Harry Potter and the art of screenwriting

Michael Goldenberg talks about the pleasures and pitfalls of adapting "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" for the big screen.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Books, Movies, Arts & Entertainment, Harry Potter, Rebecca Traister

July 11, 2007 | In less than two weeks, midnight streets will crawl with young people (and, er, not-as-young people) in pointy hats and capes, out celebrating the release of the seventh and final book in the Harry Potter series. Offering some consolation to those sad about hoisting the butterbeer for the last time is the fact that the Warner Bros. filmed adaptations of the series lag several books behind. This week, as a warm-up to next Friday night, the studio is releasing the fifth film in the series, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."

In "Phoenix," menacing clouds continue to build around Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. With the whimsy of the castle's moving staircases and chatty portraits giving way to J.K. Rowling's increasingly dark plot twists, the film is less of an escapist fantasy and more like the sweaty nightmares that wake its teenage hero from sleep each night. This Harry is an angry young man, marinating not only in the hormonal stew of adolescence, but in the chilly isolation of being the only person to have witnessed the resurrection of the evil Lord Voldemort (as well as the murder of his school chum Cedric Diggory) in the last film. Meanwhile, a jaunty autocrat has taken control of Hogwarts, and the Ministry of Magic continues to wage a media war on Harry and his beloved -- though troublingly distant -- headmaster Dumbledore.

There's no question: The teenage years are a bitch. For this installment, previous screenwriter Steven Kloves stepped aside, and filmmakers hired Michael Goldenberg to shepherd the series through its pubescence. Goldenberg, a playwright who also wrote 1997's "Contact," spoke to Salon by phone following "Phoenix's" London premiere, about the power of political allegory, Rowling's educational philosophy, and the stresses of adapting a beloved text for the screen.

How do you even begin transforming an 870-page book into a two-hour movie?

It's a translation process from one medium to a very different one. Ideally you want people, especially fans of the books, to walk out saying it was just like the book -- even if, when they think back on it later, they realize there were lots of differences. The challenge is in finding the best equivalent way to tell the story. My job was to stay true to the spirit of the book, rather than to the letter.

And was Rowling OK with that?

That was Jo's open request from the beginning: She just wanted to see a great movie, and gave us permission to take whatever liberties we felt we needed to take to translate the book into a movie she would love. It was clearly a big leap of faith on her part. I realize that sounds very goopy and like it's all spin, but it happens to be true.

So what did you feel you had to sacrifice in the translation process?

As with any adaptation, the main problem is compression. With a 900-page book the basic amount of narrative material isn't actually much more than in the other books, but it's a lot of digressions and side journeys and detail. The solution got much clearer when I figured out that the organizing principle of the screenplay was to narrate Harry's emotional journey.

That journey didn't include Rowling's Quidditch plot. It was one of the first things you cut, and it somehow hit the fan press, sparking an outcry.

Yeah, I think that was intentionally made public, just as a kind of heads up. The truth is that any movie made of this book, whoever made it, that had included the Quidditch subplot would have been a lesser film. You have to be ruthless about what stays in. And while I'm sympathetic to the fact that everyone has his or her favorite scene and wants to see it up on screen, you have to adhere to the larger goal of making a unified, cohesive film that works for everybody.

So you weren't cowed by that initial howl of fan outrage?

I couldn't imagine making any other creative choice.

In addition to trimming, you also added scenes and plot twists that didn't exist in the book, like a pretty profound conversation between Harry and his godfather, Sirius, in which Sirius gives him some very fatherly advice. In some ways, that seems an almost bolder move?

That particular scene is one I quite like. The impulse for that was a larger one, because the goal was to build up the connection between Harry and Sirius as much as possible. I culled through their scenes in the book and I thought it was important to focus on how much they have in common. Sirius was in many ways the one person who could understand what Harry goes through in Phoenix: Sirius has also been falsely accused of something, has felt isolated and like the victim of injustice. And he is the one family member Harry has left. And certainly in the film there is a very special chemistry between Dan [Radcliffe] and Gary [Oldman], and that's really important. Sirius was the one person Harry could make his darkest confessions to.

In that scene, there is that one line of Sirius' that in many ways is the theme of this film, and it's also in the book [though in a different place]: that the world isn't divided into good people and Death Eaters. That is the lesson to me of this story: It's about Harry's journey from a more black-and-white worldview to shades of gray. It's something I wanted to dramatize.

Next page: Are there parallels in "Potter" to the Iraq war and the role of the press?