"But I certainly had a great time working with him because [Goldenberg is] a hugely collaborative and sensitive writer. He was a good choice for this assignment. He'd written a version of Peter Pan. He'd worked on Contact. He's a very emotional writer, and I think, because this is quite an emotional story, that's why David and the studio invited him along. Some have compared this to the earlier Potters."

I've been getting the next one ready for three months now while I'm finishing up Phoenix. I'm doing a Chris Columbus. He did the first two films back-to-back, and he had this crazy schedule where he was dubbing One while he was prepping Two. I've been doing the same with Five and Six. We start shooting in September.

The business about Ron Weasley becoming a Quidditch king was the hardest escapade to cut, he thought. (It didn't sit well, either, with Rupert Grint, who would have executed it.)

"Inevitably, something like the Quidditch story in the fifth book is, by its very nature, an episode in the book--and it doesn't necessarily feed the broad narrative of the story. So we were fairly ruthless in that sense, wanting to make sure that our story--this adaptation, this film that the audience will experience--had the least amount of episodic turns, that it felt like a single narrative working its way through. It's difficult to achieve that, and I'm not sure that it has been completely fixed, but it all feels quite organic now, I believe."