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Preview of 'JK Rowling... A Year in the Life'
JK Rowling has been filmed for a documentary over the past year, and "JK Rowling... A Year in the Life" will air on ITV on December 30th. ITV has sent us detailed information on the documentary, including quotes from Jo, which can be viewed here.ITV will also shortly be sending us a video preview of the documentary so stay tuned for that!
For the first time in her phenomenal career, author JK Rowling invites a camera into the heart of her personal world.
Filmmaker James Runcie, a fellow author, films Jo for twelve months as she completes and launches the seventh and final Harry Potter book – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
The documentary paints an intimate portrait of a woman at the height of staggering success which often overawes her, who never expected the international fame that her books have brought her, and provides an honest, poignant and often humorous insight into her past, her personal life and her devotion to her writing and the character she describes as her own hero, Harry.
During the documentary she returns, for the very first time, to the flat where she started writing the Harry Potter saga and faces the well-worn ghosts of her past - the poverty and struggle she endured during her early writing. In stark contrast, and testament to her inimitable success, she is later filmed on a private jet with her husband as they travel to the US for the eagerly anticipated book tour.
She also reveals what influenced her writing, notably the death of her mother and how this seeped in to every aspect of the books, and why she felt Harry had to triumph in the end.
It’s November 2006, and Jo is working in secret on the final chapters of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in the Balmoral Hotel, Edinburgh. No one knows she is there, and James is poised, ready to capture the moment she completes the series.
As she reads from her notes she spots something: “I’ve helpfully made a note for myself, ‘This will need very serious planning’…I don’t know when I wrote that, and I was quite right in that,” she laughs.
An epic saga of childhood confusion, danger and adventure, the Harry Potter series has taken 17 years to write. In the programme, Jo’s vivid account of her own childhood and key events in her life offer a profound understanding of Potter’s development as an intensely moral fable about good and evil, love and hatred, and life and death.
Like her orphaned hero, Jo grew up on a suburban estate with her parents and sister, Diane. At first they lived in Yate just outside Bristol, then a few miles down the road in Winterborne. As Jo leafs through her family album with her sister Di, they discuss growing up, and in particular, their tragic childhood hair cuts. Of their terrible boyish haircuts, Jo says: “Mine was always crooked!”
The sisters always wore similar clothes. Jo says to Diane: “You always wore pink and I always wore blue.”
“Because you were the boy, Jo? Because you were the eldest?” asks James.
“Yeah and I was supposed to be a boy. I was supposed to be Simon John, I even know who I was supposed to be!”
Back in Edinburgh it’s January 11th 2007 and the end of 17 years of writing. As Jo finishes the book, James is there to capture it on camera.
She says: “Some people will loathe it, they will absolutely loathe it. But the thing is that’s how it should be, and for some people to love it others must loathe it. That’s just in the nature of the plot. Some people won’t be happy because what they wanted to happen won’t have happened.
“And to an extent there‘s so much expectation from the hard core fans that I’m not sure I could ever match up to it. I’m actually really, really happy with it, and it’s very odd to think that this will be broadcast after loads of people have read it and people may right now be throwing things at the screen.”
Jo is now the keeper of the most valuable manuscript in publishing history. She takes it in person to her agent Christopher Little in London. The handover is at Heathrow airport at 10.43 on Friday 12th January 2007. Then the publicity machine swings in to action to launch the most anticipated book in history – all in the highest secrecy.
Sarah Beal, Marketing director for Bloomsbury – publishers of the Harry Potter books, says: “We want everybody to get the book at the same and then everybody will know what happens at the same time, depending on how fast they read of course.”
As the expectation from fans and critics grows and grows, Jo reflects on how the ambitions she had to become a writer are difficult to reconcile with the some of the unwelcome attention she now attracts because of her success.
“I wished to be published, and I wished more than anything in the world to be a writer…it never occurred to me in a million years, James, that people would search through my dustbins, put a long lens camera on me on the beach, never occurred to me that a journalist would bang on the door of one of my oldest friends and offer her money to talk about me. Never occurred to me that my children would be scrutinised to see how spoilt they were because their parent is famous.”
Three weeks before the launch of the final book, Jo attends the film premiere of fifth book Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. She has superstar status, and is expected to behave like one. But as a writer, she is still not accustomed to the trappings and demands of Hollywood-style fame. On the razzmatazz of big events, Jo admits she still finds certain aspects difficult.
“Some of it’s fun,” she says, “and some of it’s frankly horrible. The fun bits are when you get to talk to people who’ve read your books. That bit is great. What I find difficult is the sort of stagy, midnight moment business, because I’m not very good at it. I don’t think that makes me a better person because I’m not good at it I hasten to add, but I’m not good at it. I’m not a natural ‘ta-daa’ kind of person. I get all up tight about having to do that sort of stuff and I feel like a prat.
“People definitely expect you to be visibly enjoying yourself, and I think Quentin Crisp said that was the secret to being good on television, just look happy to be there, and I haven’t always looked happy to be there. In fact, sometimes I’ve looked bloody miserable to be there and I know that’s not televisually good.”
Set to become the fastest selling book in history, the seventh book’s impending arrival means Jo is in demand all over the world. James and his camera join her as she flies to the US with her husband Neil.
Jo married Neil, a doctor in 2001 and they now have two children together – David and Mackenzie. James bravely asks Neil the question - what is JKR like to live with?
Neil: “When she becomes very stressed she’ll detach herself, and only trust one person and that’s herself. So everyone else gets blocked out and she becomes more and more stressed and less and less able to accept any help. The barriers go up and it’s not just me it’s everyone else around her. Only one person is trusted and she’s got to do everything herself despite the fact that it’s not possible to do everything herself.”
July 20th 2007. Launch day arrives and count downs are ticking over all around the globe, from New York to London to Sydney. At London’s Natural History Museum, 1,700 people picked out of a lottery of 90,000 applicants wait for the arrival of JK Rowling for the reading and book signing.
Jo says she finds it hard to comprehend the level of expectation surrounding the final book.
She says she swings between thinking, “It’s the best I can do, it’s how I always planned it to end so that is going to have to be good enough. And occasionally, ‘How can I ever live up to this?’”
That night from 12.20 am until 7am, Jo signs 1,700 copies of her book. In its first 24 hours, 2.65 million books are sold in the UK and 8.3 million books in the US – more than 7,000 copies a minute.
The ending has been debated the world over by fans and critics – will Harry live or die? Will he ever beat his nemesis Voldemort? And now the world knows the outcome, Jo explains why she chose to end the book in the way she did.
“I felt that it would be a betrayal of the character if I showed Harry doing anything other than living, what all along, he has discovered to be true, which is that love is the strongest power there is.
“I thought a lot of people that had been through terrible things like wars, and having to come home and rebuild normality after seeing horrors has always seemed to me like such a courageous thing to do. Climbing back to normality after trauma is much harder, it’s much harder to rebuild than to destroy.
“In some ways it would have been a neat ending to kill him [Harry], a neater ending to kill him. But I felt that would have been a betrayal, because I wanted my hero, and he’s my hero, to do what I think is the most noble thing. So he came back from war and he tried to build a better world I suppose – corny as that sounds – both on a small scale for a family and on a larger scale.”
James Runcie’s Q+A with JK Rowling
During filming James is invited to Jo’s country house in Perthshire, Scotland. She has never been filmed here before. He asks her a series of quick fire questions to get to know the woman behind the books. Here are her answers:
What’s your favourite virtue?
Courage
What vice do you most despise?
Bigotry
What are you most willing to forgive?
Gluttony
What’s your most marked characteristic?
I’m a tryer
What are you afraid of?
Losing someone I love
What’s the quality you most like in a man?
Morals
What’s the quality you most like in a woman?
Generosity
What do you most value about your friends?
Tolerance
What’s your principle defect?
Short fuse
What’s your favourite occupation?
Writer
What’s your dream of happiness?
A happy family
Filmmaker James Runcie, a fellow author, films Jo for twelve months as she completes and launches the seventh and final Harry Potter book – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
The documentary paints an intimate portrait of a woman at the height of staggering success which often overawes her, who never expected the international fame that her books have brought her, and provides an honest, poignant and often humorous insight into her past, her personal life and her devotion to her writing and the character she describes as her own hero, Harry.
During the documentary she returns, for the very first time, to the flat where she started writing the Harry Potter saga and faces the well-worn ghosts of her past - the poverty and struggle she endured during her early writing. In stark contrast, and testament to her inimitable success, she is later filmed on a private jet with her husband as they travel to the US for the eagerly anticipated book tour.
She also reveals what influenced her writing, notably the death of her mother and how this seeped in to every aspect of the books, and why she felt Harry had to triumph in the end.
It’s November 2006, and Jo is working in secret on the final chapters of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in the Balmoral Hotel, Edinburgh. No one knows she is there, and James is poised, ready to capture the moment she completes the series.
As she reads from her notes she spots something: “I’ve helpfully made a note for myself, ‘This will need very serious planning’…I don’t know when I wrote that, and I was quite right in that,” she laughs.
An epic saga of childhood confusion, danger and adventure, the Harry Potter series has taken 17 years to write. In the programme, Jo’s vivid account of her own childhood and key events in her life offer a profound understanding of Potter’s development as an intensely moral fable about good and evil, love and hatred, and life and death.
Like her orphaned hero, Jo grew up on a suburban estate with her parents and sister, Diane. At first they lived in Yate just outside Bristol, then a few miles down the road in Winterborne. As Jo leafs through her family album with her sister Di, they discuss growing up, and in particular, their tragic childhood hair cuts. Of their terrible boyish haircuts, Jo says: “Mine was always crooked!”
The sisters always wore similar clothes. Jo says to Diane: “You always wore pink and I always wore blue.”
“Because you were the boy, Jo? Because you were the eldest?” asks James.
“Yeah and I was supposed to be a boy. I was supposed to be Simon John, I even know who I was supposed to be!”
Back in Edinburgh it’s January 11th 2007 and the end of 17 years of writing. As Jo finishes the book, James is there to capture it on camera.
She says: “Some people will loathe it, they will absolutely loathe it. But the thing is that’s how it should be, and for some people to love it others must loathe it. That’s just in the nature of the plot. Some people won’t be happy because what they wanted to happen won’t have happened.
“And to an extent there‘s so much expectation from the hard core fans that I’m not sure I could ever match up to it. I’m actually really, really happy with it, and it’s very odd to think that this will be broadcast after loads of people have read it and people may right now be throwing things at the screen.”
Jo is now the keeper of the most valuable manuscript in publishing history. She takes it in person to her agent Christopher Little in London. The handover is at Heathrow airport at 10.43 on Friday 12th January 2007. Then the publicity machine swings in to action to launch the most anticipated book in history – all in the highest secrecy.
Sarah Beal, Marketing director for Bloomsbury – publishers of the Harry Potter books, says: “We want everybody to get the book at the same and then everybody will know what happens at the same time, depending on how fast they read of course.”
As the expectation from fans and critics grows and grows, Jo reflects on how the ambitions she had to become a writer are difficult to reconcile with the some of the unwelcome attention she now attracts because of her success.
“I wished to be published, and I wished more than anything in the world to be a writer…it never occurred to me in a million years, James, that people would search through my dustbins, put a long lens camera on me on the beach, never occurred to me that a journalist would bang on the door of one of my oldest friends and offer her money to talk about me. Never occurred to me that my children would be scrutinised to see how spoilt they were because their parent is famous.”
Three weeks before the launch of the final book, Jo attends the film premiere of fifth book Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. She has superstar status, and is expected to behave like one. But as a writer, she is still not accustomed to the trappings and demands of Hollywood-style fame. On the razzmatazz of big events, Jo admits she still finds certain aspects difficult.
“Some of it’s fun,” she says, “and some of it’s frankly horrible. The fun bits are when you get to talk to people who’ve read your books. That bit is great. What I find difficult is the sort of stagy, midnight moment business, because I’m not very good at it. I don’t think that makes me a better person because I’m not good at it I hasten to add, but I’m not good at it. I’m not a natural ‘ta-daa’ kind of person. I get all up tight about having to do that sort of stuff and I feel like a prat.
“People definitely expect you to be visibly enjoying yourself, and I think Quentin Crisp said that was the secret to being good on television, just look happy to be there, and I haven’t always looked happy to be there. In fact, sometimes I’ve looked bloody miserable to be there and I know that’s not televisually good.”
Set to become the fastest selling book in history, the seventh book’s impending arrival means Jo is in demand all over the world. James and his camera join her as she flies to the US with her husband Neil.
Jo married Neil, a doctor in 2001 and they now have two children together – David and Mackenzie. James bravely asks Neil the question - what is JKR like to live with?
Neil: “When she becomes very stressed she’ll detach herself, and only trust one person and that’s herself. So everyone else gets blocked out and she becomes more and more stressed and less and less able to accept any help. The barriers go up and it’s not just me it’s everyone else around her. Only one person is trusted and she’s got to do everything herself despite the fact that it’s not possible to do everything herself.”
July 20th 2007. Launch day arrives and count downs are ticking over all around the globe, from New York to London to Sydney. At London’s Natural History Museum, 1,700 people picked out of a lottery of 90,000 applicants wait for the arrival of JK Rowling for the reading and book signing.
Jo says she finds it hard to comprehend the level of expectation surrounding the final book.
She says she swings between thinking, “It’s the best I can do, it’s how I always planned it to end so that is going to have to be good enough. And occasionally, ‘How can I ever live up to this?’”
That night from 12.20 am until 7am, Jo signs 1,700 copies of her book. In its first 24 hours, 2.65 million books are sold in the UK and 8.3 million books in the US – more than 7,000 copies a minute.
The ending has been debated the world over by fans and critics – will Harry live or die? Will he ever beat his nemesis Voldemort? And now the world knows the outcome, Jo explains why she chose to end the book in the way she did.
“I felt that it would be a betrayal of the character if I showed Harry doing anything other than living, what all along, he has discovered to be true, which is that love is the strongest power there is.
“I thought a lot of people that had been through terrible things like wars, and having to come home and rebuild normality after seeing horrors has always seemed to me like such a courageous thing to do. Climbing back to normality after trauma is much harder, it’s much harder to rebuild than to destroy.
“In some ways it would have been a neat ending to kill him [Harry], a neater ending to kill him. But I felt that would have been a betrayal, because I wanted my hero, and he’s my hero, to do what I think is the most noble thing. So he came back from war and he tried to build a better world I suppose – corny as that sounds – both on a small scale for a family and on a larger scale.”
James Runcie’s Q+A with JK Rowling
During filming James is invited to Jo’s country house in Perthshire, Scotland. She has never been filmed here before. He asks her a series of quick fire questions to get to know the woman behind the books. Here are her answers:
What’s your favourite virtue?
Courage
What vice do you most despise?
Bigotry
What are you most willing to forgive?
Gluttony
What’s your most marked characteristic?
I’m a tryer
What are you afraid of?
Losing someone I love
What’s the quality you most like in a man?
Morals
What’s the quality you most like in a woman?
Generosity
What do you most value about your friends?
Tolerance
What’s your principle defect?
Short fuse
What’s your favourite occupation?
Writer
What’s your dream of happiness?
A happy family
Posted by Ciaran on Dec 10th |
49 Comments
Visitor Comments
Wish so badly we could watch it here in the US.
oh cool. i am totally interested in seeing it.....
i wish so badly we could watch it in AUSTRALIA, too! :( looks good....*sob*
Top 5!!!!!!!! Yay for Jo! I wish it were on BBC, tho! :(
Yes this makes me even more excited to see this I can't wait to see it. Oddymcjabs im sure it will be on the internet soon after anyway so it doesn't really matter that you live in Austrailia!
How can I watch this in the US? Hope I can find it on the internet somewhere...
Very exciting news!
omg i wanna watch it! will it be on in the us?? top 20?
NO, it won't be on in the U.S. I'm very dissapointed about this. I just hope I will be able to see it, although I don't like the fact that it will have to be on the internet for me to see it =[[[ top 10!
Not even fair! I want it to air in the US!!!! =(
Awesome!!!!! I'll be glued to the t.v for hours!!! Ps.... Kreatures fluffy cheekbones!
I want it to air in the US, pretty please with cheesecake on top??? Fang's slobbery cheekbones!
Can this be an international brodcast???
Can't wait for this to be on. I'd always wondered how many people had entered the National History Museum, glad that got mentioned.
This is going to make my Christmas!! I guess it will be like a final end to the book. It still hasn't quite sunk in.
i live in the US!!!! how come they wont show it here 2!!!!!!
She likes a man with morals. Ahh yay me too...!
AAAAAAAA I can't wait to watch it on youtube! to my fellow US people, stop complaining, we get so much stuff other countries don't get, hp and otherwise. Be happy we'll get to see it at all! :D
they DEFENETLY need to air this in the US...and PRONTO!!!!
They were filming the moment she finished the book? I don't really like that. It seems so... impersonal to me. If I were her, I'd want to do that in private. But whatever. That's just me.
Oh lord, I've got to read this!
Wow. I hope they will show it in other countries too eventually.
Wooo, so glad I'm English. Can't wait...Jo's amazing.
They can't limit this to the UK. PLEASE bring it to the US! PS. Does anyone have any idea when the Entertainment Weekly issue with Rowling will be in newstands?
That does NOT seem like her style, but I'm super excited!!!!
Ohh... Jo is so cool! =) Can't wait to see it.
wow, long post...but interesting. thats funny they arent playing it in other places, i bet a lot of people would watch it. maybe they will in a couple of months. anyway, im sure it will be shortly available on the internet.
Very long post. I love her!
this sounds pretty awesome...i like what she said about why harry survived, i think that was everyone who supported it before book seven's line of thinking. yay for courage!
i have great love for jo rowling :) pleaseeeeeeeeeeeee let that air in the US
Whoa. SO pretty heartfelt stuff in there. Way to go Jo!!! I wish soooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooo badly its aired in US!!!. Lucky British people who get to watch it record it!!! Post it on youtube, even if it takes a billion separate posts!!
Whoo! I'm glad it'll be on online! Stop complaining everyone...at least we GET to see it...I'd rather see it online than not at all...:P
OMG - I can't wait to see that on youtube! I'm gonna check every day starting when it airs in the UK.
That's pretty neat!
I wish it aired in the USA!!!
ootp dvd is out tommorow!!!
awww i love Jo!!!! she totally rocks..i hope this ends up on the internet...or maybe a fellow mugglenetter will record it and post it on here.....we losers in the US dont have your privalges.....*laughing.. ...crying*
OOTP ON DVD TOMORROW! YAAAAAYA!
AWESOME! DVD TOMORROW! CAN'T WAIT FOR IT TO SELL 1 BILLION TRILLION COPIES IN THE FIRST FEW MINUTES!!! LOL! AAHHH! I'M MOST LIKELY GETTING IT FOR CHRISTMAS!! AAAHHH!
Will it air in America???? I hope so!
Is ITV a British channel? :'( Darn it! Liked the rapid fire questionairre at the end!!! Cool!
thats sooo cool.....
I would really really really love to see that. Hopefully someone amazing out in the UK will get it up on the internet, on youtube or something. That way, all of us in the US or in Austrailia, or anywhere else can see it too!
yeayeah...the DVD comes out tmrw!! i'm psyched!
I know she's always said she's most like Hermione but the answers to the last few questions make her sound like Harry!
Order of the Phoneix is on DVD TODAY!! WHOOO HOOOO!!! Morning Cheesecakes!!
heyy becky! oh yes im pumped!! =] i hope my sister goes out and gets it!
Please someone tape it :)... so everyone can see it!... its kind of strange.. its been so long!... the article gave me a nostalgic feeling... :D
I do not understand why they cannot show this in other countries. I am going to sound like a whiny child but COME ON! PLEASE!
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