Stuart Craig was a softly spoken, gentle soul – full of grace, tall, slender, willowy, polite and kind – but despite appearances he masterfully stewarded a gigantic industrial creative machine. The art department for Harry Potter was huge, and Stuart guided teams across multiple skill sets – concept artists, prop makers, construction workers, painters and decorators, plasterers and model makers – to realise the fabric and architecture of JK Rowling’s world.
It wasn’t unusual to be standing with him on one of his enormous inspiring sets, the Magical Congress of the United States of America in New York or the courtyard of Hogwarts, which towered multiple storeys high, and for Stuart to suddenly be distracted and laser-focused on the texture of a tile, or the colour of the paint that had been applied to a window frame.
The people who worked with Stuart – me included – had a deep, and respectful loyalty to him; in part because he was a visionary production designer, and in part because he was just a lovely man. That loyalty was clear to see among his team, whom he nurtured and challenged in equal measure.
I was once looking for locations in Portugal with Stuart and Neil Lamont, one of his closest associates and now a production designer in his own right. We were scouting for one of our Fantastic Beasts movies, and Stuart at that time was already succumbing to the early stages of Parkinson’s. After a busy morning he was overwhelmed in the intense summer heat. We were all concerned, but what stayed with me was the way Neil and other art department colleagues tended to Stuart while he rehydrated and recovered. His team respected him, but they also revered and loved him.
It’s a testament to Stuart’s work that the Harry Potter Studio Tour, based at Warner Brothers’ Leavesden studios near Watford, is as popular as it is. The museum is a celebration of much of Stuart’s work and an enduring legacy; one just has to walk into the Great Hall or look at the huge model of Hogwarts to see. Stuart is in many ways the embodiment of the world of Potter in terms of our visual memories of those films and stories.
But most precious to me are the afternoons we’d spend together during pre- production with a pot of tea, looking over his ideas and drawings and concepts for the sets to come. It was always a treat to see how his mind worked and ideas evolved, and to engage and participate in the journey to bring those ideas to the screen with a true master and a thoughtful, gentle, brilliant man.