Donald Trump’s film tariffs would have diminished the spectacle of the Harry Potter franchise and threatened its enormous profitability, one of the film’s directors has said.
Mike Newell, who directed Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, said cross-Atlantic collaboration enabled JK Rowling’s books to be brought to life in a “gigantic magical world”.
The film’s army of fans “would not have seen it the same way” had Trump’s plans been in place because its success was built on “putting the British and the Americans together”.
Mike Newell said that the huge scale of the Harry Potter films made in the UK could only have been achieved with backing from a big US film studio
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On Sunday, the US president said he would impose a 100 per cent tariff on all movies “produced in foreign lands”.
The fourth film in the Harry Potter franchise was made at the Warner Bros Studios Leavesden in Hertfordshire and on location in the UK.
The Goblet of Fire, the 78th highest grossing film of all time, took $290 million at the box office in the US and Canada.
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“I don’t think you would have seen it [the film] the same way,” Newell, 83, said. “I think you would have seen it — it was too important as a publishing event not to.
“But the huge scale at which they were made — and the fact that long string of eight movies kept on being successful and ever more profitable — that would not have happened if it had not been Warner Bros.”
He said he feared that such a division of the British and American film-making industries would have dampened the 2005 film’s creativity and ambition, affecting scenes such as the first task of the Triwizard Tournament, which involved CGI dragons.
“The circumstances in which the stories took place, the kind of gigantic magic world, that [producer] David Hayman and … Warner Brothers created around those eccentric English children, would have changed enormously, simply because they were so extraordinarily elaborate and ambitious,” Newell said.
Newell, far left, with young Harry Potter cast members
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Last week Trump shocked the film world by saying that “if they [movie companies] are not willing to make a movie inside the United States, we should have a tariff on movies that come in”.
The president wrote on his Truth Social platform the “Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death” because “countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers and studios away from the United States”.
The announcement came after Trump met his “Hollywood ambassador” Jon Voight, the Oscar-winning actor and father of Angelina Jolie.
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Newell said that Trump “absolutely does not” understand how films are made, and added: “What’s weird is that Jon Voight does, so Trump is getting either not good advice or he’s getting the advice that his advisers think he wants.”
Newell, who is shooting a film about the Duchess of Windsor’s life after the Abdication, said that the industry on both sides of the Atlantic was “jumpy” and thought the plan was “crackers”.
“Trump thinks it’s going to bring billions of dollars into America. He thinks that all those businesses and technologies are going to be sucked in to be actually achieved in America. And at the minute, it doesn’t look like that. At the minute, it looks almost the reverse of that.”
The film, TV, radio and photography industries in the UK were worth £21 billion in 2023, equivalent to almost 1 per cent of the UK economy.
Little detail has been added by the Trump administration since the announcement. It is also not clear if big-budget television series made in the UK by the likes of Netflix and Amazon will be subject to tariffs.
Films made in the UK have since 2007 been eligible for tax breaks which have helped to attract billions of pounds of investment and build a skilled workforce in the film-making and gaming industries.