And then something horrible happened - the flames of the candles started to burn through the clear string holding them and started to drop! We had to get everybody out of the set - and then we shot it two more times, telling ourselves, “We’re just going to add C.G.I. I came back the next day, and it was still the same food! By Day 3, I can only say the scent of the Great Hall was getting a little funky.ĬOLUMBUS When all the kids file into the Great Hall for the first time, we see hundreds of floating candles in the air. I thought, “Oh my God, this is the real deal.” I’ve since never had such extraordinary production design.ĬOLUMBUS The food came in - an American Thanksgiving feast - and it was meant to last for eight to 10 hours. I opened up one of the menus, and realized they’d handwritten all 400 on parchment paper. RADCLIFFE It never really lost that power.ĬOLUMBUS The production designer Stuart Craig and Stephenie McMillan had such an incredible eye for detail.

“I thought, ‘I have to make a movie out of this,’” he said.īut when he called his agent to set up a meeting with Warner Bros., “She said, ‘Yeah, you and about 30 other directors,’” Columbus said. “Chris approaches set in the correct way, in my opinion, which is the attitude that we are the luckiest people in the world to get to do this for a living,” he said.Ĭolumbus wasn’t initially sure he wanted to do a film about wizards, but after his daughter Eleanor (who has a cameo as Susan Bones) kept bugging him to read the books, he finally cracked open the first installment and read all 223 pages in a day. That joy was in large part thanks, Radcliffe said, to Columbus’s infectious passion for his work. “That’s why we shot with three or four cameras - if one of the kids looked into the camera or smiled like they couldn’t believe their good fortune, I had something else to cut to,” he said in a phone conversation on a walk near his home in Malibu in September. When Radcliffe and the young actors who played his friends, Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) and Emma Watson (Hermione Granger), were making the film, they weren’t just pretending to have the time of their lives - they were, Columbus said.

The sorcerers stone