The First Look At Harry

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loves also sought advice from Rowling on Quidditch, the broomstick sport at which Harry excels. "She gave me a little bit of a clue in saying that she likes American basketball," says Kloves, "so I understood some of what she was doing with hoops and things." But whereas Quidditch is played in a traditional stadium in the books, the movie's Quidditch games are played on an open field circled by towers, which accommodate the spectators and give the moviegoer a sense of height and speed as the players zip around them on brooms.

Costume designer Judianna Makovsky (The Legend of Bagger Vance) initially based her Quidditch uniforms on the cover illustration for Scholastic Inc.'s American edition of Sorcerer's Stone: Harry in a modern-day rugby shirt, jeans and red cape. "It looked a mess," she says. "It wasn't very elegant." So she went on to outfit the Quidditch players in preppie sweaters and ties, 19th century fencing breeches and arm guards under their wizard robes. "There's no real period," she says of the film's costumes, which range from Elizabethan ruffs to tartan plaids to Dickensian frocks.

Reasoning that Hogwarts would date back to the medieval era, production designer Stuart Craig (The English Patient) fashioned Hogwarts' Great Hall after England's greatest cathedrals. Like all the other sets, it was built at Leavesden Studios, a former airfield outside London. "The architecture is real," says Craig, "but pushed as much as we can, expanded as illogically huge as we can possibly make it." To save money, the producers initially asked Craig to find an existing old English street to double for Diagon Alley, where wands, owls, cauldrons, broomsticks and other magical paraphernalia are sold. This was a tall order, since the row of shops would be Harry's--and the audience's--first glimpse of the world of wizards. (Upon seeing it, wrote Rowling, "Harry wished he had about eight more eyes.") Craig ended up building his own awe-inspiring version--a long, highly stylized cobblestone street of Tudor, Georgian and Queen Anne architecture. "The buildings are leaning to the point where they would actually fall over," says Craig, "and you would never get that many styles jammed together."

Today at Leavesden Studios, in a vast, drafty airplane hangar converted into makeshift soundstages, Diagon Alley is deserted. Hogwarts' magnificent staircase (partly constructed, then digitally finished onscreen) stands empty. But the lights will go on soon, as the sets will be recycled for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which is scheduled for release next year, with Columbus back at the helm. The entire Sorcerer's Stone cast will return for Chamber of Secrets, and just last week it was announced that Kenneth Branagh will join them in the role of the vain new defense against the dark-arts teacher, Gilderoy Lockhart. Meanwhile, Kloves has begun adapting the third Potter book. The three young leads haven't yet signed on for any movies past the second, but because the Potter novels chronicle consecutive school terms at Hogwarts, the child actors could conceivably continue through what Rowling says will be seven books, aging right along with the franchise. "That would be cool," says the red-haired Grint, though he admits, "I don't know what I'll look like in a couple of years."

He's not the only one worried about how the actors will age. "If they suddenly discover cheeseburgers on movie three," says Columbus, "I don't know what I'm gonna do." Other concerns will arise as the movies progress. The PG-rated Sorcerer's Stone is designed for kids ages six and older, but Rowling's books do get scarier. They also get longer. Columbus has already come up with a strategy for the very thick Goblet of Fire, which could hit screens in 2004. "I think it has to be two movies," he says. "We could shoot a four- or five-hour version, release part one at Thanksgiving and part two at Christmas." Otherwise, Columbus is keeping mum on his Potter plans, and a veil of secrecy is descending on the second movie. On Columbus' office wall at Leavesden, he has tacked up renderings and scene sketches from Chamber of Secrets. He kindly asks the visiting journalist to ignore them. Too late. It's a car--a drawing of the magically souped-up Ford Anglia that carries Harry and Ron to their second year at Hogwarts. It's turquoise, just as Rowling described it, and already in flight.