DAVID HEYMAN

All we try and do is make the best films we can. If you do that then hopefully the audiences will come, and they have. Everything else is gravy.

I think it's great to see how they've grown up, not just as actors but as people. They're still very much the same kids that I met many years ago. They've grown up and they are funny and wicked and naughty and bright, and I think as actors their work is just getting better and better. They've blossomed.

It might sound odd, but I want to thank Michael Bay because he's been saying how important it is to show 3D with the right luminescence. And that's very important for this film, a lot of which was shot at night or with very low illumination.

We've been working with the very best in the business. The studio really just let us alone to make the films.

The last day of shooting, there were tears. It was this family that's grown together over the years. Many of us have worked on it since the beginning, so there's a sadness when we all go our separate ways.

I'm interested in making films of all sizes. During this time I've made a film called 'The Boy in the Striped Pajamas', which is a modest-sized film. I was involved in 'I Am Legend' and 'Yes, Man', but 'Potter' is unique. There'll never be anything like 'Potter' again.

It's really wonderful that it's the whole franchise being recognized and it's a collective award. Each film has anywhere between 2,000 and 6,000 people working on it and so really the award is for each and every one of us. We are like a family.

I thought if I was lucky it would be a nice, modest-sized, modest-budgeted film that would be a modest success. And then something happened.

I look forward to having the time and the opportunity to take on new challenges, but I'm also aware that I've loved every minute of the 'Potter 'experience: to make films for an enthusiastic audience and work with great material.

I love books. I read voraciously, and I happened to have been fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time.

But I can't imagine Harry being a stockbroker at 35. That doesn't really seem the stuff of 'Harry Potter'.

Because actually it's really hard to get things made. It takes years. To fight the fights you inevitably have to fight, even when you've produced Harry Potter, you'd better have the commitment and the passion to knock down walls, not take no for an answer.

I got a few things, because I think the props are so beautiful as much as anything else. The detail of the work is something that one has no idea of.

If you make a good first film and audiences respond, than hopefully you'll have the opportunity to do a sequel.

I don't think you can be a director without a kind of sense of competitiveness.

A lot of things change and a lot of things stay the same, they mostly stay the same.

The truth is, it's very hard looking back... we look at holocaust now with such knowledge and such a sense of the horror of what it was, that it's hard to believe even now that in 1930s and 1940s, before something like this had happened, that it could be impossible to imagine the extent of this horror.

The films you're making have to be faithful to the material.

I'm living in the moment. I just try to move each of the stories, scripts and projects that I work on forward. And when they're ready and the people are ready to make them, we'll do that.

I like stories that begin with characters. I like to be engaged and moved by the characters in the story. I want to be moved. I want to leave the cinema and think about what I've seen. My sensibility is quite eclectic and it doesn't matter if they are small or large films, I just want to make good films.

The most important thing is that you have to have the visual effects working for you, instead of you working for the visual effects.

The only way I can work is if I care and am passionate about a project, so the challenge is to find projects that I feel that way about.

We tell the stories that we want to tell.

In some ways, many of the skills you have as a producer on independent films also apply to making big tentpole films: You surround yourself with a brilliant director, great script and talented people in every department who are smarter than you.

But there's something about the simplicity of Auschwitz... there's just nothing. There's just photographs, there's a room full of limbs, a room full of hair, and then you go into the place where the gas chambers were. You walk down these halls and the efficiency of it is so inhuman. The place is so powerful, just for its utter bald, bare simplicity.