In yet another new interview, Rhys Ifans has talked about his experience filming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

“That was great,” he said, beaming. “When you’re an English actor and you get the ‘Harry Potter’ call– it’s like Batman, you know? You have a phone, you have a normal phone, and then you have one that is made out of wood. That’s the ‘Potter’ people. They call you up [and] you get your wand out, you put your cloak on and off you go. It’s a real honor. It’s like getting knighted or something.”

“It’s such a vast world that they’ve created. You literally are entering another world anyway when you walk on the set,” Ifans explained. “The security on the gate, they have their own zoo– if they want an owl, they call an owl in, it knows the way to the set, it comes on its own. The owl has a publicist. It’s just fantastic. That, of course, in Los Angeles is par for the course, but it is the biggest sort of brand we have in England.”

The “Potter” movies sport a sizable British cast, which means that just about everyone has some sort of shared work history with everyone else. “You just sit with all these actors you’ve starved with in the theater… sitting there dressed as wizards [and] having wand-offs. So it’s very pleasantly surreal.”

The weekend of March 19th is going to be VERY exciting!  abc Family is having yet another Harry Potter weekend, but what makes it fun is that they are playing the extended Order of the Phoenix (in case you missed it on abc last Saturday) AND showing a preview of Deathly Hallows (the one that was on the Half-Blood Prince dvd)!!!!

Spend three days enjoying every spell, snitch and scar-burning moment of the first five films in the Harry Potter franchise with ABC Family’s “Harry Potter Weekend” on Friday, March 19 through Sunday, March 21. The weekend event also includes the basic cable premiere of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” featuring deleted scenes not included in the original film version.

Along with a weekend full of wizarding fun, ABC Family will be premiering a two-minute never-seen-before on television sneak peek of the upcoming film, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” throughout the weekend event.

Friday, March 19th
• (7:30 – 11:00 PM ET/PT) “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”

Saturday, March 20th
• (9:00 AM – 12:30 PM ET/PT) “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”
• (12:30 – 4:30 PM ET/PT) “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”
• (4:30 – 7:30 PM ET/PT) “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”
• (7:30 – 11:00 PM ET/PT) “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”

Sunday, March 21st
• (9:30 AM – 1:30 PM ET/PT) “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”
• (1:30 – 4:30 PM ET/PT) “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”
• (4:30 – 8:00 PM ET/PT) “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”
• (8:00 – 11:00 PM ET/PT) “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”

In an interview with ComingSoon Ciaran Hinds (Aberforth Dumbledore) and Rhys Ifans (Xenophilius Lovegood) talked about what it was like filming  Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows. Ciaran said:

“I was made to feel very welcome, but I was there for a specific part that required just one scene and then pop up once with a wand, but apart from that, it’s just one scene with a little dialogue to give some exposition about Dumbledore’s past life. I had the joy of sharing the scene with three… well, they’re not kids anymore… Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint. They were very charming, very gracious, made you feel very welcome and you’re aware. Here I am at a certain age with all my experience and these kids really know what they’re doing, they know their characters and here I am saying, ‘Who the hell am I… apart from Michael Gambon’s brother?’ It’s a lovely experience and the director is a very soft Yorkshire man, he’s not one of these guys, ‘Come on!’ It’s very considered and thought about. I saw him working with the younger ones, giving them little pointers, never pushing, just suggesting about development, and here I am, part of what everyone has to offer. You really have to say they’re confident and they know who they are, they know what they’re doing and we have to ask if we’re alright.”

Rhys added:

“Harry Potter has a history. They’ve read the book and they’ve got kids to answer to, these people. That’s a different kettle of fish, it’s like being called up. You get a phone call, and they’ll say, ‘Listen, the Queen’s a bit lonely tonight. Fancy popping over in your favorite underwear?’ It’s like the call-up, and it’s so funny. You get on set and you see all these actors who you’ve either admired from afar or more often than not, actors you’ve worked with before, all sitting there, dressed up as wizards, having wand-offs, and then bitching about other actors who didn’t get the call-up. It’s just such a surreal situation to be in. I was really genuinely proud to have been invited to be part of that whole machine.”

In a new interview with ComingSoon Jason Isaacs has talked about the final parts in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows! Spoilers ahead!

“They made the last book into two films, and it was a fantastic experience because everyone who is left alive is back… and even some of the dead people,” he said with a sly smile. “There is one long sequence where everyone who is left standing is there when the forces of good meet the forces of evil.”

“I think over the years that they’ve been adapting these incredibly popular and successful books, they’ve increasingly become more and more confident in their ability to make great cinema experiences out of it and where they need to change the book or the central thrust of the story, they do it now with real aplomb and with Jo Rowling’s blessing,” he continued. “Everybody is very savvy to the notion that this is a much-loved franchise and this will be the end of an eighth film, and it needs to have weight and substance and you need to feel drained by the end of it. It’s a ten-year roller coaster ride, not a two-hour roller coaster ride, and we all know it and we all felt it, and it was in the air while we were shooting it.”

“This franchise goes out in an epic way,” he concluded. “I think the end of the films will be a fantastically cinematic and visual feast and it will more than satisfy the readers of the books, but what you won’t get is the book on screen. You will get something more and different.”

“It’s very sad for me,” he admitted when asked about how he felt about the movies coming to an end. “I’m a particularly sentimental fool anyway so I was already nostalgic for the history of Harry Potter while I was still making it, and I knew the end was coming. I was always cognizant of the fact I was going to have to pack up my furry friend of a wig and stick it in a box and say goodbye to the cane and any magic powers. All the joy was tinged with sadness for me.”

Thanks very much to SnitchSeeker we have a bunch of photos from the Swinley Forest filming taking place this week!  See the photos here in the gallery!  Their source also spoke to someone on set and gained the following information:

Firstly he said the reason for the security is that if a person or even just a torch or camera flash gets in a shot it can ruin a whole take. [He] told me they were having 150 extras on set that night, which explained the many mini-buses we saw going through the forest, and the huge catering marquee at the WB base. He said no main cast were due in that night although I noticed on Matt Lewis’s twitter that he was “rockin in from work at 4am”.

They were filming chase scenes with freerunners – the Snatchers? (he called them Catchers) – running down a slope (i think there’s a picture of the slope) towards a crowd of extras, I heard lots of shouting (“Go, go, go!” that kind of thing) which sounded like they were rehearsing the running.

They were going to be filming this till the early hours of the morning, but it eventually would be edited down to a clip less than 30 seconds long. I assume this could only be something for the Battle, with the many people and the section of Hogwarts nearby.

Finally he said that some main cast would definitely be on set filming for about an hour on Monday night, and they hoped to be all done with filming by Tuesday.

Ciaran Hinds has done another new interview where he talks about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with Collider.com.  He talks about Potter at the beginning of the interview and then another film after that.