Alan Rickman Thought Of Harry Potter's Set As An Army Camp

As we've covered before, Alan Rickman wasn't always a huge fan of the "Harry Potter" movies he spent over a decade starring in. He didn't like John Williams' score, he thought the younger co-stars weren't always that good at acting, and was often frustrated by the directors' decisions. It was only because J.K. Rowling decided to let the actor in on Snape's backstory early on, before it was revealed in the books, that kept Rickman motivated to see the whole series through. 

If you're looking for other reasons for why Rickman considered leaving the series, you don't have to go snooping through his now-public diary entries to find them. In a 2015 interview with Empire, he talked about his experience on the set of those movies, and it all sounded exhausting. "It was like being in an army camp, because the pressure on the producers was so intense," he explained. "They had a clipboard for the stuff they had to hit every day. And sometimes there were 300 children on set."

The struggle of getting all those kids in the right places was particularly difficult in those first few films, where most of the actors were very young and new to being on set. Daniel Radcliffe has also remarked on how impressive it was that Chris Columbus, the director of "Sorcerer's Stone" and "Chamber of Secrets," kept all the children in line during an exhausting 320-day production schedule. "I don't think anyone else could have wrangled 30 kids and kept us all focused and happy in the way that he did," Radcliffe told GQ in a 2022 interview.

It wasn't just difficult to keep things running smoothly with the kids. "It's a military campaign to get the adult actors there, because half of us were doing something else at the time," Alan Rickman also told Empire. "I don't know how they got us all there."

The good news, sort of, was that as time went on the directors were able to use more advanced special effects. While most scenes were filmed with practical effects in the early films (which is more time-consuming for the actors), things in the later movies went faster because the effects could be added in later. As Rickman put it, "Whereas at the beginning we'd be off on a location, by the end, we were in a pile of s***** old grass out the back of Leavesden with a football stadium of lights." 

Sounds a little depressing, but it did help speed things along. "I've heard that we average like seven seconds of footage a day or something, like of usable footage," Daniel Radcliffe told GQ, talking about the production of "Goblet of Fire," where he had to go in a tank and film underwater for six weeks straight. 

Relying more on CGI seemed to help the latter movies' production go by more smoothly, and Rickman seemed to have an appreciation for it. "We never knew what was going to be put in around us, because they could do it so beautifully by the end," he said. "So that kept you interested." Although we know now that Rickman wasn't always having a great time during these movies, at least the set became a little less like an army camp by the end.