DUMBLEDORE’S ARMY

As Professor Umbridge wields her escalating power at Hogwarts, new and ever- stricter Educational Decrees are posted, each one more limiting than the last. Almost daily, new proclamations are hammered onto Hogwarts’ stone walls, banning anything she deems to be subversive. But all her plotting backfires, as her stranglehold on the school only serves to strengthen the students’ resolve to somehow defy her authority.

Yates notes, “What’s interesting is that, in trying to achieve complete control, Umbridge ultimately achieves the exact opposite.”

It is Hermione who is the first to act, rallying her fellow students to take matters into their own hands. Watson states, “They know that if they are not learning spells then they will be unable to defend themselves. And while the Ministry is in denial that Voldemort has returned, they are not. They believe Harry; they know there is something dark and scary out there. I think that’s the reason that, for the first time in her life, Hermione feels the need to rebel. It’s the first time she realizes that doing what you’re told all the time doesn’t quite work. You can’t always trust authority; sometimes you have to trust yourself.”

With Hermione and Ron’s encouragement, Harry agrees to step up and take on the responsibility of teaching the Hogwarts students the spells they will need to know to defend themselves against the Dark Arts. Radcliffe acknowledges, “At first Harry is reluctant, but he is talked into it by Hermione, who, as usual, is irritating but happens to be right on this occasion,” he laughs. “So we go underground and form Dumbledore’s Army. Harry becomes their teacher, using the knowledge he has gained to train up the students and teach them how to fight. The way he looks at it, there is a war coming, and there is a sense of growing danger. If Umbridge isn’t teaching us what we need to do, we won’t stand a chance when we are called upon to fight.”

David Heyman remarks that Harry going from classmate to teacher represents a critical moment in the arc of the character. “We see Harry start out being a bit of an outsider, feeling like people do not trust him, do not believe him, thinking he doesn’t belong anymore. Then, ultimately, he finds out that he does belong. And not only does he belong, but he has people who are willing to follow him. That’s a really powerful and moving thing—watching Harry go from feeling isolated, even within his group, to becoming a leader of that group. Moreover, he is a better teacher than some that he has had.”

One member of the group is the ethereal Luna Lovegood, a soft-spoken girl with a somewhat quirky personality, who is unfazed by what anyone else thinks of her. The character is making her debut in “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” just as the young actress playing her, Evanna Lynch, is making her acting debut in the coveted role.

Luna’s unique qualities made the part one of the most challenging to cast. Casting director Fiona Weir and the filmmakers met dozens of contenders, but none were quite what they had visualized for Luna, so they decided to hold an open call. More than 15,000 young hopefuls from all over the U.K. lined the blocks, standing for hours and hours for their chance to audition. One of them was Evanna Lynch, an avid Harry Potter fan who had fallen in love with the character of Luna when she read the book Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. “I loved her immediately,” Lynch states. “She is so cool because she is so honest with everyone, including herself. She is funny and free and kind of floats through life so everyone thinks she’s a bit dotty and silly, but she’s not. She’s really clever and wise in her own way, and she has a good insight into things.”

Lynch felt an instant connection with Luna when she was introduced to the character in the book, going so far as to put herself on tape reading Luna’s dialogue and even sending the tapes in for consideration. Shortly after, she learned there would be an open audition and declares, “I had to go…I was meant to go.” Persuading her father to take her, she traveled from her home in Southern Ireland and joined the queue with thousands of other candidates who shared her ambition but not her confidence. “I wasn’t nervous because being Luna was natural to me,” she asserts.

The filmmakers agreed. David Barron recalls, “Fiona Weir met all 15,000 of the girls and eventually distilled the choices down to 29, who she put on a DVD and sent to us. She told us there was one girl to watch for, but didn’t tell us which one. I got as far as the ninth one and rang Fiona and said, ‘It must be number nine,’ and it was. It was Evanna. She was just fantastic.”

Heyman attests, “The difference between Evanna and all the other girls we interviewed for the part is the others could play Luna; Evanna Lynch is Luna.”

Jany Temime adds that Lynch even contributed to her character’s costume. “She was very specific about certain details. I made earrings for her that were red radishes, and she insisted that they had to be orange. That’s how well she knew the character. We wanted to make sure that Luna’s costumes reflected a girl with very individual tastes and her own special interests, but not so completely different that she would not fit in with others.”

Another member of Dumbledore’s Army, Neville Longbottom, played by Matthew Lewis, has had his own troubles fitting in with his classmates, but he proves his mettle when he uncovers the perfect spot for the group to train in complete secrecy: the Room of Requirement. As its name suggests, it is a room that only appears to those who need it, taking on whatever form is required but remaining invisible to anyone on the outside.

Stuart Craig offers, “We gave the Room of Requirement a default or neutral state in which the walls are mirrors and you cannot determine where the real space ends and the reflection begins. I thought it was appropriate that reflected you and your need back to yourself. But, being the Room of Requirement, if they needed books and cushions or dummy Death Eaters to fight, they would appear, as in the novel.”

As a movie set, however, the mirrored room came with its own set of requirements. Craig acknowledges, “Obviously, the mirrors made it enormously challenging because they not only reflect the actors but the camera, the crew, the lights… We were constantly changing the angles of the mirrors for each shot and, in some cases, we used a dulling spray to kill a reflection.”

To minimize one concern, Craig and director of photography Slawomir Idziak devised an ingenious under-floor lighting system with which they could light the set from beneath grilles built onto the floor. For a time it looked like the system might not work as planned as “it lit the soles of people’s shoes in a rather unfortunate way,” Craig relates. “We ended up covering the soles of their shoes with black velvet and had everybody on the crew or not in the shot wearing little blue surgical shoes to prevent them from treading dust onto the floor of the set, which had to be black so as not to expose the under-floor lighting.”

NEXT: MISTLETOE
When Hogwarts adjourns for Christmas vacation, Harry’s underground class reluctantly breaks for the holiday. But as the students part company, one stays behind: the lovely Cho Chang, played by Katie Leung.