okay, i love this kid.

[fox]

The older and more wise-assed he gets, the more I adore Dan Radcliffe.  In the "Preparing for the Yule Ball" stuff he's really very funny with his chatter about it just being a rehearsal, and how important he thought it was to play it down because Harry was supposed to be a bad dancer.  (And he says Emma Watson is quite beautiful, which, given everything I've learned about the difference between US and British "quite", is also pretty amusing.)  And I dig "heh, Ralph Fiennes with orange dots all over his face."  AND.  The look he gives this interviewer when he says "Do you look forward to the days when you know you'll be able to just, as it were, potter along?"  Go, boy.  :-D

GAH!  Cutie pies!

Interviewer:  Who would you most like to meet?
Rupert Grint:  I've got quite into golf, lately, playing that a lot.  So, Tiger Woods, maybe?
Interviewer:  You know he'd probably beat you.
Dan Radcliffe:  No, Rupert's quite good, actually.

Hee!  And, talking about differences between themselves and the characters:

Interviewer:  And what about you, are you presumably extremely clever?
Emma Watson:  No.

Comments

[axiom_of_stripe]

(And he says Emma Watson is quite beautiful, which, given everything I've learned about the difference between US and British "quite", is also pretty amusing.)

oh?

[thyesc.livejournal.com]

I second this "oh" - please to be explaining :-)

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

If you believe D MacC (whom you may remember from dinner when you were here; I believe it was when you were sitting across from me that he was on my left and S the junior dean was on your left and for a minute everyone was talking about sodomy), "she's quite beautiful" means "she's hideous". He maintains that "quite" is used to mean "not very", which of course is in sharp contrast to the American way of using it, which usually means "somewhat, by which I mean very". If you see what I mean. So a rec letter in which a British professor says a student's work was "quite good" means, in D's words, that the work was shite.

I did call him on that after thinking of a couple of counterexamples -- specifically, good old Oscar Wilde has Cecily Cardew say she always feels quite plain after her German lesson, and surely D wasn't suggesting that Cecily feels pretty after her German lesson; and he said no, she does feel plain, but she doesn't feel ugly, if you see the distinction, she just sort of feels a little duller than she usually looks, whereas in general an American "quite plain" would mean "very plain", Cecily's "quite plain" means "a bit plain". It is, in short, a qualifier rather than an intensifier, in British English.

This has been reinforced by other speakers; it's not at all right to say you thought a performance went quite well, for example, unless the performers just barely got through it in one piece. If it really did go well, you have to say "very" (or, presumably, "rather"? I'll have to ask about that one).

Now, I don't suppose that young Dan meant to say young Emma was anything less than lovely. This is the modified D definition (the explanation "it means it's shite" was given in the depths of inebriation, after all), in which it doesn't mean the opposite -- but it does mean something different than we think it does. "She's quite beautiful" = "she's actually pretty; huh, go figure".

[juice817.livejournal.com]

she's actually pretty; huh, go figure

and that sounds a lot a like something a kid would say upon realizing his little sister isn't a troll after all... hee.

[elance.livejournal.com]

OMG thank you for explaining this.

*cannot even imagine how many times she has screwed this particular phrase up*

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

But they can tell, when they hear the American accent, that we don't know what we're talking about. :-)

[axiom_of_stripe]

hee! you're right; that's darn good. :)

[impyvixen.livejournal.com]

Can I pay you to transcribe all the behind-the-scenes interview shit? LOL... the DVD I bought doesn't even have the extras on it (which may be why it was so cheap, come to think of it), but even if I'd gotten the version with all the extrys, none of it would be captioned or subtitled anyway.

GAH.

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

hee. I can do it, but not quickly. Watch this space.

[zoethe.livejournal.com]

I loved that interview! Just a delight to watch.