Harry’s epic battle with the Horntail required Daniel Radcliffe to be hurled around and dangled off of rooftops as his alter ego is pursued by the relentless reptile. “The dragon battle was very physical and even terrifying at times!” Radcliffe says. “When we were doing the stunt where Harry falls down the roof, I found myself literally dangled by my ankles, hanging upside down 40 feet in the air. Then I was dropped suddenly and hurtled head first toward the ground. I knew it was safe because our stunt team is so brilliant. But I did feel my life flashing before my eyes for a second!”
The champions face even greater danger in the second task, which demands they locate and rescue a loved one from the watery recesses of the Black Lake. Even more daunting, they have only one hour to complete the challenge – lest, Harry fears, their nearest and dearest will become permanent residents of the loch’s murky depths
“The Black Lake is filled with plant life, rocks and creatures you imagine could exist for hundreds of years deep in a Scottish loch without being discovered or disturbed,” says Stuart Craig of his design for the mythical underwater environment.
The filmmakers were determined that the characters appear to be swimming in a deep and dense river, as opposed to the clear blue water of a typical underwater filming tank. “We faced one of our greatest challenges with the underwater sequence,” Heyman relates. “Filming in an actual loch would have been too cold and impractical. We looked into doing a process called ‘dry for wet,’ where you suspend an actor and blow wind on them to give the illusion that the they are underwater, but the hair didn’t undulate convincingly.”
Over the course of three months, the production constructed what became one of the largest underwater filming tanks in Europe, measuring 20 feet deep by 60 feet square, to accommodate the actors, the stunt and diving teams, the camera crew, the blue screen and camera equipment. “Every single drop of water was filtered every 1 ½ hours, so it was probably purer than bottled water!” Richardson says of the tank’s sophisticated purification system.
Richardson’s team constructed a special viewing gallery which separated 2nd unit director Peter Macdonald and the crew from the actors, the dive team and the underwater camera unit by two and a half inches of reinforced glass. Instruction was relayed to the swimmers by 2nd unit 1st assistant director Jamie Christopher via a sophisticated speaker system. A “dry room” was also built to enable Radcliffe and his co-stars to remove their breathing apparatus for short periods of time without having to surface and risk problems with ear pressure.
During the construction of the tank system, Radcliffe and his fellow actors took scuba diving training. “I’m not a strong swimmer, but thankfully I found swimming underwater relatively easy,” reports Radcliffe, who started his six months of training in a swimming pool and progressed to larger pools until he was ready for filming in the massive tank. “The hardest thing was combining the technical side of diving with acting. I had to remember that Harry has gills, so he’s not actually breathing, so I had to be very careful not to let out any air bubbles. I couldn’t see anything around me, and all I could hear was Jamie’s disembodied voice. It was quite a bizarre experience, but I absolutely loved it.”
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