EXCLUSIVE: Production Designer Michael Curry Talks Diagon Alley’s “Tale of the Three Brothers”

AK: When were you approached to create puppets for Diagon Alley?

MC: I worked with Universal doing Transformers walk-around characters, so we were given this assignment to create these full size, stilt-walking giant transformer costumes with audio to be part of the Transformer...the new ride. During rehearsal, I knew, everybody knew about the new development with Harry Potter. Then they tickled me a little bit saying that they were thinking of puppetry. That would have been 14 months ago, that happened. That was basically May of 2013. I first heard rumor that we would be looking at a puppetry solution for the Harry Potter story, so that is as much as we knew until last September. That is when they finally approached us. It was all still very confidential. We talked theoretically about how we should best present it and they wanted things to go back to report to JK Rowling about. She was very concerned about things being sort of natural to the world, you know, so not oddly enough not magical, you know puppets couldn’t just be magical within themselves, this is the mortal world. So that is where we chose this thing and I think this is why I was contacted because I have a real history with live performance puppetry, meaning we show the puppeteer. I feature them. I often use this device, as you know, you’re telling the story. This object, but the object..when told, a good story is told, and then when the object is enchanting, can really take over and create the magic of you believing that thing is real for a moment. So what we could do is compromise to JK Rowling's sort of rules by letting magic happen, but theatrical magic, which is, you know, what we always strive for anyway.

AK: Of course! It was a beautiful show. I think I maybe saw it six times the three days I was there.

MC: Oh good, you have seen it almost as many times as I have!

AK: It has a different feel to it when you watch during day than when you watch in the evening. I guess I didn’t expect that, but it certainly, it has power both ways I think.

MC: We generally do, you know, work basically at night because we do work in dark theaters, and so everything is artificial lighting. So the challenge for us often is how to make things look radiant in real lighting. We did that by…these puppets are sort of scenic painted and detailed in a way that is sort of trompe l'oeil [an art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions], really in daylight, full broad daylight they have to look convincing. It’s easy to do with theatrical lighting, but yeah it gives them…I like the night shows, they have the more….it’s just a broader palette.

AK: Had you seen Deathly Hallows or The Tale of the Three Brothers before you accepted the job?

MC: Yes, I’d seen them. I have a 20-year-old daughter who is an absolute expert and who is actually excited that I’m on this interview. So she kept me aware all along, and so yeah I saw them before I was contacted. And I also run a studio of 38 puppet makers and special effects people and every one of them are absolute Harry Potter die-hard fans so we had a lot of support, in fact, too many opinions! Universal was great 'cause they came out and visited us and then met my staff, and were like "Well, we’ve already found a nest of, you know, experts here", so they really let us make early suggestions. Designs were done back and forth and we really wanted to adhere to the designs set forth in the movie, and then JK Rowling’s, her illustrations too were followed, that was our Bible.

AK: Did you work with any of the original design team like Framestore who created the original animated versions of the Three Brothers?

MC: We had to have approval through them, but nobody, I guess it was a compliment, we didn’t have their involvement because I don’t think they felt the need to. I wish I would have. We did want to meet them, but we didn’t. I suppose we would have heard from them if there was a problem.

AK: The puppets were pretty spot on to the animated tale in the films – did you make any change other than what you mentioned before about making them able to be seen during the day?

MC: The only changes we had to make is sometimes mechanically, joints, some things are impossibly thin in 2D, you know as in too small to get a mechanical reliable joint. So the changes we made were entirely about practicality, the same changes you have to make with puppetry. When you do something in film, you can do anything. With puppetry, you actually have to follow law of physics and gravity. So the changes for us were minute and mechanical and we made compensation through the dressings. Everything was covered with fabric. It was really quite fun. The fabric of these is as much fun as the sculpture and mechanics of these. We can often cover up the mechanical things we had to do with the nice overdressing and costuming.

AK: I’m assuming you also created the larger version of death that comes out of the huge box in the back.

MC: Yes.

AK: Did you do the mechanics for that as well? As you have a huge team of people working for you, I would assume you did.

MC: Yes, on that we had to come up with a piece that would extend and cantilever forward, so it’s a compound motion – we didn’t want it to just pop up like a horror house. It has a scissor lift that is a special scissor lift, one that has two motions. It rises and then as it rises, it curves forward, like a claw shape. Then the whole death character had to fold up in the tiny box, quite small, 3x4 feet. The shoulders, the head would have to collapse down, but that also added to its animation,. Because during the animation stroke, we could control so the shoulders are moving and the head is curling down so we took the function of the storage position, and we found out that it looked actually quite natural because if you were to take a character and fold it up in the small, you would curl it up in the fetal position and something about it emerging from that position is doubly creepy. We did everything, all the mechanics on that one.

AK: It’s so funny that you say it’s doubly creepy, the night show that I ended up seeing, there was a mother with a five year old child and he was not happy, he was scared, he was crying. I just thought wow, it just looked so real!

MC: [laughing] The guys had a special…I don’t let them do that much horror. We do really nice shows, beautiful operas. We’re all about beauty and lightness and positive, and my crew is filled with a bunch of people who love horror and actually I would not put Harry Potter in the realm of that, not gore, but they love it when I let them do things that are a little bit scary. Half of my work is Disney, frankly, and we never get to do that so we sort of went for it with this. That kid no doubt slept with his mother that night. [laughing]

AK: For the puppets in the boxes, I know the second brother has the love that he lost and she's in a box, did you do all the boxes as well?

MC: No, we worked with their props team on that. We had mock up boxes here while we built and configured everything, but they did that. This came about…well I also do this anyway, when there is someone else who can do scenery I generally let them because we are so in demand for our puppetry characters. [to his daughter Eva] Hey Eva, I’m doing my Harry Potter interview! I have her on hand in case you ask me a question I don’t know, because I’ve referred so heavily to my team. I was telling you about how everybody down here is so good with that story, it's as if I had a bunch of experts around, which I did.

AK: You said your daughter is obviously a fan of books and films, what was their reaction to the project. Did you tell them right away or did you sort of drag it out?

MC: No, we told them right away, they were excited. We have a very close knit company, we’re like a village. I think I told Eva and she squealed and someone overheard, and it kind of went through the shop like wildfire and it was…you know everybody was so glad and thanked me, like I had anything to do with it. I didn’t – they called me!

AK: Did your family get to see any of the work in the various stages prior to being debuted at the park?

MC: Yes, but my family has yet to see it at the park. We look forward to doing that. They were down last year, but it wasn’t yet open. They’ll come down. They see it at the studio all the time, and [to his daughter] Eva, you saw it all along. Eva worked with me this summer and was able to give every detail...every day, she was here so she saw their whole development.

AK: Lovely! Did she offer suggestions, knowing obviously what they looked like in the films?

MC: I’ll let her answer, she’s listening suddenly, do you mind?

AK: No, that’s fine!

MC: Eva come on, get in here! Did she offer suggestions? Yes she did. She made…the sort of continuity, it would be like in film they call it a continuity director to make sure they haven’t made any mistakes. You know, kind of like you make sure the dragon doesn’t have five toes instead of three. But no, she was really accurate about that. And fortunately, Universal was very good about supplying us with…any questions we had. And then there was a lot of verification process, back and forth, so we didn’t make any mistakes. Because when you do things that are so loved by fans like this, we know this from our Disney and Universal work both, the fans will get very upset if you miss protocol of things that are accurate. And accuracy of course is a huge issue there, and everything had to be approved by JK Rowling. They can’t afford to make mistakes, because the fans will just kill you, as you know. You would be leading the charge right?

AK: Exactly! The work that you do is absolutely amazing – I read in a previous interview that when you are working on a project, you usually are involved in the auditions.  Did you audition the actors for Universal as well, and does that require a certain amount of flexibility in your vision of your pieces that you are working on as the actors may have a different take on it?

MC: In this case, no because they had already done a workshop. What they did…what I saw was the workshop – I was so impressed, I said “Are those your actors?” They didn’t yet know. We just chose everyone from that video. They had already done the casting. But this came from…many of the people had already operated the frog in the other show so they were kind of already good in front of the public. In this case no, but yeah the rehearsals or the auditions are really important when we do a really high level Broadway show. We’re literally knowing who is going to act the part before we design the piece. In the case of Lion King, you know having John Vickery, the voice of Scar, we design around them. In the life of this piece, they’ll have 50 puppeteers in and out of that show.

AK: If they were to create other shows based on Tales of Beedle the Bard, would you be up for creating more puppets?

MC: Yeah, of course. We would love to continue. I suspect, there is good momentum here, I think we’ll be doing more puppetry around the theme of Harry Potter, I’d like to do the Broadway show.

AK: There will be a show, she is currently writing that. That would be very interesting if you ended up doing that, although I think the Broadway show they are doing, I don’t think it’s magical. I don’t know what kind of puppets would be involved in that. I think it’s his [Harry’s] life before [magic].

MC: Yeah, they always think they don’t need puppets but it always happens that they do. [laughing] We just sit out here in St. Helens or Scappoose and wait!