When the eighth and final Harry Potter movie is released in 2011 -- the seventh book is being filmed in two parts -- director David Yates will have spent five straight years with Little Whinging's little wizard. In the latest, 'Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,' he fends off Death Eaters and pines for a girl. Yates' four films in the J.K. Rowling universe will, in all likelihood, total between 10 and 12 hours of celluloid. That's a whole lot of Harry. But here's the thing: He really, really likes to tell long stories. Witness his award-winning work for the BBC, which includes a four-part Anthony Trollope adaptation (2001's 'The Way We Live Now') and a six-part political thriller (2003's 'State of Play'). He never consciously went after long-form narratives, he says. They went after him. 'They were the scripts that I was attracted to when I was working in television. I like the time you get to develop characters. I like that kind of epic sweep,' says Yates, a soft-spoken man in a grayish corduroy blazer, cradling a cappuccino in a Manhattan hotel room. He turned down opportunities to direct a few pre-Potter features because, he says, they were never as engaging as the TV projects he was offered at the time. 'Who needs a movie, frankly, when you can do something intricate and interesting? So if I've fallen into the pattern of making things within that form, it's because they're particularly well-written and they're intriguing and involving.' What he finds most involving in the Harry Potter saga are, he says, its vivid characters 'and their delightful development how they change and shift.' The actors have shifted a bit themselves: Daniel Radcliffe (Harry), Rupert Grint (Ron) and Emma Watson (Hermione), all pip-voiced prepubescents when 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone' started filming nine years ago, have matured on-screen both physically and artistically. Yates was channel-surfing recently when he stumbled across his last film with Radcliffe and Co., 2007's 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.' 'I thought, 'Oh, my God, Rupert's so thin and tiny! And Emma!' And that was -- I suppose I shot that three years ago. They're making huge leaps in this extraordinary time frame we've got with them,' he says. 'And I feel oddly parental as well. I feel very proud of what they're achieving.' As for the film's design, it sports a much mistier and more gothic look than any previous Potter, its visual style closer to classic Universal spookfests than the cheerier, chummier, earthier episodes of Harry's early life. 'I wanted it to feel really heightened and atmospheric and painterly,' Yates says. 'It was very important whereas the fifth, 'Order of the Phoenix,' I wanted it to be gritty and a bit realer. It was a very conscious choice.' Another conscious choice involved a show-stopping bit near the end, a deathly emotive scene that plops Harry into the water with submerged corpses and surrounds him with a burnin' ring of fire. It evokes a certain iconic moment in a certain Charlton Heston epic. At a news conference in the same Manhattan hotel, Radcliffe describes shooting the scene with Michael Gambon as Dumbledore. After the surface of the pool was ignited, he says, the water went black with soot. Then he climbed up onto a small central island and saw Gambon standing over him ' looking like God or Moses, swirling fire high around his head.' In Exodus, Moses held a staff, not a wand. He wasn't rescuing the Israelites from reanimated cadavers. But his robe flowing, his beard long, his arms raised at the water's edge of doom, Dumbledore sure does look like that guy from 'The Ten Commandments.' When asked about it, Yates laughs. 'Do you know what? It was one of those things where, you know, Michael's got the frock and the beard. He's surrounded by a whirlwind of fire, he's standing up there with his wand,' he says. 'As I was shooting it, I thought, 'This is so biblical.' And I thought, 'Is it a good thing, or is it a bad thing?' And I said, 'Well, how do I change it to make it less biblical? And is that a problem?' And then I just kind of thought, 'That's not a problem. It's cool.' I thought, 'Go with it.' And so, you know, we went with it.' Sure did. At scene's close, Dumbledore parts the fire like the Red Sea. 'Well, you know, you've got to get out of there,' Yates says. 'So you've got to part the fire.' 