"It's changing out there," mutters benign giant Hagrid. "There's a storm coming, Harry..."
Fans of the Harry Potter films will have noticed the way each installment in the blockbuster fantasy franchise has been darker and more serious than the last one.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the eagerly awaited fifth film, is far from being an exception to this rule.
Harry has a lot to be angry about
With evil wizard Lord Voldemort back from the dead, sinister forces invading Hogwarts and Harry himself tormented by nightmares, ostracised from his classmates and riddled with teenage angst, there's no doubt Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fifth film in a series that has so far earned more than $3.5 billion worldwide, is shaping up to be the scariest and most complex episode to date.
"A lot of people have said they disliked Harry in the fifth book because of how angry he was," says 17-year-old Daniel Radcliffe, the young actor charged with bringing JK Rowling's boy wizard to life from 2001's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone onwards. "I talked to Jo [Rowling] about that, and she said that if people don't understand why he is angry then they've not understood what he has been through in the last five years. He has every right to be angry. For me though it was just as interesting to play the reflective side of that anger - Harry's feelings of loneliness and being misunderstood."
"It was exciting to me that this story takes place at a time in Harry's life when he is maturing and everything is becoming more complicated," says David Yates, the acclaimed British TV director hired to bring book five to the screen.
"It is about rebellion and understanding the limits of adulthood and discovering how difficult the world can become." At 766 pages in hardback, Rowling's tome was a daunting proposition for a director best known for such small-screen offerings as State of Play and The Way We Live Now.
Luckily Yates had a very clear idea which story he wanted to tell. "Once you fall in love with these books it can be a struggle. But once you begin to focus on the essential story, which in this case is Harry's struggle with his identity and him fighting his dark side, anything that didn't feed that suddenly felt quite spare."
"One of the decisions we made early on was to put the focus on Harry's emotional journey," agrees writer Michael Goldenberg. "Once we decided that, it clarified a lot of things and became the organising principle for the script. A lot of things in the book had to be taken out, but we tried to keep the spirit of them and the sense of them happening in the background, just off screen."
"The books are divided into chapters, so it is easy when you adapt them for the films to be episodic," continues Yates, who will remain with the series to direct the sixth installment, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. "We were keen to make this a film experience with a very clear beginning, middle and end and an emotional spine all the way through."
"I think we're blessed with having fantastic source material," says producer David Hayman. "That's always the foundation. Each book provides new and exciting challenges, and we always want to make a film that is better than the last one."
As far as actress Emma Watson is concerned, though, that's a given. "For me this is the most genuine of all the films," says the 17-year-old making her fifth appearance as studious Hermione Granger. "It has a realism to it. The word I connect most with David Yates is truth: he always wanted to find the truth in all the characters..."
Dan Radcliffec cannot act MAD AND ANGRY.
