Harry Potter actor Warwick Davis (Professor Flitwick) hosts a documentary about all things Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts.
Warwick Davis appeared in all eight Harry Potter movies, whether as Griphook the goblin bank teller or Professor Filius Flitwick. He’s also appeared in several Harry Potter videogames and even lent his voice to the Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts theme park ride. He’s been inextricably tied to the film version of J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world from the beginning, which makes him a good candidate to host a new documentary about its most recent expansion.
The documentary is called Fantastic Beasts & J K Rowlings Wizarding World, and was released online by Shapero Rare Books. As the title implies, it’s mostly focused on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them—Davis talks to actors, set designers, special effects technicians and J.K. Rowling herself to get an idea of how the film came to be. It goes beyond that, though, as he also chats with Harry Potter fans and explores what the wizarding world means to people. It’s clear that, having been a part of it for so long, Davis has a real affection for the series.
The documentary is around 50 minutes long. Watch it below.
Things to note:
- Let’s not forget that Newt Scamander’s book, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, was mentioned in the very first Harry Potter film, so in a way, the Fantastic Beasts movie has been a very long time coming.
- Rowling: “When I wrote the textbook from within Harry’s world that I did for Comic Relief, I had ideas around the issue of fantastic beasts that went beyond the demands of writing that particular book. At Hogwarts, there’s a forest where many of them dwell, but what happens in the wider world? They can’t hide themselves. They don’t understand they’re supposed to hide.”
- Rowling on Fantastic Beasts character Newt Scamander: “I thought of those 19th century explorers at home out in the savannah but perhaps a bit rough around the edges in a drawing room…Newt has an understanding of people who may be stigmatized, or othered. That’s at the heart of most of what I write, and it’s certainly at the heart of this movie.”
- Rowling: “If you don’t love the Niffler, there’s something wrong with you.”
- The designers on Fantastic Besats took J.K. Rowling’s sketch of the Fwooper from the Fantastic Beasts textbook and elaborated on it. It’s pretty close to her original idea, though.
- Rowling things the very first line of the very first Harry Potter book—”Mr. and Mrs. were proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”—set up an important theme that runs throughout the wizarding world. “What is normal, and what does that mean for those of us who do not conform to those norms?”
Next: Potterverse extras are turning up in the Cormoran Strike series
h/t SnitchSeeker