Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

Film Type:

Feature

Language:

English

Colour Info:

Color

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital, DTS, Sony Dynamic Digital Sound

Camera:

ARRICAM Lite (LT), ARRIFLEX 435 Advanced

Frame Rate:

24 fps

Aspect Ratio:

2.39:1 (Scope)

Stereoscopy:

No

Taglines:

Darkness will descend
Something wicked this way comes.
Have you seen this wizard? Approach with extreme caution! Do not attempt to use magic against this man!
Everything will change
The time has come
Cast Your Spell In IMAX
Mysteries will unfold
Secrets will be revealed
Character will be tested

Movie Connection(s):

Followed by: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (English)
Followed by: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (English)
Follows: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (English)
Dubbed into: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Portuguese)

Filming Locations:

Goofs:

Revealing Mistakes
During the boggart scene in the front view of Parvati, Harry is played by a stand-in.

Revealing Mistakes
In opening scene in Harry's bedroom, it can be seen in one shot that Harry is lying on a sheet of glass (to allow magical lighting effect) rather than on a sheet.

Revealing Mistakes
When the Whomping Willow hits Harry and Hermione, they land on the grass hard. However, as Hermione gets up, she pushes down on the grass they are on, and you can tell that it is separate from the rest of the grass around them. They obviously landed on a softened mat rather than the regular ground.

Revealing Mistakes
While Harry (hiding under the Invisibility Cloak) is attacking Malfoy and company in Hogsmeade, he leaves no footprints behind in the snow. However, in all other Hogsmeade scenes, Harry leaves footprints in the snow.

Miscellaneous
Professor Lupin says that he was watching the Marauder's Map and that the map showed Peter Pettigrew on the grounds. Had he seen this, he would have also spotted two 'Harry Potter' and two 'Hermione Granger' symbols on the grounds on the map as there was one of each from the present and one of each from the future. This however goes unmentioned.

Miscellaneous
When the Dementor attacks Harry on the Hogwarts Express, everything freezes in ice. The bottle on the table does not expand like freezing liquid would. (Only water expands when it is frozen, if the liquid is alcohol of some sort, it will shrink when frozen if it is strong enough. Or maybe there is a spell on it, there is a number of possible explanations for this.)

Miscellaneous
After the class has finished dealing with the boggart, Harry's scar appears to be on the wrong side. We are seeing his reflection in the mirror on the door of the wardrobe that holds the boggart.

Factual Mistake
In the closing credits, "Book of Monsters Repair Shop" is misspelled "Book of Monster's."

Errors in Geography
In one shot, there is a white and black butterfly flying, a species that doesn't live in Britain. It's a tropical butterfly, not a cold dwelling butterfly.

Errors in Geography
The Knight bus squeezes between two buses on Lambeth bridge while traveling North towards the Leaky Cauldron. The other two buses are heading South but one of them has Kings Cross as a destination which is North of the river and is therefore traveling in the wrong direction.

Crew/Equipment Visible
At the beginning of the film, when Aunt Marge enters the Dursley's, she is closely followed by a camera under a umbrella, just before it cuts to a shot from behind Aunt Marge.

Crew/Equipment Visible
When Lupin is talking to Harry about Harry's parents a piece of lighting equipment is reflected in Harry's glasses.

Crew/Equipment Visible
When Dumbledore reaches the landing where the Fat Lady had been ripped, we are put into the door's view, as he rubs the loose paper up so the screen goes black for a short time. In the next scene you can see the small camera and the camera hole on the door.

Crew/Equipment Visible
(Widescreen Edition only) In the Leaky Cauldron, when Mr. Weasley pulls Harry aside to talk to him about Sirius Black, the number 301 briefly flashes in the bottom left side of the screen below the "Have you seen this wizard?" poster.

Continuity
When Peter Pettigrew is forced back into human form he is fully dressed, yet later when he escapes by changing into a rat his clothes remain behind untransformed.

Continuity
When Harry and Professor Lupin are walking through the forest discussing the Dementors, they step up to a large rock and Hedwig is sitting there waiting. All of them are clearly in the shade of the trees when they arrive at that spot but when the shot changes to a view from behind them, they are all standing in bright sunlight.

Continuity
When Harry is under the invisibility cloak and throwing snowballs at Malfoy and his cronies, there is a point at which he pulls down the pants of Crabbe and kicks him. In the next shot, Crabbe who was previously on the ground is now standing up, perfectly fine, while Goyle is on the ground in the position of the first. In addition, when the view changes to a long shot, you can see one person being spun around by their scarf and another getting his hat pulled over his eyes, which would be impossible for one person to do on their own.

Continuity
Hermione's hair length grows back and forth all along the movie, often between chronologically adjacent scenes, in a manner not consistent enough to suppose that she gets haircuts.

Character Error
The Marauder's Map clearly reads "Mooney" rather than the correct spelling which is, as JK Rowling spells it "Moony." This was done deliberately as an in joke, as the film's visual effects supervisor is named Karl Mooney.

Trivia:

During the filming of the sleeping bag scene, director Alfonso Cuarón, Michael Gambon, and Alan Rickman played a practical joke on Daniel Radcliffe (who had requested to have his sleeping bag next to a girl whom he liked at the time) by hiding a remote-control-operated Whoopee Cushion in his sleeping bag. According to Cuarón, Daniel tried really hard to stay in character while everyone else was laughing.

The tattoos on Sirius Black's body and hands are borrowed from Russian prison gangs. They are markings which identify the person as a man to be feared and respected.

To make the Knight Bus appear as if it was zipping through traffic at an extremely high speed, the scenes were filmed with the bus driving at normal speed and the rest of the traffic driving at snails pace. The film was advanced though the camera at a slower rate than it would eventually advance on screen. When the scene was played back at normal speed, the bus appears to be driving super fast.

A clause in Alfonso Cuarón's contract forbade the director from cursing in front of the kids on set.

The bats seen flying around in Hagrid's hut are real. They were particularly challenging to train, and Daniel Radcliffe noted that they tended to urinate everywhere. The animal trainers kept the bats under control using food-rewards; they especially enjoyed banana.

Alfonso Cuarón had the idea that when the dementors approached the Hogwarts Express the rain would turn to ice. However, due to his thick Mexican accent the visual effects team misheard "ice" as "eyes". They went as far as to draft a storyboard which depicted eyes falling from the sky, which they presented to a stunned Cuarón, who instantly corrected their mistake.

Alfonso Cuarón had the idea to better establish the layout of Hogwarts to make it seem more like a real place and not simply a group of sets. "We started linking spaces," Cuaron said. "You see that there's the Great Hall, and right outside the Great Hall you see a hallway leading you to the staircases. And you take those staircases to the Gryffindor dorm. Or if you walk over the wooden bridge, you exit into a little garden of monoliths. When you go past the monoliths and down this specific path, you get to Hagrid's hut.

Alfonso Cuarón had the idea to have Harry, Ron, and Hermione wear everyday clothes more often than their Hogwarts uniforms in order to show more of the characters' personalities. He also gave the rest of the Hogwarts students permission to wear their uniforms any way they wanted to in order to bring a greater sense of realism to the wizards' school, hence why some of the students wear the uniforms very neatly while others have the shirts and ties hanging out.

Ian McKellen turned down the role of Dumbledore. Having appeared as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, he said, "I had enough trouble living up to one legend. Two would be too much to hope for."

In order to acquaint himself with his three lead actors, director Alfonso Cuarón had each of them write an essay about their characters, from a first-person point of view. Emma Watson, in true Hermione fashion, went a little overboard and wrote a 16-page essay. Daniel Radcliffe wrote a simple one-page summary, and Rupert Grint never even turned his in.

Originally the script called for Hermione to slap Malfoy as opposed to punching him. During rehearsal for the scene Tom Felton told Emma Watson to slap him, however he had intended for her to not actually hit him, and thus was taken by surprise when Emma smacked him across the face as hard as she could. Emma said she felt terrible about it afterwards and didn't know what she was thinking.