Richard Taylor, who supervised the designs of armor and weapons for the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the upcoming film adaptation of Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, said that although both stories were adapted from British novels of the same period, the styles of the films have significant differences. “Trying to find the world [of Narnia] was really quite hard,” Taylor said in an interview. “It’s a different audience. It has to play for a similar audience, but it’s the story of four children and it’s a very unique story. [Narnia author] C.S. Lewis and [Rings author J.R.R.] Tolkien actually debated it themselves. They were close friends, but they had a fervent debate about how Tolkien liked to write his world and how C.S. Lewis wrote his world. And that was challenging at a technical level.”
Taylor, who works for the New Zealand-based special-effects house Weta Workshop, said that Narnia director Andrew Adamson had a more particular vision than Peter Jackson, who directed the Lord of the Rings films, but he was just as concerned about faithfully interpreting the novel on the big screen. “From the very first meeting ever in a cafe just down the road from Disney x number of years ago, and now, Andrew said it’s all about the book, which was very pleasing for us, because that’s what we’d done on our previous films,” Taylor said. “Thankfully, I knew the books very intimately. Actually, more intimately than I knew the world of Tolkien when we started Lord of the Rings, because I wasn’t the best reader as a kid, and as we all know, the world of Narnia you can enter very easily. But it was a much more complex film to design because basically you’re stepping into a childhood dream. And C.S. Lewis created this world that was a huge spread of mythological Greek and European myth. And that made for a very complex job. [There] wasn’t a great deal of descriptive writing within the book that we could use, so we had to extrapolate out from that, using Andrew’s inspiration and trying to find the place that felt like the reality of Narnia.
