Seven secretsThe penultimate Harry Potter movie — The Deathly Hallows, Part 1 — opens today and, with one million tickets pre-sold in the UK, it is expected to be the year's biggest box office hit.
To mark the occasion, super fan David Thomas opens his own chamber of secrets to bring you his spellbinding trivia, with everything you ever wanted to know about the world’s most famous wizard...
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ...
1 Is the first Harry Potter film in which Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is not seen at all.
2 Became the first two-part Harry Potter film, as the scriptwriter Steve Kloves found it impossible to fit all the elements of the book into a single story.
3 Required Daniel Radcliffe to impersonate six actors as their characters took a Polyjuice Potion, which made them look like Harry Potter. The scene — which took three days and 100 takes to shoot — ends with seven Harry Potters in the same room, at the same time, all played by Radcliffe.
Chase: Hagrid and Harry escape the Death Eaters4 Features a chase between evil Death Eaters and the motorbike and sidecar containing Hagrid and Harry, which was filmed in the Dartford and Mersey Tunnels in East London and Liverpool.
5 Brought traffic to a standstill in London’s Piccadilly Circus when a scene was shot there. Although filming took place before dawn, hundreds of Potter fans turned up.
6 At one point in the film, Harry, Ron and Hermione end up in a London diner. On the wall is a poster from Equus: the play in which Daniel Radcliffe starred as stable boy Alan — a role that required full nudity.
7 Ends at a cottage made of shells, on a beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales. The cottage was held down by water bottles, weighing several tons each, to stop it blowing away.
Wizard locationsWhere to find your favourite Potter places
Many of the scenes from the Harry Potter books are filmed on location in Britain, with real buildings and landscapes standing in for magical fictional ones. For example...
Hogwarts School, the centrepiece of Harry’s life, is comprised of the exterior of Alnwick Castle, Northumberland; the cloisters of New College, Oxford; and interiors from Harrow School, Durham Cathedral, Gloucester Cathedral, Lacock Abbey (Wiltshire), the Bodleian Library and Christ Church College, Oxford.
Privet Drive, the street where Harry’s awful foster family the Dursleys live, is shot in the leafy suburb of Martins Heron, near Bracknell, Berkshire. The area is also the location of many Tesco TV ads.
Malfoy Manor: the home of Harry’s enemies the Malfoys, which features in The Deathly Hallows, was inspired by and partly shot at Hardwick Hall, a Tudor mansion near Chesterfield, Derbyshire.Gringotts Bank, the financial heart of wizardry, is actually Australia House in The Strand, London.
Diagon Alley — the shopping street where Harry buys his wizard supplies — is Leadenhall Market in the City of London.
The Forbidden Forest, the dangerous territory near Hogwarts School, is actually the delightful woodland of Ashridge, near Berkhamsted, Hertfordhshire.
One other place dear to the hearts of all Potter fans is... the Buffet King all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant in Edinburgh, which used to be Nicholson’s Café, where a near-penniless J K Rowling wrote a lot of the early Potter stories.
10 Things To Know About Harry Potter: Deathly Hallows Part 1
source: dailymail
Posts
