When J.K. Rowling said she saw an early screening of
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in April, she wasn't kidding about it being private. The fall issue of Entertainment Weekly revealed the
Harry Potter author viewed a very rough cut of the first installment all by herself in a private screening room somewhere in the UK, and gave her thoughts to Yates about it beyond the Twitter update she posted.
On J.K. Rowling's first screening of
Fantastic Beasts this past spring:
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J.K. Rowling went into the screening room, alone. director David Yates waited outside. The situation was pretty unusual.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them wasn’t anywhere close to finished, and Yates typically would never show a cut of a film that’s full of crude animation to somebody of the Harry Potter author’s importance, but he wanted to know if his team was on the right track.
“We were all very nervous,” Yates recalls of this April screening. “We waited and waited.” When Rowling finally emerged, she found Yates in his editing room, where she made him wait some more. For about a minute, she couldn’t say anything. “The film is very emotional,” Yates explains. “The end, in particular, is quite tender and moving.” And then? “She was very happy.”
After the screening, Rowling did of course give some notes to Yates about the project, on how better to fit it into her Wizarding World.
The feature also teases that Credence Barebone, played by Ezra Miller, might actually be a wizard, despite being raised by a witchcraft-hating No-Maj (portrayed by Samantha Morton), and that Graves (Colin Farrell) takes a keen interest in him.
Eddie Redmayne revealed his inspiration to use a magical wand and do spells as Newt Scamander:
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Eddie Redmayne: “I’ve dreamt all my life about holding a wand, and suddenly I have this thing in my hand and I’ve got complete stage fright and not a clue what to do with it.”
“I had to do an obliviate spell, and I literally went and looked at all the moments in the films in which there was an obliviate spell, and there was an absolutely stunning moment in which Emma Watson did this gentle turn of her hand,” he says. “So there were specific things that I went and looked at, and then thieved.”
On where he'd like to see Newt going forward in the sequels, and what J.K. Rowling told him about what might be to come:
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Eddie Redmayne: “I would like to see Newt out in the wild, to see him properly in the jungle.”
“She [Rowling] comes up and she goes, ‘Eddie, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but’—and then she sort of jumps forward with all the details of what’s in her brain. What she’s doing gets me so excited.”
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them screenplay book can be pre-ordered now via the following links: Amazon.com (hardcover) | Amazon.com (Kindle) | Amazon.co.uk (UK hardcover) | Warner Bros. Shop (hardcover) 
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David Yates reveals J.K. Rowling's 'Fantastic Beasts' film first screening reactions 
