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[♪ soft, mystical music playing]
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[narrator] Some stories change us.
[station announcer] Please travel in the front
six coaches only.
[narrator] Some stories define us.
But few stories live with us.
And, action!
[narrator] Quite like the boy who lived.
Soon to be told by HBO Max...
♪♪
...like never before.
[♪ epic music playing]
[narrator] Harry's story from J.K. Rowling's beloved book series
is a truly immersive tale...
requiring incredible dedication
to realize this mesmerizing,
almost limitless magical world.
To create a place so rich, complex,
and expansive,
building it in our world would be impossible...
until the true wizards get to work.
♪♪
[John Lithgow] The Harry Potter stories
are-- are this extraordinary phenomenon
from 30 years ago,
for young people.
But it struck a chord with people of all ages.
And to reimagine the Harry Potter canon...
to let it breathe,
to tell a story in eight episodes
rather than a single two-hour movie,
to go down all the wonderful rabbit holes.
The story is there,
but we get to enact all the things
that you know are going on in the wings,
but you don't see them.
You wait forever to do something
that-- that means that much to people.
And I think-- I think this really will.
And they have done a brilliant job
of selecting this extraordinary ensemble.
[♪ soft music playing]
[quiet chattering]
We stopped counting at 40,000.
Yeah. It wasn't a good use of our time at that point
to count, but we watched all of them.
Yeah. We're looking for a child
who he-- he means so much to people in different ways.
And so, you are looking for a kid
who perhaps on the face of it seems quite ordinary,
but is ultimately very extraordinary.
We wanted to make sure that all kids in the UK
could audition by submitting their first auditions online.
And then we went to Manchester, Scotland, Ireland, and...
- Cardiff. - Cardiff, Wales.
[indistinct chatter]
[Emily Brockmann] When we were auditioning children,
we knew it was gonna be a long process.
[Lucy Bevan] We started with Harry, Ron, and Hermione,
and they are really good friends.
And so, it was a really exciting challenge
to find three kids
that you would believe as friends
with these very strong, different personalities.
These are all ordinary kids, you know?
But they are all extraordinary.
There's magic in all of them.
[♪ cheerful music playing]
We saw Alastair in Manchester,
and he was just funny and charming
from the word "go." Yeah.
This is him doing his, um...
- His story. Poem. - ...his little story.
Mother doesn't want a dog.
She's making a mistake. 'Cause more than a dog,
I think she will not want this snake.
[Emily chuckling]
That was first day of Alastair.
And then, Arabella in London.
"Hermione, lack of filter from being an only child.
"Her superpower is her emotional intelligence.
She's got main-character energy."
So, this is Arabella's first audition.
- [Emily] Yeah. - So, she did the poem Invictus.
It matters not how strait the gate,
how charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
[Lucy] Hermione has to be playful,
so we got her in to do a scene
where she's talking to her parents
about, um, Harry and Ron.
And she was-- got-- got the giggles
and did little snorts, and that's the take we used
to show them that she's playful.
So, you're constantly using bits of the audition
that you know is gonna help the kid
when you show it to the director and the showrunner.
So, Arabella's snort was quite crucial
- in her casting process. - [Emily] Yeah.
[Lucy] We met Dominic in Glasgow.
What did we have about Harry?
"He's skeptical of the adult world.
He's got a vulnerability and a melancholy."
- And-- - And a solitary--
- a solitary quality to him. - A solitary quality.
- He's grown up alone. - He's grown up alone,
and he-- he's-- survival is his thing.
Artful Dodger, not Oliver Twist.
It's basically, find an incredible actor,
- age ten. - [Emily] Basically, yeah.
- That was the brief. - Yeah, yeah.
[Emily] He has so many different qualities.
[Lucy] So many different qualities.
Dominic came in and his piece was a poem
about his weekend that he'd written himself,
and it was rhyming.
And we thought, "He's so interesting."
"My Weekend" by Dominic.
So, started off Saturday morning,
I had a football game to play,
and I can tell you, it went my way.
Didn't really have anything to do after that,
so I just slept the rest of the day.
Dom just had this sort of quiet confidence in himself.
- Who do you live with? - Hey, I live with my mum,
my dad, and my two sisters.
- [Lucy] Okay. - And my dog.
[Lucy] And have you done any acting before?
Um, I did Macbeth in January.
[Lucy] And were you one of Macduff's sons?
[Dominic] Yeah, I was.
[Lucy] Oh, you got killed, unfortunately.
- [chuckles] Yeah. - [Lucy] Sorry to hear that.
[laughs] Okay. That's great.
I really feel confident in these kids.
I think they're incredible.
[♪ soft, mystical music playing]
In a show of this scale, it's easy to get lost.
You can go to the Great Hall, it's huge.
You can go to the Quidditch pitch, it's massive.
You can go to, uh, Diagon Alley.
And we go back to the sets and we're revisiting them,
adding a bit of detail.
Sometimes, for example,
I'll go to the Gryffindor common room
or to the tower,
and you're in there on your own,
and you're looking around and you look at the noticeboard
and you're looking at every little bit of detail
on McGonagall's desk, of the, uh, books,
on the spines, and you-- it's goosebumps.
[♪ magical music playing]
[Mara LePere-Schloop] The volume of this is just so fun...
to be able to build at a scale like this.
It's just a designer's dream
to play in a sandbox that's this big.
We're trying to get in the joy and the playfulness
of what it means to be a magical kid.
When the first Harry Potter book came out,
it really felt so novel and exciting.
I think everyone had that shared experience
of thinking what an incredible world,
it would be so great to touch.
And so, we're trying to capture those moments of discovery
that you find within the books.
We want you to have that same experience here.
But we are adding a level of world-building
that is even beyond what the audience is familiar with.
[♪ thrilling music playing]
Harry's introduction
to the physical space of the wizarding world
starts with the Leaky Cauldron.
And eventually, we come out the back
and go into our Diagon Alley set.
♪♪
The elements that we see
are all things that we would recognize,
but how they combine and form
is gonna be something really new and exciting.
[♪ thrilling music continues]
Privet Drive in our Muggle world,
we really wanted to be rooted in reality.
And part of that, I think, for someone as a fan
and an audience member, is when your Muggle world
is rooted in a reality that we're all familiar with,
it makes the excitement of the wizarding world
just being beyond our reach all the more enticing.
There's really a ton of thought that's going into this,
so that for the die-hard fans, we're trying to land it.
We've created these spaces
that I think are gonna give everybody a lot of joy
to kind of be in and experience.
It's just so exciting that everybody is so game
to make these things come alive.
Walking into the Great Hall that first time, where you go,
"It's like walking into a cathedral."
It was so magical.
It's so huge. It's so beautiful.
And the entrance of the children coming in,
the first-years coming in,
and then bringing them into that hall,
was possibly my favorite set in that sense.
It was just so iconic
and so, kind of, uh, symbolic of,
"Right, here we go.
"Whole new bunch of kids, into this world we go.
"And here we are in Hogwarts, and welcome,
and a whole new mystery is unfolding for you."
And sometimes, you're in your dressing room
and you'll be sitting there,
and then suddenly you hear this explosion of people outside
as the children run in.
You're thinking about your work or whatever,
and they're just-- they've just got their own thing
with whatever it is that's going on,
the way children do, it's just--
it's a real energy.
♪♪
Sometimes on a really tiring day,
I always go, "Close your eyes, open them again,
and look around. Wow!"
You walk onto a set and you think, "Wow!"
And it just ups your game.
'Cause it's all just so beautiful.
Beautiful.
[♪ intriguing music playing]
[Mara] In the initial conversations with Mark and Francesca
about the core values of our show,
there was this kind of inherent desire
to be rooted in naturalism.
Also, in this idea at the core of Harry Potter,
nature is the root of magic.
And so, magical realism,
rooting things in principles that we find in nature
and the phenomenon of the natural world.
♪♪
If we could harness those things,
that's what magic is.
These ideas of naturalism
being this core principle within the wizarding world,
is something that we're integrating
into a lot of our sets.
We have to bring the natural world to them.
And to think that I'm at the helm of this,
it really is incredible.
[♪ mystical music playing]
This project is so exciting
that there's so much overlap
and play between different departments
to really capture these concepts and themes
and express them on so many different levels.
As we designed these practical and visual effects,
we wanted there to be a deeply rooted logic
to what was happening.
Even though magic is not logical,
for us, it's more of these, like, consequences of magic
that we're interested in.
For every expression of magic,
we're trying to do that critical analysis
of how does this tie back into
what we're saying magic actually is.
And we really wanted to celebrate it as a moment
to do things a little bit differently.
[♪ mystical music playing]
This is one of the most exciting conversations
I've had as a designer,
diving into the science of something
that should be unexplainable.
The joy of working on a project like this
is that we have so many really creative
and exciting department heads.
It really is such a pleasure to work
with such high-level craftsmen
who also are genuinely excited about this.
I-- I can proudly say you've done a good job.
- Thank you. - A very good job.
- Means a lot. Cheers. - Cheers.
- Appreciate it.
My father actually designed and painted
the very first Quidditch box from the first film.
And here I am, um, uh, 26 years later,
painting the new Quidditch box,
uh, for the HBO production.
[♪ light music playing]
[John Nolan] I actually worked on Harry Potter three
and four film, 25 years ago.
And I was actually a trainee to some of the guys
that are working here.
Every creature we build within Creature Effects,
whether it's, uh, an owl, a rat,
whether it's a creature or a human being,
all starts with the same process.
Basically, extensive research into nature.
Observing and looking at how an owl might move.
They just look incredible.
And it's our job to try and copy that movement
and repeat that with, um, the use of animatronics
and creature effects.
You can see within the animatronics,
you've got all these pivot points,
and pieces of metal and plastic,
and servo motors.
And our job is to try and make that feel organic.
[♪ light, upbeat music playing]
[Laura Sindall] We are looking at, essentially,
the culmination of a lot of teamwork.
These are some early prototypes we did
of how we would create this incredible neck movement
that you have within owls,
how they move so much, this almost 360 movement,
the up and down, the turning,
that we put together in fabrication.
And then, we hand these over to the wonderful feather team
to do all their beautiful work-over
so that we can fill these voids
and have amazing feathers that all glide and move,
and create that incredible motion that an owl's neck has.
So, we then insert each and every feather individually
in the net, and glue it down.
And it's about 36,000 feathers per owl.
And we made about ten owls for this show.
[♪ upbeat music playing]
[John Nolan] Because technology's moved on,
and we've actually got stronger and faster motors
that we can actually fit inside,
you can actually pick the rat neck up
and push it around and bully it around.
When Ron holds the animatronic, it actually pushes it aside
rather than it feeling like a, a stuffed Scabbers.
Dan has actually put that into this animatronic here
where, as you push the feet down,
it actually compresses,
and I can actually move this around.
You can see here.
So, it doesn't feel too robotic and-- and rigid,
which I think really helps the performance of--
of a young boy who's probably never held an animatronic before
in his life.
Um, and then, of course, when you put it
into the sort of context of,
uh, you know, down on the floor like that,
it's-- it's really believable.
And we also made a biting Scabbers
that Charlotte's gonna bring in now.
Put your finger in his mouth and wiggle it around.
That's it.
There you go. Thank you very much.
[♪ creepy music playing]
This is the Dugbog, which is a character
that hasn't been seen in any of the films before.
It's, um, based on a toad that has, uh,
movements that we've taken directly from nature,
from toads, where the eyes pull in, retract inside.
We've got a mechanical tongue.
Nose movement, nostrils.
We added, uh, this detail on top
so the kids could actually snap the backs--
the back off and pull these mollusks off
so it doesn't feel damaging for the creature.
It's actually an amazing opportunity for us
to all come together,
all departments, all disciplines,
whether it was Creature Effects, Special Effects,
Visual Effects, Model Making, Set Deck.
We also created these flobberworms
and characters like this
that we didn't tell the-- the kids
that we're actually gonna be able to pick them up
and, uh, add slime.
And we had these fire crabs
that was actually working closely with Special Effects,
and these two will actually blast fire
out of their backsides at each other.
So, we've got a self-contained animatronic here
where all the motors are inside,
and someone's actually operating that remotely.
[flames whooshing]
I'm shaking right now, just being in this room.
Like this is-- this is crazy.
[♪ exciting music playing]
I was the right age and it was always there.
And I sort of-- it was something I really--
I really bonded with my siblings over.
I think my cousin first introduced me to it.
So, we used to--
I mean, we used to run home from primary school
and change out of our-- our primary-school clothes
and into our Hogwarts robes.
[♪ exciting music continues]
[Holly Waddington] We're set in 1991,
and we did a full study of what people were wearing in 1991,
um, and we tried to make the Muggles feel as true
as we possibly could make them.
We've really sort of drawn out, you know, certain--
tried to sort of create real contrasts.
The Muggle palette is pastel-orientated,
very cold colors,
and there's a big emphasis on synthetic fabrics.
As you can see here, it's really the period of shell suits.
I don't-- We call them shell suits.
They're these crinkly tracksuit tops.
[Jason Airey] I think in terms of finding Harry's look,
he lives in a world where everyone
is following the fashions.
He hasn't ever had the luxury of choosing his clothes.
He's-- he's given--
he's given these old castoffs by Petunia,
which are Dudley's old clothes.
His clothes just hang off him and they're just grayed out.
Actually, everything that he wears, we found original--
Beth found original pieces,
which we then meticulously recreated.
[Beth Collins] We're finding real clothes,
sort of trawling many vintage yards
and wholesale scrapyards and just finding it.
And the amount we've amassed as we've costumed thousands.
And the more we found,
this palette came naturally together.
These are the-- the colors of 1991.
[Holly] We want to time travel.
We get to dive in and out of different time frames,
different styles of costuming,
and you can't time travel
if they're not exactly the right thing.
Our uniforms are all made of British wool,
organic cotton, shell buttons,
wooden buttons, Scottish tartan.
Natural cloth is-- is something that is almost rare.
It's quite a radical act just to wear a-- a jumper
that's made of sheep's wool.
Even though, you know, we live in a country
that's like full of sheep.
[soft chuckling]
[all laughing]
For magical people, we had to find how we present them,
that feels somehow a little bit "other."
What Francesca and Mark really wanted us
to be bringing into the design,
was with lots of nature.
That-- that when-- when we decided to use
all these very imperfect,
natural processes,
like leaf-printing, like hand-painting,
- like marbling. - [Beth] Marbling.
[Holly] When you print with leaves,
there is this natural, magical process that happens.
You don't know what you're going to get depending on the leaf,
you just have to go with what you get.
For Dumbledore, we wanted to use leaf-printing
because we wanted to do this camo fabric for him to wear.
And we wanted to create the sense of this natural,
immediate, um, unruly process.
It's the imperfection that brings the beauty.
[Jason] It's not kind of like a high fantasy.
It's really rooted in "the real."
And I think that would hopefully make people think, oh, maybe...
- "Maybe it's real." - "Maybe it is around that corner," or...
- Yeah. - ...look at a person
walking down the street, and think, "Oh."
I remember, we kept saying,
"I've just seen a magical person."
- I remember that. - "I've just seen a magical person."
And we were photographing people,
like on the tube or the bus,
that we'd identify as sort of a "magical person."
And so, it's this idea that magical people do exist
and they are around,
and we wanted that to be within all of them.
Just a sort of... combination of elements
that just made you look.
[♪ soft, mystical music playing]
And by complete contrast,
we have created an inky, moody...
natural palette for the magical people.
So, that's one way that we've created, um, a dichotomy.
[Basia Kuznar] Everything is rooted in reality.
Our Dumbledore,
he is a little bit like Edwardian gentleman,
because that's what we thought,
knowing how old he is, we kind of work out
that his height, his heyday.
[Holly] A little bit of Scottish tweed here,
embroidered, as you can see, in a very unruly,
not-too-perfect way.
I mean, I love Harry Potter because I picked up the book
when-- when I had my children.
And I got really into reading the books
with my son Eric, who just loved them.
[♪ heartwarming music playing]
He could really project himself into the story,
and I think it was so good for him,
and I could see how much he was loving it.
And-- and we were loving it together.
Our thing where we'd sit down together at night
and read very intricate stories with quite complicated plots
and lots and lots of things happening.
And he said to me,
"Mummy, is there a school that I can go to like this?"
And, um, and I--
I thought, "I need to find this school.
And if I can't find it, I need to try and create this school."
It definitely feels like a big responsibility.
[Holly] I think it's a big responsibility
to get it right, isn't it?
To honor what has gone before,
but to hopefully, like, find more detail.
♪♪
I think I was literally the same age
as the kids in the book, you know?
I think the first one came out in '97. I was seven.
Um, and I was definitely at the age
where, like, the books were still coming out
when I was at school.
So, it was actually really intense.
I remember reading those books,
and you wouldn't be able to talk to your mates at all.
Because, like, if someone was reading faster than you were,
they were gonna tell you what was gonna happen.
And like, these stories are so important at that age,
it wasn't worth, like, the conversation
with your mates.
At that age, you--
you imagine yourself being a kid at Hogwarts,
or you imagine yourself being in Harry's shoes.
I remember on one day, I came in to see, uh, Mark,
and they were shooting the scene
on Platform Nine and Three-Quarters.
And just walking in and seeing the real train,
it was like being thrown into the book.
It was like being thrown into it, it was real.
[narrator] So, as you can see,
though the world of Harry Potter
is already legendary,
its legacy is still growing.
As a new generation discovers its magic,
an exciting new era is upon us.
[John Lithgow] I knew that while I did
the first season of Harry Potter,
I would be turning 80 years old. [chuckles]
That meant that I would age to about 88
before it was all over.
This is an extremely difficult thing to contemplate.
[♪ light, upbeat music playing]
They're just an amazing ensemble.
All of them, Arabella,
and Alastair,
and Dom.
- [Lucy] What you think? You excited? - Yeah.
Do you want to come and sit down?
[John Lithgow] And they all adore each other.
I'm really excited to see how they grow
and how their artistry grows
and what kind of people they grow into.
♪♪
[John Lithgow] They're gonna grow up in this.
And, uh, and I'm gonna grow old with them.
[laughing]
[Janet McTeer] Theoretically, we could be working
for many years together
and they'll be young adults by then.
We want them to grow up thinking, "Wow!
"It might have been hard, it might have been difficult,
"it might have been tiring, but boy, it was good
"and so glad I did it.
It was so exciting to be a part of it."
- [train tracks rattling] - [narrator] And here we are.
What better place to end this journey
into the heart of Harry Potter
than where he begins his journey to Hogwarts?
Here, we're surrounded by both unbelievable scale,
along with the little things that make it all feel so real.
Talking about mind-blowing detail,
come and have a look at this, a tiny taste of what's to come.
[♪ majestic music playing]
[narrator] So, all aboard.
You might wanna hold your ears.
[shouting] It's about to get very loud!
[steam hissing]
[train whistle blowing]
This feels like my cue.
[♪ majestic music continues]
[train bell dinging]
[train whistle blowing]
So, my Dad was a prop master
on all of the, uh, eight original movies.
And I'm here to carry on the legacy.
The next generation of fans
being something very important to me
because my son is a big Harry Potter fan.
Uh, and so, I cannot let the little guys down,
cannot let the new generation of fans down.
I know it's really important.
My family worked on the original Harry Potter
and I get to carry on the legacy.
What a dream.
I met my wife on the third Harry Potter,
um, and now my son works for me.
So, it's-- it's been our life, really.
Well, I started my Harry Potter experience in 1999,
and 27 years later, I'm still here. [chuckles]
I remember the first day that I was filming,
we were on set on-- on Privet Drive,
and we had-- we had Harry's owl with him,
and I just sort of looked around
and it was such a "pinch me" moment.
There's been too many good moments to count,
to be honest, it's--
this has been a-- a year of highlights.