13

HOW TO FLY A BROOMSTICK

or

THE WASPS AND THE WIMP

What’s it like to fly a broomstick? Well, if you’ve read this far, you’ll know that’s a loaded question. You’ll know that I learned early on not to ruin the magic for the children at Comic Con. And if you prefer to remember Harry and Draco’s Quidditch matches as the magical battles that appeared on screen, may I gently suggest you move on to the next chapter.

One of our earliest location shoots was at Alnwick Castle, where I managed to get myself and Alfie Enoch into a sticky slalom skateboarding situation. This was also our first shoot with broomsticks. Zoë Wanamaker was Madam Hooch and the Hogwarts first years were receiving their first flying lesson.

It was not only Madam Hooch and the first years who were in attendance. It was a warm, sunny day and, attracted by the smell of thickly applied make-up and hair gel, swarms of wasps were taking an interest in us. More specifically, they were taking an interest in me. Draco’s hairdo required the application of an entire tub of gel each day. My blond locks were so rigid, I might as well have been wearing a Kevlar helmet. And as far as the wasps were concerned, the hair gel might as well have been strawberry jam. They were all over it. Full disclosure: when it comes to wasps, I’m a wimp. While Draco might have been acting too cool for school during the scene, off camera I was flapping around like a landed fish, running from the wasps, squealing and trying to swat them away. (And it’s not impossible, of course, that the more people laughed at my ridiculousness, the more I might have played up my apparent distress.)

Madam Hooch to the rescue. Her spiky hair required a similar quantity of gook, so Zoë Wanamaker had the same problem. She gave me a strategy to deal with it. “Just repeat the words ‘green trees,’” she said.

Huh?

She explained that the wasps weren’t going to hurt me and I needed a way to relax around them. Repeating her “green trees” mantra was a way of doing that. So when you watch Draco in that scene, you can imagine me silently chanting those words in the back of my head, and doing my best not to shriek with terror as wasps circled my rock-hard hairdo.

With the wasps dealt with, the students stood in two lines opposite each other, their brooms on the ground. On Madam Hooch’s word, they gave the instruction “Up!” and, with varying degrees of success, caused the broomsticks to jump into their hands. The approach was that if a piece of magic or any kind of special effect could be achieved practically, that was the best way to do it. This was especially true in the early days, when the visual effects teams had less-advanced technology at their disposal. So what you don’t see, when the camera points down the middle of the two lines of students, is the guys lying on the ground behind each broom with a see-saw-like contraption, raising the brooms off the ground and even making them waft around a little bit.

Actually flying the things took a bit more ingenuity. Blokes with see-saws weren’t going to cut it. The flying scenes were all done in a studio. Imagine a massive room wrapped in blue canvas—or green in the later years. The broomstick was a metal pole fitted with a deeply uncomfortable bike saddle. There were stirrups for your feet and a harness to stop you falling. They strapped you to the pole so you couldn’t fall and they had a more elaborate see-saw device to move you up and down, left and right. They blew fans in your face to make it look as if you had the wind in your hair. And because the background was going to be added digitally, and all your nifty broomstick moves were to be cut in at a later date, it was important that all the players were looking in the right direction for the shot. In order to ensure your eye line was as it should be, a guy held up a tennis ball on a long pole with a little bit of orange tape on it. When the first assistant director shouted “Dragon!” or “Bludger!” you had to look at the tennis ball like it was, well, a dragon or a bludger. Sometimes there would be more than one tennis ball up there, and as one looked very much like another, after a while they gave us more individual objects to stare at. We chose pictures of something or somebody close to our hearts. Daniel Radcliffe had a picture of a particularly beautiful Cameron Diaz. I chose a picture of an even more beautiful carp. I mean, there’s no competition…

Shooting a Quidditch match or another big broomstick scene was a slow, painstaking, bum-numbing process. The geniuses behind the camera had to work to an unbelievable level of precision. They would shoot the backgrounds first for reference, then the actors on the broomsticks, so one could be superimposed on the other. The camera movements for both shots had to be precisely the same and there always seemed to be a lot of people manning the cameras and the computers needed to make that happen. Quite what they were doing, I don’t know—I was just the guy on the metal pole with the fans blowing in my face, staring at a picture of a stunning carp—but I do know that it seemed to take forever to complete even the smallest amount of footage. We would finish those shooting days distinctly saddle-sore.

As kids, we desperately wanted to do as much of the stunt work as we could. I still had happy memories of the stunt work I did on The Borrowers, and amazingly my little disagreement with the gymnastic beam was yet to dampen my enthusiasm for such activities. Certainly we did a lot more of the stunt work than I imagine they would let us do now. In the scene in Chamber of Secrets where Harry and Draco have a duelling competition standing on the table in the Great Hall, we had to create shots where Harry and Draco hit each other with spells, one of which shot me in the air and spun me round. That was all achieved practically. I wore a full body harness with a wire coming out of the back, which they wrapped around me several times. Give the wire a good tug and Draco’s going to spin. I remember thinking at the time that this was pretty cool. There were maybe a hundred background artists there, and I was up on the table doing my heroic stunt work. Never mind that it was a painful business, or that it left me with a nasty bruise where the cable rubbed into me. This was a fun moment for a slightly cocky teenage actor. Stunt work is cool, right?

Well, yes and no.

The vast bulk of the stunt work was done not by us but by the stunt team. I have nothing but respect for those men and women who push themselves to extremes in the name of filmmaking, simply so that an audience can be entertained. Pretty much every time you see somebody falling from a broom, or jumping, or being bashed about, you can be almost certain it’s one of the stunt team rather than us. I might have felt like the big guy during the duelling scene, but in fact the stunt artists took the brunt of that by far. They seemed to spend a lot of time—especially during Chamber of Secrets—working with a piece of equipment called a Russian swing. Imagine an ordinary playground swing but larger and with metal bars instead of ropes. The stunt performer stands on the platform and it swings back and forth, back and forth until its arc is as long as can be. Then, at the peak of the arc, the performer jumps high into the air and falls onto a crash mat. It looked fun, but it was definitely a job for the pros. And the pro that I had the most involvement with was the incredible David Holmes—or Holmesey to us.

Holmesey was Daniel’s stunt double from the beginning and also mine from the second film onwards. Given the various escapades of Harry and Draco, it meant he was kept busy. He routinely used to do stunts dressed as Harry in the morning, go off for lunch and come back to do stunts dressed as Draco in the afternoon. He was an Olympic-standard gymnast from a very early age, and in any shot where you see Daniel or me apparently doing something dangerous, you can be fairly sure it was actually Holmesey. And during the filming of Deathly Hallows it was brought home to us all that stunt work is not an activity to be approached naively.

Stunt artists do everything they can to minimise the risk of their job. But they can’t eliminate it completely—there’s no totally safe way of falling from a great height, or being hit by a car—and it is impossible to legislate for an unexpected turn of events. Which is exactly what happened when we were filming Deathly Hallows. Holmesey and the rest of the team were rehearsing with a stunt that involved him flying through the air and hitting a wall, wearing a harness and suspended by a high-strength wire. Something went wrong. The wire yanked him back and Holmesey hit the wall far harder than he should have, before falling to a crash mat below. He knew immediately that something was wrong. Paramedics rushed him to hospital, where he learned that he was paralysed from the waist down, with very limited use of his arms, and would be that way for the rest of his life.

Naturally, everyone involved in making the films was distraught. Imagine going from being able to do a backflip on the spot, to lying in a hospital bed being told you’ll never walk again. Sure, it’s a risk that stunt performers take every day at work but the reality, when it happens, must be earth-shattering. A lesser man than Holmesey might let it faze him and obviously he now lives a very difficult life. But he is the bravest, most strong-willed person I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. He has the heart of a lion and remains one of my closest, dearest friends. When he was in hospital, the studio brought him food, much to the envy of the other patients on his ward. So Holmesey insisted that the studio should cook for everyone on the ward—either everyone should have it or no one should. That was Holmesey through and through. Despite his challenges, he continues to bring us so much joy, and his determination to live as normal and active a life as possible is a true inspiration. He tirelessly raises money for the hospital that saved his life, and has his own production company. He is a constant reminder to me that stunt artists on film sets deserve a great deal more credit than they receive. The actors might get all the adulation, but so often it’s the stunt artists that make us look good and Holmesey is the best of them. He’s a beacon of light.

In Holmesey’s honour, we now have an annual Slytherin vs Gryffindor cricket match to raise money for the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, where he was treated in the days following the incident. Radcliffe and I are team captains, and the old Hogwarts grudges have by no means been diminished by the years. I really don’t have to tell you which house is in the lead, do I?