I assume you’ve been to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince a dozen times already. And if you are such a fan of the HP movies, you’re surely familiar with the name Steve Kloves. Kloves has written nearly every one of the HP screenplays as well as some other notable movies including The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) and Wonder Boys (2000).
The LA Times blog “Hero Complex,” which I just recently discovered, has a Do you work with Rowling when you’re hammering out a script, or do you have total freedom to adapt as you please?
I’m a little too free. Jo’s become a really good friend, one of my best friends, and I wish I had more of her. When I first got to know Jo, she wasn’t married, and now she is married and has kids, so she’s gotten a much bigger life. Now, we mostly correspond through e-mail, and she’s very responsive and very helpful, but from the beginning she has always said to me, “I know the movies will be very different. I know they can’t be the books, and I don’t want them to be the books. The only thing that matters to me is that you stay true to the characters.” So that’s always been the one thing I feel very much in charge of, protecting the characters, and it’s the thing that upsets me the most when I feel the characters are being violated. That’s when I push back hard.
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Why didn’t you decide to adapt “Order of the Phoenix”?
You know, I don’t even know why. The fourth film, “Goblet of Fire,” was really hard to do. I wrote on it for two years. But it’s not that simple and I don’t know that I’ll ever fully understand why I didn’t do it. This will sound glib, but it’s somewhat true: They asked me on the wrong day. They asked me for the last time on the wrong day. Had they asked me the next day, I probably would have said yes. There’s always stuff that goes on around these movies and I felt an urge — and I still feel an urge — to do other things. To go back to making movies nobody wants to see, and I’ll do so. But I think I was feeling that urge particularly keenly at that time. I always said too that if the kids left, I would leave too. And there was some talk about Emma Watson [who plays Hermione] leaving and that would have been hard for me if Emma had left because I like writing for the three kids.
Imagine the pressure on Kloves on each of those scripts. All these HP fanatics worldwide.
Which is your favorite HP movie?
