''I was daunted, and I was also ill-tempered," said the 63-year-old director. ''Because I felt very strongly that the tail wagged the dog, and that the special effects had on earlier films been the event."
Newell succeeded in balancing story and visuals. The film has all the dazzling fireworks of its three predecessors, while putting the most human face yet on the bedeviling challenges of growing up the world's most famous boy wizard. It earned $102 million at the box office in its first weekend.
''Goblet of Fire" is adapted from the fourth book in the fantasy series by J.K. Rowling, the first of the books to hit epic proportions, topping 750 pages.
No longer the wide-eyed innocents of their early days at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his chums cope with more adult threats from the magical world and the jealousies and rivalries that come with puberty.
Much as he admires the first two ''Harry Potter" flicks, crafted by US filmmaker Chris Columbus, and the third, made by Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron, Newell felt he brought the one thing his predecessors lacked: intimate knowledge about the quirks of a British education.
''It wasn't possible for them to get that right. They'd never been to such a school," Newell said. ''English schools are very, very eccentric. They're not like any other. I know they've changed now, but when I was in school in the '50s, I was beaten with a cane, a rattan cane, as thick as my little finger.
''And that was a very common occurrence, and so they were kind of dangerous and violent places, but they also were very funny and anarchic places. I wanted to get the sense of the school as a character, having a character, so that the kind of crazinesses that she, Jo [Rowling], is so good at, I wanted to find an organization into which that kind of stuff could fit and bring the two things together."
To that end, Newell rewrote a scene to add a glint of schoolboy mischievousness and the corporal punishment it provokes, in which dour Professor Snape (Alan Rickman) bonks Harry and his friend Ron in the head with a book for goofing off during a study period.
