Harry Potter director still thinks he got Daniel Radcliffe’s scar wrong

Chris Columbus, director of The Office recalls feeling scared when he started to direct. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s StoneIn the 1990s. “I was undertaking this job where billions of people were going to be scrutinizing every move,” he tells Polygon, on the occasion of the movie’s 20th anniversary. “So weirdly every decision was important, every decision would eventually affect what would come later.”

November 14, 2001 was the debut of Harry Potter’s first film. It made Potter book fever a global phenomenon. Daniel Radcliffe (11 years old) was Daniel’s director. Sorcerer’s StoneThe visual design for Harry Potter’s first movie was key. It would also be used in future movies and the multimedia future, with theme parks built around it. Unfortunately, the director and audience were unaware of exactly the direction that the series took in 2001. Columbus did know, however, from conversations with author J.K. Rowling, was that the books would get grim — and that ultimately informed the set design.

“We did put into the design the fact that these sets have to start off with some sort of storybook kind of warm fantasy feeling,” he explained. “And then as the series progressed, we had to utilize the same sets and create a darker world.”

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Columbus directed and produced the Potter movies. However, he was not involved in any of the subsequent adaptations. His early gambling decisions, including the Quidditch uniforms and the Great Hall, proved to be successful. Some of his decisions, such as the set design were made deliberately, while others were simply luck.

“Voldemort in the first film was not played by [Ralph] Fiennes but he looks almost exactly like him,” says Columbus. “It’s interesting to me that you can watch these films back to back without a hitch in terms of Voldemort! It was Voldemort. Was Fiennes in his first movieThis is the best. We got lucky with that one.”

Columbus was mostly satisfied with the outcome of the first movie, which helped define seven films that followed. There is a catch. one thing he still thinks they didn’t quite get right.

“Harry’s scar was so incredibly difficult to get right. I don’t know if we ever really did to be honest with you,” he says. “But we struggled with that for months. When you’re working with kids under 16, or something, you can’t really use prosthetics, or you couldn’t back then. We couldn’t really utilize a prosthetic scar, which is kind of what I saw, like a real scar. That’s the one detail and important detail that I wish I could go back and tweak.”