It was a friendship that thrived on a complex fantasy world, created in an English pub, that produced some of the most memorable literary characters ever written. Now a new film by a Scottish-based director will celebrate the real-life fellowship of two literary giants, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis.
CS Lewis: The Man Who Created Narnia aims to ride a wave of interest in Lewis that is anticipated to accompany the rel ease in 2005 of up to seven films based on his Narnia novels. First to reach the public will be the £40 million The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, filmed by Shrek director Andrew Adamson and tipped for the same kind of success as The Lord Of The Rings.
Norman Stone’s 54-minute drama, which starts shooting in Oxford this week, is a more modest affair. The film, being made for the Hallmark Channel will follow Lewis’s life from his troubled childhood to his fantasy workshops with Tolkien in an Oxford pub, where he dreamed up his Chronicles Of Narnia.
It will be linked by the voice of the writer (played by Anton Rodgers) remembering his life story from the trauma of his mother’s death from cancer to the death of the love he found late in life, the American poet Joy Davidson Gresham.
Stone directed the 1985 BBC version of Shadowlands, a film about this last phase in Lewis’s life, which won several international awards. “The whole of his life att racted me initially,” said Stone. “He was a man who wrote wonderfully on the page, telling his own story of losing his mother through cancer when he was nine, and finally falling in love with a woman who has cancer, gets better, then relapses.”
The film will also feature Lewis’s meetings with Tolkien and their much-derided fellow fantasy enthusiasts at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford.
Stone said: “The tiny back room of the “Bird and Baby” was crammed with these “peculiar” people who wrote about fairies, and out of that came Narnia and the Hobbits. In terms of box-office receipts, that must be the most hallowed ground in the world. “Tolkien persuaded Lewis away from atheism after the war. It’s a crucial part of his life, and great to reconstruct. I want to give an insight into the magician behind the magic. Twenty-four years after Shadowlands, this will be the whole story.”
Alongside Anton Rodgers as Lewis, the film will star Diane Venora, who played Lady Capulet in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo And Juliet, as Joy Davidson Gresham , with Robert Hickson as the older Tolkien. It will be shown as part of the Hallmark Channel’s series Heroes, Saints And Sinners.
The screenplay has been written with the assistance of Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s step son. Stone has also asked for the guidance of Lady Jill Freud, who was one of four children who spent time as a second world war evacuee living in Lewis’s house in Head ington, just outside Oxford. The Chronicles are thought to have been partly written for and inspired by these children, who feature as Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter.
The film is based on two of Lewis’s autobiographical books, Surprised By Joy and A Grief Observed, and also deals with his lifelong struggle with his Christian beliefs.
Stone, whose Glasgow-based feature film Man Dancin’ is out on DVD this week, believes the new drama will tap into the fascination with religion revealed by the success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion Of The Christ. “There has clearly been an interest in spiritual films, which has confused the film moguls” he said. “Lewis wrote about God doing experiments on us after Joy’s death, but struggled with heretical thoughts to a strong faith.”
Karen Pascal, producer of The Man Who Created Narnia for the Canadian firm Windborne Productions, said the film’s timing was perfect. “It is almost like Lewis is about to burst on to the scene again, and there is a great deal of anticipation of what is coming in the Narnia films. – This is an accessible biography. Lewis described Narnia as a supposal, and this is a supposal too – what would Lewis have remembered if you had met him as an old man? “We are filming in authentic locations, from the Eagle and Child pub to the home that he lived in for 30 years.”
24 October 2004
