Sci Fi Wire has a new interview with Mike Newell in which he talks about varying aspects of '
Goblet of Fire'. He expresses sadness at the loss of the Dursleys, explains how he condensed the book and likens the tale to real life events.
Quote:
"I'm sorry about the Dursleys, actually," he said. "Because I think there's a kind of a convention in the movies that it's enjoyable to see the Dursleys each time. But, in fact, if you read the books, the Dursley incident is absolutely tiny and not central at all."
Quote:
"People ask me, 'What was it like dealing with such a fantastical story?' And it wasn't a fantastical story to me at all," he said.
"It was absolutely real. OK, it's got wands and stuff like that, but you could say that this was what it was like living in Europe in the '30s. There was something really bad out there, and people were either going to do something about it, or they weren't going to do something about it.
And that really bad stuff was creeping ever absolutely remorselessly forward. It was getting worse. And so there are all sorts of things that you can do, really quite recent manifestations of this, that you can point to. And you can make a very real world out of it."
Source:
The Harry Potter Fan Zone