"I've worked with Jim before, and that's where you most see my British sensibility," says Yates. "Jim as an actor is a real touchstone of the British sensibility. He understands the people in the British middle-class, and their need for social advancement, and their need to be recognized that they have achieved social advancement. He's built a career on understanding those characteristics. He has great pathos but he's also very funny."

Prince presented challenges because of "a series of memories that inform the past and the present." While Yates "enjoyed the flashbacks enormously as separate incidents, he didn't feel they were satisfying within the whole. In other words, they diluted the dramatic experience from his point of view and he felt we needed to concentrate exclusively on those memories that informed one particular thread of the story - the story I was, by and large, telling."

Yates says, "We often have conversations which go along the lines of 'Will the fans really like it if we lose that?' Some choices may be right for the framework of the film but will put the fans out." Yates wants "to make sure the fans are happy" and says he always lets pieces of the book go "regretfully," but his goal is to make "the best adaptation that will warrant spending two-and-a-half hours in the dark."

"I'd wanted Order of the Phoenix to be an intense journey with a troubled young kid, more social-realist than the other films. But The Half-Blood Prince is more heightened, and if Deathly Hallows Part I is quite verite and goes back to that social-realist style, Part II should be epic and operatic."

"He's always been the funny one, but he has so much more as an actor than that. In Prince, he has lovely stuff that's funny and true, but in Deathly Hallows, he must be defensive and haunted, and Rupert took to that like a duck to water. I'm always thankful that Jo Rowling gave us a world that allowed us to turn corners with the actors."