Credit: Warner Bros.The director of four Harry Potter films has trashed one of the franchise’s most popular entries.
Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter), Emma Watson (Hermione Granger), and Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) may have been staples throughout all eight Harry Potter movies, but things were a little less consistent behind the scenes.
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When Christopher Columbus declined to return to direct a third Harry Potter film after Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), the franchise was handed over to Alfonso Cuarón for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), Mike Newell for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), and to David Yates for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) the remainder of the series.
Not only was Yates at the helm for four of the franchise’s entries, but he also oversaw its highest-grossing movie – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) – which held the title of the most profitable Warner Bros. movie ever until Barbie (2023) kicked the wizard off the top spot this summer.
Deathly Hallows: Part 2 also holds the title of the best-reviewed film of the entire series, with 96% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. However, Yates also directed the franchise’s worst-reviewed film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010), which scored 77% (which, objectively, is still pretty good).
It turns out that Yates himself isn’t overly keen on the latter, despite being its director. In a recent interview with Collider, he explained that the film’s wandering structure proved challenging while editing.
“The great challenge of that film was it didn’t actually have a third act,” he said. “It kind of ran out of steam halfway through, and Mark [Day, the editor] and I would often sit there kind of figuring it out and saying: ‘This movie doesn’t have a third act. How are we gonna…? Hang on, this is crazy. It doesn’t have a third act.'”
Fortunately, Yates and Day put in the effort to trick audiences into feeling like the film ended on a high. “We noodled Part One to bits to try and feel that the end of the movie had an escalation when, in fact, it’s jazz hands,” he explained. “There’s not much going on at the end in the second half of the movie.”
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The irony is that for many Harry Potter fans – especially book loyalists – Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is a favorite. This is something that amazes Yates to this day. “People still say to me: ‘My favorite film is Hallows Part One, mate. That was so amazing. It felt like a European road movie.’ And I’m going: ‘Yeah, but the work we did in the edit was unbelievable.'”
Deathly Hallows: Part 1 ends with (spoiler alert, if you haven’t caught the film in the past 13 years) Dobby sacrificing his life to save Harry and his friends from Malfoy Manor, while Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) breaks into Dumbledore’s (Michael Gambon) tomb to steal the Elder Wand. It makes for an impactful conclusion on the big screen – but it turns out it took endless effort for that to be the case.
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