John Hurt on Deathly Hallows and big budgets

The actor who plays Mr. Ollivander in the Harry Potter series recently sat down with Rotten Tomatoes. In the interview, he reveals that he'll be heading back to the Deathly Hallows set sometime this month.

More interesting is where he voices his concern over Warner Brothers' large budgets for films in the Potter franchise:

Q: Do you think the big franchise movies shooting in the UK give a false impression of the health of our industry? All these productions move in and hire local talent, but they aren't British films.

A: No, they're not British films. Even Harry Potter isn't a British [franchise]. We gave it to Warners, we just sit and collect. That always infuriates me. I do think huge areas of the industry are being neglected and we've lost the ability for middle-budget films. When we did have a stronger industry -- and not just a business -- we did have room for middle-budget films. They've gone out of the window, as they've done in America as well, but a $20m picture would be wonderful to make every now and then. We could do a lot for that.

But it's like any country, if you don't have a lot of money to spend. And it's interesting seeing how much money gets spent on Harry Potter. It's quite absurd, really. I watch it and think it's just the same as Hollywood. I look around and you've got three costumes there, none of which are likely to be worn, and they're all replicas of each other. It's a vacuous waste of money and it drives me insane.

Posted by Andrew on Nov 4th | 23 Comments