Fantasy, driven by reality

Fidelity has long been a touchy subject here in modern Babylon, but last year Hollywood had a very particular faithfulness issue. Could two worldly men, film directors at that, really understand the nature of devotion, constancy and commitment?

In a matter of a few weeks, those fears were assuaged. The many devoted readers of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” showered directors Chris Columbus and Peter Jackson with fistfuls of ticket stubs in gratitude for the respect they showed in their film adaptations of these works. Indeed, the criticism most often leveled at “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” was that it was too faithful to the book.

So this year, as audiences prepare for Round 2 -- the Nov. 15 release of Warner Bros.’ “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” and the Dec. 19 opening of New Line’s “The Two Towers” -- the fans are very calm. Impatient, but calm.

Which actually makes the filmmakers a little nervous. Because the only thing more daunting than a suspicious audience is a really, really expectant one.

For both directors, success came with a few strings attached. Although the budget for the second Harry Potter film is reportedly about the same as the first -- about $125 million -- the hope is that even more dazzling special effects will break through the disdain many critics and adult viewers felt for the by-the-book script of “Sorcerer’s Stone.” But the film is still only the second of what was originally conceived as a series of seven books and films, and so must prove that the Harry Potter franchise is still on the upswing.

Across a few time zones in New Zealand, Jackson has worked steadily through the $300 million pledged by New Line at the onset of the project. “The Two Towers” also will introduce characters and scenes representing the latest in film technology, but that will not address the biggest obstacle the film faces. The extraordinary critical success of “The Fellowship of the Ring” set a high bar: To make this middle film of a trilogy best picture or best director material will require all kinds of magic, computer or otherwise.

“There was much more pressure this year,” said Jackson from New Zealand. “For ‘Fellowship,’ ” he said, “we had the advantage of being the mystery film. This time, we don’t have the future of the studio riding on our shoulders, but we have to worry about the millions of people who loved the first film, who are counting on us.”

The makers of “Chamber of Secrets” felt much the same way, with the additional nagging memory of critics’ charges that they had gone too strictly by the book last time around. “The goal was to make a film that was even better than the first,” said Columbus. And having the trust of the fans made that task much easier. “We had proved to the audience that we were faithful, so with the second film we could be a little more relaxed,” he said.

Which is not to say that Columbus threw caution, or Rowling’s book, to the wind. When Columbus says “more relaxed,” he’s referring to a few ad-libbed exchanges and a couple of drawn-out action sequences. But overall, “Chamber of Secrets” is a more straightforward adventure tale. The paintings and staircases still move, Quidditch players whiz through the air, but neither the characters nor the camera spend much time in wide-eyed wonder at this. Even the appearance of Dobby, the computer-generated house elf, is pretty much taken in stride by Harry, and the story line.

“Magic is more magic when it’s just there. The first movie was about Harry discovering what is essentially his home,” producer David Heyman said. “The second film is about what he does when that home is threatened.”

“Second film” is the term both sets of filmmakers are using to avoid the word “sequel.” This is not, they would have you know, “Home Alone 2” or “Batman Returns” territory. And according to Columbus and Jackson, the new films are very different in mood and focus.

“ ‘The Fellowship’ was much more whimsical,” Jackson said. “And it had to cover a lot of ground, backstory-wise--it was a half-hour before we even got out of the Shire. ‘The Two Towers’ is much more of an adventure film, with horses and swords and battles.”

“The Two Towers” begins right after the final action in “Fellowship,” and if people are expecting a when-we-last-saw-them prologue to get them up to speed, they’re out of luck. “That is just too TV miniseries,” he said. “And I’m not really concerned with the people who didn’t see ‘The Fellowship’why would they be going to see this movie if they didn’t see that one?”

“Chamber of Secrets” also forgoes any kind of recap, but over at Warner Bros., folks have a slightly different definition of a non-sequel sequel. They stress that, like the books, each film can stand on its own. “You don’t have to have seen the first film to enjoy the second,” Heyman said, “although it makes it a richer experience if you have.”

“Chamber of Secrets” too is different in tone and focus from its predecessor. It is a bit more sinister and more psychologically complex, which reflects the filmmaker’s intentions as much as it follows similar shifts in Rowling’s book.

“The film is darker,” Heyman said, “but fairy tales traditionally are a way of preparing children for what lies ahead. The world is not a safe place.”

The script focuses on the three (or four, if you count Draco Malfoy) main characters, although the faculty of Hogwarts remains a Who’s Who in British theater. Alan Rickman’s delicious Professor Snape gets less screen time, but the addition of Kenneth Branagh as the new defense against the dark arts instructor, Gilderoy Lockhart, and Jason Isaacs as Draco’s reptilian father, Lucius, may placate adult audiences.

“The first movie, I wanted more Alan Rickman,” Columbus said. “The second movie, I wanted more Alan Rickman. But we focused on the story, which follows the kids.”

A sense of continuity

Having a core cast of young actors creates logistical problems for any movie -- minors can only film four hours a day. Using the same core cast of young actors for a series of films adds another twist -- biology. When plans for the first movie were announced, the idea was that there would be a film a year and the cast would age along with the characters. So it isn’t all that surprising to find that Ron and Harry have deeper voices than in “The Sorcerer’s Stone” or that Hermione’s face is not quite as round.

“We expect growth spurts,” Heyman said. “The trouble is when they occur in the middle of shooting, because we don’t shoot in sequence. I don’t think the audience will notice,” he said of several early scenes in which the actors seem a bit older than in later scenes, “but of course I do.”

Heyman and Columbus quickly scotched rumors that the third movie, “The Prisoner of Azakban,” was to be re-cast. But many plans have changed in recent months -- the nifty idea of a film a year is out (the third movie won’t begin shooting until early next year and will be released in 2004), the recent death of Richard Harris will necessitate recasting of Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, and Columbus is turning over his director’s chair to Alfonso Cuaron (“Little Princess,” “Y Tu Mama Tambien”) for the third film. To ensure a gentle transition for the young actors, he will remain on the set as a producer until at least June. Columbus bowed out, he said, because he felt he had given his all to “Chamber of Secrets.” Cuaron will bring a new eye and sensibility to the series. “You’ll see new magic at Hogwarts,” Heyman said.

Jackson, on the other hand, has no plans to step down, and he really couldn’t even if he wanted to -- the main action of all three movies was shot all at once, over 14 months (from October 1999 to December 2000), and mostly in sequence.

Since then, he and his team have holed up in Wellington, New Zealand (dubbed “Wellywood” by the locals), editing and adding sound, doing a tiny bit of re-shooting and, of course, filling in all the special effects. For “The Two Towers,” this includes the computer-enhanced characters of Gollum and Treebeard, the destruction of Isengard and several jaw-dropping battle scenes. The success of the first movie assured him he was doing something right. As “The Fellowship” was edited, there had been much anguish expressed by Tolkien fans who learned, through Internet rumor, of this cut or that. But when the film came out, there was very little criticism.

“I think even the hard-core fans understood that the two things [the film and the book] are very different,” Jackson said. “I think they realized we weren’t stomping all over the essence of it, that we were being respectful.”

The trust issue is crucial because Jackson and co-writers Frances Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Stephen Sinclair took even more liberties in “The Two Towers.” They excavated the love story between Aragorn and Arwen from the book’s appendices and made it a centerpiece, and the movie will end in a different place than did the book. (For those familiar with the work, Shelob will not make her big entrance until the third and final film, “The Return of the King.”)

The trilogy, Jackson has pointed out many times, was actually written as a single book -- a paper shortage led to the decision to publish it as three volumes. The new ending, he said, is actually truer, chronologically, to the tale than the book. But if the fans seem content, some folks not familiar with Tolkien’s work had a few issues this time around. Last year, a petition was posted on the Internet, asking Jackson to change the name of the film, “The Two Towers” being, according to the petition’s author, “clearly meant to refer to the attacks on the World Trade Center.” The page with the petition, which has been suspended due to lack of maintenance, also includes a note from the Web site, PetitonOnline .com, explaining that the literary classic was published 47 years prior to the attacks.

But it wasn’t just Web surfers who had issues. Earlier this year, New Line proposed making its New York premiere of “The Two Towers” a benefit similar to the one held for “The Fellowship of the Ring,” which raised $300,000 for the Twin Towers Fund. But the organizations they approached got cold feet.

“Apparently, they thought the name of the film was too close,” said New Line head Robert Shaye. There was, he said, a conversation about changing the film’s name. “Not going to happen,” he said flatly.

The Harry Potter domain was also assailed, albeit unsuccessfully, this year -- a U.S. federal judge rejected a claim that Rowling stole the word “muggle” from another writer, and the campaign claiming that the author and the films promote witchcraft and, by extension, Satan worship, seems to have died down.

But the thing that concerns the studios the most is whether the films can meet the expectations set by their predecessors. Industry insiders are betting not on whether the two movies will be hits, but which will be the bigger hit. The money seems to be on “The Two Towers” this time.

“We are cautiously optimistic,” Shaye said.

Which seems a sensible approach. As Harry and Frodo know only too well, it’s when things are nice and quiet that the monsters jump out of the shadows.