“You are translating from one language into a very different one,” he says. “The tools of a screenwriter are opposite to those of a novelist. In a novel, you have the luxury of digressing and exploring, and stopping to luxuriate in all the details. Screenwriting is first and foremost about compression—distilling, picking the one detail, the one telling image, or the dialogue that encapsulates what might have taken many pages in the book. We’re looking at it from the other end of the telescope.”

“It’s a powerful moment when your parent—and especially a parent who Harry has idealized enormously because he never knew him—is revealed as a flawed human being. I remember that moment for me, and I know there is a similar moment for a lot of people—and not just your parents but that the people in charge are just as messed up and confused and uncertain as you are, and how terrifying that is. It’s the death of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and God all wrapped up in one.”

“Jo pointed out that Harry always was secure in his mother’s love, but over the course of all of the books, he keeps coming up with flawed father figures,” Goldenberg says. “In Order of the Phoenix, Dumbledore, who has been the overtly paternal figure, is suddenly radically absent from the story. Dumbledore had always been all wise and all knowing, but now he is revealed as just a man—a very smart man, but one who has, in this case, made a terrible mistake, a strategic error that has resulted in disaster, and he is admitting that to Harry—both because Harry deserves to know, but also because Harry needs to be disillusioned. He needs to realize that in order for him to grow up and take on the responsibilities that he needs to take on, Dumbledore has to come down from his pedestal.

“That’s very moving to me. I do think it’s one of the great themes—loss of innocence. I’ve always been attracted to coming-of-age stories that dealt with that. So that was my deepest connection to this story—and the reason I wanted to tell it. Life lessons happen, and he goes from being a kid who sees the world in fairly black and white terms to seeing just how complicated a place it is—and how complicated he is. I thought that was a really good story to tell, particularly now.”