The Wizarding World

In praise of watching the credits

There was a lot of comfort-watching for the Metropolitan Editorial Board in the last month. A combination of illness, Christmas and middle-age meant that a lot of time was spent supine on the sofa, gazing slack-jawed at the TV.

One of those comfort watches was Shakespeare, another was Line of Duty, and another was the Harry Potter films. Not all of them, we weren’t that ill, just the later David Yates directed instalments: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (although only the first part of the latter, because the denouement was too frantic for our fragile senses).

As ever, rewatching a well thumbed (eyed?) work makes you start noticing things you hadn’t picked up on before. This time it was the absolutely stellar work of Production Designer Stuart Craig.

It was the stunning design on the interiors of the Ministry of Magic that made us look up his name - all dark green tiles and gold fittings like a ladies loo in Harrods in the ’70s, but Craig was Production Designer on the whole movie series. Indeed he’s become so integral the to look and feel of Rowling’s world that she now insists he’s involved in the design of anything Harry Potter, including the theme parks.

---

---

There’s some division of opinion over Harry Potter among the Editorial Board of The Metropolitan. I’m a genre geek and hence somewhat snotty about it, inevitably. I’m about the same age as Rowling and grew up reading many of the same Puffin books as I suspect she did, full of magical schools and duelling wizards: Eva Ibbotson, Jill Murphy, Diana Wynne Jones, Joan Aitken, Margaret Mahy, Susan Cooper and Ursula Le Guin. Oh, and let’s throw in Roald Dahl, C. S. Lewis and J. P. Martin for gender balance. Having fallen in the cauldron as a child and hence being fully saturated with magical schools, chosen one narratives and fantasy worlds, Rowling’s world-building can feel somewhat second-hand and her plotting a bit ‘this magical gadget can also do this one weird thing I hadn’t told you about yet but which conveniently solves the current plot problems’.

If you haven’t spent your childhood arguing about the precise relationship between the goblins in The Hobbit and the orcs of Lord of the Rings, though, she does an amazing job of pulling all these pulp tropes together into a beautifully constructed whole and sparking a gripping, page turning life into them. Like you needed to be told that. What with her being one of the most successful authors in the world and everything.

What Craig does, though, is give this world a magically concrete reality. The films have some properly beautiful settings, the aforementioned Ministry of Magic, the shabby-chic interior of the Black family house, Snape’s home study, all dark blue book spines, but they also have character. Craig’s magical world is persistently ragged and skewhiff, either aged or tilted or both, at angles to the normal and of an alternate tradition of design.

Here is also where we need to acknowledge the amazing teams who built these designs, both physical and digital, and decry the streaming services that hustle you on to the next film without letting you watch the credits. Especially when I’m looking for my childhood friend Matthew Harlow, who worked in practical effects on the movies.

The magic is also greatly helped by Rowling’s admirable insistence that everything be filmed in Britain. We couldn’t quite pin down who the location scouts were for the series but they were presumably on a retainer from Visit Britain, finding all the most curious and visually striking bits of the islands, from Malham pavements to Surbiton station.

David Yates is primarily thought of as a director of actors, rather than an image maker, and the dramatic establishing shots of scenery were presumably covered by second units anyway, but they play a key part in creating a sense not just of a fantastical world, but of a hidden one as well. This is scenery that is recognisably local but tantalizingly magical.

Together with the design it creates a concrete sense of an actual whole other world just round the corner from our own. Turn quickly enough on a London street and you might just catch a glimpse of it, out of the corner of your eye.

The core of the story, after all, lies in the characters and Rowling’s determined subversion of ‘chosen one’ tropes or individual action and hero worship, instead valourising team work, mutual support and friendship, concentrating on the central characters and their intimate relationships. But the settings, both designed and natural, create an epic, mythic experience around this core.

They’re also cinematic, of course. It’ll be interesting to see how these aspects of the storytelling are approached in the proposed TV series, traditionally better at the intimate than the epic (and yes, I’m looking at you Rings of Power). Although Rowling will no doubt once more summon Stuart Craig to work his magic once more. We’ll be watching the credits to check.

---

We’ve covered wizard’s schools before, in Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea series: