Steven Spielberg's Vision Of Harry Potter "Let’s Make It Animated"
The first part of the final films for the Harry Potter franchise will be in theaters on November 19,2010. Now its time to bring out the promotion hype. Like this film is going to need any help selling out the first few days. I for one will not be in line to see the film. I have never been a huge Harry Potter fan since the first film came out.
Speaking of the first movie, WB president Alan Horn revealed that he offered the first directing job to Steven Spielberg but Spielberg’s plans did not fit into what he was looking to turn the franchise into.
Heyman sent the book to his friend and fellow Brit Lionel Wigram, a production executive at Warner Bros., to gauge the studio’s interest. Wigram said some in Burbank questioned the viability of the creaky fantasy-adventure genre and viewed the tale of a magical boarding school called Hogwarts as too British for the American heartland. “Don’t spend too much on it,” was the word from the home office, Wigram recalled.
Warner Bros. secured the rights for four “Harry Potter” novels for about $2 million. At that point, only the first book was on shelves in England and none had reached America. Warner Bros. tried to get a financial partner on the project, reaching out to studios including Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks, which passed.
Once the books became a sensation, greenlighting the first “Potter” film became a major priority at Warner Bros., where Alan Horn had recently taken over as president and Barry Meyer as chairman (replacing longtime studio chiefs Terry Semel and Bob Daly). DreamWorks circled back and proposed a partnership, but Horn wisely declined. There was one aspect of the DreamWorks talks that did intrigue him, however.
“I did think it would be worthwhile for Steven Spielberg to direct,” Horn said. “We offered it to him. But one of the notions of Dreamwork’s and Steven’s was, ‘Let’s combine a couple of the books, let’s make it animated,’ and that was because of the [visual effects and] Pixar had demonstrated that animated movies could be extremely successful. Because of the wizardry involved, they were very effects-laden. So I don’t blame them. But I did not want to combine the movie and I wanted it to be live action.”
Spielberg instead took on Warner’s 2001 sci-fi film “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence” and the Hogwarts post fell to Chris Columbus, director of “Home Alone” and “Mrs. Doubtfire,” was then tapped for the job. Initially, Rowling wasn’t high on the idea.
Please Leave A Comment-
Source-LATimes
Comments