Inside the Magic: The Making of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Yates has encouraged all the actors to come up with their own ideas. Redmayne calls it, ‘trouble shooting by magical ideas’. For instance, when he came up with idea of using his wand as an umbrella, Yates was delighted: ‘I love it. Use it.’ Indeed, apart from a small amount of puppetry, the beasts were going to be conjured up later with CGI. On set they mostly existed entirely within the actors’ imaginations.

With the welcome assistance of the design ­department showing him concept art and even acting out how they behave, he was able to picture the likes of the Niffler – ‘the bane of his life’ – that looks like a cross between a badger and an anteater and has a fondness for shiny things. Or the tiny, twig-like Bowtruckle, one of which has ‘attachment issues’ and Newt keeps in his pocket. Or, for that matter, a female Erumpent – like a mix of rhino and elephant – that is currently in heat.

Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander, wearing his signature blue coat and armed with his ordinary looking case.

Newt & Tina hide behind some MACUSA filing cabinets.

Newt and Jacob: two guys on the same seat in the same bank with the same type of case. What could possibly go wrong …? ­

Newt takes cover behind an ­overturned car.

‘Newt has to try and entice her back into the case,’ Redmayne recalls ruefully. ‘That involved one of the more humiliating moments in the film. I had to do an Erumpent mating dance. It is weirdly exhausting trying to seduce an Erumpent.’

Katherine Waterston, who plays the witch Tina Goldstein, found herself mesmerized by the ­different relationships Redmayne created with each of the beasts he is looking after.

‘It might be my favourite thing,’ she laughs, ‘because he has developed ways of communicating with them. It’s the middle of the film and suddenly we’re ­watching an excerpt from a nature show. He crawls around with them, he makes cooing sounds – it sounds ridiculous, but it’s really awesome and sweet, and Eddie’s done such detailed work with that.’

Over the course of the story, however, the ­fantastic beasts Newt is going to learn most about are human beings.

‘There’s something really sweet and endearing about him,’ thinks David Yates. ‘He’s amazing with these beasts, and his journey is ultimately to discover how to get on with regular people.’

‘He is learning to be himself,’ says Redmayne, which means he must learn to trust and find comfort in other people. Almost out of necessity, Newt will form two very different friendships with two very ­different locals. First, he literally collides with Dan Fogler’s ­forlorn Jacob Kowalski, a No-Maj whose dreams of opening his own bakery have come unstuck.

Newt’s British passport reveals that he left to go travelling in search of fantastic beasts on 16 June 1923.

‘It has this odd buddy movie quality to it,’ says Redmayne, capturing this unlikely but touching ­partnership. They are comical opposites: portly Jacob, ­aspiring baker, is a real people person, whereas Newt is a tall, thin, scatty wizard who is a bit standoffish. Somehow they will draw out the best in one another.

Meanwhile, Waterston’s witch Tina, a former Auror with a complicated past, is hot on his trail. With some justification, she suspects all is not what it seems with this tourist and his case.

Yates explains that, ‘In the course of the story Tina and Newt have this unrequited, quite tender, quite funny journey together.’ Newt’s romantic past, which complicates matters, is as haphazard as most of his dealings with humankind, particularly his family.

The Scamander family are none too impressed with the career path the younger brother, Newt, has taken.

The wizard has a significant background. ‘Newt actually went to Hogwarts, and he trained under Albus Dumbledore,’ says Yates. The director goes on to explain that Newt was expelled from the famous wizarding school under ‘enigmatic circumstances’ and only Professor Dumbledore spoke up for him.

Dumbledore has always had an affinity with misunderstood wizards.

Newt looks to be in a spot of bother.

NEWT’S WAND

‘Wands are weird,’ declares head prop modeller Pierre Bohanna, ‘because they can be so simple, literally a stick. But there are so many opinions that have to be included in how they look, because they are absolutely bespoke to the characters.’

The process of designing each of the principal wands – those belonging to Newt, Tina, Queenie and Graves – began with junior concept artist Molly Sole, who worked in Stuart Craig’s art department.

Beyond a general sense of the fashions of the era and the American setting (wands owned by New Yorkers are more Art Deco than Gothic), individual wand design boiled down to what best reflected the character in question. In Harry Potter lore, a quasi-sentient wand matches a wizard or witch’s character. How they look speaks volumes about who is casting the spell.

After the design is set, a prototype wand is first carved out of wood, and then, if possible, crafted with real materials. This is then used as a reference to create a mould, from which various replicas can be made. There were practice versions for the actors to take home and get the hang of casting spells round the house. As well as rubberized versions that were action safe. ‘A fourteen- to sixteen-inch long, half-inch-thick shaft made out of wood is actually quite dangerous,’ says Bohanna. ‘If it splits and cracks it’ll get quite spiky, so it’s only for very close-up work that you’ll use the original wand.’

When it came to Newt’s wand, says Bohanna, they wanted something that could be traced back to some ‘animal component’. However, Eddie Redmayne, who attended special ‘wand-work’ classes and, like all the wand-wielding actors, was thrilled to have input into the final model, was insistent there could be no leather or horn involved. Newt wouldn’t stand for that. Which definitely ruled out anything macabre like bone.

More practical than eye-catching, the handle was conceived to be made out of a piece of shell, but tubular like a sandworm’s shell. In reality, the prop department made it from a piece of ash wood, which was then given a pearling effect for the desired texture, and finally weathered to look as if it had already seen years of service.

‘It had quite a lot of character,’ says a ­satisfied Bohanna: ‘chips, knocks and bangs to show a ­well-worked life.’

EDDIE REDMAYNE (#ulink_64859aac-07bc-5599-896d-e9d01f8fdcc5)

As soon as Eddie Redmayne read the script he knew he had to play Newt Scamander. ‘I found it funny. I found it thrilling. I found it dramatic,’ he says. ‘It took all the imagination and escapism of Harry Potter to the New York of flappers and prohibition. It was just a really exciting place to be.’

Newt, he recognized, was a ‘wonder’ of a role.

Which is a good thing. The core team of producers had originally put together a long list of all the stars they thought might be right to fill the boots of their eccentric Magizoologist. It was full of great actors and star names. But something strange had happened. The more they worked on the script, and the better they got to know Newt, the shorter the list became. Before they knew it, there was only one name left.

‘It all kind of led to Eddie,’ says director David Yates. In fact, it was like a spell – once you thought of him, you couldn’t think of anyone else. It was as if he was already Newt.

‘What Eddie has in spades is soulfulness,’ Yates explains. ‘I also love the shape of Eddie. He’s got an extraordinary shape, this vertiginousness. And I loved the idea of Eddie doing funny stuff, because he has done all this lovely serious stuff. Once we got Eddie it was about fitting the world around him.’

Getting Redmayne, however, wasn’t a ­foregone conclusion. The London-born actor had deservingly won an Oscar for his remarkable portrayal of the scientist Stephen Hawking afflicted with a rare form of motor neurone disease in The Theory of Everything, and was about to embark on the equally demanding drama, The Danish Girl. After maturing from theatre and television work into films as diverse as My Week with Marilyn and Les Misérables, he was now one of the most sought-after actors in Hollywood. As Yates admits, he could practically do anything he wanted.

But this wasn’t just anything; this was a script by J.K. Rowling set in her legendary wizarding world. Redmayne called back as soon as he could.

He loved it.

‘One of the things I love most is the variety,’ he says. ‘It jumps seamlessly between genres from physical comedy into a love story into action.’

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was about far more than casting spells and tracking down runaway beasts. As with all of J.K. Rowling’s work, there were hidden depths. Redmayne insists that Newt is far from a straightforward hero. ‘Throughout the film you realize that for all the wonder and excitement of his life there is a hole in there in some ways. There is a sadness and complexity in there.’

While making sure he was fluent in all the details of the wizarding world by rewatching the Harry Potter films, re-reading the books, and going over the script with a microscope, Redmayne met up with real zoologists. The script had described Newt as being like the great television presenter and animal expert, David Attenborough, and he wanted to understand why scientists devote their lives to studying animals.

His research took him to safari parks where he spoke to experts in animal breeding and discovered the extraordinary relationships they had developed with animals. ‘They literally had ­new-born cubs sleep in their beds with them,’ says an ­

astonished Redmayne.

There was also something about the way they moved. Anyone tracking a wild animal has to be incredibly silent. They turn their feet outwards, placing each footstep with the utmost care, or even crawl along the floor. Redmayne points out how in J.K. Rowling’s script she says that Newt ‘walks his own walk.’

Eddie Redmayne relaxes on set.

Newt and Tina are careful to remain hidden inside MACUSA.

The camera follows Eddie Redmayne’s gaze as Newt looks up.

Newt & Tina look for answers.

‘HE’S SO CHARMING AND FUNNY. AND HE BRINGS A REAL SENSITIVITY TO NEWT THAT I DON’T THINK A LOT OF ACTORS COULD PULL OFF.’

Such was Redmayne’s dedication not just to his part but the film as a whole that days after he agreed to play Newt, he was on a plane to New York to spend a weekend meeting the various actors who were up for the roles of Jacob, Queenie and Tina. Yates is proud of how the actor took it all in his stride.

‘It was like one of those Japanese game shows,’ he laughs. ‘He spent forty-eight hours in a hotel room doing the same scene with different actors. And out of that we were able to clearly see who was right for those roles.’