“Emma is such a naturally beautiful girl that we have to play her makeup down when she’s dressed in her school uniform as ‘plain’ Hermione,” says makeup artist Amanda Knight, “but we were able to really have fun with her makeup for the Yule Ball.”
Then there was the considerable task of teaching the teenage cast to dance over several weeks of rehearsal at Leavesden. “The girls were really looking forward to the dance and the boys, being typical boys, were very nervous about it,” Watson observes. “I love dancing and really enjoyed learning to waltz, but what was interesting was that Mike didn’t want us to be perfect dancers. He wanted the camera to pick up that we weren’t exactly sure what we were doing.”
“It was terrifying,” Radcliffe says. “My parents are both very good dancers, but it seems to have skipped a generation. Everyone else had about three weeks to learn the steps, but because I was so busy filming other scenes, I only had four days. So I would get halfway through the steps and just lose it completely. Luckily, Harry’s not supposed to be a fantastic dancer.”
“The dancing was absolutely hysterical,” says Newell, who readily admits he’s a terrible dancer himself. “Dan works so hard at absolutely everything, but it seems God did not necessarily mean for him to be a ballroom dancer. He is absolutely his character at that particular moment in the story!”
The Ball quickly segues from stilted formal dancing to a wild rock free for all. “I remember my own time at university,” Newell recalls. “At the end of every year there was a swanky ball with formal dancing, but by the end we would all let our hair down and it was enormous fun. So I wanted to recreate that feeling with the Yule Ball, a real sense of teenagers letting rip!”
Newell and producer David Heyman recruited British band Pulp’s legendary singer and lyricist Jarvis Cocker, who together with members of his new group Relaxed Muscle and drummer Phil Selway and guitarist Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead, took the stage to play original music during the rocking Yule Ball sequence. Working with renowned music producer Mike Hedges, Cocker penned three songs for the band to perform in the film: “This is the Night,” “Magic Works” and “Do the Hippogriff.”
“Jarvis was a wonderful collaborator,” says Newell. “He had a lot of fun with the whole thing. He said that when he was a kid, he used to be called ‘four eyes’ because he wore glasses, so for the scene he wanted to be four eyes. Then he shut his eyes and revealed eyeballs painted on his eyelids!”
“It’s not often that you get members of Pulp and Radiohead in the Great Hall,” Heyman says with a smile. “Although it was just make believe, it really was an awesome experience watching the Yule Ball scenes come to life. I think for all the cast and crew, it created a great party atmosphere in which to end the year.”
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