SnitchSeeker Australian correspondent Rotae Lupin was on hand for the press preview of Harry Potter: the Exhibition in Syndey earlier today, where she and several other fansites and media participated in a roundtable chat with actors James and Oliver Phelps, Robin Stapley, executive creative director of the exhibition, and Eddie Newquist, chief creative officer. During the press conference, the cast and exhibition crew discussed the creation and set of the display itself, and for the twins, working on the films and their experience between the sets and the exhibit itself. That can be read below; a photo of the twins at the chat can be seen here, as well as a new display prop of Bellatrix Lestrange's robes from the film series, which is making its debut at Harry Potter: the Exhibition in Sydney now. The exhibition opens to the public at the Powerhouse Museum on Saturday, November 19, 2011.

Question: Where there any props that you wanted to put in but weren’t allowed to?
Robin Stapley (Executive Creative Director): I think we had more of a problem just selecting, because there are so many props and so many amazing things, so to actually get that list, we wanted the most iconic props and costumes that people would relate to. There was actually too much for us to pick from, so it was incredible.

Question: Where do you start, with putting together a collection like this?
Robin: Ah… watching the films, obviously! Reading the books, you know, I think that’s really the start of it. And we’re big fans, so that helps.

Question: Did you have any favourite props?
Robin: That’s tough! I like the creatures, because I just know the amount of work that went into those creatures and they’re really impressive. But really, you know, it’s hard. Every time I walk around I go, ‘Ooh! That’s amazing!’ so you know, this is the sixth venue and every time I sort of go to a different prop, and they’re all amazing.

Question: Will there be any more stops after Sydney?
Robin: We are doing more stops, but we don’t know…

Eddie Newquist (Chief Creative Officer): We haven’t really decided where those stops will be yet.

Question: What were the logistics of getting it from the US over to here?
Eddie: Twenty-three shipping containers, I believe?

Jesse: A 40 day trek, all the way from New York. It was a long haul! I think it went through about two hurricanes just to get here, so it’s pretty incredible.

Robin: You actually see some big scenic pieces, and we built them in such a way that they can travel around, and all the props and costumes, so it’s a lot of pieces together.

Jesse: I don’t know if you guys talked about it, but all the trips back and forth to Leavesden Studios?

Eddie: This really couldn’t have happened without Warner Bros Consumer Products, and the filmmakers supporting everything that we were going to do, so we spent many months, with a great team at GES – a great design staff; Robin was leading it – and just coming up with lots of different concepts. We had to go and meet with filmmakers, meet with all the different department heads, and just make sure that we were getting it right. You know, that we were staying in the boundaries that we felt were appropriate and them too, and that was really a great meeting, just because it was so much fun being on set, and walking through the different sets with the different department heads. And then from there, it was really just peddle to the metal.

- James and Oliver Phelps arrive -

Jesse Phillips (moderator): We were just talking about when we first went out to the Leavesden Studios – just with our initial concepts – and you actually saw that concept book because it was the same one that was in Chicago, and it was really a thrill for Robin and I to be part of the team to meet with David Heyman and David Barron and the different department heads, and kind of, put together the concepts for The Exhibition.

And then once that was approved, we had the hard work of actually sorting everything and choosing everything and getting the pieces together. So we just talked about what a big thrill it is to be at Leavesden and walk through those sets, which obviously we’d seen pictures of – and I’m sure all you have as well – but being on set you know, you can describe it; it just takes you into a different world. You’re immediately transported, I guess would be the safe thing to say.

Oliver Phelps: Yeah! Yeah, you really are. And especially, because it doesn’t even feel like going around museum pieces, this could be anywhere in the world really. Which I think makes it even more incredible, because you when you see an exhibit piece you think, ‘Oh yeah, right, I’m still in Sydney, say,’ but walk around [the Exhibition] and it’s like you’re on set. It’s all genuine stuff, and you set about choosing the right props and stuff, and it’s not like you’ve taken what you’re allowed, it’s taking the best bits.

Eddie: Yeah, and we were talking about how Robin was over with the team, we made many trips to Leavesdon to choose the items, but the only place that was large enough for us to do this in, to select everything and lay it out, was the Great Hall. You guys weren’t shooting in there at the time, so we laid everything out – virtually – every prop, every costume, and then went through the meticulous process of choosing them and labelling the obvious, making sure that we were handling them appropriately, and it was secure, so then that was a real treat, because we’d walk around the sets and point at things and go, ‘Are you going to use that chandelier in the Common Room anymore?’, or we’d say, ‘The door in the Gryffindor dormitory, are you guys done with that door yet?’

Robin: Or the bunk beds! They’d finished filming the bunk beds, so we said, ‘We’d love those bunk beds!’. A little negotiation went on and we got the bunk beds.

Eddie: Now, one of the things we had to do, was we had to ship props back and forward many times to Leavesdon, because we’d have it in The Exhibition and then we’d get a phone call and they’d say, ‘Oh, you know, somebody wants it back…,’ so did [the twins] ever make us send anything back?

Oliver: Our wands.

James Phelps: We were in Toronto and we had to get our wands shipped back to film it.

Eddie: Did you have favourite costumes or jackets or street clothes that you wore, or you just said, ‘I’m comfortable in these, just make up some new ones,’ were there some that you were attached to? And is it at your home right now – is the question that a lot of people ask.

Oliver: No, as I said, the wands are the main thing on the set, but like, some of the school uniforms as well are here on display and, uh, I can’t believe how short we were. We’d have been 16/17 when we wore those, and you can tell the difference in the costumes between the styles the directors had. So you actually see, I think you can see, the difference in the Death Eaters as well. Mike Newell’s concept of a Death Eater – which almost looked like a member of the Ku Klux Klan type of look – to David Yates’ impression, which is really just as menacing, really.

Eddie: So, one of the things I remember was David Heyman mentioning – because we were looking at a lot of Quidditch – which you guys obviously played, and Quidditch for each movie got progressively kind of cooler and the effects became a little bit better, so did you have specific Quidditch brooms that you utilised, that were customised to each character? Or was it, you know, ‘Here’s the Gryffindor broom?' Or, how did that work?

James: Yeah, the brooms were pretty much the same, apart from, I think Harry’s broom was the one which was different. I think there were maybe two or three different brooms that they put on, but they were pretty much the same model. But was we did because Oliver and I, we had the Bludger bats, so there were three different variations on that. There was a hard one, a soft one and like a foam one, kind of thing, just for the way they could shoot with it. So it’s quite cool that the one that’s here – I actually dropped it, so you can see the mark where I dropped it from quite a high feet.

Eddie: So was there anything on set that you can remember you had to be so overly cautious with because they could only make one, or you had to be so careful with it? Was there anything you were nervous about touching or handling or holding? For instance, I notice that all the candy boxes and everything, there’s so much detail in them, I wondered did they make enough boxes to get through a variety of scenes?

James: Yeah.

Oliver: Yeah, there were a lot of those. I think that’s the cool thing with the props is that you were never too cautious about holding them, because they’d always make a back-up. I think that if you were cautious with it, it would come over quite a lot on set. I mean, even to the point in the exercise books in the Great Hall set, we’d actually do our own school work on set.

Jesse: Oh, really?

Oliver: Yeah, try and make it look as authentic as possible. They’d just put a cover over it.

Eddie: Even in the Great Hall’s tables, you can see where people have carved into the tables, and you can see, you know. It’s incredible.

Are your initials carved somewhere in the Great Hall tables?
James: I think somewhere, yeah. But that’s only for the sake of boredom, you’re just sitting in the same place. But we learnt early on, and you’ll see it on a couple of videos going around, the Halloween scene for example, all the ADs [assistant directors] told us before we went on, ‘All right, just remember, just have like, a little bite and then go from there,’ but of course we were like, 15/16 year old kids and they would load loads of sweets in front of you, so they just went straight down. On like, take 30 it was like, ‘Ohhhh… God (groans)’, and I think I went a good year without having a profiterole [cream puff]. It was just like, a lot of chocolate to have in one go.

Eddie: You know, Robin and I, Robin was the one who was really all the different, specific, artefacts and categorising them with Warner Bros Archives and Warner Bros Consumer Products, and we got a great helping of the Great Hall feasts, and different chocolate bunnies and the ice creams, and we noticed how real it looked, and then we heard this story that on the first film, they were trying to actually cater the food for some of the sequences, and because you’re shooting with kids, and kids can be a little tough to film, you know, especially first-timers, they kept shooting longer and longer and the food kind of started smelling worse and worse.

Oliver: Yeah, the smell of brussel sprouts.

Eddie: So, is it true that after the first film you guys just decided to switch to the plastic foods for the sequences just so you didn’t have to smell them?

Oliver: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, a lot of the big turkeys and chickens were just on the tables, and a lot of them were just hollowed out plastic and then they’d like, the steam would come out and there’d just be a kettle really, and they’d just boil it. So definitely saved the nostrils.

Question: How many wands did you end up breaking between the two of you?
James: I broke three.

Oliver: I broke two.

James: The first one, I learnt my lesson very early on. I hadn’t had a wand until the fifth movie, and so I got this thing, and it’s kind of like a pinecone – the handle’s like a pinecone – and yeah, I’d had it for about a month, and they’d only give us them when we were going on and coming off set, they’d take them off us. And so anyway, I’d – and this is a pretty good action, I (stands up, sits back down, makes cracking sound), never put your wand in your back pocket! Another one was, we were doing a duelling scene, and I was going for it and it flew out and cracked. And the third and final time was, we were actually doing a press shoot, and like, I was trying to be the cool kid and I went (twirls fingers) like a drum stick and it just went flew, crack.

Oliver: Mine was a lot thinner in the middle, the middle parts – it was almost shaped like a broomstick, sort of where the seat and the saddle would be – and it would always be like, if I dropped it, or if it had any impact, we were filming in the Room of Requirement, in the fifth movie and they were all squares with lighting underneath it, and I just dropped it on that and the thing went snap. And I didn’t want to tell anyone, so I was trying to hold it for that whole day in the film like, just the end bit in my hand.

Eddie: Small wand.

Oliver: Yeah, it shrank quite a lot, and then the other time was just yeah, drop it, and to a point where there’s a part in the Part 2 of The Deathly Hallows where I get – well, George gets – disarmed and his wand goes flying, and before we actually did that I said, ‘Can I have a rubber wand, because this thing is going to break as soon as I drop it.' And so yeah, you kind of learn your lesson the hard way.

Eddie: And Robin, handling a lot of artefacts, you didn’t break any wands did you?

Robin: I, no (laughs). We went very carefully.

Question: With casting, did you get to decide who was Fred and who was George, or did they say, ‘No, you’re Fred, you’re George?'
James: Yeah, they told us. Basically, we’d had six weeks of auditioning and we got cast, had our hair dyed, and it was all good, and before you shoot a movie you do something called a read through - so literally, you sit in a huge room with a huge table, and the whole cast is there and they read the script through – and we got there, and we still didn’t know who was Fred and who was George, we just knew that we were Fred and George.

So we said to Janet, who was the casting director, when she came over and said, ‘Are you looking forward to today?’ and I said, ‘Yeah! Quick question, Janet; who am I?’ (laughs). And she was like, ‘You’re joking, right?’, because she was thinking we were like, pranking around, and we were like, ‘No, really, who’s Fred and who’s George?’ and she was like, ‘Ah!’ So she went over and spoke to Chris Columbus, David Heyman and J.K. Rowling, and she came back about five minutes later and said, ‘Oh yeah. Oliver, you’re George, James, you’re Fred’. So I’d like to think that they said, ‘What – you didn’t get the memo of the big board meeting we had in L.A. or anything?’ but yeah, so that’s how we found out.

Question: So you didn’t have a, ‘He’s not Fred, I am!’ moment?
Oliver: (laughs) Not initially! Not at that moment, no.

Question: Following on from that question; were you ever tempted to switch?
Oliver: Yeah, we were tempted a few times, yeah. But it was one of those things where, like, at the end of the film you see how long the credit are, and I really didn’t want to be the one who had to get all those guys back in on a day when they didn’t need to be or, you know. We did swap once in the first movie between massive wide shots of the Great Hall with about 400 people in the same shot. With the hats on and everything, so we didn’t necessarily look that dissimilar from each other, sitting opposite from each other on the tables, but apart from that, it was nothing more than that.

Question: Were there any crazy, on-set stories from Deathly Hallows? I mean, I know in Goblet of Fire you broke one of Mike [Newell]’s ribs.
Oliver: Yeah, yeah. That was a fun day! (laughs) I didn’t actually know that I’d done that at the time. Many months later someone told me about it. He was good about it though, Mike; he never let on about it. There is actually a still that someone sent me of the moment that he broke his ribs. But I’ve got this big beard on at the time, so it looks a bit silly. But as for on The Deathly Hallows, I can’t really ... I don’t really think so.

James: I actually, during the rehearsals for Fred’s - when you see Fred, uh, he - as he ends up … uh … everyone’s seen it, right?

Everyone: (laughing) Yes.

James: So when he’s dead … (laughs) I was so in my character that I was dead to the world. So, um, I fell asleep. And everyone went to lunch, and I woke up in the middle of the Great Hall on my own. I was like, ‘Damn! I’m having an out of body experience here!’ (laughs)

Question: Some of the Weasley twins' nastier pranks were left out of the film, like with Dudley and the Ton-Tongue Toffee, and Montague and the Vanishing Cabinet, and things like that: Are you happy that those are out and they’re kind of nicer characters or would you have liked to be nastier?
Oliver: I would have liked, because you see that they are … they’re very kind of the same way with the Skiving Snackboxes and Puking Pastels and that, and selling stuff like nose-biting tea cups and stuff, you can tell there is that element where they can cross the line, but in the same sense it wouldn’t have made the characters, yeah, as you say, like, as loveable maybe to the people who hadn’t necessarily read the books when they see the films, but yeah. We’ll never know what it would have been like.

James: But when we were still filming, we still knew that that was what the characters were up to, so we still had that in the back of our mind, like, it was like a little twinkle of the eye kind of thing. Just like that little thing to get that characteristic out without blowing up a toilet seat or something.

Question: [Harry Potter: The Exhibition] started two years ago; how has it changed over the two years? Like, have you got feedback from fans and the general public and how has it changed since it first began?
Eddie: I think the first part is, we really haven’t changed it dramatically. I mean the sequence that you follow when you go through The Exhibition is really quite similar. We have done, with all the exchanges we’ve made with all the folks and prop masters at Leavesden, we have been able to add things. Some things went away, but they came back, so we’ve been able to add things.

Robin: Yeah, and as films have been wrapped, we’ve been able to get some new props and costumes, and for Sydney we actually have some really neat stuff. We’ve collected all the Horcruxes, we just have one to go …

Eddie: One to go. (laughs) We’ll have Dan in a case! That’s a great idea.

Robin: (laughs) We have Ravenclaw’s diadem, so we have some really nice stuff, and we have a Deathly Hallows case, so we’re excited about that. We actually have had some of these, but this is the first time that we’ve actually had them all together.

Eddie: It’s really hard to see the Invisibility Cloak (laughs), but it’s there; you’ll see it.

James: We never actually saw those together, even when we were filming, so it’s quite a buzz for us.

Robin: I don’t think anyone has seen them together!

Oliver: I feel like, the good think about how it’s all set out is that no other part, no other prop is sort of made to feel more important than another. So, even though it is the main thing in the final set-up, how it’s all very much ... there’s no difference from that to all the Quidditch World Cup memorabilia.

Eddie: Now, I remember that we went into your shop that was on, I guess it was Diagon Alley?

James: Yeah, Diagon Alley.

Eddie and Robin: That was amazing.

Eddie: Did you walk in there and just have so much fun? Like, the packaging was basically real, and that was so much fun to see and it looked like a really fun scene to shoot as well; what was that like?

James: Yeah, it was. We had a good chat to the Art Department guys beforehand, because they were like, coming up with the concepts and everything, and they were like, ‘So … how’d you like a 15-foot version of you there outside? Doing that (tips imaginary hat)?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah. That’d be cool.’

Eddie: Make it 20!

James: Yeah! (laughs) Make it 20 and we’re in! I think that’s what you notice when you’re there is the attention to detail on all the props is just out of this world and like, as you say, it all looked real and I want to say that for the Snackboxes and everything, they were like, 20 high and deep in the store and you could literally, like, pick them up and walk out with them – not that I did (laughs) – you could easily imagine that it was a shop in real life. Even to the sake of, there’s a scene where there’s kids walking up the wall, like, with these boots on and he was actually there walking up the wall while we were shooting.

Oliver: There’s a Dolores Umbridge statue on a tricycle thing going across the middle, and that was actually there. They guys had worked out the perfect weighted thing on this small trip-wire. Just little details like that where you wouldn’t really think of.

Robin: What amazed us, is that you think a lot of it is CGI, and actually a lot of those big set pieces are made, like the Chamber of Secrets door. I thought, you know, the snakes, the locks? All those are mechanical, and it was just incredible seeing that sort of thing.

Question: You guys just came back from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, did you enjoy it?
Oliver: It was good fun! It was good to see quite a lot of the cast members there as well, we got some cool stuff done when we were there. And the response from that place is just insane. It’s always busy. We just walked around and it was just incredible. So yeah, it was nice to see everyone again for the release of the Blu-ray and everything, so yeah. We got some golf in as well. It’s good fun.

Question: I have to ask, is the toothbrush here? And who came up with that?
Oliver: I dunno really! It was just an idea! (laughs) It wasn’t my idea necessarily, but it was an odd concept.

Eddie: We don’t have it, so is it still somewhere …? (looks at Oliver’s head)

James: It might be lodged … (laughs)

Oliver: (laughs) I have to admit, I don’t have much between the two so … but no, I think the main part was that it was just taken that after he’d totally interrupted his sister and Harry about to have a good, you know, intimate moment, that he’s like, ‘Well, what do I do now? Stick it in the hole what should be an ear.’

Question: What’s the next project now that Harry Potter’s done? Are you going to pursue your interests in music or football?
Oliver: I wish! I wish all of the above. I’d love to be a football commentator, that would be a good laugh. No, definitely going to keep up with the acting; we’ve got some stuff on in the new year, which is quite exciting. Some together and there’s two projects which are separate from each other, which will be quite good. But yeah, it’s just one of those things where we’re going to keep ourselves busy. I think a vacation for James. James is going on about a holiday.

James: He says, ‘a vacation,’ and he’s here in Sydney on the company’s credit card! (laughs) I get away with that, but you know, I’d just like to say that the thing I’m really looking forward to the fans seeing when they come here is the dragon from The Goblet of Fire. You actually see the detail, I mean, it’s not chained up and like, (laughs) it’s just a head, but you see just the detail that goes into creating … I mean, did you say it took like, six months to make?

Eddie: Something like that.

James: Like, some insane time to put this thing together and it’s been put on really well in there and I got such a kick when I first saw it. I think I saw it in Toronto, and I’m really glad that still made the trip.

Oliver: There’s cool bits as well, where you hear Voldemort speaking, but you don’t hear it all around that room and it’s like …

Robin: It’s a special effect where he’s literally, whispering in your ears… (audience shudders collectively) so don’t freak out! (laughs)