Ìý As well as taming the forces of evil, Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) has to figure out girls in Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire. It's a "tough-minded take" on JK Rowling's fourth novel in the series, but kids and grownups lapped it up to the tune of $600m in worldwide ticket sales. That makes it the fifth biggest grossing movie of all time, just behind Chamber Of Secrets and The Sorcerer's Stone. Hmm, reckon there'll be a sequel?
A Fool For Yule
The highlight of a bumper reel of additional scenes is a full performance from Jarvis Cocker and The Weird Sisters at the Yule Ball, which includes a spot of midget crowd surfing! There's also more from Alan Rickman, who was short-changed for screen time in his role as Snape, and Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) battles the demons of pubescent insecurity. According to a featurette on preparations for the Yule Ball, it was a case of art imitating life; "I like Harry because he's pathetic at the whole romance thing," says Radcliffe, "I know how it feels." Indeed, he and the rest of the boys struggle to put a foot right in dance rehearsals. Thankfully, the stunning production design serves as a distraction.
Each of the tasks Potter undertakes in the Triwizard Tournament is explored in separate behind-the-scenes featurettes. In Harry Vs The Horntail, the dragon is followed through various designs stages and The Maze reveals how a combination of clever set dressing and CGI endowed it with, as Newell puts it, "a malign personality." However, the most challenging of all the tasks - for Radcliffe as well as the filmmakers - was the underwater sequence. In Too Deep shows Radcliffe splashing about in a giant fishbowl for a training regime that lasted six months. We're surprised he didn't shrivel to the size of a prune in that time...
Class Of 2005
Meet The Champions introduces franchise newcomers Robert Pattinson (Cedric Diggory), Stanislav Ianevski (Viktor Krum) and Clémence Poésy (Fleur Delacour). It's presented as a video diary following each actor through one day of shooting and conveys the huge amount of time and effort that goes into creating just a few seconds of film. Each Harry Potter takes around a year to produce and Reflections On A Fourth Film paints a broader picture of life on set. Katie Leung, who is also new to the franchise (as Cho Chang), admits the routine of shooting, attending drama workshops and hanging out between lighting set-ups was initially "quite a shock", but there's also a summer camp atmosphere and obvious bonding between the actors. Meanwhile Newell spends a lot of time rolling around on the floor, trying to be one of the kids...
Ralph Fiennes gets his own forum in He Who Must Not Be Named. His appearance as the villainous Voldemort is stripped down to its CG basics and Fiennes also talks about the mental process of getting inside the character's skin. Mental is the operative word as behind-the-scenes footage shows him hissing and dancing around a sweaty-looking Radcliffe who's apparently been tied up for hours. Fiennes recalls this day with a sheepish smile, finally apologising to Radcliffe for insisting on "endless takes while he suffered..."
In Conversations With The Cast, Radcliffe reveals that Fiennes was terrifying even with little orange dots stuck to his face (that'll be the performance capture technology). He's joined by Grint and Watson in recalling some of their favourite moments from the film and fans also get to ask their questions. Finally, a batch of interactive games and DVD ROM features are thrown in to keep younger viewers amused. Disappointingly there are no audio commentaries to accompany the film and absolutely nothing on screenwriter Steven Kloves and his valiant efforts to squeeze Rowling's 630-page opus into two-and-a-half hours of screen time. Even with these gaps, however, The Goblet Of Fire is overflowing with goodies.
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