This time, Newell accepted. He loved the book, and recognized that beneath its meaty humanity beat the cold heart of a lean, mean thriller. He also saw the chance to give Harry a makeover. Newell has only praise for Columbus (''a heroic job''), but he has a different perspective on British school life, having experienced it firsthand. ''I felt the children were rather...oh, stiff,'' says Newell, 63. ''My view is that children are violent, dirty, corrupt anarchists. I was very anxious that [the franchise] break out of this goody-two-shoes feel.''

Newell had the makings of a provocative new Potter. Then, a month into preproduction, Cuarón invited him over to see Azkaban.

''As I watched his film, I realized, to my horror, that he had done everything I had planned to do,'' says Newell. ''Darker tone. Sharper edge. The kids were more untidy and rougher and 'realer' and so on.... I had thought, 'Number 3 will be roughly the same as the ones before it.' It wasn't. I had to come up with something else.''

Newell's solution was to zero in on Harry's increasing inability to count on friends, adults, and Dumbledore to bail him out of jams. The only problem with this narrow approach is that it left out the billion other things that made the book so special. Rowling's dense, complex plot concerns Harry's life-changing participation in the Triwizard Tournament, a dangerous triathlon involving three schools. Weaving in and out of this story line are several subplots: an outing to the Quidditch World Cup; the reemergence of the Death Eaters, Voldemort's Muggle-hating followers; and the efforts of a radicalized Hermione (Emma Watson) to liberate Hogwarts' indentured house-elves. At one point, Warner Bros. considered splitting Goblet into two films, but abandoned the idea because the book didn't offer a natural breaking point. ''It's fiendishly intricate. It resists adaptation,'' says Kloves. ''Far and away the hardest one yet to crack.''

Ultimately, it took eight formal drafts to get Goblet rolling by summer 2004. Scenes were telescoped (like the Quidditch World Cup). Subplots were ditched — like that Hermione/house-elves business. (''I was disappointed to hear that,'' says Watson, 15. ''But I guess something had to go.'') Newell continued to worry throughout filming that Goblet lacked a thriller's proper backbone. Over Christmas, he brainstormed a way to bring more cohesion to the tale — a recurring motif, too spoilerish to describe — that required further script work. On top of all this, he had to make sense of a massive budget (reportedly $130 million) that never seemed massive enough, while also mounting some of the trickiest set pieces ever in a Potter film, including an underwater tussle with fanged aquatic creatures that called for the construction of the largest water tank for filmmaking purposes in Europe.

Like Cuarón before him, Newell was offered a chance to direct the next Potter flick — in his case, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — but he declined; wrapping one film while prepping another, he says, ''isn't possible.'' Up-and-coming British helmer David Yates and screenwriter Michael Goldenberg have been tapped to adapt, and over the summer, Radcliffe, Watson, and Rupert Grint decided to return. ''I'm out of school now. Got nothing else better to do,'' quips Grint, 17. Watson — known for being the one who deliberates the most carefully about returning — says working with the performance-driven Newell (he put all the kids through weeks of improv boot camp with an acting coach) recharged her batteries. ''[He] really made me remember why I love acting in the first place,'' she says. ''Leaving this all behind would be very difficult.''