Adapting Harry Potter

For the Writers Guild of America West, Dylan Callaghan talks to Michael Goldenberg about adapting J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix for the film that opens in the UK tomorrow.

Order of the Phoenix is not only darker and more adult, but, despite a good amount of action, it's loaded with drama. If you were forced to narrow it down, what was the most crucial element of this story for you?

To me it was always a coming-of-age story, in the sense that it was about Harry's journey from seeing the world with a child's black-and-white simplicity to a more nuanced, complicated world view. The key scenes that jumped out to me in the book, where Harry sees [in a mind reading exercise with Snape] that his father was not the idealized character he thought he was. That's that striking loss-of-innocence moment where you realize your parent is just a flawed human being. And then he learns that Dumbledore has made a huge strategic mistake later... So life is more complicated than you think it is when you're a kid and that you're much more complicated than you thought you were.

Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix Trailer