In a new interview with the San Fransisco Chronicle, Production Designer for the Potter films, Stuart Craig, talks about set designs for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

“In the earliest movies, we consulted J.K. Rowling pretty regularly,” says production designer Stuart Craig, 68, a three-time Oscar winner. “Actually, very first thing, she gave me a map of Hogwarts: The lake, the forest, the station, the road, how it went through the village. So she very carefully set it up – in broad strokes, obviously – and set us on the road, literally, to the correct geography. Inevitably, the book has to be so condensed. There’s been a great deal of tolerance on the part of the public – at least I think so. I could be proved wrong, still.”

“One thing I like to do, and I hope it’s served the movies well, is to find a really convincing logic for these magical people in these magical spaces that have a real kind of credibility – and I’m thinking of the Ministry of Magic, which features very strongly in ‘Part 1,’ ” he says. “This is an underground world; this is a ministry, so we went to the real ministries, the muggle ministries – Whitehall, in London – and decided that our magical ministry was kind of a parallel universe to these real ministries.”

“The Weasley house, you may remember, was very badly burned at the end of ‘The Half-Blood Prince’ (2009). So Arthur Weasley has rebuilt his house pretty much in the same form as it was before,” Craig says of the site of the wedding of Bill Weasley and Fleur Delacour. “The wedding tent, where the reception is held, rather than make it an extension of the house, which is rather eccentric, homemade, we decided to make it rather elegant. In fact, to make it very French. Since the tradition is the father of the bride paid for the wedding, it was quite feasible that Mr. Delacour would have paid for this and insisted on some French elegance and some French style. It’s lined with silk and beautiful, floating candelabra. So it’s a nice contrast with the house.”