So maybe all of you aren’t incredibly excited about the new Harry Potter movie opening this Friday, but I certainly am. Of course, then, I began to read the Times Arts article entitled “A Screenwriter’s Hogwarts Decade” as soon as I saw the headline.
This article discusses Steve Kloves, the Potter screenwriter, and his role in the Harry Potter series. Kloves has been entrusted, since Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, with transcribing J.K. Rowling’s words into a screenplay. He constantly works at balancing accuracy with time and slaves over word choice and trueness of character.
Mr. Kloves, in an interview, also discusses the idea of living with art. He has lived in the Harry Potter world for years. The characters to him are not just words on a page of Rowling’s book or his script. They are not just stories to be acted out. He also discusses the wealth of knowledge Rowling knows about her Harry Potter universe that is never discussed directly in her novels.
I think this article highlights the idea of art as a living entity and also the balance that must be put into creating a great work of art, especially when it involves an adaptation of another work.
Besides, someone needed to discuss Harry Potter.
I’m really glad you brought this up Alyssa! I mentioned in an earlier post that I am always excited to see us bring literature into our world of “Arts in New York City” because I love to write (which I sure many of us in the class do). On top of that, I am so enthralled by the world of Harry Potter! I think that the only way to create such an elaborate, thrilling place like the fantasy world of Harry Potter is for the screenwriter and author to actually live in it to a certain extent, which is just what this article said. That’s absolutely an art to come up with such a real feeling place and even more, it has the power to make readers and followers feel deeply enough about the characters to become emotionally attached, like I have!
JK Rowling is an enormously talented writer, and it has been quite an achievement that the books and the movies of this franchise have been greeted with such positive audience reaction. Movies and books are indeed very different media, and especially in this screen-conscious world, books that are just words on the page (even if that page is an e-reader) engage the mind and the imagination in distinct ways I don’t think we are ready to discard. Reading this blog takes a different kind of engagement than watching a video or surfing the web. It is worth reading great (and good) literature to experience language and ideas at their best.