“People are waiting for Narnia and they are waiting for Narnia for generations,” British actor Tilda Swinton, who plays Jadas the evil White Witch in the popular children’s story, said. “They are absolutely justified expectations … but people will expect all sorts of things that we won’t be able to deliver.”
First-look pictures released this week show the four relatively unknown British child actors who will take a starring role in the film – Georgie Henley, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell and Skandar Keynes.
“You can tell it is really big (the film) by how much effort is going into this,” 13-year-old Keynes said of the film. “But I don’t think anyone has put pressure on me to meet expectations.”
“It will be a nice escape from normal life,” Popplewell said of the fictional world.
Other actors cast in the film include Dawn French (Mrs Beaver), Rupert Everett (Fox) and Jim Broadbent (Professor Digory Kirke). “He wants it to be classical,” Swinton said of director Andrew Adamson, who last worked on the film based on the loveable green ogre Shrek.
Adamson says the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (LLW) will be very different from other children’s flicks such as Harry Potter, which have been extremely popular in recent years. “This film is already finding its own flavour and tone and taste that makes it very different,” he said. “It is a story about a family and the fact that it happens in a fantasy world on epic proportions is really just an expansion of what is going on for them.”
The Disney-Walden production, which will be distributed by Buena Vista International, reportedly boasts a budget of between $150 million and $230 million.
Eighty-five people worked in Los Angeles for eight months before the project was taken to New Zealand, where the production team behind Lord of the Rings, Weta, began work on the project. “It’s bigger than The Lord of the Rings,” special effects designer Howard Berger said. “Lord of the Rings had orcs and trolls … this has 23 (different) species.”
The film was shot at locations throughout New Zealand with a main production base in Auckland.
