You're gonna be bothered by how cool I am.

Most of you (except perhaps you Brits who know his TV work) never heard of him before he was announced as the chosen director of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix last year. I certainly hadn't. His IMDB page lists 15 projects (prior to OotP) for which he received a director's credit. Of these, I have been able to track down only three. His breakout film, so to speak, was "State of Play," a political thriller that appeared on BBC and which is so far only available on Region 2 DVDs. *pouts*

However, there are some interesting things to observe about what I could find of his work and what I could find about him in general.

He went to film school, but like every good film geek he started making films well before that. He was inspired by Jaws to want to become a filmmaker, so he's got the Spiel-nerd factor there. :P He broke into the business by doing short films for the BBC, and a lot of his stuff was made for television. He feels there's a kind of rift between the respective industries of TV and film, and that it's ridiculous, because in the final analysis it's all storytelling anyway. (I heard George Clooney say almost exactly the same thing a couple of days before the Oscars.)

The first film I saw of Yates' was The Way We Live Now - a costume drama, and an adaptation of a novel ... the kind of thing the BBC has been doing so well for so many years. It was adapted from the Anthony Trollope novel by Andrew Davies (who most of you might remember as the genius who wrote the screenplay for the BBC's stellar 1995 production of Pride and Prejudice). And it starred a lot of now familiar faces - Matthew "I'm-no-Colin-Firth-but-I'll-do-in-a-pinch" MacFadyen, Cillian (*swoon*) Murphy, Shirley "Moaning-Myrtle-is-a-total-perv" Henderson, Miranda "Arwen-who?" Otto, and David "Filch-is-the-new-Minister-of-Silly-Walks" Bradley.



TWWLN is one of those stories that has lots of juicy characters and intertwined plots. They're all balanced fairly well, as far as pacing and keeping everything interesting. So my first impression of Yates was that he would be able to do justice to the many plots in OotP and juggle them effectively.

My next exposure to Yates was an hysterical adaptation (again for BBC) called The Young Visiters (misspelling intentional). This was based on a novel written in 1890 (though not published until almost 30 years later) by nine-year-old Daisy Ashford. Considering the age of the author, it is a frighteningly scathing look at the pious Victorian society, and Yates handles the absurdity of the story and its characters remarkably well. And it has Hugh Laurie in it, so it's doubly superb.



So, The Young Visiters convinced me that Yates - with the help of a good screenwriter - would handle the humor of OotP with ease. Not to mention the bumbling romance.

I finally got a chance to watch the only other movie of his I could find, The Girl in the Café, last night. It's another romance, and one that's even more adorably awkward than The Young Visiters (though it doesn't hurt when Richard Curtis is writing your lines). I have high hopes for Harry's first kiss, first date, and first attempt at hand-holding. :D But what really struck me was the emotion in the story, and particularly the "current issues" factor.


(Look! There's even a sugar bowl on the table!)

The film is a great blend of romance and politics. Lawrence (Bill Nighy) is a researcher for the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He's very lonely and only lives for work, but he gets a little ray of sunshine at last when he meets Gina (Kelly McDonald) in a coffee shop. Theirs is an extremely shy and awkward, though very quick, courtship, but somehow he plucks up the courage to invite her to join him in Iceland when he attends a G-8 summit. They don't talk about the issues much, and Gina actually jokes about Lawrence putting her to sleep when talking about them, but when he gets to the issue of global poverty, her interest is piqued. She begins to ask questions and read Lawrence's reports.

Soon she finds herself spouting off at world leaders and getting Lawrence into a lot of trouble. But she has some very important and poignant things to say, and she doesn't mind embarassing herself or others in order to say them. Her most dramatic showing is at a formal dinner party, where she insists that helping merely a fraction of the children who are dying every day is just not good enough, and that future generations are going to find a way to make a real difference for every last one of them. That they'll look back on the current generation and be ashamed that those people could have done something but didn't. She points out - as Lawrence has told her - that a child dies every three seconds because of poverty. She snaps her fingers ... "There they go." After a moment, she snaps again ... "There goes another." The movie also ends on a somewhat ambiguous and uncertain note, which again seemed to me to speak to the demands of properly adapting OotP for the screen. (Perhaps, after four rather strange and unsatisfying endings, we'll get a good one at last. And for a book that ends on such a downer, how ironic would that be?! :P)

I'm very, very interested to see what Yates does with the politics and emotions of OotP. When asked about his favorite filmmakers, he lists David Lean (director of epics like Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago), Martin Scorsese (known best for character-driven films like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas), and Ken Loach (I've only seen one of his movies, Bread and Roses, which is a political movie of sorts, and several of his other films seem to be somewhat political).

I also love what he has to say about working with actors and the script:

"Improvisation has always been a part of the work I do. Even with very tightly scripted material, you always find an opportunity with an actor to spin in an idea and try something in addition to what you already have. I think it’s a healthy approach to the work. But attempting to try and reach a sense of truth is what intrigues me – even when you have pretty heightened and larger than life characters. " (Yates, to Film London, Dec. 2004)

He seems to have really gotten into the HP books, and he looks on OotP as his chance to make a big-scale movie like Jaws, which he has wanted to do since he first had the desire to make movies.

I have a love/hate relationship with OotP, the novel. I love it in that it's such a fantastic book, and is very engaging and urgent (once I can get into it). But I also have a hard time re-reading it, because so much of it is a bring-down. However, there are so many incredible moments in it - many of them iconic moments in the series as a whole.

Having said all that, I'm pretty sure this movie is going to be AWESOME. Now when do we get those first set pics?