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UNDESIRABLE NO. 1 (PART 2)

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GREGORY GOYLE AND THE EXPLODING HOT CHOCOLATE

Making a film is a collaboration. The Harry Potter films were the product of hundreds of brilliantly creative imaginations, from Jo Rowling, through the art departments and camera teams, to some amazing actors. For me, though, the glue that bound them all together for the first two films, the guy who made them what they were, was the director Chris Columbus.

I was a fan of his without even knowing it. He’d made some of my favourite films growing up, including Mrs. Doubtfire and the Home Alone films with Macaulay Culkin, whose own fans I briefly stole as a nipper in New York. But what kid thinks about who the director is when they’re watching a film? If I’d been unperturbed about acting alongside Jodie Foster or John Goodman, I was certainly going to be unmoved about working with a director I’d never heard the name of. That soon changed. Columbus quickly became something of a mentor to me on set, and without him my performances would have been unquestionably different.

Columbus had an innate understanding about how to work with children and how to get the best out of us. I guess you don’t make a film like Home Alone without having somewhat of a playful, childish touch. He understood that if you put twenty kids in a room together, it won’t take long before they’re all mucking around. (Having thumb wars and playing slapsies were particular favourites.) He made no attempt to stifle that. On the contrary, he encouraged it. He had a brilliant ability to not be consumed by how big the project was. He did that by larking about. One of his larks was setting up a little basketball court, just one net, right in the middle of the studios. To start with it was just for him, so that at lunchtime he could shoot a few hoops. Two or three people joined him, then I asked if I could play. “Sure dude, come on in, come on in!” Eventually, about eight of us would have our lunch then go and play for 45 minutes. Trouble was, after 15 minutes, my hair and wardrobe would be drenched with sweat and every ounce of my pale make-up would be slopping down my face. Columbus got told off by hair and make-up for letting us kids get into that state. “Sorry, dude,” he told me, genuinely regretful. “I want you to play but we just can’t.” (I still snuck on a few times after that, but I kept my sweating to a minimum.)

Columbus was not a big advocate of telling us what to do or how to act. He possessed a critical knowledge of what made a shot work from behind his monitor. He then seemed to know exactly what to say to each individual to get what he needed out of us. It was also often more about what he didn’t say than what he did say. His strategy was sometimes to fix the environment so that the performances of his child actors happened naturally and organically. The best example of this is when we first entered the Great Hall. All the kids were purposely kept away from that set until the day we were to film the scene. In the meantime, Columbus made sure that everything was magnificently perfect. The tables were set, the background artists all in place. Hundreds of flaming candles hung from the ceiling on fishing lines (which later melted, causing the candles to plummet). Dumbledore, Hagrid, Snape—and my grandpa—sat at the head table in full regalia. There was no starry sky, of course, just an enormous scaffold for a ceiling, but it was impossible to enter that space for the first time and not be awestruck. The reaction of the Hogwarts first years that you see on screen was genuine. They were as astonished as they looked, just as Columbus cleverly intended. He didn’t have to tell us to do anything. He just had to engineer the perfect circumstances for the response he was after. (Of course, I was still outwardly displaying some of my world-weary, meh, nothing-impresses-me attitude, so despite being as impressed as everyone else I may have worn a slightly less enchanted expression. I’ve no doubt that this was all part of Columbus’s plan: my attitude fitted the part perfectly.)

Columbus’s enthusiasm was relentless. His constant refrain was: “Awesome, man, that’s awesome!” We actually started mimicking him towards the end of the second film with our own takes on “Awesome, man!,” but I’m absolutely certain he wouldn’t have minded that. In fact, he would have encouraged it. He wanted us to be cheeky, to be having fun, because he knew that it would translate directly onto the screen.

One-on-one, his directing technique was equally cunning. Because he was such a great guy, the young cast were all keen to impress him and I was no different. He used to make a big deal of how much he loved to hate Draco. Every time I sneered or oozed superiority, he would call “Cut!,” screw up his face and, with a smile, say: “Ooh, you bastard!” Rather than tell me what he wanted, he would respond positively to those parts of my performance that pleased him. In doing so, he would tease the performance out of me, without stress or demands. For me, that is the sign of a great director.

It can’t all be shits and giggles, though. Columbus’s laid-back attitude was precision engineered to get the best out of his child actors, but we couldn’t be too laid-back. With scores of kids on the set, that way bedlam lay. So how do you keep a host of high-spirited hooligans under control when the boss is more focused on making sure they’re having fun? Somebody needed to play, if not exactly bad cop to Columbus’s good cop, then at least strict cop. Enter Chris Carreras: the second crucial Chris on the Harry Potter set.

Carreras was the first assistant director. Columbus’s right-hand man. That means he runs the set. It was his responsibility to ensure that everything happened smoothly and on time, that everybody knew what they were doing and when they were doing it. No mean feat when you have a sea of excitable kids to keep in line. Carreras was the right man for the job. He’s one of the best-established, most-respected first ADs in the industry, and he rightly ran that set like a drill sergeant. Wherever he went, he had a black whistle round his neck, and on day one he gave a speech to us all. Like Dumbledore announcing to the school that the third-floor corridor was out of bounds to those who did not want to die a most painful death, Carreras held up his whistle and laid down the law: “If I blow this whistle and you don’t stop talking, I will send you home.”

Carreras was a nice guy, but we were all a little afraid of him. I don’t suppose he ever would have sent us home, but he had the gravitas and commanded enough respect for us to believe that he might. So whenever he blew that bloody whistle, every kid in earshot stopped what they were doing, shut their pie holes and listened.

With maybe the occasional exception.

Josh Herdman—who played Goyle—and I used to get into a fair bit of trouble. I distinctly remember the very first day we shot at King’s Cross station. It was one of the few days my dad chaperoned me and I’m happy to report that I wasn’t the only Felton to cause trouble that day. He walked on set and was understandably impressed at the sight of all the props, cameras, crowds of background artists and of course the “Platform 9 ¾” sign, which had been erected for the first time ever and had to be kept under wraps from the outside world. Dad enthusiastically took out his camera to take a photograph of it. This was, of course, strictly forbidden and contrary to set etiquette. An assistant director saw him from behind and shouted that someone was taking pictures. Cue a swarm of people furiously trying to locate the dastardly paparazzo. Dad quickly hid his camera, pointed in another direction and shouted: “He went that way!” And so he smoothly avoided a substantial telling-off.

I was less lucky. It was freezing cold that day, so they provided a Costa Coffee hot chocolate for all the kids. I guzzled mine down and put my empty cup on the ground. Josh crushed it flat with his heel. He made it look pretty cool. Josh, however, sipped his slowly and had barely drunk any when Carreras’s whistle blew. He put the cup on the ground and stood to attention. I was a little less obedient. Not to be outdone, and assuming that Josh’s cup was also empty, I jumped as high in the air as I could and landed on it with both flat feet.

It’s quite incredible, the mess an exploding hot chocolate can make to every set of Hogwarts robes in a twelve-foot radius. The last thing a filmmaker on a tight schedule wants is a bunch of soggy, dirty teenagers whose costumes require emergency cleaning. Carreras’s face dropped. He strode up to us and gave us a look that would have had Snape himself quaking in his boots. A look that said: you little shit! I was properly scared of Carreras in that moment, and genuinely thought my career as Draco might be over before it had really begun. Happily, I detected the slightest of smiles as he reprimanded me. I’d gotten away with it, although we were never allowed hot chocolate on set again. And while I’d like to say that being the focus of Chris Carreras’s wrath kept us in line from that moment on, I’m afraid it would not be the truth…

From the very first moment I was offered a part in the Harry Potter films, the rules were clear: I wasn’t allowed to do anything dangerous. Skiing? No chance. Extreme sports? You’ve got to be joking. It was the Barclaycard advert all over again. The restrictions made sense. Nobody wants to spend millions of pounds shooting half a film, only to find that you have to reshoot a big chunk of it because one of your actors has to spend the next six months in hospital with three broken bones.

Even minor injuries can—and did—cause a problem.

When we were shooting the second film, my friend Richie, whose house I’d been at when my mum called to say I’d landed the role of Draco, came round for a sleepover. We slept in the front room, me on the couch, Richie on the floor. At the time, the Felton family were the proud new owners of a cordless telephone and Richie and I had spent the night making prank calls. The lights were out so that Mum wouldn’t know we were still awake.

“Chuck us the phone,” I whispered excitedly.

Richie did just that. He chucked it. Hard. You’d think that being part of the Slytherin Quidditch team, I’d be good with my hands, but as I reached out to catch the phone my seeker skills let me down. The phone cracked me solidly on the forehead. Shit. We fumbled our way towards the lightswitch and flicked it on. Richie stared at me. “What?” I said. “What? Can you see something?”

“Oh… my… God,” Richie breathed.

A bump the size of a golden snitch had immediately appeared on my forehead. Not great under even normal circumstances. Especially not great when you have a big scene to shoot the following morning in the Great Hall.

Mum called the set first thing. “Er, Tom’s had a bit of an accident…”

“Right,” replied a long-suffering production person. “How bad is it?”

“Um, it’s not that noticeable,” she lied. “Just a tiny bump on the head…”

But I walked into hair and make-up that morning to a shocked silence. I looked like something out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon. A make-up lady whisked me into the chair and did her very best to cover up my ridiculous wound, but every shot of me in the Great Hall that day had to be taken from my good side, thanks to Richie’s dodgy aim and my inept catching.

So the rules were strictly enforced: do nothing dangerous.

But rules are meant to be broken, right?

That was certainly my approach in those early days of Potter. One of our first location shoots took place at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, where we filmed the broomstick lesson scene with Zoë Wanamaker as Madam Hooch. That one scene took three or four days at least: time enough for me to get into a good deal of trouble with Alfie Enoch, who played Dean Thomas. Alfie was a year older than me, and a smart, funny guy. He had a professional chaperone rather than his parents or a family member, and like me had a penchant for skateboarding. Which was, of course, strictly forbidden. A reckless young actor could do himself a lot of harm on a skateboard. I’d managed, though, to smuggle one into my suitcase. I soon identified one of those perfectly tarmac’d hills that you sometimes find in the middle of nowhere, and persuaded Alfie that it would be a good idea for us to sneak off and try it out.

It wasn’t a good idea. As an idea, it had disaster written all over it. But we didn’t care about that. We scarpered up the hill and put it through its paces. I think we had the sense not to stand up on the skateboard, but to ride it more like a bobsleigh. It didn’t help our cause one little bit when Alfie’s chaperone found us wildly speeding down this hill with little thought for our own safety, or for the hassle we might cause the film if we hurt ourselves. She went absolutely nuts, we found ourselves in extreme disgrace and I was swiftly marked out as a bad influence.

I’d like to think of that as poppycock. Truth is, it wasn’t. Almost immediately after filming began, life had started to mirror art and I found myself in a little clique with Jamie and Josh—Crabbe and Goyle. Josh and I had already made a name for ourselves as trouble-makers with the crew, thanks to the exploding hot chocolate at King’s Cross, but we soon gravitated towards explosions of a different kind.

We were filming in and around Newcastle and staying at the same hotel, which was cool because we got to hang out after filming. We were very excited when Josh revealed he had managed to bring a blank-firing replica pistol with him. This was something that my mum would never in a million years have let me have anything to do with, and rightly so. It looked identical to a normal handgun, although it would only fire a blank round. No bullets, but still not the kind of thing you want in the hands of a trio of mischievous young teenagers. And that, of course, was half the thrill.

We were desperate to fire the gun, but we couldn’t think of a good place to do it. Obviously the hotel was out, and even we knew it would be stupid to allow it anywhere near set. In the end, we waited until the witching hour before we sneaked off to the basement level of a nearby multi-storey car park. The level was empty and I suppose our backwards reasoning was that this would be a safe place to fire the thing without scaring anybody and, crucially, without being caught.

We failed to take into account the acoustics.

If you’ve ever been in one of those car parks, you’ll know how they echo. So imagine the noise a gun makes, albeit a blank firer. Josh cocked the weapon. We braced ourselves. He squeezed the trigger. The noise was earsplitting. It rang out and echoed through the whole car park. If we’d wanted to fire the gun subtly, we’d chosen pretty much the worst place in Newcastle to do it. We stared at each other in horror as the retort of the gunshot refused to fade. It reverberated and lingered like a howler in the Great Hall.

So we ran.

I don’t think I’ve ever sprinted so fast. Sweating and breathless with panic, we tore out of the car park, back to the hotel and shut ourselves in our rooms. I was terrified that someone might have seen us, that we were going to be reported and hauled up in front of the police or, worse, in front of David Heyman, the producer. What would happen then? Surely we’d be sent home. Surely that would be the end of it? Surely even Chris Columbus would have a sense-of-humour failure at our stupid exploits?

I waited, cold dread in my veins, for the knock on the door or, worse, for the parp of Chris Carreras’s whistle. Neither came. We’d dodged a bullet—almost literally. And while we were never so stupid again as to try to discharge a blank firer in a public car park, there’s a bond that develops between people when they get up to no good and get away with it. Draco, Crabbe and Goyle were a troublesome trio on the page and on the screen. Some people might take the view that the Slytherin trio were worse in real life, at least in those early days. I couldn’t possibly comment.