ComingSoon.net spoke to Adamson during his recent New York press jaunt for “Narnia.” With his long blonde locks and casual attire, Adamson is a warm and open guy, as jovial and friendly as you might expect from the man behind the “Shrek” phenomenon. With The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Adamson took on some new challenges, namely working with live actors, and in particular, with the film’s four fairly inexperienced young actors. Here are some highlights. Visit ComingSoon.net for the rest of this outstanding interview
CS: When you go into a movie like this, how do you balance it being an “Andrew Adamson Film” while staying true to C.S. Lewis’ novel while interpreting it for a new audience?
Andrew Adamson: (laughs) No, I was making a C.S. Lewis film, but luckily, my agents got me the “Andrew Adamson” credit. You always make a film that is first and foremost for yourself, or at least I do. I think that if you start second-guessing too much, if you start trying to think what any particular audience member wants or even what the author would have accepted, it’s very hard, because you’ll end up second-guessing yourself. Ultimately, I was making an Andrew Adamson film, but I could only trust my own instincts. On the other hand, I grew up with these books, and they were a huge part of my life. They were very important to me, and I set out to be very true to them, but I think, what I set out to do was be very true to my memory of the books, because I remember them as bigger. It’s like the house you grew up in. You go back there and it’s like “Wait a minute. This is smaller than I thought.” When I reread the book as an adult, it was much smaller than I remember it. I like to say that I had 30 years of prep time, because my imagination, my memory had expanded over those 30 years, the imagery from seeing films like “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings” had in some ways increased the imagery and made it more epic and also, reading all seven books had made it more epic, and I really wanted to make the movie as epic as that memory.
CS: Can you talk about how you ended up with Liam Neeson providing the voice of Aslan?
Adamson: Liam came to me. I don’t think he had ever read it, but I think his children had read it and told him about it. He said that he had gone into one of his kids’ rooms and got the book down and read it after he sort of heard that we were making it, and he actually called up and said, “Look, I’m interested in playing Aslan.” He actually offered to read for me, which is a fairly amazing thing. He put himself on tape somewhere else in the world, and I was listening to him on the phone, and even on the phone, you could just hear this warmth in this voice. And aside from the resonance and depth, which was obviously perfect for coming out of a big creature like a lion, in a fairly short period of time, I wanted to understand why the children liked Aslan and why Lucy cared so much about him. A lot of that was the warmth in Liam’s voice, I think, that makes you like the character. He didn’t know how big this was. He didn’t really realize what an iconic character he was playing when he got into this. He just read the book and really liked the character.
CS: This movie has a PG-rating, but there are a lot of battle scenes that some might deem to be too intense for younger kids. How do you feel about that?
Adamson: It’s very much a PG film. There’s no one writing on the wall in blood or anything like that. There is no blood in this film, in fact, but I wanted the excitement of the action. The scene when SPOILER dies is a pretty heavy scene. It’s very scary, but at the same time, it’s played for the emotion. I actually think that the battle is really played for the emotion. Yes, it has that big epic sense, and that excitement, and it gets your adrenaline going, but still, I’ve tried to stay very close to the two boys and stay with their story without the battle. As far as the PG rating, I mean, I wanted it to be a PG film, because I read the book when I was 8 years old, and I would be mortified to think that I made a film that I couldn’t have seen when I was 8 years old after reading the book. So I always intended to keep it a kids’ film. There was only one scene, one moment, that I had to cut, and it’s where the phoenix lays down the fire, I originally had some of the creatures running through the fire and catching alight, and I understand that was maybe a little intense for kids.
CS: Do you think you’d do a sequel or a prequel? Which Narnia story would you most be interested in telling?
Adamson: You know what? There’s so many different answers to that. The story most likely to tell next would be “Prince Caspian” because it’s the same four children, and we’d have to do it before Skandar grows a moustache. My favorite story as a child reading them was probably “The Magician’s Nephew,” “Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe” and “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”. Which one would I be most interested in telling next? Probably “Voyage of the Dawn Treader” just because it takes you to all these different worlds, and it’s so visually different because of that, but I think actually “Prince Caspian” is probably, in some ways, one of the most emotional stories, because you have this whole story of Peter and Susan accepting that they’re never going to go back to Narnia.
[Visit ComingSoon.net for the rest of this outstanding interview]