Heyman adds that Rowling
“didn’t need to go back to this
world for any other reason than
that she wanted to. There’s a
real sense of it being an author’s creation.”
J.K. Rowling’s First
Screenplay: Director David
Yates, who has been a part of
the wizarding world since Harry Potter and the Order of the
Phoenix (2007), also heaps
praise on Rowling’s first outing as a screenwriter. “Jo’s an
extraordinary writer,” he says.
“She hadn’t written a screenplay before, so this was a new
experience for her.
“If you work with a traditional screenwriter, you’ll give
lots of notes and the writer will
go away and spend three to six
months re-writing. With Jo, it’s
an extraordinary process because she doesn’t realize that’s
how it should work. You give
Jo notes and then a week later you’ll get a script. And I’ll be
like, ‘Whoa! Jo’s just delivered
a script — after a week!’”
Heyman adds of Rowling: “Her tireless imagination is
a gift. She’s always there if we
need to consult her.”
Wizards
Assemble:
Eddie Redmayne was the filImakers first and only choice for
the lead role. “You can believe
that [Eddie]’s a magizoologist,”
says Heyman. “He’s kind of
quirky, kind of off-center, but
he has a deep-seated intelligence.”
In Fantastic Beasts,
Scamander teams with a trio
of new friends to round up his
crazed critters and — with Redmayne in place — the hunt was
on to find actors that could
authentically portray outsiders but had that chemistry that
proved so important to the Potter
films.
Katherine Waterston secured the role of Porpentina
“Tina” Goldstein, an ambitious
worker at the Magical Congress
of the United States of America
(