Bad news for those who were looking forward to seeing Professor Trelawney chucking crystal balls at dementors during the final installment of Warner Brothers adaptation of the Harry Potter book series.
Emma Thompson, who plays the flighty Hogwarts instructor, has chosen to film a sequel to her 2005 film Nanny McPhee rather than participate in 2010’s Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows. In an interview with MTV MoviesBlog, Thompson stated that choosing between the two came down to what interested her more on a personal level.
The Harry Potters are great big franchises that are something I’m not emotionally attached to or necessarily particularly creatively attached to. That’s more like doing a turn, whereas the Nanny McPhees are something I’ve written. The art is in those films, they’re very handmade, they’re something that’s very close to me. Those are the ones I really care about.
It is hard to blame Thompson for making the choice she did. While Potter probably does supply a nice paycheck, a new Nanny McPhee with her co-writing the screenplay will allow her to greater flex her creative muscles. Both films are scheduled to start production early next year.
As for what a second Nanny McPhee film will be about, Thompson let slip a few details.
The working title is Nanny McPhee and The Big Bang. It’s not a sequel, actually, it’s a new story… [The second film] is set one hundred years later; the only thing that is the same is Nanny McPhee. It’s about two families: A family of country children, and a family of town children, [both] during the war. So it’s about evacuees, and the father is away at war. So this time, the lone parent is the mother. That’s what it’s about: The big war, and a war between these two sets of extremely different children.
