Metro: Speaking of England, the third Harry Potter movie, The Prisoner of Azkaban, is the best one according to J.K. Rowling. How did you do it?

Cuarón: Guillermo del Toro pushed me to do it. He said, "You need to be clear on this. If you're going to do it, you need to honor and serve the material. If you do that, you'll make the movie great."

Metro: Serve the material!? But your movie had the most personality of any of the series.

Cuarón: We had a great production designer. And we had Rowling. She has all this geography in her mind. The thing that we wanted to do was something we hadn't seen. We hadn't seen all of Hogwarts except in bits and pieces, and there were feelings you were watching a set. Let's link the spaces, let's allow audiences — even if they don't consciously know it — to experience the geography of the place. They'll know that if there's a corridor, there's going to be a clock, and if you go past the clock, there is going to be a courtyard, and beyond that, a bridge, and then down to the mountain, there is Hagrid's hut. We did something similar in Y tu mama ... and Children. There are very few close-ups. We tried to make Hogwarts a character.