Michael Gambon & Robbie Coltrane Video Interview On ‘Harry Potter’

ROBBIE: The book came first and also I got fantastically detailed information from Jo Rowling because she has an encyclopedic knowledge of every character that appears in any of the books. Quite breathtaking. I was trying to catch her up. Saying, "So what about Snape? What age was he when..." And she says, "Oh, 14," and she loves all that stuff. I get very good guidance from her really. And then once I'd worked out what it was supposed to be like. It's just a matter of not bumping into the furniture, really. MICHAL: Keep your head up. ROBBIE: Exactly, for the first two films, all the direction was on the children, because they were just kids in these huge great sets. So, Christopher was kind of tied up with that.

ROBBIE: I didn't become an actor until I was about 27. So I never played a young person. I've never been a young person as an actor. I didn't really know quite what he was going through. But he was going through the usual stuff that you go through in your adolescence. But, in the midst of glaring lights, and they had to do all their schoolwork and so forth. And they were almost on all the time. In the first two films, they were almost not off the screen. MICHAEL: He was amazing though. The day they found Daniel they struck gold. Perfect. ROBBIE: Definitely. And the other too. MICHAEL: What I took out of it. I was very anxious, and I got a note from J.K. Rowling. I don't know really, and she just said he seemed like a bit of a hippy. Which I thought was good. They didn't seem to mind that. The flowing costumes and the silk. It was a bit hippyish. I think she quite liked that.