All across the twilight years of Warner’s Harry Potter movie franchise, producer David Heyman, David Yates and of course J.K. Rowling served as the core trio pulling the strings behind the camera. Fast forward to 2016 and with Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them launching later this year, the creative team have once again found themselves knee-deep in perplexing spells and magical creatures.
But what distinguishes the upcoming spinoff from WB’s financial juggernaut is the period in which it is set. Long before the birth of the Boy Who Lived, a certain magizoologist prodigy known as Newt Scamander traversed the world in search of those elusive oddities, before making tracks to New York during the roaring ’20s with a briefcase full of Fantastic Beasts in tow.
[zerg]Featuring an entirely new cast of characters and the Magical Congress of the United States of America, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a fairly major departure from what Potterheads have come accustomed to, and recently David Heyman spoke about how the high-profile spinoff came to be. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, here’s what the series stalwart had to share:
“It was exciting to move on and to embrace new challenges with Gravity and Paddington, but when it finished, there was a not-insignificant sadness because [the Potter films] had been such a big part of my life. Jo Rowling created such an incredibly rich and deeply conceived world. What you read in the books is in some ways just the surface of this world. I’d ask her about the [character Sirius Black’s] family tree because we had to paint it on the wall [for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix], and the book only had two names, and half an hour later I’d receive a family tree going back six generations with 100 people.”
Continuing on, Heyman also noted that the nucleus of Fantastic Beasts can be traced to one burning question: What else could we do in this world?
“I’m sure Newt Scamander and his story have been in her mind for many years. We were sitting around wondering what else we could do in this world, and [producer] Lionel Wigram, who is the person I first brought the first [Potter] book to, thought about maybe doing a documentary about Newt. That idea was floated to Jo, and she responded to doing a film about [that character].”
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them will hope to ignite a newfound trilogy of magical films at Warner Bros. when the Harry Potter offshoot opens on November 18.