British Filmmaker Mike Newell feels lucky these days. You could say that these are 'magic' days for him. The 'Four Weddings And A Funeral' director recently took some time off from his hectic schedule to talk with Variety about his latest gig, directing "Harry Potter and The Goblet Of Fire".

Strange as it may sound, Newell is the first Englishman to direct a Potter adaptation, even though the character, novel and author are all British. He himself hopes that his root will help him bring a sense of authenticity to this fourth cinematic outing.

There's a very strong literature in Great Britain of school stories, a really enormous number of them," he says. "One Hoovered those up when one was little. I found myself remembering those stories and how they worked. ... In terms of tone, [I found] a way of making the material personal. It wasn't popular to do this great overall sweep: That had been done before me. But it was possible on some level to make it about my school and my schooldays."

The man had also hoped to bring some darkness to what started as a child's franchise, but predecessor Alfonso Cuaron beat him to the punch, and quite remarkably, with "Prisoner Of Azkaban".

"Of course, what I had wanted to do was introduce the darker adolescent tone myself and found to my horror that Alfonso had gotten there before me and with great style and determination. And so I think there is a kind of tap dance between the mixture the audience wants, which of course is determined by the books."

His biggest challenge, though, was to bring a mammoth amount of pages and material coherently on the big screen. There had been talks about splitting the film in two (a la Kill Bill), but screenwriter Steven Kloves feared a second stand-alone chapter of the same book would simply suffer, and the idea was scrapped. Both men decided to rely on audiences' predetermined knowledge of the story and its elements.

"What you do is you pack it with references and suggestions and so forth which, of course, you have taken from the book. So that a reader coming to the film goes, 'Oh, I see. I get it. They did it that way.' You're the guardian of the book, and at the same time, you have absolutely to be able to step off the books and say, 'We had better distill this.' Distillation is a very good word for it."

Filming on the fourth Harry Potter is getting on these days, with release eyed a year from now.