THE DESIGN OF...
Designing a sprawling school from scratch is no small feat. Making it magical is even tougher. Harry Potter production designer STUART CRAIG explains how he did it
Empire delves into the iconic designs of both franchises. Lots of pretty pictures here, my precious.
PRODUCTION DESIGNER STUART Craig had worked on big films before Harry Potter: epics like Gandhi and The English Patient, period dramas like The Elephant Man. But none of those came close to the scale of the work he would do across nine films set in the Wizarding World (he also did the first Fantastic Beasts movie). He designed goblin banks and magical high streets, triple-decker buses and haunted houses. But his biggest single challenge was to conceive and build the 1,000-year-old castle-school of Hogwarts, and then to adapt it to the needs of a still-evolving story under four different directors. So, was he ever kept up at night, paralysed by the challenge?
“Every time!” laughs Craig. “You have a good bit of reference but every time you sit there with a blank piece of paper. You make a mark, rub that out; make two marks, rub those out; and then it actually starts to take shape. It’s a magical process.”
ON THE FIRST FILM, CRAIG’S WORK GOT
a hefty boost from reality. That’s because the producers decided to shoot the majority of the film on location. Given Hogwarts’ age, says
Craig, “that meant there were very few places to go. We went to the two great secular institutions of Oxford and Cambridge, the cathedrals, the best public school in these islands. We took [those] as the standard, a kind of model. That’s what good feature-film sets should be, really; they should contain ingredients of your choosing but the inspiration of the great buildings, the architectural detail, all helps.”
That real-world model gave the inexperienced child actors something to react to and established a sort of parallel wizarding history for Craig to build upon: one that still had Gothic architecture and the Victorian period styles that influenced Diagon Alley (based partly on York’s Shambles and Brighton’s Lanes, but less prettified than either) and Gringotts Bank (initially played by Australia House in London). These touchstones formed a base for visual effects like moving portraits and swivelling staircases — though that was an unsettling prospect for Craig 20 years ago. “Being a generation older than most, [VFX are] so commonplace now, but I worried about it because — in my ignorance really — I didn’t trust how smooth and successful it would be.”
One of his easiest decisions was setting Hogwarts itself in the Glencoe valley in the Highlands, and building an enormous model of the school designed to blend into that landscape — though the main unit didn’t spend much time there until Prisoner Of Azkaban.
“I don’t think Jo [Rowling] ever specified Scotland as the background to all this, but certainly she went with it when she saw it for the first time. On the third movie we were up [there] and it poured, it was really wet. An American producer with us was greatly upset that we would choose such a damp and awful place. But it [looked] terrific, a real step up in terms of scale and scope.” It wasn’t always an easy place to shoot — keeping Hagrid’s hut in one piece in the torrential conditions could be a challenge — but Glencoe offered a spectacular location for Craig’s sets, like the covered bridge to the standing stones that first appeared in the third film. “It’s particularly gratifying to put something in a real landscape. And that [bridge] went together rather satisfactorily.”
Similar weather problems are just one of the reasons why, after the first film, Hogwarts kept as many sets as possible in its forever home at Leavesden Studios, just north of London, in the backlot around the studio and in the Black Park behind it. The film’s producers had grown confident that they’d be adapting these books for a while, and put up sets that would, in some cases (the Gryffindor common room, for example) stand for a decade — and even longer when the studio made them a tourist attraction. Not that Leavesden was always a walk in the park in those days — a World War II airfield that had barely been upgraded since, the studio was cold, draughty and often leaky before it was refurbished entirely post-potter. “It was in shocking condition,” remembers Craig. “Sheets of corrugated iron, some asbestos still in the walls. Muddy, cold. But there was so much space! That was its great joy.”
All that space would be called into use during filming, particularly on the back-to-back shoots for the two-part finale, with the production overflowing Leavesden’s main soundstages into the annex building at the bottom of its runway, which became the setting for Bill Weasley’s wedding and a reconstructed Gringotts Bank, while the main stages were filled with the Great Hall, Room Of Requirement, or bits of the Ministry Of Magic, easily distinguishable by their dark-green subway tile.
But the move indoors, the ever-developing story of the books (still being published at the time) and a rotating coterie of directors meant that endless, sometimes contradictory demands were made of the Hogwarts sets — a problem that Craig and his crew eventually solved by not solving it.
THE FIRST BIG CONTINUITY CRUNCH
came on the third film, with a short scene that involved Harry, Ron and Hermione walking into the Great Hall. It should not have presented any great challenge: just a few kids chattering on their way into the building for a meal. Just one problem: the films had already established that the entry to the Hall was via the grand Renaissance staircase at Christ Church College, Oxford. The extra storey beneath it was built into the enormous model of Hogwarts used as a reference for the whole complex, and into the lighting plan, and now the script called for a simple walk directly in from outside. Craig wasn’t quite sure how to break the news to incoming director Alfonso Cuarón: the scene in the script would have to be tweaked or there’d be a few days in Oxford to shoot. “I remember screwing up the courage to go to Alfonso and explain that this is what he’d inherited. He was
less worried than I was! So we opted to do it [without the stairs], and I don’t think anyone really sees any discrepancy there.”
In a world where newspaper images move and bathrooms can be haunted, who says that architecture has to be permanent? From that point, Hogwarts became a malleable place: consistent in its feel but not necessarily in the details of its layout. The inside of the Great Hall was relatively stable (apart from minor things like the placement of House tables) and Dumbledore’s study was a fixed point. But Hogwarts and its grounds shifted more or less every film, with at least three bridges (covered, suspension and stone) appearing at different times and those swivelling staircases that posed such a health and safety hazard in the first film barely used by the cast later. “Engineering-wise, they don’t make any sense! They swing from one landing to the next. You can, as we did, storyboard a bit and try to make it make sense but there’s so much going on, with creatures loose from the pictures around them, giraffes and hippopotamus; nobody gives a damn about whether the staircase structurally hangs together.” As Harry and his friends grew, the school changed around them — and if the stairs didn’t structurally hang together, the metaphors did.
That clear sense of what’s important (or not) in a magical building is perhaps why Craig lasted as long as he did on the saga. “I made a point of saying [to the directors] every time that, ‘You may believe you need me but you don’t,’” he says. “This could begin and end with somebody new [in my job] very easily, invisibly. But fortunately I was one of the few who stayed connected through the long periods in-between.” Maybe the directors sensed that the continuity of the design work was one of the steady elements that allowed so much variation in tone and focus elsewhere. Certainly they were all smart enough to see Craig as an important fixture at Hogwarts. Either way, that long association allowed Craig to see what each new director brought to the mix.
“Chris [Columbus] turned up the volume [from the book]. He saw that, legitimately, as a way through to the kids and their performance. Everything was strong and simple lines. Then Alfonso Cuarón — and I think many people would agree — made visually the best of the films. He was a delight. He was just very interested in everything the art department did and could offer.”
If Columbus established the world, Cuarón gave the later directors permission to follow his example and rewrite the rules with each new film, changing school uniforms, hairstyles and tone as necessary as they went. “Mike Newell made a funny film, he’s a funny man. The whole business of preparation for the Yule Ball was terrific. The scene of Ron Weasley dancing with Maggie Smith couldn’t be better.” By the time that David Yates came aboard, the priority had to be scale and size: the danger got bigger, and so did the sets — especially for the devastating Battle Of Hogwarts that capped off the saga and saw parts of the school that had stood for a decade, or possibly for hundreds of years, reduced to rubble. enjoyed tearing down the castle he had built, but he was a little disappointed by a few details that never made it on screen. Two sculptures that stood outside Dumbledore’s office, one of Hogwarts’ founder and the other depicting its architect, were never really featured, and a glorious telescope chair designed for Dumbledore in the first film sat unused for the saga’s entire run. “The design idea was that Richard Harris would sit in [this] spherical, 1960s chair, with the lens piece right up in his eye, and then the introductory shot would have him step out and down the mini sweeping staircase in his library. It was deemed to be too long a walk to his desk. I can see why. On every film set you’ve ever been on, people will say it’s ‘too much shoe leather’.”
Craig takes considerable pride in his favourite set, Dumbledore’s office and library (although he laughs that the shelves are full of “London Yellow Pages covered in phony vellum”), but, a true perfectionist, even there he has tiny reservations looking back. “As you sit at Dumbledore’s desk and look up, there’s the frieze under the floor above, and if I could go back I’d decorate [around] it with some Gothic masonry. So that’s a missed opportunity. There aren’t many, I will say.”
That’s the glory of spending a decade or more in one enchanted, ever-shifting building. You get a chance to pick up on minor mistakes, to explore every nook and cranny of it, and really make yourself at home in the place. The productiondesign process may be magical even in normal times, but there’s never been an environment quite as conducive to it as this one.