With Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince debuting in just a few days, filmmakers and stars have already started ramping up expectations for the series' two-part finale. At a New York press conference, director David Yates revealed that shooting for the first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is roughly 85% complete, and since the movies are being shot in tandem, about 10% of the shooting for the second part has been done as well.
The two parts are going to be quite different though, the director explained:
The first movie is a road movie basically, and it's quite intense and very raw and we're way away from Hogwarts, and it's a bit like three refugees being pursued across the landscape by these terrible Death Eaters. We're really enjoying it actually. It feels very different. ... The first one is very verité and documentary and edgy and on the road, and the second part is a big opera basically, a great big epic with huge battles and very oddly moving, because it concludes the whole saga really. So they're two very different films.
Not only will they be different from each other, but a big change from what came before as well, according to Daniel Radcliffe:
I'm so excited about the seventh film. I don't know if anybody else had the same experience as me over the last couple of days, but seeing the sixth film again, it does suddenly strike me that we are doing something very, very different with the seventh film.
As to the precise details of the movies, where part one will end, and exactly what the movies will and will not include, filmmakers were a bit more circumspect. And some key issues haven't been resolved yet.
Different ideas for how to do the final scene, in which the characters 19 years later are sending their own children off to Hogwarts are still being explored. "Probably not Benjamin Button technology," Yates says. But producer David Heyman adds, "We're going to do everything we can and it will be Dan, Rupert and Emma in those parts, not some other actors."