David Yates & David Heyman: Discovering Fantastic Beasts And Where to Find Them

October 24, 2016
The Harry Potter veterans talk returning to the franchise, starting a new series, and what it’s like working with J.K. Rowling in her first stint as screenwriter.

Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them is loosely based on the compendium of the same name, and marks a return to the franchise for both director, David Yates, and producer, David Heyman. Yates directed the final four films in the Harry Potter series, and Heyman produced all eight films in the series after acquiring the film rights in 1999. J.K. Rowling wrote the script for Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them in what will be her screenwriting debut, with the film marking the beginning of a new five-film series.

“It’s a very hard world to leave behind,” says Heyman, returning to the franchise after successful stints producing Gravity and We’re The Millers. “I had the great pleasure of going off and making other films, but this world is so alluring. What is a gift is that within her magical universe, Jo [J.K. Rowling] somehow tells stories that are about us, and that are about our times. These are stories about outsiders. We all feel like outsiders at times. This is a society in which people are stigmatised, and in which people are given labels, and this story – and in Potter in a way, but particularly in this one – there is a divide between the magical world and the Muggle world.”

David Yates on the set of Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them

David Yates on the set of Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them

The film is set in New York in 1926, where Newt Scamander (played by Oscar winner, Eddie Redmayne) has just arrived after a global tour rescuing magical creatures. When a No-Maj (American for muggle) accidently lets loose some of Scamander’s creatures, he must form an unlikely band of assistants to help him return them safely before too much damage is done. That is the basic premise for the first film, but the larger series is rumoured to focus on the dark wizard, Grindelwald, purported to be the second most powerful dark wizard of all time behind Voldemort.

The series will then interlock with the story of a young Dumbledore and his inevitable battle with Grindelwald in 1945, where he defeated the dark wizard and acquired The Elder Wand, a crucial object in the Harry Potter series. Yates and Heyman are keeping quiet about the details of subsequent films. “Jo’s working on another script, but obviously it will depend on how this film does,” says Yates. “We didn’t know if we were going to make another one…we had no idea. We began working on the first, and then we’d started pre-production on the second, before we finished. So we knew we were doing the next one, but we didn’t know beyond that. There are no conversations yet…we’re not sure about three or four yet.”

A scene from Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them

A scene from Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them

Apparently, Rowling caused quite a buzz on set, with Heyman and Yates commenting that she’s seen as a matriarchal figure, “She popped to set more times than she did on any of the Potters that I did,” says Yates. “But not often. She’s been about five times in the course of a twenty-week shoot. The cast don’t get anxious at all. They love it, and she loves being with them. It’s a real lift for them, because we respect her enormously. They think about new things to ask her all the time, which is really funny. She came to set and they were all crowding around her. It’s really sweet.”

Fantastic Beasts And Where to Find Them is released in cinemas on November 18.

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