(Music)
(Sound) It wasn't very long ago that we shared some lesser-known things on
Harry Potter, not to mention all of those What's the Difference episodes we did.
We figured that would be plenty of HPV for a good while.
But since you guys were so pushy about wanting a part two, and since today is
Boxing Day, we feel like doing it right now would be a great way to say,
thanks, you guys are the best.
Except for the jerks.
But most of you guys are the best.
So here are seven more things you didn't know about the Harry Potter movies,
probably.
(Sound) - There's no Hogwarts without you, Hagrid.
- Let's start off with a thing about the gentle half-giant Hagrid.
Making Hagrid look large when compared to the other characters was
often just clever use of the camera and visual effects.
But it was still kind of rough to actually play Hagrid.
The Hagrid costume weighed about 90 pounds and
would have to be as tall as 8'6" practically in some shots.
It was so cumbersome that they built a cooling system into
it to mist down the actor inside.
Which only made it heavier, by the way.
They'd also have to clear extra-wide pathways for him to move around set and
have special giant chairs for him to sit in between shots.
Plus it took two guys to play Hagrid, which is, boom,
a bonus thing you didn't know.
- I shouldn't have told you that.
- Robbie Coltrane is the actor we see any time we see Hagrid's face clearly.
But for all of the long shots, the guy inside is named Martin Bayfield, and
it's an animatronic Hagrid head on top.
An animatronic Hagrid head that will be giving me night terrors from now on,
by the way, so thank you.
Moving on.
(Sound) Hagrid is just one of many things in
Harry Potter that's larger than life.
Another would be the waves crashing on Azkaban in these exterior shots.
Sure, they obviously look really big, but
you probably didn't know that based on scale, those waves are 250 feet tall.
That's around 25 stories high.
Just to give you some more perspective,
the largest wave ever recorded was about 100 feet.
So 250 feet is more than that, like, by a whole lot.
(Laugh) Yeah, that is some magic math for you.
Moving on.
(Sound) - The Dark Lord shall rise again!
- Aah! - It was a long wait until we finally got
to see Voldemort for real in The Goblet of Fire.
But you probably didn't know that just like audiences, the actors in the film
also had to wait until Goblet of Fire was done to see Voldemort for the first time.
Daniel Radcliffe and the rest of the cast didn't have a real idea of what
Voldemort was going to look like until they saw the film.
All they had to go on was a photo of a super-basic pre-viz version of him.
Beyond that, they were just acting with a devilishly handsome Ralph Fiennes,
who had a bunch of orange dots all over his face.
They had to ignore the dots and
just Voldemort him up on their own in their imaginations.
Not that you should feel bad for them.
It's acting, that's the job.
- (Sound) - (Sound)
(Music)
Voldemort's face may not have been real, but
all of the drawings on the walls of the burrow were.
And they were not done by the art department.
They were drawn by regular kids from a school nearby just a few minutes
away from the studio.
Which I guess means that all of those kids can claim they did some of the production
design on Harry Potter.
Frankly, they'd be idiots not to.
- (Laugh)
(Music)
- Production designer is a job title anyone could've assumed would
be part of the Harry Potter team.
But one job title you may not have thought of was wand choreographer.
They needed someone to come up with the physical language of using the wands in
battle scenes, so that it was more than just, you know, pointing.
- And make sure you get this twist of the wrist with a swish and a flick.
Right side.
(Sound) - So choreographer Paul Harris developed
a whole vocabulary that combines bits of fencing, a touch of dance,
as well as movements he created on his own.
It made it a lot more interesting visually that it would have been if the actors were
just jabbing their wands at each other over and over, yelling fake Latin.
Which brings us to our next thing.
(Sound) - Stupefy!
- (Sound) - Thank you.
- Shut up.
- I let her do that.
- The spells that the witches and
wizards cast in Harry Potter all have a distinctly Latin-y sound to them.
What you may not know is there are a lot of legitimate Latin roots in those spells.
Because J.K. Rowling minored in classics when she was at the University of Exeter,
so she actually studied Latin.
When she started writing the Harry Potter books, she liked the idea that wizards
would still be using Latin, and used it as a jumping-off point for the spells in
Harry Potter, putting various twists on the original Latin words.
- Lumos maxima!
- Take the wand-lighting charm lumos.
It's derived from the Latin lumen, which means light.
Or the Cruciatus Curse.
- They're coming to get me!
- Crucio!
- Aah!
- In Latin, crucio literally means pain or torture.
Does anyone know how to say moving on in Latin?
I'm sure you'll tell me down in the comments, you (Bleep) assholes.
- Eat slugs!
(Sound) - Let's end on a good
old-fashioned Easter egg.
In The Deathly Hallows Part 1, there's that scene where Harry, Hermione and
Ron apparate to a cafe.
But one of the posters on the wall in the cafe is for the Broadway revival of Equus,
which Daniel Radcliffe starred in back in 2007.
The play made the news a whole bunch because got to see Harry Potter's wand,
if you know what I mean.
And if you don't, I'm talking about his genitals.
Specifically his penis.
(Sound) I assume his balls too, they're probably right in the same neighborhood.
Seriously, though, he even waxed his asshole for it.
Which is, boom, a bonus thing you didn't really need to know, but there you go.
That's it for this one.
We hope you guys are enjoying the holiday season as we sign off with our final
episode of Things You Didn't Know for 2016.
Hopefully you learned some new things about Harry Potter today.
And if you didn't?
- Good for you!
- (Laugh) You said it Christian Bale.
Thanks for watching, and subscribe to Cinefix for more trueish things about
movies, and sometimes Harry Potter's penis and butthole, but
not his balls for some reason, right here on Things You Didn't Know.
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