Mike Newell: My Harry Potter is the Best  11/17/05

British director Mike Newell predicts the latest Harry Potter movie will be hailed as the best yet, because he has filled it with English eccentricity.

The film-maker, who worked on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, drew on his childhood experiences to make Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as authentic as possible.

But he decided not to draw on painful memories of being beaten with a cane - a disciplinary measure which is now outlawed in the UK.

He says, "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 1950s 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 were also funny and anarchic places.

I wanted to get the sense of the school as a character, having a character, so that the kind of craziness that she (author JK Rowling) is so good at, I wanted to find and organization into which that kind of stuff could fit and bring the two things together."