In a just-released interview with Tom Felton, British blog Female First interviews Tom Felton about the upcoming DVD release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.
An excerpt from the interview:
Exactly, so tell me a bit about, because I’ve seen all the other ones, not in the right order though.
Oh, that’s all right then, that’s just like my friends and family then, it call get a bit confusing. The last one, the sixth one’s a real coming of age for the films I think. Far more action filmy, if that makes sense, more British humour in there than there has been before, Rupert’s got a place to hold in the limelight as the comedian and obviously you know love is in the air with Ginny and Harry (ahhh) so that always gets me, yeah it melts a few hearts and I’m on the darker side of things and been given a mission by the dark lord to infiltrate the gates of Hogwarts, rather epic, and he kinda struggles in this task being the young fragile boy that he is. Yeah, it’s err many story lines and they all manage to entwine themselves into a rather epic finale…
Ooh, exciting
… And the DVD, I’m actually quite exciting about the DVD, I don’t know whether you’re a bit of a fan of the extras and all the other stuff you get on the DVDs, but, personally in years previous most extras on DVDs have been fairly tame, this year was really cool ‘cos they all gave us cameras and they all gave us sort of slots and then things to go and talk to people that we don’t really know, the special effects team, I did a bit with them, the editing team stuff like that so it was actually a lot of fun, ‘cos considering we’ve been there for six, seven years we didn’t know half the people that were doing all this amazing stuff. It was really cool for us to meet them and do a few features for the extras, I haven’t actually seen all of them yet and I’m really excited to do that over Christmas.
Love it, sounds awesome! So, you know when you’re making the film, obviously, we see it and you’re in these amazing settings and there’s all these places, how do you create that, how easy is it like, you know filming with green screens.
Well, it’s a mixture. If you came down to the set you may not, it’s pretty funny. Whatever is in front of the camera is obviously decently lit, heated and looks amazing, the props etc, whilst anything behind the camera is basically err, up to our own devices, lots of cables running about and lots of building materials and the rest of it.
For example we’ve been shooting outdoors at the moment and they build, basically this decrepit castle that’s all been smashed up and it’s quite incredible… so a lot of credit goes to Stuart Tozer who’s the set designer, it’s never an easy task.
They go such lengths of detail too, one example from an earlier film is when the students get books to read in the class room, and to be honest, there was no need for that book to have anything written in it, but it’s actually 122 pages of withering text that some guy’s sat down and written just to help the other kids and stuff like that, so it’s incredible the amount of detail that they go to!
That’s brilliant, I want to see one.
Ahh bless you, you could have it now but…
So what is like growing up, because obviously you were young when you started it and now you’re 22 – you’ve grow up being involved in something like this. What types of pressure have you had?
I don’t really know what to say to that.
Well I’m 22 as well and the only pressure I’ve ever had was deciding what club to go out to at uni.
I suppose that in a way, all my friends have obviously gone of to uni and done all that and I never really felt like that was, well, that was an option obviously but never really felt like it was an option for me because I did my GCSEs but I chose not to do my A-Levels when everyone else was doing them because they made me feel like I wasn’t part of the school anymore and didn’t really want to hang around any longer.
I felt slightly left out that I didn’t get to do those things but saying that, I’ve visited my friends at uni and thought, you know what? I don’t feel left out. But there’s certainly experiences that have been compromised and actually, saying that, it mostly bothered me when I was a kid.
Now I obviously understand you gotta work, but when I was 14-15 and couldn’t go on the school trip to Spain or something… because you don’t want to go to work, you don’t care about work.
Now, on your Wikipedia page it says you’re an actor/musician. So I’ve got to ask, what exactly do you do that’s musical because I couldn’t see a lot on there?
Well, it’s basically a YouTube thing that got out of hand… I’ve got a guitar and I kind of sing – if you want to call it that – and I put a couple of videos on YouTube a few of years ago and they’ve done pretty well. There’s a small, cult sort of following that are always after new music. I’ve always been a bit of a musician and I like to record it and I’m happy to share with the people that want to hear it.
That’s amazing. So, will you doing any stuff when you’ve finished filming and can people come and see you, because I want to see you on stage.
Brilliant! But no, not at the moment. It’s probably not ideal as obviously the days are pretty long… and I’m not really up for becoming a pop star just yet.
So you’ll not be auditioning for X Factor next year then?
(laughs) Not at the moment, not at the moment.
