.) Columbus praises his young star’s “tendency to play things so subtly,” though some may wish he seemed a bit more rowdy, like the Harry in the books.
At the same time, for fans of the novels, there will be much pleasure in seeing Sorcerer’s Stone brought to the screen with all the attention to detail that a budget north of $125 million can buy. And those familiar with Columbus’ previous work will be glad to know that he hasn’t poured on too much sugar. Despite his solid box-office track record, Columbus, 43, wasn’t a natural choice for the much-sought-after Potter job. Even Steven Spielberg was eyeing it at one point, envisioning a computer-animated film, like Toy Story, with Haley Joel Osment supplying Harry’s voice. Rowling, says Warner Bros. Pictures chief Alan Horn, “hoped that whoever brought it to the big screen would not take it in a direction toward sappiness.”
Of all the directors in the running, including City of Angels’ Brad Silberling and Dead Man Walking’s Tim Robbins, Columbus had the sappiest rep after his most recent movies, Bicentennial Man and Stepmom. But he also had two Home Alone movies to his credit, which meant that he knew how to work with child actors. Another plus: earlier in his career, as a screenwriter, Columbus penned the wickedly subversive action comedy Gremlins, which was a hit for Warner Bros. in 1984. Columbus admits that as a director, “I was going down this soft, sentimental road…I’m the guy who wrote Gremlins. I tried to find something after I finished [Bicentennial Man] that would go back to that [Gremlins] area.” Despite his A-list status in Hollywood, Columbus agreed to audition for the job by pitching himself to the studio. Heyman says Columbus was hired ultimately because of his “desire to be faithful to the material.”
Screenwriter Steve Kloves (Wonder Boys) also convinced the producers that he would respect the novels, and Heyman thought he would supply “a touch of melancholy, a little darkness, which I think is really vital to the story.” Some of the movie’s most poetic moments come from Kloves’ head: after his kindly headmaster, Dumbledore, gives Harry a moving lecture about letting go of his troubled past, the boy strolls out to the schoolyard and watches his pet owl, Hedwig, take a slow, symbolic flight. “Those are the moments that move you and elevate the movie beyond being just sort of a highlights reel,” says Kloves. Still, the filmmakers have stayed remarkably close to the novel. “Jo [Rowling] had a tremendous influence,” says Heyman.
While the author didn’t have final say over the movie, her contract gave her a consulting role, and she will receive a share of the profits. “When I optioned the book,” says Heyman, who most recently produced the savagely dark 1999 cannibalism comedy Ravenous, “I made a promise to Jo that I wanted the film to be as faithful to her vision as possible. Her books work. That’s the reason 100 million have been sold.” Although she rarely visited the set, Rowling was involved during preproduction, when crucial design and plot decisions were being made. Columbus wondered early on where to put Harry’s lightning-bolt scar, a souvenir from his infancy, when he had his first run-in with the evil Lord Voldemort, who killed his parents. Editions of the books all over the world showed the scar in various places, so the director went to the source. “I drew a face with a wizard hat, and I had her draw in the scar,” says Columbus. She described it as “razor sharp” and drew it vertically down the right side of Harry’s forehead.
Rowling also had a hand in choosing most of the adult cast members. She specifically requested Coltrane. Others, like Richard Harris as Dumbledore, Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall and Alan Rickman as Professor Snape came straight from a wish list of actors that Rowling provided the producers. She gave Rickman and Coltrane precious bits of information about their characters’ futures. “There’s an awful lot revealed about Hagrid in book five,” says Coltrane, “and Jo thought it was important for me to know.” Like what? “I could tell you,” says Coltrane, “but then you’d have to die.”
While writing the screenplay, Kloves kept in touch with the author via e-mail. At one point he sought her advice on truncating the book’s lengthy, entertaining but tangential chapter on Hagrid’s pet dragon, Norbert. “I said, ‘This chapter is killing me,'” recalls Kloves. “She e-mailed back, ‘I’m glad to hear it, because it killed me too.’ It’s the one part of the book that she felt easily could be changed.” Audiences will see Norbert hatch from his bowling ball-size egg and ignite Hagrid’s beard with fire from his nostrils. But the book’s subsequent sequence, in which a grownup Norbert is crated and carted away on broomsticks, alas, was never shot. Similarly, the Dursleys–Harry’s awful Muggle relatives (Muggles are nonmagic folk)–get far less screen time than they did page space.
Kloves also sought advice from Rowling on Quidditch, the broomstick sport at which Harry excels. “She gave me a little bit of a clue in saying that she likes American basketball,” says Kloves, “so I understood some of what she was doing with hoops and things.” But whereas Quidditch is played in a traditional stadium in the books, the movie’s Quidditch games are played on an open field circled by towers, which accommodate the spectators and give the moviegoer a sense of height and speed as the players zip around them on brooms.
Costume designer Judianna Makovsky (The Legend of Bagger Vance) initially based her Quidditch uniforms on the cover illustration for Scholastic Inc.’s American edition of Sorcerer’s Stone: Harry in a modern-day rugby shirt, jeans and red cape. “It looked a mess,” she says. “It wasn’t very elegant.” So she went on to outfit the Quidditch players in preppie sweaters and ties, 19th century fencing breeches and arm guards under their wizard robes. “There’s no real period,” she says of the film’s costumes, which range from Elizabethan ruffs to tartan plaids to Dickensian frocks.
Reasoning that Hogwarts would date back to the medieval era, production designer Stuart Craig (The English Patient) fashioned Hogwarts’ Great Hall after England’s greatest cathedrals. Like all the other sets, it was built at Leavesden Studios, a former airfield outside London. “The architecture is real,” says Craig, “but pushed as much as we can, expanded as illogically huge as we can possibly make it.” To save money, the producers initially asked Craig to find an existing old English street to double for Diagon Alley, where wands, owls, cauldrons, broomsticks and other magical paraphernalia are sold. This was a tall order, since the row of shops would be Harry’s–and the audience’s–first glimpse of the world of wizards. (Upon seeing it, wrote Rowling, “Harry wished he had about eight more eyes.”) Craig ended up building his own awe-inspiring version–a long, highly stylized cobblestone street of Tudor, Georgian and Queen Anne architecture. “The buildings are leaning to the point where they would actually fall over,” says Craig, “and you would never get that many styles jammed together.”
Today at Leavesden Studios, in a vast, drafty airplane hangar converted into makeshift soundstages, Diagon Alley is deserted. Hogwarts’ magnificent staircase (partly constructed, then digitally finished onscreen) stands empty. But the lights will go on soon, as the sets will be recycled for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which is scheduled for release next year, with Columbus back at the helm. The entire Sorcerer’s Stone cast will return for Chamber of Secrets, and just last week it was announced that Kenneth Branagh will join them in the role of the vain new defense against the dark-arts teacher, Gilderoy Lockhart. Meanwhile, Kloves has begun adapting the third Potter book. The three young leads haven’t yet signed on for any movies past the second, but because the Potter novels chronicle consecutive school terms at Hogwarts, the child actors could conceivably continue through what Rowling says will be seven books, aging right along with the franchise. “That would be cool,” says the red-haired Grint, though he admits, “I don’t know what I’ll look like in a couple of years.”
He’s not the only one worried about how the actors will age. “If they suddenly discover cheeseburgers on movie three,” says Columbus, “I don’t know what I’m gonna do.” Other concerns will arise as the movies progress. The PG-rated Sorcerer’s Stone is designed for kids ages six and older, but Rowling’s books do get scarier. They also get longer. Columbus has already come up with a strategy for the very thick Goblet of Fire, which could hit screens in 2004. “I think it has to be two movies,” he says. “We could shoot a four- or five-hour version, release part one at Thanksgiving and part two at Christmas.” Otherwise, Columbus is keeping mum on his Potter plans, and a veil of secrecy is descending on the second movie. On Columbus’ office wall at Leavesden, he has tacked up renderings and scene sketches from Chamber of Secrets. He kindly asks the visiting journalist to ignore them. Too late. It’s a car–a drawing of the magically souped-up Ford Anglia that carries Harry and Ron to their second year at Hogwarts. It’s turquoise, just as Rowling described it, and already in flight.
Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1001148,00.html
Original page date 13 March 2007; last updated 13 March 2007.
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Rodrigo Signoretti
Revisão:
“J.K. Rowling’s Books That Made a Difference.” O, The Oprah Magazine January 2001.
When J. K. Rowling, author of the hugely popular Harry Potter books, came to visit O, The Oprah Magazine last fall, we weren’t sure what to expect. Rowling answered our questions about everyone’s favorite wizard, the magic of reading and her own most-loved books. At the top of her list is The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by acclaimed Irish writer Roddy Doyle. This unflinching novel chronicles a woman’s relationship with a violent man in a way that brings fresh insight to the subject—and, far from being a punishing read, it is surprisingly engaging and uplifting.
O, The Oprah Magazine: Why do you love The Woman Who Walked Into Doors?
J. K. Rowling: It is the most remarkable book. Roddy Doyle gets inside the head of his character so utterly, so completely. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered such a believable, fully rounded female character from any other heterosexual male writer in any age. I should emphasize that I would feel the same way about the book if it had been written by a woman; I would still think it was the most remarkable achievement. But when I sit back and think, ‘A man wrote this?’—phenomenal. He has created a woman who, you imagine, will go to the bathroom and defecate. He also leaves her with her dignity, even though what she’s going through is a horrific thing. And he does it all in such a subtle way. I do think he’s a genius. His dialogue is irreproachable. And your heart…you’re totally drawn into his books. I’m very passionate about Roddy Doyle, and I’ve never met him, which is a frustration to me.
O: Well, maybe you could now…
JKR: My editor edits Roddy. And I’m always just missing him! But I might freeze, being in the same room.
O: You’re saying it’s difficult to write outside your gender, but you’ve chosen to create Harry Potter. Is that hard?
JKR: If I say no now, that’s going to sound really arrogant. But I had been writing the first book for six months before I stopped and thought, ‘Why’s he a boy?’ And the answer is, He’s a boy because that’s the way he came. If I had stopped at that point and changed him to Harriet, it would have felt very contrived. My feminist conscience is saved by Hermione, who’s the brightest character. I love Hermione as a character. She’s kind of a caricature of me when I was younger. I was obsessed with achieving academically, but underneath that I was insecure.
O: We love Hermione, too! We identify!
JKR: I think we have a very strong female character in her.
O: You have a young daughter. Do you read Harry Potter to her?
JKR: I kept thinking you’ve got to be 7 years old before you read Harry. And then I cracked because it was unfair to her, really, that all these kids at school were asking her about this stuff and she had no answers to give them. So I started reading Harry Potter to her when she was six. Now they are her favorite books, which makes my life an awful lot easier.
O: You admire Roddy Doyle and Jane Austen—both of whom write about class distinctions. You do in Harry Potter, too. Was that a conscious decision?
JKR: Well, a German journalist said to me, ‘There’s a lot about money in the Harry Potter books.’ And I had never really thought about that before. But kids are acutely aware of money—before they’re aware of class. A kid isn’t really going to notice how another kid holds his knife and fork. But a kid will be acutely aware that he doesn’t have pocket money. Or that he doesn’t have as much pocket money. I think back to myself at 11. Kids can be mean, very mean. So it was there in Ron not having the proper length robes, you know? And not being able to buy stuff on the trolley. He’s got to have sandwiches his mom made for him, even though he doesn’t like the sandwiches. Having enough money to fit in is an important facet of life—and what is more conformist than a school?
O: I think one reason your books are so popular is that they’re not sanitized. They’re very real.
JKR: I think so. I hope so. The funny thing is, I have people saying to me, ‘Oh, so you’re an apologist for boarding schools?’ No! See, you laugh. In America, people laugh. In Britain, it’s a big deal. In Britain, it’s, ‘Aha! So which boarding school did you go to?’ I didn’t go to boarding school. Harry Potter has to be set in a boarding school for reasons of plot. How would it be interesting if the characters couldn’t get up at night and wander around? You’re going to have them go to a day school and trot home, and then break into school every night? And then you have people who think the books are too dark, too scary. After The Chamber of Secrets was published, this grandmother wrote to me and said, ‘I was appalled to see you encouraging joyriding.’ It was like, ‘Okay, hello?!’ I read the letter, and for a moment I thought, ‘Where did I say joyriding was good?’ And then I realized, it’s a very, very literal approach to things. Harry steals a car, so it’s good to steal cars—no! I didn’t say that.
O: Your books create a believable world in that everybody isn’t wonderful all the time. The characters aren’t examples for how all children should behave.
JKR: What we forget is that kids lead this whole hidden life, however close they are to their parents. I’m aware of this with my 7 year old daughter. I don’t find it constantly, but I know it’s the reality. It’s the slow process of separation—and slightly underground. I have to be aware that my daughter is leading this kid life I cannot share. And that’s part of the books. Harry’s in a unique position because he has no living parents. So for him, all life is kid life. Ron and Hermione go back to a safe place. Harry hasn’t got a safe place. In fact, he finds his safe place in the scary place.
O: With so much on your plate, when do you find time to read?
JKR: I never need to find time to read. When people say to me, ‘Oh, yeah, I love reading. I would love to read, but I just don’t have time,’ I’m thinking, ‘How can you not have time?’ I read when I’m drying my hair. I read in the bath. I read when I’m sitting in the bathroom. Pretty much anywhere I can do the job one-handed, I read.
Source: http://www.oprah.com/obc/omag/obc_omag_200101_books.jhtml
Thanks to Elisabet for sending this one in!
Original page date 21 March 2007; last updated 21 March 2007.
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: {patylda}
Revisão:
Boquet, Tim. “J.K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter,” Reader’s Digest, December 2000
Author J. K. Rowling explains the magic of the strange young boy who has cast a spell over publishing-and her life
“I can’t wait! I can’t wait,” cries ten-year-old Alula Greenberg-White, hugging herself in expectation. It’s 9am outside a large bookshop in north London and Alula is at the head of a queue of 100 excited children and parents. They peer through the windows at stacks of a 640-page novel, eyes searching for the small strawberry- blonde Pied Piper who has brought them here-and to bookshops round the globe-and who is somewhere inside nursing a coffee.
“I’m really not a morning person,” admits J. K. Rowling as she flexes her fingers in preparation for another marathon signing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth volume of a publishing phenomenon.
Children in more than 30 countries are just wild about Harry, their bespectacled hero who discovers on his eleventh birthday that he is a wizard. For the few who don’t know: Harry inherited his magical powers from his parents who have been slaughtered by the evil wizard Lord Voldemort. Harry, who bears a lightning scar on his forehead, also the handiwork of Voldemort, then has a series of white-knuckle adventures at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. This is housed in a remote Scottish castle, where mail is delivered to pupils by their owls.
Rowling has so enchanted children with her imagination and a vivid cast-redoubtable Hermione Granger and plucky Ron Weasley, Harry’s sidekicks, sinister Professor Snape and Hagrid, the endearing gamekeeper who likes a drink and has a passion for hatching dragons-that the first four stories in the series have taken up permanent residence at the top of the best-seller lists. To date, they have sold an astonishing 41 million copies.
On July 8, UK publication day of Goblet of Fire, an astonishing 372,775 hardback copies were sold. In the US-where Rowling is believed to be the first author ever to occupy the top three slots on The New York Times best-seller list at the same time-a nation of bleary-eyed children stayed up for the midnight launch to snaffle 3.8 million volumes.
In this digital age when it is said kids don’t give a fig for the printed word, Joanne Kathleen Rowling has turned more children on to reading than any living author. And with a film of the first book in production and a range of Harry merchandise ready to ride into the shops on its back, she has one of the highest profiles on the planet. Yet the reality is a softly spoken, bird-like 35-year-old, who shifts on the sofa as she considers the question: what is it about Harry that captivates in all languages and cultures? “Magic has a universal appeal. I don’t believe in it in the way that I describe in my books, but I’d love it to be real,” she says, picking up speed like the Hogwarts Express, which at the beginning of every term takes the children to school from platform nine and three-quarters at London’s King’s Cross station.
“The starting point for the whole of Harry’s world is ‘What if it were real?’ And I work from there.” She has never had a market in mind. “I started writing these books for me, but I really like my readers. They are very likeable people.” She glances at the queue outside, which must now be 300 strong. “Children are a writer’s dream. They are not interested in sales figures. They want to know why the plot works a certain way. They know the books back to front and talk about the characters as though they are living, mutual friends of ours.” They mirror Rowling’s own feelings perfectly.
But with its public school dorms and house points, isn’t it all just too British? “Wherever I go, children seem to like the Britishness of the stories, even if they are probably getting a very rosy picture of what school in Britain is like!”
J.K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter 2 Tim Bouquet
And they all know the Rowling story. She was born in 1965 in Chipping Sodbury, South Gloucestershire-an appropriate birthplace for someone who loves strange, but believable, names. Writing from the age of six and with two unpublished novels in the drawer, she was stuck on a train in 1990 when Harry walked into her mind, fully formed. She spent the next five years constructing the plots of seven books, one for every year of his secondary school life.
Rowling says she started writing the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, in Portugal, where she was teaching English and had married journalist Jorge Arantes. The marriage lasted just over a year, but produced baby Jessica.
Leaving Portugal, she arrived in Edinburgh in 1993 to stay with her younger sister Di, a lawyer, with just enough money for a deposit on a flat and some baby equipment. “I was depressed and angry. Angry that I had messed up my life and let my daughter down.” She went to visit a friend of her sister’s who had a baby boy. “His room was full of toys. Jessica’s toys fitted into a shoebox. I came home and cried my eyes out.”
The tears did not last. Harry’s bravery strikes a chord with children because he is full of anxieties but gets by on luck and nerve. Rowling agrees she is much the same. “It’s not pure luck,” she explains. “He has the will to get through and I never lost that. When you are really on your uppers, you don’t sit there and cry, you try and get out of it.” However, stories of an impoverished single mother living in a rat-infested bedsit and scribbling her way to wealth in an Edinburgh coffee shop are journalistic inventions. “I am a single mum, I did, and still do, write in cafes and I was broke,” says Rowling, who recently gave £500,000 to the National Council for One Parent Families and became the charity’s first-ever ambassador. “Those early stories neglected to mention that I come from a middle-class background, I have a degree in French and Classics and that working as a supply teacher was my intended bridge out of poverty.” And the bedsit? It was a mouse-infested two-bedroom flat. At first nobody wanted to publish Harry Potter. “The fact that it was set in a boarding school was very un-PC as far as most publishers were concerned,” Joanne explains. She was told that the plot, like her sentence construction, was too complex and too long. “That unnerved me because I knew it was going to be the shortest book of the series!” Refusing to compromise, she at last found a publisher, Bloomsbury, and, armed with an £8,000 grant from the Scottish Arts Council, ploughed into book two, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
In 1997 she received her first royalty cheque for Philosopher’s Stone. Until then Rowling was “a happily obscure person”. By book three the world, fuelled by word of mouth and some astute marketing, went crazy for Harry, slapping a row of noughts on Rowling’s bank balance and turning her life upside down. Day and night she had journalists knocking on the unanswered door of her flat. Success, it was reported, had turned J. K. Rowling into a paranoid recluse. As ever, the truth is prosaic. Joanne does get out, but writing four books back to back has been totally time-consuming, especially when a massive flaw in the plot of Goblet of Fire took three months to fix, delaying delivery of the manuscript. “I am not an editor’s dream!” she laughs.
J.K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter 3 Tim Bouquet
She claims never to read what is written about her and is fiercely protective of Jessica, now seven. On her first day at primary school, excited 10 and 11-year-olds surrounded Jessica, clamouring to know about Harry and his creator. “At first Jessica liked it-she’s a feisty little thing.” But when the attention didn’t ease off, Rowling went into school and asked the older children: “Could you lay off a bit? She’s very young and she can’t answer your questions because she hasn’t read the books.” In return, she did a reading and a question-and-answer session with the two top classes. “It was fun and solved the problem.” Jessica is now a fully-fledged Potter fan, but like every other child she has to wait for publication day to find out what Harry does next. A broomstick’s hop away from the bookshop, Annie Williams, deputy head of Christ Church Primary School in down-at-heel Camden, swears by Harry. “When I read the Philosopher’s Stone to a class of 11-year-olds, ten of whom have special needs,
they were so inspired that I prepared worksheets based on the book to help them with grammar.” Soon they were writing newspaper articles about the story, and postcards from Hogwarts. “Their written work has improved dramatically.”
So what has Rowling got that other writers haven’t? “Potions, intrigue, magic and ‘what happens next’,” says Williams. “The same formula Shakespeare used.” Rowling may write about wizards, ghosts, elves and the hippogriff, which is half-horse, half-eagle, but her books are driven with all the suspense and twists of detective novels. Perhaps that’s why Harry is also hugely popular with adults. Stories of parents muscling in to read each new volume ahead of their children are common.
“I love a good whodunnit and my passion is plot construction. Readers loved to be tricked, but not conned,” Rowling says, warming to her theme. “The best twist ever in literature is in Jane Austen’s Emma. To me she is the target of perfection at which we shoot in vain.”
J.K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter 4 Tim Bouquet
The Harry Potter film is being directed by Chris Columbus, who worked on Home Alone and Mrs Doubtfire, and has a predominantly British cast, much to Rowling’s relief.
“When I first met screenwriter Steve Kloves (who wrote and directed The Fabulous Baker Boys) the fact that he was American made me spiky and I felt he was going to mutilate my baby. But as soon as he said his favourite character was Hermione I melted, because she is very close to me. I was very like her at that age.” Kloves loves Rowling’s characters just the way they are. “From the first page she had me. There’s a genuine edge and darkness to her books. One reason they’re so popular with children is that there’s no pandering whatsoever.” While the death of a well-loved character in book four is upsetting, Rowling believes that it is only by letting children experience the real consequences of evil actions that they can understand Harry’s moral choices. The actor to play Harry was not cast for months. More than 40,000 young hopefuls put their names into the hat to star as the world’s most famous wizard. But when Rowling saw young British actor Daniel Radcliffe’s screen test, she knew the 11-year-old was perfect for the part. Rowling’s quality control is legendary, as is her obsession with accuracy. She’s thrilled with Stephen Fry’s taped version of the books, outraged that an Italian dust jacket shows Harry minus his glasses. “Don’t they understand that they are the clue to his vulnerability?” One person who is not there to see and share her success is her half-Scottish, half-French mother who died of multiple sclerosis in 1990, aged just 45. She had no idea that Joanne had started writing about Harry Potter.
In a moving scene in Philosopher’s Stone, Harry stares into a magic mirror that can let him see what he most craves in life. In it he sees his dead parents seemingly alive. It is a rare autobiographical insight into Rowling’s feelings about her own loss. “I miss her daily,” she says. “I still hear her voice. It’s very painful…” For the first time she stutters to a halt and stares at the floor as though searching for a lost thread.
“My father, a retired aircraft engineer, is immensely proud,” she says. “He would have been proud whatever I’d succeeded at. But books were my mother’s big passion. Having a daughter who was a writer would have been a very big deal, even if I’d only sold three copies.” She’s sold a few more than that, but this unpretentious woman with the loud percussive laugh has only recently learned to admit that she enjoys being rich-she is rumoured to be worth around £20 million. “I bought a house in London; that’s pretty extravagant! The biggest luxury is that it stops you worrying. Not a day goes by when I’m not thankful for that.”
J.K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter 5 Tim Bouquet
Back in the London bookshop the doors burst open. Camera flashguns blaze. Faster than a game of Quidditch, the aerobatic broomstick-basketball at which Harry excels, the roped-off route to the signing table is twitching with small trainers. How does Rowling view life after Harry? “I never forget A. A. Milne,” she says, pen in hand. “When he wrote for adults every review he ever got referred to Pooh, Tigger and Piglet. What appeals to me is sending in manuscripts for other books under a pseudonym. Anonymity was a nice place to be.” But when she sees ten-year-old Alula’s smiling face she relaxes visibly, happy to be popular children’s author J. K. Rowling. “Hi, how are you?” she asks, as though greeting a long-lost friend. In seconds the two of them are huddled, in cahoots about the latest adventures of the boy wizard. Afterwards, as her mother joins other parents at the till, Alula says her heroine has surpassed her expectations. “She’s so friendly and she answered all my questions!” For Alula, a Harry Potter book can never be too long. While others try to fathom Rowling’s success, this ten-year-old knows why the magic works. “Because it’s exciting.” Spills and spells. It really is that simple.
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Bruno Radcliffe
Revisão:
Gollum, Mark. “20,000 Fans making Rowling a bit nervous,” National Post (Toronto), 23 October 2000
20,000 fans making Rowling a bit nervous: “This was purely a way of satisfying a lot of people in one go,” says writer of SkyDome appeareance
J.K. Rowling was a little overwhelmed when she heard about the seating capacity of the SkyDome, the venue of her book reading tomorrow.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God. I’m not The Rolling Stones. How’s that going to work,” she said at a press conference yesterday afternoon at the Royal York Hotel.
At least 20,000 fans are expected to be at the stadium to hear Ms. Rowling read from her fourth and latest in the Harry Potter book series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which was published in July.
The 35-year-old writer is in Toronto as part of the International Festival of Authors.
“I’m trying not to focus on that at the moment. Thanks for reminding me,” the British author joked with one reporter, adding that her largest audience to date has been 2,000 in Germany.
“This was purely a way of satisfying a lot of people in one go, hopefully. I hope that’s how it’s going to work out.
“Obviously, this is very new territory for me, too. You won’t see me playing Wembley [stadium], though.”
The first three Harry Potter books, which focus on the adventures of a boy wizard, have appeared in 200 countries (in 39 languages), and have sold more than 35 million copies worldwide.
She calls the attention odd, claiming she leads a “very, very, very quiet dull life. Entirely by choice, I should say.
“Then I come out and I am exposed to this for two weeks and then I go home and the normal life is resumed.”
A typical day in her Edinburgh home consists of getting her seven-year-old daughter off to school (she is a single parent), a trip to the local cafe, writing until her daughter returns, “feed her and do all the mommy stuff,” and more writing in the evening.
She refuses to spend time analyzing the mass appeal of the books, fearing that it force her into formulaic writing.
Despite being overwhelmed by the attention, she still finds it touching to meet her young readers.
“They feel these [characters] are mutual friends of ours [who] I happen to know better. It’s a magical experience speaking to children.”
Die-hard readers are constantly writing her with minor discrepancies –like the four-legged special stool in one book that has three legs in another book. But she gets a kick out of her young critics.
“It proves they must have read the book several times in order to pick up on some of these things.”
To the oft-asked question, “How do you come up with your ideas,” she replied: “I don’t know. They just come out of my head, which is a dull answer but a truthful one.
“Just give me a pen and note pad and put me in a cafe somewhere. As long as I have enough caffeine in my system, I will write something for you.”
Ms. Rowling was also asked yesterday about those critics who worry about witchcraft in her books.
(Recently, Durham Region school officials insisted children get parental permission before using Harry Potter books in class assignments. They have since lifted the requirement.)
“If people think that witchcraft should not be in books for children per se then there’s no point in engaging in a debate because a lot of children’s books are going to be off the library shelves.” She pointed to The Wizard of Oz as one classic that contains witchcraft.
After the press conference, about 280 adults and children attended a $500-a-plate charity luncheon featuring Ms. Rowling.
Each person got a free pair of Harry Potter glasses and an autographed book.
“It was great. I’ve read her books four times each,” said 10-year-old Connor Soye.
Despite a no-autograph policy, many of her young fans went up to Ms. Rowling’s table to grab an autograph. Ms. Rowling happily obliged until organizers put an end to it.
But Arielle Kaplan was lucky enough to snatch an autograph when she bumped into the author in the washroom.
“Sometimes it pays to be a woman,” said her mother, Merle.
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Quilia Black
Revisão:
Cowell, Alan. “All Abord the Potter Express,” New York Times, July 10, 2000
BOARD THE HOGWARTS EXPRESS, near Oxford, England, July 8 — J. K. Rowling, the creator of Harry Potter, insists that she does not regard herself as a celebrity. But the assertion rings a little hollow when you are traveling in a style once reserved for royalty, in a personal train full of plush and brocade, crisscrossing Britain.
Of course this train — the Hogwarts Express, named for the train that takes Ms. Rowling’s blockbuster creation to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in all four Harry Potter books — is the centerpiece of a publicity stunt timed to celebrate and feed the frenzy stirred by the latest in the series, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” published to great hullabaloo today. And the apparent luxury — dining car resplendent with white linen and crystal, sleeping car for Ms. Rowling and the entourage from Bloomsbury, her British publisher — is not quite the magical ride of the novels.
The train rocks and rattles and wheezes. Its 57-year-old steam engine develops a fault and has to be towed behind a diesel locomotive. The antique cars make so much din that a reporter’s tape recorder is overwhelmed with white noise during a tightly scheduled 30-minute interview in an observation car. The train’s itinerary is to trundle for four days from book signing to book signing at railway stations large and small where the Harry Potter aficionados await a glimpse of the person who gave them their hero.
And at the center of all this stew of hype, stress, adulation and ever-changing deadlines stands Joanne Kathleen Rowling, a slight, 34-year-old writer from Britain’s university-educated middle-class, a onetime single mother on welfare now credited with being No. 3 among Britain’s top-earning women, with a reported $22 million-plus already gathered from a lightning career.
But the moment is not all triumph, and in a way this rolling monument to success says as much about modern Britain as it does about the phenomenon of Harry Potter. There is an expectation, for instance, that her success automatically entitles the world beyond the Hogwarts Express to bestow the familiar trappings of celebrity — photographers’ popping flashes, glamour to feed dreams — as if acclaim for her writing made Ms. Rowling the same kind of public property as others might only yearn to be.
And there has been a possibly curmudgeonly reluctance in the broader literary world to allow Harry Potter — and Ms. Rowling — to pass by without pointing out that however Harry Potter may be drawn as a fictional persona (one respected literary editor called him a “cipher”), Huck Finn he ain’t. Even as the cash registers have been ringing across the Atlantic, Ms. Rowling’s work has lost out on two prestigious prizes: the Whitbread, for book of the year, and the Carnegie, the top British prize for children’s writers. (“She was thrilled to bits just to be short-listed,” said a Bloomsbury publicist, Rosamund de la Hey.)
Ms. Rowling’s books, said the author and Whitbread jurist Anthony Holden in The Observer a few weeks ago, are “Disney cartoons written in words, no more.” (The United States reaction seems more “celebratory,” Ms. Rowling observed in the interview. “It’s a horrible cliché, but Americans do regard success differently.”)
Of course the publication of the fourth book has been mercilessly hyped. And with Warner Brothers planning to begin filming the first Harry Potter movie in the fall, directed by Chris Columbus of “Home Alone” and “Mrs. Doubtfire” renown, the exploitation of the dream world Ms. Rowling spins around the boy wizard is only beginning. But will that lead to an anti-commercial backlash? It is an issue, Ms. Rowling implies, on which she is ready to take a stand.
“I would do anything to prevent Harry from turning up in fast-food boxes everywhere,” she said. “I would do my utmost. That would be my worst nightmare.”
From approving the script for the forthcoming movie to the spinoffs it produces, Ms. Rowling seems to be ready to defend her vision of Harry Potter to the last. In conversations with the director Steven Spielberg about a possible Spielberg movie of Harry Potter, she said, as the train chuffed and hooted its way past the hedgerows and meadows of central England, the project never went anywhere because “this film would be my vision, and I think he felt he would he hampered in giving his imagination free rein.”
And on the commercialization of the fourth book, she said, “I’m quite clear in my mind what I would like to be out there and what I wouldn’t.”
Ms. Rowling has sought to maintain similar control over public access to her personal life, but that has not always been possible and, much as she sought in the earlier years of her success to pretend to herself that acclaim would not change her life, it has.
Earlier this year, for instance, Britain’s tabloids tracked down her ex-husband, a Portuguese journalist named Jorge Arantes with whom she had a brief marriage in the early 1990’s. Ms. Rowling has brought up their daughter, Jessica, single-handed. But suggestions that her ex-husband may have helped in the creation of Harry Potter rankle with her. “He had about as much input into Harry Potter as I had into ‘A Tale of Two Cities,’ ” she said tartly.
After the breakup of the marriage in Portugal, she returned with Jessica to Edinburgh, weighted by depression and poverty. “If you have been through three or four years of worrying on a daily basis about the money running out,” she said, “you are never going to forget what that’s like.”
She acknowledged that she shook her depression in 1994 only with nine months of counseling, realizing later that her continued ability to write during this period was “a sign that I wasn’t very badly depressed.”
Finding a publisher for the first Harry Potter book was not easy either, she said, and she is still at a loss to explain what, precisely, has propelled sales of more than 30 million, most of them in the United States, a landscape remote from the boarding-school culture of Hogwarts.
“I can’t explain it,” she said. “I don’t have an answer.”
But, offering an oblique riposte to those who have criticized her use of language or the depth of her characterization, she said: “I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.”
“There’s no formula,” she added later.
With the arrival of the fourth book this weekend, of course, popularity has turned into feeding frenzy. Hundreds of children and their parents have waited at the railside stops, forming lines for book signings. Batteries of television cameras at King’s Cross station in London — where the Hogwarts Express departed for its four-day perambulation ending in Perth, Scotland, on Tuesday — were so intrusive that her fans had a hard time glimpsing her. In a nation that celebrated Diana as the People’s Princess and is obsessive about celebrity from soccer players to soap stars, did she feel she had joined those illustrious ranks?
No, she said. She has sometimes been recognized and has been photographed writing in her favorite cafes in Edinburgh. (“The first draft is always in longhand,” she said.) But “I can go completely unnoticed down any street in Edinburgh,” she said. “Celebrity is not a word I would even apply to myself at all.”
Of course her life has changed: just giving interviews on a personal train underscores the transformation from obscurity. Television news has charted the sales, in Britain, of the entire record first print run from warehouses to bookshops: 1,027,000, said Bloomsbury’s chief executive, Nigel Newtown.
A promotional tour in the United States is to follow in the fall. “But then I go home, and life will resume its normal pattern,” she said. “It’s not particularly interesting — seeing friends, working, raising a daughter — the most important thing in my life, Harry included.”
Her newest book, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” is arguably her most ambitious. It is the longest — 734 pages in the American edition from Scholastic — and that is longer than even she imagined. She was late delivering the manuscript. She worked 10-hour days to produce it. She had, she said, to start over from midway through when she realized that part of the plot had not been set up to reach the conclusion she wanted. Not only that, the fourth book was designed as the culminating point to which the first three had been leading. (There are supposed to be seven, meaning three more are due.)
For the first time she touches on themes like political involvement, jealousy, fame, romance and the death of a Potter ally: all rites of passage.
“It’s the end of an era in the context of the whole series of books,” she said. “For Harry his innocence is gone.”
She intimated that as the series progresses the mood may darken. The death of one character in the fourth book, she said, is “the beginning of the deaths.”
Oddly enough, though, death was not the most difficult theme to handle. “I don’t want to disturb children,” she said, “but I don’t want to write about death as if it’s something that doesn’t happen.” And after all the whole series begins with the death of Harry’s parents.
So what was the hardest part?
The answer was a character called Rita Skeeter, a hard-bitten journalist with a liking for fabrication and scoops, usually blending the two into one. “I knew people would assume that this was my response to what’s happened to me,” she said. But she decided to go ahead with the character anyhow.
One question that begs asking after Ms. Rowling’s success in the United States is why none of the characters are Americans. In the latest books the reader is introduced to European wizards, and there is even a passing reference to African and American wizards. But Ms. Rowling, who calls herself “a very British person,” insists that “you are not going to get an American exchange student brought in at Hogwarts.”
“I don’t think it would be faithful to the tone of the books to have somebody brought in from Texas or wherever it might be,” she said.
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Hulbert, Dan. “Just wild about Harry: Dedicated fans of a young wizard have Scottish scribe J.K. Rowling to thank,” The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, October 22, 1999
Let the owls go forth!
And let them spread the news — as they do so well in the tales of “Harry Potter,” the all-around regular nice kid who happens to be a wizard — that Harry’s fabulously hot Scottish creator, J.K. Rowling, is now among us.
Or will be shortly: Her flight was delayed. There’s more ominous news this cool, clear fall evening that her book-signing wrist is sore and numb. But no matter! Hundreds of kids are covering what used to be the front lawn of Hobbit Hall Children’s Bookstore in Roswell — many with Harry’s trademark lightning bolt painted on their foreheads — crowding between TV satellite- dish vans and hoping for a glimpse of the shy, slender author as she slips in to her book signing.
“She’s not here yet!” a preteen girl shouts hoarsely to her friends across the yard.
The real action is in the back yard. Here are the 400 kids, with parents, who started lining up early enough (six hours ago) to get passes to the signing by the woman they simply call “She” or “Her” (few seem to know even that the J in J.K. stands for Joanne). The scene is somewhere between a carnival and a Hollywood premiere that skews young (8 to 12, on average). Security guards mutter wearily into walkie-talkies. A guy in a kilt plays the bagpipes. Still Elvis, so to speak, has not yet entered the building.
“She will not come in unless the deck is cleared!” cries a harried store employee.
Weird, in this day and age, to see such mass excitement for wit, narrative, character and wholesome moral values (along with a few troll boogers, just for flavor). All conveyed in that form of communication that is supposedly so over: the printed page.
“I love Harry because he’s funny and has guts and he’s my age,” says Jonathan Davis of Woodstock, 11. “Nobody notices him in the real world, then he goes to wizard school and — look out!”
Look out, indeed: Suddenly there She is, standing on the elevated deck as if she magically apparated there. Rowling (rhymes with bowling) waves and a cheer goes up from the crowd. The hottest author on the planet (her “Potter” books command the top three slots on The New York Times Bestseller List) then ducks inside to begin signing fresh copies of her newest book as fast as her Ace-bandaged wrist will allow. The kids look a bit dazed, hustled through the stuffy little room crammed with TV cameramen. Then, a local boy walks in dressed in a scarlet wizard robe and Rowling cries with relief, “Harry! I’ve been waiting for you! You can help me sign these.”
Anything but mundane
The next day, following a professional wrist massage, looking around the hotel suite where her publisher, Scholastic Press, has booked her interviews, the 34-year-old Rowling sounds like a sightseer visiting someone else’s amazing life.
“Cool!” she says, surveying the posh surroundings and royal view. “Wish I had time to actually look around this place.”
Taking a seat, she describes her own household: Rowling has a daughter, Jessica, 6, “and a rabbit named Jemimah and a guinea pig named Jasmine, and anybody who’d like to take them off my hands, you’re welcome.” Not Jessica, of course. “My house is quite mundane,” she goes on, and though she was photographed with a stone gargoyle in Time magazine, “That belonged to the photographer, and he’s the weird one, not me.” As to significant others, the divorced author says, “I love reading about other people’s love lives, not mine. So, no comment.”
Rowling has a face you can’t stop watching, with the offbeat beauty of a brainy romantic lead in an art film. Someone whose flashes of delighted mischief filter through an air of gentle melancholy. Someone who might start writing her first novel on the backs of envelopes in a cafe in a cloudy, classy old burg like Edinburgh — which happens to be the case.
If Harry travels a long way — from a miserable orphaned childhood in the Muggle World (where you and I live) to his true calling as celebrity wizard in a parallel universe — Rowling had an equally remarkable journey. Just a few years ago she was unpublished and between teaching jobs, raising her infant daughter on a welfare check (she was only briefly on the dole, but the British press seized upon that phase to build a Rowling legend).
After three British publishers passed on the book, one finally accepted it but advised Rowling to use her initials on the theory that boys wouldn’t read her if they knew she was a woman.
“Then I went on the telly, boys kept reading like mad, and that theory was pretty well blown out of the water,” Rowling says with a husky laugh.
“I was six months into creating Harry (in 1990) before I asked myself why I wasn’t making him a heroine, since I obviously am female,” she continues. ” But by then I was so fond of Harry, and believed in him so strongly, that I wasn’t about to send him out in a dress. It’s funny, when I was teaching (French), I was placed in charge of all-boy classes because it was considered my forte. Just recently, someone asked me why I don’t have stronger female characters and I was offended, because I consider Hermione (Harry’s goody- goody, but fearless, sidekick) quite strong. Hermione’s a kind of caricature of me at 11, but then, there’s a lot of me in Harry, too.”
The third member of Harry’s intrepid crew, fighting hidden evils at the Hogwarts school of wizardry, is Ron Weasley. “He’s modeled on my old friend, Sean, a schoolmate, still a kind of surrogate brother today,” Rowling says softly. “For some reason I’ve spent most of my life in very close groups of three. I think there’s great fear in a child’s life — even the happiest child’s life — and the books show how children can overcome those fears. But I myself, as a young outsider, was lucky to have two wonderful male chums. I have the happiest, happiest memories of us together.”
Fantastically literate
If Harry is becoming a household word today, translated into 28 languages, with 8.2 million copies of the books in print in the United States alone, he’s headed for even bigger fame onscreen. Rowling has an author’s dream clause — final script approval! — for the Warner Bros. film in the making of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” With its flying cars, terrifying beasts, heart-stopping games of Quidditch (a mad variation of polo on broomsticks) and magical transformations, this first 1997 Potter book has all the makings of a Spielbergian blockbuster.
And yet the most miraculous feature of the books is that they are so unmistakably books — good, literate books, no goosebumpish pandering. The imaginative range is vast. The wit is dry (wizard gardens must be forcibly ” de-gnomed”), the satire sharp. There’s sheer Jabberwockian joy in language as character is proclaimed through such names as Snape, Filch, Voldemort and Peeves (the annoying poltergeist). Like “The Wind in the Willows” — one of the few familiar children’s classics that Rowling loves — Potter makes wonderful reading for adults for the same reason it’s catnip to kids: It gives them credit for having minds.
And running under all the colorful action is a clear spiritual message, exemplified in the fearless sacrifice Harry’s mother made for her son before the first book begins.
So it’s not surprising that a wince of pain flickers across the author’s face when she’s asked about the school boards — in four states, including South Carolina — that have not accepted the Potter series on account of its alleged sympathy with witchcraft and the occult.
“They don’t get it,” Rowling, a member of the Church of Scotland (Presbyterian), says wearily. “They have a perfect right to control what their own children read but not what other people’s children read — that’s a basic censorship issue. Look: I don’t believe in witchcraft. Many of the terms for spells and charms and so on, I invented. Witchcraft is just a metaphor for this other world of possibilities, beyond convention, that the mind can reach.”
Rowling, who has planned four more Potter books and will release another next summer, is being described in news accounts as one of the wealthiest women in the world. The first flush of success rattled her life.
“The publicity hit as I was finishing the second book — suddenly, for the first time in my entire life, I was in a panic, unable to write. Mentally constipated. Typical of me, really: Something wonderful happens and I’m the last to really believe it.
“It’s odd,” Rowling continues, “how, as more people love the books, they feel entitled to interfere. One adult told me, ‘You mustn’t kill off this character.’ Finally I told myself, ‘It’s no good thinking what anyone else wants, just follow your unconscious and write what you want.’ And the writing flowed again.”
And will there be a sea change in lifestyle?
“We’re moving to a new apartment, 10 minutes up the street in Edinburgh,” Rowling says with her — some might say mysterious — smile. “Jessica only has a tiny garden to play in and she needs a bigger one.”
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Frede_Potter
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MacPherson, Karen. “‘Harry Potter’ goes to Washington,” Post-Gazette National Bureau (Pittsburgh), October 21, 1999
Politics may be the lifeblood of Washington, but it’s Potter – Harry Potter, that is – who’s taken the nation’s capital by storm.
J.K. Rowling, British author of the best-selling children’s novels about the likable young wizard, spent two days here, and the place went crazy. Parents took their children out of school to spend hours waiting in line for Rowling to sign copies of her book at area bookstores. Teachers permitted classes to tune into Rowling’s appearance on a local radio show yesterday morning.
Children also left school to crowd into Rowling’s sold-out appearance at a National Press Club luncheon yesterday. One fifth-grade Virginia teacher took her entire class to see the diminutive Rowling, saying she’d never had such competition among parents to be chaperones.
An old hand at the club’s luncheons said he’d never seen anything like the crush of children and adults who overfilled the 400-person capacity ballroom and balconies. “Even Elizabeth Taylor didn’t pack them in like this,” said John Mathew Smith, a Baltimore-based free-lance photographer.
Rowling, a single mother of a 6-year-old girl, doesn’t put on Hollywood airs. In fact, the slight, strawberry blondhaired author is refreshingly down-to-earth about her life, transformed into a real- life fairy tale two years ago with the publication of her first Harry Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”
Rowling took time to say a cheery “hello” to each of 100 children who waited in line to have Rowling sign her latest book, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azakaban.” She told one child who said proudly that she, too, was a writer: “You keep writing, and one day when you’re famous, we’ll meet again.”
Rowling had her young fans laughing when she told them how her British publisher decided that she should be known as “J.K. Rowling,” instead of Joanne Rowling, because boys would be more likely to read the books if they thought a man wrote them.
“Frankly, if they’d wanted me to be known as ‘Enid Snodgrass’ that would have been fine,” she said. Now that she’s famous, however, Rowling exhorts her audiences to “write and yell” at her British publishers for making such a sexist decision.
Rowling was clearly delighted by the gift of a bedazzled “Quidditch” broom created by one young fan of the fictional sport played by Harry Potter and his friends at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
But Rowling flashed with anger as she responded to a question about parents in South Carolina who believe her books should be banned from schools.
“I just think it’s not good that they make decisions on behalf of other people’s children,” said Rowling. She says there is a simple solution for those who think her books are inappropriate: “Don’t read them.”
For millions of children and their parents, however, the Harry Potter books are already classics. So far, Rowling has sold 5 million copies of the first three books in the series and has achieved a publishing “triple crown” as her books occupy the first, second and third places on best-seller lists.
Rowling says she has the series all plotted out and intends to stop in 2003 with book seven, when Harry will be 18 and ready to graduate from Hogwarts. During the press club’s question-and-answer session, Rowling received numerous queries about Harry’s future, but she declined to answer. “I do know exactly what will happen, and I can’t tell you about it,” she told her eager audience. “At the moment, I definitely think I’ll stop at No. 7…. It’s going to feel like a bereavement. I think I’ll be really heartbroken.
“The only reason I would write a book No. 8 is if I have a burning desire to do it, 10 years after the last book is published,” Rowling added. “But I never say ‘never,’ because the moment I say I’ll never do something, I do it the next month.”
Rowling actually came up with the idea for the Harry Potter series during one of the lowest points of her life. A native of England, she was divorced and living in Scotland when she began writing the first book about Harry, a mistreated orphan who suddenly discovers on his 11th birthday that he is not only a wizard, but also that he is a legend in the wizard world.
Rowling says she never actually meant to write for children.
“I wrote it for me,” she said of the first Harry Potter book. “I wanted to write something that I would like to read now, but I also wanted to write something like the books I used to read as a child.”
Rowling added that she is asked, “time without number,” why her books are so popular with both children and adults.”
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to analyze them. I don’t want to think of putting in ` X’ ingredient. It’s for other people to analyze, not me.”
But Rowling did list some of her favorite children’s authors, saying she has been inspired by the likes of Philip Pullman, Paul Gallico and, the grande dame of children’s fantasy novels, E. Nesbitt. She also recommended a new book, “Skellig” by fellow Britisher David Almond.
And Rowling had some advice for budding authors.
“Read as much as you possibly can. Write as much as you can…. You’ll probably go through a phase where you imitate your favorite writers. That’s perfectly OK. Resign yourself to the fact that you’ll write lots and lots of rubbish to get it out of your system.
“You’ve just got to persevere…. To be able to do this as a lifelong thing is the best thing in the world. But it’s not a career for the easily discouraged,” Rowling said.
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Frede-Potter
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Bock, Linda. “‘Harry Potter’ magic draws thousands,” Telegram & Gazette (Worcester, MA), October 12, 1999
WORCESTER – J.K. “Jo” Rowling, author of the “Harry Potter” series, started her three-week U.S. book signing tour here last night to the sheer delight of thousands of enchanted fans.
The English author, whose bestselling “Harry Potter” books have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide, signed hundreds of her books at Tatnuck Bookseller & Sons, 335 Chandler St.
“We’re absolutely overwhelmed by the turnout. We couldn’t believe that people were arriving so early. Nothing else we’ve ever done has approached this,” said Tatnuck Bookseller owner Larry J. Abramoff. “I’ve read all three “Harry Potter’ books myself, and I’m just like the kids: I wanted them to go on and on.”
Abramoff said people started lining up at 11 a.m., some with lawn chairs and picnic baskets. Crowds were so eager by late afternoon that the store had to distribute the allotted 500 tickets at 4:30 p.m., a bit earlier than planned. Rowling arrived right on time for her 7 p.m. appearance.
The crowd inside hushed as management made the announcement that Rowling had arrived. They began wildly cheering and applauding as soon as Rowling was spotted making her way through the packed store.
An entirely gracious Rowling barely had time to greet the crowd because a pen and book were thrust into her hand while she was approaching the table. She signed the first copy midair, and never stopped. She signed her first 100 copies in just about 10 minutes, and only looked up to smile warmly and thank each fan for coming.
“She’s like really funny. She’s also really nice, even though it was so short a time we had to meet her,” said Andrew M. Slowaski, 10.
The “Harry Potter” phenomenon is best described by many parents and teachers at the signing last night as “the books” that got their kids to read again.
“My dad read to me until I was 12, and then that’s when we got a TV,” said Anne K. Oehling. “Parents are reading to their kids again. That’s what “Harry Potter’ is all about.”
And many parents think that someone has cast a magical spell over their own communications between themselves and their spellbound children.
Mary C. Crompton of Worcester waited all day with Brittany M., her 14-year-old daughter, and Michael R., her 9-year-old son, to meet the celebrated author.
“It’s wonderful to talk to the kids about the books, and even more wonderful to hear the kids discussing the characters with each other,” Crompton said.
Brittany, a ninth-grader at St. Peter-Marian Central Catholic Junior & Senior High School, first heard about the fantasy books when Rowling appeared on the “Rosie O’Donnell Show” early this summer. Since reading all three books at least twice each, she has prepared a school report on Rowling as the public person she admires most.
Brittany most wanted to ask Rowling: “When’s the fourth book coming out?”
A series of seven “Harry Potter” books is planned; the fourth is tentatively scheduled for release next summer. The first three titles are: “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” and “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”
All of the books have topped all the major bestseller lists, including “The New York Times,” “Wall Street Journal” and “USA Today” on both the adult and children’s fiction lists.
Lisa A. Crowley, a fifth-grade teacher at Floral Street School, Shrewsbury, said that the enthusiasm for the books is growing. She’s thrilled most about the literary influence on the school-aged youngsters because of the amazing detail in the stories and the richly drawn characters.
“The whole class is reading them. During the silent reading period at the end of the day, everyone pulls out “Harry.” The kids even have the adults reading them. They’re so great,” Crowley said.
TEMPORARY TATTOO
For fans of all ages, part of the fun last night was wearing the trademark “Harry Potter” scar on their foreheads, a temporary tattoo each guest received. Harry got his scar – in the shape of a lightning bolt – in an accident caused by Voldemort, the villain of the stories.
Behind Rowling’s successful series is Harry Potter, her hero, an orphaned 11-year-old wizard, who attends Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Harry lives in a magical world where letters are delivered by owls, diaries write back to you, and chess is played with living pieces. His adventures are what keeps his readers coming back for more.
Janine Rosenbaum of Worcester, a school librarian, has read all three of Rowling’s books. She said Rowling’s adventure series has conjured up whole new worlds for readers.
“Look at all these kids here. Imagine that they’ve spent their whole day-off to meet an author. An author: Think about it. It’s a miracle,” Rosenbaum said.
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Stanton, Jim and Jennifer Veitch. “Maggie’s is Magic, says creator of Harry,” Evening News (Scotland), October 4, 1999
EDINBURGH author JK Rowling, the creator of the Harry Potter novels, has revealed that a pioneering centre for cancer patients may have saved her friend’s life.
The writer was the guest of honour at a glittering ball held at the Sheraton Hotel on Saturday to raise money for Maggie’s Centre at Edinburgh’s Western General Hospital.
The author of the phenomenally successful novels about a schoolboy wizard told guests of her own family’s pain at losing five relatives to cancer.
And she spoke movingly of her belief that Maggie’s had helped to save the life of one of her best friends, Patricia, who she met after moving to Edinburgh three years ago.
She said one day, she went to see Patricia and found her “planning her funeral” after receiving a “brutal” diagnosis of secondary breast cancer.
Ms Rowling added that Maggie’s Centre may even have saved Patricia’s life, and said she was proud that the centre had been pioneered in Edinburgh.
“Maggie’s Centre certainly improved her quality of life and I believe may even have saved her life,” she said.
“I can think of no cause more worthy of support.”
Single mum Ms Rowling, 34, who penned the first Harry Potter book, The Philosopher’s Stone, in a city cafe while struggling to get by on income support, also lent her support by bidding successfully for two lots in the charity auction held after the dinner, which raised GBP 12,000.
She bid GBP 500 for a round of golf with rugby heroes Tony Underwood and Doddie Weir, and paid GBP 1300 for a two-night stay at Champney’s Health Spa.
Social Security Secretary Alistair Darling and Liberal Democrat MP Menzies Campbell also offered auction prizes of guided tours of the House Of Commons, which raised GBP 900.
The money raised at the dinner will contribute to the centre’s annual running costs of GBP 200,000.
But the centre’s assistant director, Barbara Kidd, said Ms Rowling’s support had been an “enormous boost” to the Evening News appeal to raise GBP 100,000 towards the expansion of the centre.
“There is no doubt the appeal to help build the extension brought 300 people out at the weekend,” she said.
Ms Kidd added: “Ms Rowling gave a very moving account of her friend. Although she was still being treated for cancer the woman said through her visits to Maggie’s her quality of life had been much improved.
“She said her friend had a much more positive outlook on life, knowing she had the support of the centre to fall back on.
“We hope, through this appeal, to be able to do that for many, many more cancer sufferers.”
With the appeal fund just over half way towards its GBP 100,000 target, Ms Kidd said she was confident users of the centre at the Western General Hospital would be using the new facility next spring.
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Bere
Revisão:
Barnes & Noble chat transcript, Barnes&Noble.com, September 8, 1999
On Wednesday, September 8th, bn.com welcomed J. K. Rowling to discuss HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN and her other bestselling Harry Potter books.
Good afternoon, J. K. Rowling! (Well, I suppose it’s late evening for you in England.) Welcome to bn.com. I can’t tell you how excited we are to have you in our Auditorium. How are you?
I’m very well and very excited to be here.
Where does your insight into young boys come from?
From inside myself. I’ve been writing about Harry for six months before I stopped and asked myself why he was a boy and not a girl, because I’m obviously a female, but it was too late — Harry was too real for me to change. And I liked him too much by that time.
How long did it take you to write the books?
THE SORCERER’S STONE took five years to finish, but during that time I was working full-time as a teacher, and I was also planning the whole series of Harry books. CHAMBER OF SECRETS took two years, and AZKABAN took one year. They’re getting faster to write because of a kind of snowball effect. I know the characters very well by now. And the plots are fully worked out.
Jo, I want to say a big thank you for making me feel 12 again and bringing me so much joy when I read your books. I have a few questions: (1) How do you keep track of all the strange names in the world of Harry Potter that you created from scratch? Do you compile a list of characters as you go along, or did you already have a clear idea from Book 1? (2) Did you do any substantial research on wizardry and witchcraft when you were writing these books? You’ve quite convinced a lot of us that Hogwarts and the world of wizards and muggles do exist! Thanks again. Michelle, age 23.
It is wonderful to hear that I’ve knocked 11 years off someone’s age. I had nearly all of the characters worked out, including names, for all seven books by the time I finished Book 1, but I do change names sometimes. I like to play around with names, and I collect unusual ones from all sorts of sources, like maps, books of Saints, war memorials, and some names I just invent myself. And, yes, I have done research on witchcraft and wizardry, but I tend only to use things when they fit my plot, and most of the magic in the books is invented by me.
This is probably a very American question, but how do you pronounce “Hermoine”?
It’s pronounced: Her-my-oh-nee.
I have seen some amazing fan work by kids online, like drawings and paintings of Harry and fan fiction. Do you ever go online to see the web pages created for Harry?
Yes, I do. And I have been staggered by the response. I only recently found the web pages devoted to Harry, and it was like Christmas –Christmas in August.
You’ve said in interviews that there will be casualties in the Harry Potter series. Now, everyone at a web site I visit says someone (probably Hagrid) will die in Book 4. Will someone die or is this a terrible rumor? I love Hagrid!
It is true that there will be deaths in Book 4 for the first time. It is likely that the reader will only care about one of the deaths. I can’t say who it is, but I have certainly never told anyone that it’s Hagrid — hint, hint.
Ms. Rowling: Are you helping out on the movie at all? Do you have an idea when cast auditions may be? (Sorry, I know that has nothing to do with PRISONER OF AZKABAN, but no one will give me straight answers!) Thank you very very much!
Yes, I have script approval on the movie. And no, unfortunately, I have no influence on casting.
In PRISONER OF AZKABAN, Professor Dumbledore mentions Professor Trelawney’s “second true prediction.” What was Professor Trelawney’s first true prediction?
I love a perceptive reader! Professor Trelawney’s first prediction was a very important one. And you will find out in due course what it was, but I’m not going to reveal it at this stage. Sorry.
Is Harry Potter based on anyone you know? What will you do or write after the seventh book?
No, Harry came completely out of my own head, so I suppose he must have a lot of me in him. Although Hermoine is a more faithful portrait of me when I was younger. After I finish the seventh book I will cry because it will feel as though someone died. I will have been writing about Harry for 13 years when I finish Book 7. And then I will write something different.
What is Harry’s middle name?
James, after his father.
Hello! Will Sirius ever be proven innocent? Or have you not decided yet? Thank you very much!!
I have decided, but if I answer it gives away something quite important in the plot, so I’d rather not…however, Sirius will be back in future books.
Without giving away any plot details, can you tell us if we might expect to hear any more from Crookshanks in future Harry Potter books? He seems to be a very smart cat!
You’re right. He is a very smart cat, and you will be hearing more from him.
I know that the third installment is just out, but when will the next one be out? My children and I thoroughly enjoy reading about Harry and his adventures every evening.
There is nothing I like to hear more than that. And I hope that Book 4 will be available next summer.
What is your favorite book?
One of my favorite children’s books is a book called THE LITTLE WHITE HORSE, by Elizabeth Goudge. The last great book I read was THE VIRGIN SUICIDES by Jeffrey Eugenides.
Do you have characters for other books running around in your head, or are you completely consumed by Harry and Hogwarts?
Other characters do live in my head, but because the cast of the Harry Potter books is already enormous and will become larger, they take most of my attention at the moment
What are your plans for allowing movies and toys to be made of the books? I am so very happy with the way your books have set people to reading again and have sparked the imagination. These will surely be literature classics. It just seems a shame to cheapen them with toys — so counter to the imagination –and movies. Kids won’t have to read to be in on the fun. What are your thoughts on this?
The truth is that I am both excited and nervous about the prospect of a Harry film. Excited because I would love the chance to see what I can see so vividly in my own head, especially Quidditch! However, I agree that no medium can replace reading, and my dearest hope would be that children would be led from the film to the books.
What is your favorite Harry book so far?
The first book will always have a special place in my heart, because it was the first book I ever published. However, I prefer the plot of CHAMBER OF SECRETS. And just to confuse the issue, I was looking forward to writing the third book from the start of the first because that’s when Professor Lupin appears, and he is one of my favorite characters in all seven books.
You have such a phenomenal imagination! Is it a result of a very imaginative childhood?
First of all, I will be using your name in a future book. To answer your question, yes, I lived a lot in a fantasy world when I was younger and spent a lot of time daydreaming — to my parents frustration.
Do you have any suggestions for young people who are interested in writing someday?
I think it’s best to start with writing what you know. In other words, a good place to begin is your own emotions or a subject you know a lot about. But the most important thing to do is to read, because that will teach you what makes good writing, and it will also teach you to recognize bad writing.
Do you have an internet address where kids (and grown-ups) can send you email?
At the moment, I don’t. But I can be contacted via Scholastic Books.
Dear Ms. Rowling, I’d like to ask if there would be a lot of romances between the characters in the upcoming books?
Good question. I’m having so much fun writing Book 4 because for the first time Harry, Ron, and Hermoine are starting to recognize boys and girls as boys and girls. Everyone is in love with the wrong people. Let no one say my books lack realism.
Did you attend a British public school?
No. I’m often asked that by British journalists. I attended what you call a public school in the United States.
My children and I love your books, and we care about Harry Potter. We are wondering if Harry will continue to live with the Dursley’s every summer.
Well, you have to decide whether you want to give up the fun of seeing Harry getting the better of the Dursley’s or whether you’d rather see Harry happy. I’ve made my choice, but I can’t tell you what it is because it will ruin future plots.
Will Aragog appear in any later books?
Yes. But I’m not telling you anymore than that!
Tell us about your family! How have they influenced your books?
My mother passed way nine years ago, and her death greatly influenced a passage in Book 1. And I’m sure careful readers don’t need to be told what passage that is. My father is still alive, and he really likes the books, and my sister, to whom the first book is dedicated in part, was the first person ever to hear the story. She didn’t read it, but I told it to her.
How old is your daughter now? Does she read about Harry as enthusiastically as we do?
My daughter is six, and she really wants me to read the Harry books to her, but I told her she has to wait until she’s seven because that will be the most important reading of my life, and I really want her to be able to appreciate them.
What do you like to do when you are not writing?
It’s quite boring, and I wish I could say I went ab-sailing, but I don’t. Nothing exciting and ludicrous, I’m afraid.
Have you considered creating a Harry Potter game, i.e., something that will stimulate young minds?
I haven’t considered it. I suppose it could happen at some point, but I’m hoping the books stimulate minds.
Will we ever hear from Mr. Weasley’s car again?
Yes, you will hear from Mr. Weasley’s car again, but yet again, I’m not telling you how.
Is Hogwarts possibly located in Scotland? I am an American and have never been to the United Kingdom, but from reading the first book and going by the train station Harry leaves from and how long the trip takes, I am guessing it may be Scotland? Thank you.
You are absolutely right. If you travel north from King’s Cross, you do indeed arrive in Scotland.
With the huge success of the first three books and your seemingly endless imagination, do you think that you might (please, oh please) consider continuing the story past the originally planned seven books? Maybe continuing with Harry as an adult or books about his children?
So you’re convinced I’m not going to kill Harry??!! I try never to say never, because it seems that every time I do I end up by doing the thing I’ve forsworn. So, there is a remote possibility that there will another Harry book, but at the present time I am planning only seven.
With your recent success, you have traveled a great deal. Who is the most interesting (real!) person you’ve met and why?
When I was in Belfast, I was filmed speaking to a large group of children and sitting right in front of me, in the middle of the crowd, was Harry Potter. He had black hair, green eyes, and round glasses. I completely forgot what I was saying, pointed at him, and said, “Harry, what are you doing here?” He laughed, and all his friends laughed too because they all been saying it to him. So, if ever Warner Brothers asks me for the perfect Harry, I’ll tell them to go to Belfast and find a boy named Nialls.
Before your success with the Harry Potter series, what was the worst job you ever had?
The worst job I ever had was working as a temporary secretary in a company that made surveillance equipment. Bugs, infrared binoculars…industrial espionage. I spent the whole time reading the catalogue. They were very creepy people. The products were very interesting, but the people were quite horrible.
Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon, J. K. Rowling. Before you go, do you have any closing remarks for your online fans?
I’m sorry to everyone who didn’t have their questions answered, but if they keep reading, I bet most of their questions will be answered in the end.
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