CraveOnline: Are you looking at this as a potential franchise? I know that’s how a lot of people would look at it.
David Heyman: It’s so funny. I never viewed Harry Potter as a potential franchise, and I think that’s a very dangerous thing, to look at any film as a franchise. I think that what we did on Potter and what we did on this was try to make the best film possible. If we make a good film and if enough audiences come, then there’s the possibility of making another one. If we make another one, we’ve got to make that better than this one, and so on. Because you can’t approach it like a commodity, and I hope you feel when you see the film that it doesn’t feel like a product.
It doesn’t feel like a product, and I’ve heard a lot of people say that you just try to focus on making the one movie good and if there’s a sequel there’s a sequel but… Paddington might be a bad example, Harry Potter might be a better one, where you know there’s a serialized narrative involved. Surely it has to occur to you that you need to find a way to organically extend this story while still making a satisfying single film?
I’ll address both films. Paddington was a series of short stories, where the job was a very different one. It was about expanding it to fit an hour and a half, as opposed to five or ten minutes. So it required a lot of invention, bringing different stories together, creating our own narratives. There was never a baddie in the Paddington books like Nicole [Kidman].
“I never thought we would get to the end until the fourth [‘Potter’] film came out.”
I like that you were able to organically fit her into the story though.
That wasn’t part of the [books]. There wasn’t a calypso band. So that part of the plot at the Natural History Museum was all homespun, as it were. Potter is a different beast. I never thought we would get to the end until the fourth film came out. Maybe I was naive. I knew we were going to make the first two but once we made the fourth film and it started going up again, I thought maybe…
Was three down?
One [gestures], two [gestures upward], three [gestures down], four [gestures back up]. Alfonso [Cuaron]’s was the least successful of all of them financially. [Laughs.]
That’s the one that got me into it.
Obviously it has a special place in my heart given that I’ve carried on working with him. He’s one of my best friends and godfather to my son.
But also in the Harry Potter series you’re working with the writer very closely.
Jo [Rowling] was very hands off.
But you had her support.
But so too Michael Bond, you know. He’s alive. Paul something today, “Tonally, Michael was very helpful.” Just because he’s lived with it for 50 years, he’s very aware of the tone of it. Jo was very supportive, very understanding of the fact that it was a different animal, a film to a book, and very supportive of each of the directors as they went off and did their films.
But with Potter, so I was saying, I didn’t know it was going to be a series. I promise you all I was trying to do was make as good a film as [possible]. The good news [is], each director was competitive with the one before, and themselves. Wanted to make a film better than the one before. So that was some of the energy brought on by Alfonso replacing Chris [Columbus], and Mike [Newell] replacing Alfonso and David [Yates] replacing [Michael]. And when they directed more than one, like Chris and David, they were competitive with themselves and determined to make something better than the last one, to justify doing another one.
“We’re all quite brave and bold in our approach to what we’re creating.”
Is that why you brought David Yates back? Did he say, “Deathly Hallows sucked, I can do so much better with Fantastic Beasts?”
[Thinks.] No, just he’s a great director. He knows the universe very well. He can handle the humor and the drama of the piece, and I think he’ll be great.
I think he’ll be great too, it’s just interesting that he made so many of the previous films, and now that you’re spinning off into… I don’t know the details, but a different direction, different time period, different characters, it seems like you may be keeping him as sort of a through line. That’s how it looks from the outside.
You could also argue Steve Kloves, myself, Jo [laughs] are also through lines.
Yes, I guess it seems very homespun, to use your word.
Yes, but we’re all quite brave and bold in our approach to what we’re creating.
