Variety reports that the Harry Potter creative team will be receiving the Cinematic Imagery Award at ADG’s 16th Annual Excellence in Production Design Awards on February 4th. The creative team consists of J.K. Rowling, producers David Heyman and David Barron, director David Yates, screenwriter Steve Kloves, art director Neil Lamont, production designer Stuart Craig and set decorator Stephenie McMillan.

“Their phenomenal success is due to a unity of vision and the masterful wizardry of the franchise’s creator, producers, screenwriter and art direction family,” said ADG President Thomas A. Walsh.This is the first time the ADG has given this award to a film series.

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J.K. Rowling wrote an article for the latest issue of the Writers Guild’s WGAW Written By magazine about her friendship with Harry Potter screenwriter Steve Kloves.  A snippet may be read below and the full article may be read here.

The important thing to know is that I had complete confidence in him, from that one meeting in L.A. He’d said enough during those few hours together to convince me that he had a real connection to the characters. As we subsequently agreed during our decade-plus email conversation about the books, when you strip away all of the diversionary magic, the Potter novels boil down to the characters; our relationship with them and theirs with each other.

—

Actually, I’ve just remembered the only time he did get something wrong, and it was a funny one. We were at a script read-through for Half-Blood Prince at Leavesden, so for once we were side-by-side in the same room. I hadn’t read the very latest draft, so I was hearing it for the first time. When Dumbledore started reminiscing about a beautiful girl he’d known in his youth, I scribbled DUMBLEDORE’S GAY on my script and shoved it sideways to Steve. And we both sat there smirking for a bit.

A small scan of the article may be seen below:

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The New York Times has another new interview with screenwriter Steve Kloves where he talks about his experience working on the Harry Potter films.  Producer David Heyman also chimes in with his thoughts about splitting the book into two films.

“I took my cues from Jo,” Mr. Kloves said, speaking of Ms. Rowling. “The first day I met her, she said: ‘I know the movies can’t be the books. All that I ask is that you be true to the characters.’ And I believe I’ve fulfilled that request.”  Ms. Rowling always vetted his scripts, however, stepping in when she could see Mr. Kloves veering off course. Early on, for instance, she redirected his approach to Dobby, the downtrodden house-elf. “I had elected to slightly de-emphasize him, and she said, ‘Dobby’s going to be important, and so you want to revisit the scene,’ ” Mr. Kloves said. (Dobby plays a pivotal role in the new movie.)

After a while, Mr. Kloves said, “I had a remarkable ability to anticipate events, because I swam in the narrative for 10 years.” For example, he said, he always suspected that behind the oily nastiness of Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) lurked a man of deep bravery with his own lonely integrity. You can never decipher where Jo will take the plot, because she is completely original,” Mr. Kloves said. “But there was no question in my mind that Snape was going to be heroic, and I wrote him that way from the start.”

Ms. Rowling has always said the series would end with “Deathly Hallows.” But years of back-and-forth correspondence with her, Mr. Kloves said, have revealed that the material in the books is just “the barest surface of what she knows about that world. If you can get her to talk about it, it’s so remarkable what she knows,” he said. “I once e-mailed her and asked her what were the 12 uses of dragon’s blood” — information that is taught to Hogwarts students — “and she wrote back in 30 seconds what they all were. If I ask about Ron’s uncle, I get back five pages about Ron’s uncle, who never appears in the books.” “I can’t tell you how great this stuff is,” he added. “It’s almost a crime for it not to be published.”

Hero Complex has interviewed Steve Kloves, who is the screenwriter for the Harry Potter films.

“The truth is ‘Potter’ was really strange for me, right from the beginning, it wasn’t the sort of thing I ever expected to be doing,” he said. “It was really, really nice in many ways but always a little odd…. I always saw myself writing movies that, you know, people don’t go see.”

“At that point, this was 1998, ‘Potter’ wasn’t that big a deal here in the States, and later one of my friends said to me, ‘If it had been on the cover of Time magazine before you signed up, you never would have done it,’” Kloves said. “And that’s absolutely the case.”

“The single greatest thing I take from the experience of the past 10 years is becoming friends with Jo. That’s a separate thing from all of this now, separate from ‘Potter,’ and it’s become a very important part of my life. I used to say she’s the coolest chick on the face of the planet. You read that first book and you thought, ‘Angela Lansbury wrote this book,’ then you meet her and she knows all of your music references and she’s funny. The first thing you pick up sitting down with her though is the intelligence. We had to make movies as smart as her books and as smart as her.”

Kloves is proud of the work he’s done but he still gets spooked by its reach and ripple. “I still don’t understand the magnitude of it,” he said. “I only catch glimpses of the size in my peripheral vision. It kind of freaks me out.”

The LA Times has updated with their latest edition of Hero Complex and it has some quotes from Daniel Radcliffe, David Heyman, Tom Felton and Steve Kloves.

Screenwriter Steve Kloves said that there technically is one glimpse of Hogwarts in the film but he’d rather not elaborate. “This moment would fall in the category of flashback,” said the writer who finishes the franchise having written scripts for seven of the eight films. “Revealing it may ruin a rather lovely — albeit small — moment of the movie.”

Radcliffe said treading past the stony floors of the well-used Hogwarts movie set in Watford, England, energized the cast during the production of the seventh and eighth films, which were made together in a shoot that began in February 2009 and did not wrap until mid-June of this year. “I think getting out was a marvelous thing for the story and for the look of the film,” he said. “This movie just looks different than the other ones. We’ve spent so much time at Hogwarts that it makes it fresh to go somewhere new on screen.”

In Total Film‘s latest issue they have some new information on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Director Davis Yates, producer David Heyman, screenwriter Steven Kloves, and Emma Watson (Hermione Granger) spoke with them while on the set.

Yates called Part I a road film, saying it was dynamic, adrenalised, and visceral. He continued, “It’s a refugee story about three kids cut off from everything they know and everybody they love, being pursued relentlessly by people who want to murder them.”

He then pondered about the split and how one should go about splitting one story to make it two distinct stories. “Do you break it with a moment of suspense or one of resolution?” he asked aloud.

He also called Part II,  “A big opera, a great big epic, with huge battles.”

Emma said she felt she was on a different film as this film doesn’t have the structure that the previous films had.  She explained, “The others have this structure. You know, we come into the Great Hall and there’s the opening talk. And that’s gone.”

Screenwriter Steven Kloves gave a bit of a hint about the split, saying it was the most sound creative decision on where the split occurs.  He also stated that the split will give a proper send-off to certain characters, “It should allow us to stretch a bit with the characters and give them the proper send-off.”

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