interview - EMMA WATSON

Daniel Radcliffe, who plays the epony­mous hero of the Harry Potter movies, has been prancing around naked on the London stage.

Rupert Grint, a.k.a. Harry’s goofy pal Ron Weasley, spends his spare time on the golf course these days.

And then there’s Emma Watson who, true to the brainiac nature of overachiever Hermione Granger, is preparing to go to university.

She always was the sensible one.

Raised in intellectual Oxford by lawyer parents, Watson has seemed more mature than your average kid actor from the start. But as the fifth film in the series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, is about to be released, the 17-year-old admits that she’s come a long way from when she first signed up at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

“It’s quite hard to tell you how I have grown up because I can’t really be watching myself,” Watson says during a phone interview in BBC-perfect elocution. “But I guess, more than anything, that I have gotten used to this industry and what my job is. I came into it completely having never done anything like it before, and I came into one of the biggest film franchises of all time. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, to be frank. Now I know what I’m doing. I have the confidence to add my own input, I can really get my teeth into it and enjoy it comfortably.

“On the first one, I was scared that I wasn’t going to be what everyone wanted me to be and I wasn’t going to live up to the huge expectations that everyone had,” continues Watson. “Now I can make mistakes and ask questions and really learn from the experience. I’m learning a lot.”

In Order of the Phoenix, our adolescent heroes discover that life is far more complicated than they’d previously imagined. Harry finds himself something of an outcast at Hogwarts for reporting his encounter with villainous Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), while bureaucrats turn the school into a place of paranoia.

This confusion has a devastating effect on Harry’s psyche, and Hermione does all she can to help her friend through these dark times, according to Watson.

“Essentially, all of the books are about coming of age,” she observes. “But this one really is because cozy, nice, safe Hogwarts has become corrupted by the wizarding government. They’re really having to fight for themselves, which is quite an interesting dynamic. They’re not just fighting Voldemort anymore; they’re fighting the supposedly good guys.”

Watson credits Order of the Phoenix’s director David Yates, a relatively unknown veteran of British indies and telefilms, with bringing a more sophisticated storytelling scope to the latest adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s novels.

“I don’t think you’ve heard of David Yates,” she explains, “but he’s very much into political dramas and intense psychological films. And this is what this film is like. It’s very intense, there’s a little politics, and there’s a lot outside the world of Hogwarts. Which I think is nice. It kind of shows you that the world is quite a big one.”

Watson’s world, however, remains fairly constrained. Even with the new adventure of university looming, she’s looking at a fairly predictable life for the next couple of years while the final two Rowling films are in production.

“I just had to figure out what I wanted the next three years of my life to look like, how I was going to make that work,” she explains. “And I really wanted to come back, don’t get me wrong. And I am back.”

Despite questions that have been raised since Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone hit theatres in 2001, Watson isn’t worried that she and her maturing co-stars will be too old for their roles by the time the next film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and then Hallows go before the cameras.

“They’re 18, 19 in the final book, so it should work out about right,” she figures. “It takes a year and a bit to make each film, so obviously that ties in with us growing up. Also, I’m the youngest of the three, so I’m not concerned about outgrowing the role.”

That said, Watson is all for her and her friends acting their age. She fervently supports 17-year-old Radcliffe’s controversial decision to appear in the play Equus, with its extreme psychosexual themes and full-frontal nudity, earlier this year.

“If you couldn’t do things that you believed in and were passionate about, then really what’s to do,” she reckons. “I think it’s a great play, it’s a famous play. Yes, it’s provocative, but it’s not the only play in the world that has shocking elements to it. It was just a very brave move and he’s pulled it off. I think that’s very cool, to be honest. It might be different if Dan was just doing it to be some pin-up or whatever. But him actually being naked onstage is this crucial element to the whole play. It’s not like he’s just getting his kit off for publicity or whatever.”

On a more innocent note, I had to ask the actor — who, in the past, has claimed she was too busy to meet potential boyfriends — what’s up with Hermione and Ron. The unlikely pair shared a smooch in the last instalment, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Does more develop in Phoenix?

“Ron!” she yelps like a love-struck teenager. “Well, unfortunately, it doesn’t go anywhere yet. We’re waiting for the seventh book, eagerly, to see how this is going to end. So just the usual things come up, kind of like tension. There’s an underlying thing going on, I guess. If you really watch for it, I guess you can pick up some stuff.”

Asked why go-getter Hermione would opt for slacker Ron rather than smart, accomplished Harry, Watson had a typically worldly theory.

“I guess Harry would be more logical,” she acknowledges. “But I think what it is is, opposites attract. Hermione is very serious and takes things very seriously, and in a way she needs to be with someone like Ron who can lighten her up a bit and make her laugh. It’s kind of a love-hate relationship, I guess, like you always tease the ones you like.”

Bob Strauss is an L.A.-based entertainment writer.

Thanks to the techno-muggles at IMAX, the shooting spells, floating curses and miscellaneous magic found

in the newest Harry Potter film will seem to fly straight off the big, big screen and right at viewers.

This month’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will be screened in IMAX 3D theatres using state-of-the-art IMAX 3D technology. Specifically,it will be the film’s grand finale, about 20 minutes worth of viewing, that’ll employ the cool effects.

Regular movies are shot in two dimensions (2D) and only adhere to a single point-of-view. To turn a film into IMAX 3D, you have to add another point-of-view, or a “second eye.” IMAX 3D uses a new technology that converts a film shot in standard 2D by accurately mapping out and then recreating three-dimensional space to form that second point-of-view. Then the IMAX 3D projector projects the two images simultaneously — one for each eye — onto a silver screen.

The final piece of the puzzle has viewers putting on the lightweight, polarized IMAX 3D glasses that channel the right-eye image to the right eye, and the left-eye image to the left eye and voila, the action pops right off the screen.