‘Harry Potter’: Daniel Radcliffe Says He Averaged Only ‘7 Seconds of Usable Footage a Day’ for 1 Intense Scene
It’s safe to say that the Harry Potter movies provided Daniel Radcliffe with a wonderful training ground for a career in acting. The English actor beat out thousands of boys for the titular role in the film franchise. He spent a full decade of his life filming and promoting the beloved films. And though the December Boys star appreciated his time on set, sometimes the bigness of what he was helping create was lost on him.
Daniel Radcliffe had acting credits before working on the eight ‘Harry Potter’ movies
Unlike his fellow castmates, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, Radcliffe had professional acting experience prior to portraying the boy who lived. But no amount of work could have prepared him for the Harry Potter movies. The budgets for the fantasy films were sky-high. And since magic is essential to the story, the sets that the crew built at Leavesden were truly larger than life. While speaking to GQ, Radcliffe explained that the intricacies of making the films were often lost on him at the time.
The main cast member reflected on the enormous scope of the film franchise
“There is so much on Potter that was so intense and so crazy you don’t even think about it at the time,” Radcliffe confessed. “Cause you’re just like, yeah, they’re building a tank where D stage used to be. They’re just like building a tank, and they’re gonna be filming underwater for six weeks.”
Continuing on, Radcliffe reflected on how much effort it took to film the aforementioned underwater scene. Fans of the Harry Potter movies will likely recall the second task in the Triwizard Tournament. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry is tasked with rescuing Ron from The Black Lake. The scene was certainly a challenging one for the protagonist, but it seems it was even more challenging to shoot. The scene actually took weeks to film.
Radcliffe gets candid about filming the underwater Triwizard Tournament scene from ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’
“I had, like, a log book of all the hours that I’d done underwater,” Radcliffe recalled. “Like it was…really cool. I’ve heard that we average like seven seconds of footage a day or something like [that] of usable footage. But again, those are one of those things that you go like, ‘I will never do that again,’ and if I do, I’ll be one of the only people who’s done it before. It was one of those moments that you look back and you go, ‘God, that’s special.'”
Of course, that wasn’t the last time that Radcliffe and the film crew were tasked with shooting an intricate underwater scene. In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the young wizard was forced to fight off Inferi in a cave. He gets dragged underwater, only for Dumbledore to save him in a final hour by conjuring fire. In the aforementioned interview, Radcliffe explained how that scene was achieved and revealed that he was actually on a wire underwater.
Radcliffe explains how he accomplished another memorable underwater scene in the ‘Harry Potter’ movies
“I was holding myself by [a] rope under the surface of the water, and then, on action, I let go, and they pulled me on the wire,” the Harry Potter alum recalled. “So I flew out of the water, and there was like a ring of fire around me, so I was just like bursting out of the surface of the water through a ring of fire. It’s phenomenal that they allowed me to do that myself, and like again, I’ll never probably be on a job where they do let me do that kind of stuff.”
Clearly, Radcliffe enjoyed his time on the set of the Harry Potter movies even when he was shooting intricate scenes. We’re sure Potterheads appreciate his commitment to the intense scenes.
