That joy was in large part thanks, Radcliffe said, to Columbus’s infectious passion for his work. “That’s why we shot with three or four cameras - if one of the kids looked into the camera or smiled like they couldn’t believe their good fortune, I had something else to cut to,” he said in a phone conversation on a walk near his home in Malibu in September. When Radcliffe and the young actors who played his friends, Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) and Emma Watson (Hermione Granger), were making the film, they weren’t just pretending to have the time of their lives - they were, Columbus said.