Producer Perry Moore wasn’t quite so psyched, but he was obviously pleased. He knows he’s in the final stretch for this film, and he obviously knew that he was among friends at a place like Comic Con. In this first part of my coverage of Narnia at Comic Con, we’ll focus on Moore. Future installments will feature the FX folks, including Howard Berger and Weta’s Richard Taylor.
Moore sat at our roundtable and started off by introducing himself…
Moore: I’m the guy who went after the rights about five years ago and convinced the CS Lewis estate and the studio to take it on. They also asked me to write the official making of the movie book, and I had the good sense to let each of the gentlemen in this room [the heads of the FX departments] write their own chapter about what they do because I feel the fans deserve a bit more. Usually a journalist gets to go down to the set for two weeks and they get to observe and they do the best with what they have, so it was special to write that book.
Q: How faithful is the film?
Moore: I’ll just preface this by saying I’m not a Hollywood guy. I live in New York, I am actually a big comic book guy. I go to the store every Wednesday. When I was a kid I used to save my allowance and do it, and people would tell my mom, “Why do you let him read that garbage?” I would read every fantasy book I could get my hands on and I just went to the estate and said, let us do this faithful and let us do this right. Thankfully they entrusted us to do it. Now that I’ve seen the movie I feel like not only have we done that, I’m shocked at just how powerful the story itself is. This is one of those movies that are going to surprise people because the artisanship is obviously impeccable on every level from costumes to weapons to visual effects, but the heart behind it, the real characters and the emotions – I don’t think people will be ready for this in a big budget movie because I think Hollywood has largely forgotten it in movie making.
Q: What were the kids like?
Moore: The kids are so special in this movie. They’re exceptional. We spent years looking for these kids. The other studios that had the material wanted to modernize it – put it in LA after the earthquakes, and exchange Turkish Delight for hot dogs and pizza! If you’re a fan – this is what got me going to the estate to say we’ve got to do this right. Part of what we wanted to do right was to find real kids from the UK. I had done a tiny little movie called I Am David in the UK which had a ten year old boy. I used a casting director named Pippa Hall, who only does UK children. She did a movie called Billy Elliot. I don’t know if you saw that movie but there’s no sort of Star Search, gee aren’t I cute actor kind of kid in that movie. They’re real kids from the schools. We spent two years looking at these kids and we see over four thousand kids. Our idea, and Andrew’s credo for the whole movie was “Fantasy has to be real.” So four thousand kids later we chose four kids who are pretty close to the real kids in the movie.
Q: The book is Christian allegory –
Moore: He calls it supposition, by the way. I now know more than what any human could possibly know casabout what CS Lewis thought about anything in that regard.
Read the rest at Chud, linked to above.
