Director Chris Columbus expected to be fired from Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone while working on the project.
"The first film was fraught with anxiety for me. The first two weeks I thought I was gonna get fired every day," Columbus revealed in a new interview with Collider. "Everything looked good, I just thought if I do one thing wrong, if I fuck up, I'm fired. And that was intense."
Columbus went on to explain that, thankfully, he didn't let any of that anxiety show on the set, adding, "There was no frustration, I'm not a screamer, I get along with everybody and I want everybody to feel like they're part of the family, so I just had to hide that side of my emotions."
Even so, the director didn't realize he'd done a good job with the adaptation of J.K. Rowling's first book until screening a three-hour-long cut of the film in Chicago. "The audience just ate up the film," Columbus recalled. "The film was two hours and fifty minutes long at that point and the kids thought it was too short and the parents thought it was too long." The final running time of Sorcerer’s Stone is two hours and 32 minutes -- meaning Columbus cut about 18 minutes' worth of footage before the film hit theaters in November 2001.
The success of the film ultimately enabled Columbus to have more fun while he was working on the second installment -- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets -- which was released in 2002. "It was like night and day because then I could really let loose a little bit and bring a little bit more of my particular style to the movie," Columbus shared. "That was a very specific choice, the style of the first Potter movie, but part of it we were boxed into because as I said we had three cameras on the kids at a time."
While Columbus stepped away from the franchise after the first two films and handed the reins to director Alfonso Cuaron for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, he admitted he would have loved to adapt the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
"I always wanted to go back and shoot the final two movies, but [Deathly Hallows director David] Yates decided he was gonna stay with the series, and it was a great thing to do because I particularly love the very last movie," Columbus explained. "I think that is just a brilliant film, the second part of Deathly Hallows."
The Harry Potter novels were published from 1997 to 2007. The Warner Bros. Pictures franchise spanned eight films, beginning in 2001 with The Sorcerer's Stone and ending in 2011 with The Deathly Hallows Part 2. The Harry Potter films star Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson as Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, respectively.
Yates is currently filming the third installment of the Fantastic Beasts franchise, which serves as a prequel to the events in the Harry Potter films. Fantastic Beasts 3 stars Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Ezra Miller and Jude Law. The film arrives in theaters on July 15, 2022.
Source: Collider