Harry Potter: How do you end a movie franchise?

By Tim Masters Entertainment and arts correspondent, BBC News

The final Harry Potter film is the first of the franchise in 3D

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As the final Harry Potter film arrives in cinemas, its producers and directors explain how they steered the world's most successful film franchise to its conclusion. But what does studio Warner Bros have lined up after Potter?

There is a chapter in the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows novel called The Seven Potters.

Any book about making of the Harry Potter movies is likely to contain a chapter entitled The Three Davids.

Producers David Barron and David Heyman, and director David Yates have been the triumvirate in creative control of the Harry Potter franchise for the final four films.

Now, as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 hits cinemas worldwide, they are adjusting to life without JK Rowling's boy wizard.

David Barron, David Yates and David Heyman at the New York premiere of Deathly Hallows Part 2

"It's been an unbelievable journey," says Heyman, whose Heyday Films production company has made the Potter films from day one, with Warner Bros providing the financial muscle.

"I've been doing this for 12 years solid and it's been the gift of all gifts," Heyman adds. "For a producer, that's such stability."

The franchise has conjured up more than $6.4bn (£4bn) worldwide, making it the highest grossing film series, ahead of James Bond and Star Wars.

Industry commentators have observed the Potter films' distinctive tone is a product of Warner Bros decision to defer control of the production to a small British team.

Heyman admits the success of the first film in 2001 made that relationship easier.

"Warners in general are quite tough, as all studios are, before you get to the starting line. Then they let you make the film as long as you work within the budget.

"They have been respectful of us and allowed us to make the films we have. One of my sadnesses is that I will never have it so good again."

Last week's world premiere in London was an emotional time for the cast

He praises the studio's strategy of giving creative control to directors like Alfonso Cuaron (Prisoner of Azkaban) and Christopher Nolan (Batman series).

"They are a film-maker's studio. People with a point of view - that's what they tend to like."

Heyman, who worked in LA during the 1980s for Warner Bros and United Artists, set up Heyday Films in the UK in 1996, and secured the rights to Harry Potter the following year.

Apart from the Harry Potter films, Heyman's producing credits include Yes Man, starring Jim Carrey, science-fiction thriller I Am Legend, with Will Smith, and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

He is currently producing Gravity, starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, with Cuaron directing.

"I'm not easing into unemployment yet," says Heyman. "I view it not as the end but the end of the beginning."

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“Start Quote

I view it not as the end but the end of the beginning.”

David Heyman

Deathly Hallows director David Yates describes Heyman as the "guardian" of JK Rowling's boy wizard on the big screen.

"When I started on Order of the Phoenix, there were areas that David was very sensitive about. We would haggle and negotiate about what I could and couldn't do.

"It got subsequently easier as we built up a relationship of trust over the films until it got to the point where he left me more on my own towards the end."

Producer David Barron, says Yates, would keep him in line on the budget.

"We were a good team and they were always my first audience. I like having something to bounce against. It's healthy.

"You see some directors who become very successful surrounded by people who only say, 'Yes' - and then the standard of the work goes down."

The Merseyside-born director won his first Bafta for BBC period drama The Way We Live Now. In 2003, he directed the drama series State of Play, and the following year Sex Traffic, for which he won another Bafta.

Cauldron of cash

Yates, who directed the last four of the eight Potter films, admits he might go through "a bit of a dip" now the films are over.

Guardian film critic Jason Solomons gives his verdict on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

"It's been physically and mentally hard to do four films back to back, but it's been fun."

Having been a cauldron of cash for 10 years, how is the end of the Potter films likely to affect Warner Bros?

Producer David Barron is no doubt the studio will survive the loss of its top earner.

"I'm sure they'd like it if there was another one, but they've got plenty of material that I think will be very audience friendly."

He names Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises, Bryan Singer's Jack the Giant Killer and Tim Burton's Dark Shadows among the candidates.

Also on Warner Bros list of releases for 2012 are Clash of the Titans 2; Clint Eastwood's J Edgar, starring Leonardo DiCaprio; Superman: Man of Steel - and the first of Peter Jackson's Hobbit films.

While Barron doesn't envisage any more Potter novels from JK Rowling - "I think it's a full-stop for her" - he does see the "three Davids" working together again.

"I'd like to make a great psychological thriller, or a Western - if it's good character-driven material we'd all be interested I think."

Barron and Heyman have recently produced thriller Page Eight, written and directed by David Hare and starring Potter regulars Ralph Fiennes and Michael Gambon.

Heyman points out that while the Potter films are finished, the franchise is very much alive.

"They are already talking about where the DVD launch is going to be, and Warners will find a way to repackage in every which way the ultimate collection.

"And I'm sure there will be Potter conventions..."

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 is out on 15 July

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Commentary

I grew up with Harry potter in a lot of respects and his aging coincided with a lot of my own aging.

Jumping on the bandwagon of the movie at Prisoner of Azkaban started a ride that didn't end til I read those last words of the last book and it will finally conclude when i see the last seconds of that last movie.

There really only is one thing left once a good adventure has ended, to find another and thank the first for the amazing ride you went on.

Harry, Hermione, and Ron are all influential to millions of people world wide and now they will be stamped in the hallmarks of history for endless time.

To be associated with it is to be part of the impression itself.

One day you can tell your children, "Yes, I was part of that era, and yes Harry and his friends are a part of me", as you hand them their own journey and let them follow in your own footsteps.

From writer with love

A POINT OF VIEW

Ever since the art of letter writing was perfected in the Renaissance, private letters and intimate secrets have gone hand in hand. Lisa Jardine reflects on the art and dangers of writing secret missives - from love notes and confidential documents to illicit text messages.

Among the 35 or so luminous paintings that survive by 17th century Dutch artist Jan Vermeer, six of the best-known take as their subject a young woman reading a love letter.

Sometimes she is alone, sometimes a female servant hovers discreetly at her shoulder. In some she is engrossed in reading, in others she is absorbed in composing a letter herself.

Jan Vermeer's paintings often portrayed women reading love letters.

Where the maid is poised to carry the completed missive to its destination, she holds the precious page, folded and sealed with wax, against her bodice, the name of its intended recipient concealed from us.

How do we know these are love letters? Well, to begin with, the young woman is to all intents and purposes alone, in a period when decorum required that when a single woman received a written communication a parent or relative ought to be present. Often a letter intended for a daughter would be enclosed within one addressed to her father or mother, respectfully requesting that it be passed to her.

Usually the young woman concerned would then have read her letter aloud. So here we have a young woman reading a message which has apparently been delivered directly to her by a personal maid, and is pored over unsupervised.

Erotic intensity

This helps to explain why in each of these paintings the expression on the young woman's face lies somewhere between the complicit and the furtive. Besides, the paintings are atmospherically infused with an aura of delicious secrecy. The light flooding through a half-open window illuminates her face, which is filled with barely-disguised anticipation. Something illicit is going on here, that is for sure.

Fiction of the 17th and 18th Centuries, often uses the dramatic possibilities offered by covert exchanges of letters to heighten erotic intensity. In Eliza Haywood's popular amatory novel Love in Excess, published in 1720, handwriting is the clue that gives away the lover's identity, threatening the reputation of the sender.

Recognition of the handwriting can add a note of conviction, or at any rate an element of pleasure, to a letter Erasmus of Rotterdam

The devastatingly attractive Count D'elmont, in some confusion because he is simultaneously being pursued by two desirable young women, returns the wrong love letter to his rejected sweetheart Amena. She recognizes the handwriting as that of her best friend, thereby discovering to her dismay that her trusted confidante is in fact her secret rival.

Samuel Richardson's 18th-century epistolary novels Pamela and Clarissa are both couched in the form of intricate exchanges of intimate letters, in which passions and betrayals are candidly revealed, to the delight or dismay of the letters' recipients.

Closer to our own day, the plot of Edgar Allen Poe's short story, The Purloined Letter, turns on the detective Dupin's recognising the handwriting on a fragment of a compromising letter stolen from a lady of Royal status.

An obliging letter

In his textbook, On the Education of boys, the 16th-century pedagogue Erasmus of Rotterdam stresses how important it is that those in high places should be able to write a good legible hand themselves, rather than relying on a secretary:

"Recognition of the handwriting can add a note of conviction, or at any rate an element of pleasure, to a letter [he writes]. One should remember that the apostle Paul sent his Letter to the Galatians entirely in his own handwriting.

When we get letters in their own hand from friends and fellow-scholars, how we welcome them and seem to be listening to their very voices and to be looking at them face to face."

Hand-written letters are harder to counterfeit. Erasmus's Treatise on Letter Writing, which went through numerous editions in Latin and the vernaculars after its first publication in the early 1520s, defines a familiar letter as "a kind of mutual exchange of speech between absent friends".

FIND OUT MORE... A Point of View, with Lisa Jardine, is on Fridays on Radio 4 at 2050 GMT and repeated on Sundays at 0850 GMT Or listen to it here later

Starting with simple instructions on the formal Latin ways of beginning and ending a letter, he goes on to provide lists of phrases to be used in writing letters of all types, from a "friendly consolation with a rebuke" to "a letter of invective", "an obliging letter" or a "letter of entreaty".

Few of us can still find time to write these kinds of carefully crafted familiar letters nowadays. The finer points of epistolary exchange are no longer observed. And the only attempt I have made to dissemble my own handwriting recently was on the Valentine's Day card I sent my husband last weekend.

Yet the situation remains very much as it was four centuries ago when it comes to interception and inadvertent disclosure of confidential correspondence. Now as then, reputations are wrecked by a single indiscreet communication which has fallen into the wrong hands being circulated and broadcast to a wider public.

Electronic subterfuge

Except that nowadays, amorous liaisons are more likely to be betrayed by emails and text messages than by purloined letters.

Golfer Tiger Woods is just one imprudent husband whose infidelity was discovered when his wife read passionate text messages to another woman on his mobile phone. Footballer Ashley Cole allegedly "bombarded a pretty secretary with nude photos and raunchy text messages" in 2008, sending "hundreds of texts over a two-month period". Now these have been passed to a tabloid newspaper, and he too has some explaining to do to his wife.

Handwritten letters are harder to counterfeit

Our 18th-century amorous fiction-writer Eliza Haywood would have relished the way in which intimate exchanges of electronic messages, conducted with all the careful subterfuge Vermeer's young women used to conceal their love letters, once suddenly disclosed, turn amatory worlds upside-down.

There are, however, some contexts in which real letters, set out in the way people used to be taught to do at school, are still sent and received. These are the ones written by lawyers acting on a client's behalf, and generally dispatched to other lawyers acting for another client.

Here again the electronic age makes it harder than ever before to keep the most sensitive of letters confidential. Although lawyer's communications continue to be composed on paper, they then tend to be scanned, and dispatched electronically. It is a simple matter for such a letter to be circulated in multiple copies at the click of a mouse.

Virtually indestructible

Earlier this month, we learned that Lord Neuberger's ruling in the Binyam Mohamed case had been delivered with a crucial paragraph deleted, after a last-minute intervention by a top lawyer representing the government. Having read the draft judgment (which was sent out electronically, but encrypted), the QC "protested over the strength of a judge's 'exceptionally damaging' criticism of the British security service", and Lord Neuberger was persuaded to modify his ruling. The following day, the letter sent by Jonathan Sumption QC to Lord Neuberger, could be viewed in its entirety on a reputable newspaper's website.

Both the deletion and the leaked letter caused a furore among the participants in the legal action. Those acting for Binyam Mohamed deplored the alteration to Lord Neuberger's ruling; those acting for the government demanded and got an apology from the QC who had released the letter to the press. No doubt more under-cover documents will emerge before the matter is settled, but of one thing I personally feel sure. I prefer to live in a country whose judiciary generally supports our right of free access to information, rather than one which would have kept the entire matter tidily under wraps.

Letters used to be considered a genre in themselves, a literary form. Intellectuals and artists corresponded with one another in the hope or expectation that their letters might be preserved for posterity, and would one day appear in print. Today, by contrast, we treat electronic communications - emails and texts - as the most fleeting and ephemeral of things, barely worth dignifying with our attention with regard to punctuation, spelling or grammar.

The humble love letter is being replaced by text and email

Yet these messages are virtually indestructible, lingering on back-up discs and in electronic archives long after we have forgotten we ever wrote them. These are the fatal exchanges that may eventually come home to haunt us, months and years after they were sent.

In the 17th century when letter-writing was part of everybody's education and their composition a matter of pride, their survival was a matter of chance. As such they provide an erratic window into the past. But now, when we hardly give a second thought to how we express ourselves in an email or text, we can never be sure that that missive will not eventually be retrieved and closely scrutinised in the public domain. Caveat scripter - writer beware.

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Harry Potter actors look to the future - My Take on the Series and Movies as a Whole

Harry Potter actors look to the future

Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint talk Half-Blood Prince, Hallows and the future

By Tim Masters Entertainment correspondent, BBC News

With filming on the final two parts of the Harry Potter series under way, the young actors who have grown up on the set and become global superstars are now considering their next steps.

We asked them whether it would be a case of deathly silence after the Deathly Hallows...

The child actors were cast in the summer of 2000

As you might expect, Daniel Radcliffe - who has kept busy on both film and stage projects in between playing Harry - laughs off the idea that the rest of his life might be an anti-climax.

"No man, I've got kids to have yet!" he says excitedly, despite nursing a sore throat on the cold, cavernous film set at Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire.

"They're going to keep me busy if I do - which I hope I do at some point. I'm not planning on it soon - that's one of the things I'm really looking forward to doing."

The 20-year-old adds: "What's been cool is that I've been here when a lot of people here have had kids while on the film, and I've seen the change it's made in their life and how amazing it is."

His co-star Rupert Grint, 21, who plays Ron Weasley, says he has no doubt that Harry Potter will be the "biggest thing" he will be involved with.

"I make the most of it and enjoy it," he says.

Tom Felton on filming the saga's final films, what his future holds and how he has never seen Star Wars

"It is quite scary when this all ends because we're stepping out into the real world - it is quite a bubble I suppose, we've had these films to do every year and it's become quite a routine.

"I'm definitely going to miss it. It's been a great 10 years. I am quite keen to move on and see what else is out there."

Grint, speaking at the launch of the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince DVD, says he is interested in more parts like the "bad boy" role he gets to play in his forthcoming movie Cherrybomb.

The coming-of-age drama premiered at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, but failed to find a distributor.

Fans set up an online petition for its release, and producers now say a distribution deal has been signed, and the Belfast-set movie should be in cinemas in 2010.

I think it's just because I'm ginger they throw me into the frame Rupert Grint

"It's nice because it's so different," says Grint. "That's what attracted me to it - it wasn't really a conscious thing to move away.

"It was really fun to be on a different set and experience a whole different budget - it was quite a shock. I really enjoyed it and hopefully I will get to do more films like that."

He dismisses press speculation that he's in the running to play Prince Harry in a film called The Spare that's due to shoot next year.

"I think it's just because I'm ginger they throw me into the frame, but I haven't really heard anything about it," he says.

Actress Emma Watson, 19, who plays Hermione Granger, began studying at an American university in September, though she hasn't ruled out acting projects out of term-time.

Fellow actress Bonnie Wright, 18, has just begun a degree course in film and TV in London. She has played Ron's sister Ginny Weasley since the first film in 2001.

Personally I think a greater project is out there Bonnie Wright

Speaking on the set at Leavesden, she points out that she's spent more than half of her life working on Harry Potter.

"Although it has been massive," she says, "personally I think a greater project is out there. That's what makes me keep working, knowing that there's this project out there that I'm yet to do."

David Heyman, who has produced all of the Harry Potter films, is confident that the global stars that he's helped create will go on to further success.

"They've had a good structure here and at home, they are pretty solid kids," he says.

"They are going to go and have great fun - they are going to have great success. I'm sure they will thrive."

He adds: "I think they all know I'm here to support them, and if they ever want a chat I'll be there for them.

"Ultimately they've got to leave the fold and take flight - and I know they will."

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is out on DVD on 7 December

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Commentary

I loved the books and re-read the 3rd, 4th, and 5th books to get ready for the 6th and 7th ones. What's funny is i started by reading the 3rd book after seeing the first 2 movies. Then I read the 4th book and then the 5th. After a while I went back and read the first and second book and decided to reread the series continuing onwards to prepare for the newest 6th book.

The movie that is truest to the books is probably the 2nd one, Chamber of Secrets, which follows the book almost to the tee. My favorite book is probably the 4th one, Goblet of Fire. That's really the climax of the story and where it becomes an adult book.

My favorite movie was probably the 3rd one because of the overall feel and the creepiness we really don't witness again in any of the other movies.

The actors are great and the best actor hands down is the one who plays Ron; Rupert Grint I think his name is. He feels so natural on camera and everything seems so unscripted.

My favorite character in the series is probably either Hermione or Hagrid. Snape was definitely the most interesting one.

I hope all these actors do really well in the future and I wish them all the best. I also hope the writer of Harry potter starts up a new series that has nothing to do with Harry or magic.

Mantel named Booker prize winner

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Hilary Mantel's acceptance speech after winning the Man Booker Prize

Author Hilary Mantel has been named 2009 Man Booker Prize winner for her historical novel Wolf Hall.

Mantel, 57, beat five other shortlisted authors, including Sarah Waters and JM Coetzee, with her book based on Henry VIII's adviser Thomas Cromwell.

Judges praised the "extraordinary story-telling" of Mantle.

The author, who received the £50,000 prize at a ceremony at London's Guildhall, said it had taken her about 20 years to decide to write the book.

"I couldn't begin until I felt secure enough to say to my publisher - just what a publisher always wants to hear - 'this will take me several years you know'. But they took it on the chin," she said.

Mantel, who is now working on a sequel, also beat AS Byatt with the novel The Children's Book, Adam Foulds for The Quickening Maze and Simon Mawer for The Glass Room.

Waters was shortlisted for her book, The Little Stranger and Coetzee had been in the running for his fictionalised memoir Summertime.

"When I began the book I knew I had to do something very difficult, I had to interest the historians, I had to amuse the jaded palate of the critical establishment and most of all I had to capture the imagination of the general reader," Mantel said.

We thought it was an extraordinary piece of story-telling Chairman of judges James Naughtie

Chairman of judges James Naughtie said: "Our decision was based on the sheer bigness of the book. The boldness of its narrative, its scene setting.

"The extraordinary way that Hilary Mantel has created what one of the judges has said was a contemporary novel, a modern novel, which happens to be set in the 16th Century.

"We thought it was an extraordinary piece of story-telling."

Despite that, he revealed it had not been an "unanimous decision, but it was a decision with which we were all content".

Bookmakers favourite

Mantel, who was made CBE in 2006, saw her first novel, Every Day is Mother's Day, published in 1985.

Its sequel, Vacant Possession, followed a year later.

Hilary Mantel reads from Wolf Hall

In 1989 she won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for Fludd, then A Place of Greater Safety scooped the Sunday Express Book Of The Year award in 1993.

Three years later Mantel was presented with the Hawthornden Prize for An Experiment in Love.

She was also shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction, both in 2006, for the novel Beyond Black.

Mantel had been the bookmaker's favourite to win the award.

William Hill had offered odds at 10/11 - the shortest odds it has ever given a book to win the prize.

Ion Trewin, literary director of the Booker Prizes, said the last time a favourite walked off with the prize was Yann Martel's Life of Pi in 2002.

Naughtie was joined on the judging panel by biographer and critic Lucasta Miller; Michael Prodger, literary editor of the Sunday Telegraph; Professor John Mullan, academic, journalist and broadcaster; and Sue Perkins, comedian, journalist and broadcaster.

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction, first awarded in 1969, promotes the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book of the year.

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