The next person to walk into the room for an interview was director Andrew Adamson. He is a very nice man, and deserves the break that he’s taking. The night before I asked him about the cat that appears in Prince Caspian. I mentioned that I thought it looked really similar to Puss in Boots. He told me the reason is because both actually look like a cat that he used to have. Very cool bit of information there. Here, he talks about each of the cast members, the challenges of filming a sequel, the music, and passing the reigns to Michael Apted, among other things.
Andrew Adamson: Hi!
Paul Martin: Hello, again!
Andrew Adamson (referencing me): This is the most excited man from last night.
(laughter)
Paul Martin: I didn’t even know what to say.
Andrew Adamson: (laughs) Have you thought about it for today?
Paul Martin: I little bit
Andrew Adamson: Oh, good, thank you very much. The enthusiasm was very enjoyable, thank you.
Paul Martin:Oh, you’re welcome, I just loved it, and my friends gave it very high marks as well.
Andrew Adamson: Good.
Reporter: So, not that the first one was like trial and error, but it had to be a little bit easier coming on the second one..
Andrew Adamson: Yes, I think it was easier, and therefore, we made it harder. Basically, we had some idea going in this time of what we were facing, which made it harder to actually commit to, in some ways, because it’s much better going in with sort of a blissful ignorance. But I think with any situation, you end up putting challenges in front of yourself and trying to make this film bigger for my own sake and I think that’s as big a challenge as any.
Reporter: Were you happy with the audiences reaction last night?
Andrew Adamson: Yeah, you know, I mean particularly seeing half audience was you guys, and you’re all cynical. (laughter) It was really nice to hear cheering and clapping and things like that, and some of the unexpected. I really liked one of the scenes with Ben and Anna when there was like “oooooh,” because I hadn’t really heard that before, so that was nice.
Reporter: And the bear got a couple of reactions there, too.
Andrew Adamson: Oh really?
Reporter: ..which I found funny there at the end.
Andrew Adamson: You know, it’s worth watching, and I hope that people will, it’s worth watching again, sometimes for background animation. One of my favorite bits of animation is actually behind Reepicheep when their doing the thing about cutting their tails off. One of the mice is just very reluctant to cut his tail off, and it’s just a really cute piece of animation. One of the nice things with animation, ’cause you’re looking at it again and again, you get to layer in stuff, and so very often there’s just some sort of background piece that comes forth, so it’s always nice to catch those.
Reporter: Does that make it harder to actually be finished with the film? Because isn’t their always…
Andrew Adamson: You’re never finished with the film, you just run out of time, basically. (laughter) It’s true, it’s like the last few weeks of finishing any film are really difficult, because leading up to that point, all the decisions you make have heavy consequences, but in those last few weeks, all the decisions you make are final. It’s a letting go process, it’s kind of like, okay, I can’t do any more. I just have to hope that everyone’s happy with it at this point.
Paul Martin: You said you finished it like two days before, what was the last thing you were cutting?
Andrew Adamson: The last thing, it wasn’t actually cutting, we locked the cut probably about a month ago. But it was putting in visual effects and so on and you’re always tweaking those, both in terms of lighting and finish. And the last few shots to go were a couple of the River-god shots, a couple of the Reepicheep shots at the end. Because of the nature of it, we had a very short post-production schedule, and we were actually handing reels over before the last reel was even finished. So it was a sort of strange thing where reels one through six, the first two-thirds of the movie basically, were done and being printed while I was still working on reels seven, eight and nine. So that’s kind of a little challenging, not to feel like you’ve finished the whole thing, watched it and then having to move on. You know, I only saw the whole thing completely finished on Wednesday.
Reporter: Do you have any favorite scenes from the film, yourself?
Andrew Adamson: There’s always that question that people ask me, you’re like, do you have any favorite children? (laughter) Different scenes for different reasons. And different, every time that I watch it, actually. It’s who you watch it with and how the audience responds. You know.. I really like Reepicheep and I think he came out very much how I’d hoped. I love the scene when their sucked back into Narnia. I love the scene when the four kids come to the How and the Centaurs do their thing and they’re sort of re-living their coronation. The scenes like that, that sort of get me on an emotional level. When they go into Aslan’s How and it’s dark and it lights up. That gets me on an emotional level. But then I like the night raid, I like the intensity of the night raid. I love how much that’s action and drama. I mean, there’s a lot of story being told at the same time as a lot of action happening and so I find that very emotional. When I watch that reel, cause reel five is basically the whole of the night raid, when Peter rides away from that bridge, I find I still get a little bit choked up.
Reporter: How many actors auditioned for the role of Prince Caspian?
Andrew Adamson: I honestly don’t know. I mean, I looked at a lot of people on tape. We were casting all over the world. I really don’t know the number. I would say it would be over five-hundred people that we had on tape.
Reporter: What is it about Ben Barnes that attracted you?
Andrew Adamson: Have you met him yet?
Reporter: I have.
Andrew Adamson: Well, do I need to answer then? (laughter) Well, you know, we were casting all over the world and I wanted somebody that had sort of a Mediterranean feel to them, so they’d get on with the Telmarines, and hadn’t been searching as hard in the UK or the US as I had been in Spain, Italy, Argentina, Central and South America in general. So, when Gail sent a tape of Ben, she had seen him in The History Boys on stage here in the UK. Where am I again? (laughter) She sent him on tape and he did a very good accent that was vaguely Spanish, and he just understood something. He got something in one of the scenes. He got a nuance in one of the scenes that was in the writing that not everyone had got. When I talked with him, he seemed to have a good understanding of the character and what he was going through. And then, I was in New Zealand prepping and he was in the UK on stage and we met in LA and he was obviously very charming and he looked great for the part. I wanted someone who looked very different from William. I wanted the boys to seem like they really came from different worlds. And he just brought all that to the role, and on top of that, he’s a very accomplished actor who still looked about sixteen years old. So he worked out very well.
Reporter: When you did the first movie, the kids were basically, you know, their first big movie. Talk a little bit about how they changed by the time you started filming the second one.
Andrew Adamson: Well, one of my biggest fears was, of course, how much they’d change, cause I was very happy with them in the first one. And you always worry that they’re going to go through that gangly stage, or go through some unfortunate stage that kids go through. But all our kids grew and matured really well, both physically and in terms of who they were as people. I met Anna and auditioned her for the first film before I put it on hold. For the first film, I started auditioning and then I put it on hold for script work, and then got back auditioning again. I met her when she was thirteen and she’s now studying literature in Oxford. Will was, I think, fifteen and he just turned twenty-one last week. So there’s obviously been a lot of changes. Skandar grew five inches in the last film and probably another four or so in this film. Georgie, I just saw her, has grown another three inches since I saw her two months ago. I mean, they’ve all changed a lot, but one of the things that I’ve been really happy about is not just how they’ve changed in terms of their abilities as actors, but that they’ve stayed true to who they are as people. I think a lot of this has to be attributed to really good families, or really good parents. But I remember after the first film, when the trailer came out, I contacted Georgie. Just kind of seeing if she was okay, and was it too weird to suddenly have people see her or something. And she had e-mailed me back and she had written that she’d seen the trailer and she thought I was doing a very good job. And then she went on for two paragraphs to describe a game, Rounders, which is a game they play in Britain at school, which she had scored two goals in. And it was kind of like, that was her big achievement and that made me really happy, and that made me realize she was still staying true to being still a kid.
Reporter: When you have a film like this that’s kind of a family film, but there’s also a lot of action and a lot of fighting, how hard is it to decide how much death you show, how much you keep to the side, how tough is that?
Andrew Adamson: It is difficult. I mean, we all wanted to make a PG film. At the same time, I wanted an intensity and a visceral quality to the action that made the life and death situations and the jeopardy feel real. You know, I think children are okay as long as you don’t traumatize them, and that’s the balance. You have to be able to let them get scared, let them get tense, to go to all those places, but not take it so far as to be gratuitous or traumatizing. And sometimes it’s duration. Sometimes it’s how long you stay in a dangerous moment for. Sometimes it’s the use of sound. It’s like, you could watch that whole battle, with different music, without sound effects, and it would have a whole different impact on you. So sometimes it’s a matter of letting the action play, and then letting the emotion be carried by the music and actually dropping some of the sound of the action away. And all of those things are kind of how you shape it in order for it not to be traumatizing or harmful or abusive. And then other things just test how far you go, I mean there’s really very, there’s little bits of blood in the film. I think when Miraz bleeds at his neck and I think when his leg’s cut, but there’s really no blood. There’s a lot of times you see the sword swipe but you don’t see the impact. You see the arrow, you hear the arrow hit, but you don’t see it, and those kind of things.
Reporter: I found myself wondering what those mice were doing, exactly.
Andrew Adamson: Yeah, (laughter). you hear a swish sound and somebody falls over, yes. It’s that kind of thing, and it’s somewhat arbitrary, to be honest. It becomes a very subjective thing, I mean obviously the ratings board look at it, and they look at it from a somewhat subjective point of view. There’s a group of people, they’re looking at it, and between them they’re deciding if it’s acceptable for a PG or a PG-13 or whatever the rating is. And then as a director, you kind of have to take notes, like, I think the fight’s a bit nasty, and interpret that to, what do I have to do to make it not nasty. And so it’s always a judgment call.
Reporter: How do direct a huge action scene and get what you want out of it?
Andrew Adamson: A little piece at a time. A small mouthful and then chew. I do a lot of pre-vis. I do a lot of development work before going into the scene. Particularly because a lot of it is also second unit and so you have to lay a road map because sometimes there’s three units shooting on an action scene at any given point in time just to accomplish how much needs to be shot. So I sort of map it out, I allow for things to kind of evolve from there. Then you have another chance, I think, when you do the visual effects to kind of hone and fix things again and reorder things and change things around. But it really is, sort of, you set a road map and then you just tackle it piece by piece. If you try and think about the whole thing, your head explodes. You have to do it a little bit at a time.
Reporter: How much pressure was it this time around?
Andrew Adamson: A little bit. (laughter) Definitely in terms of audience expectations, in terms of my own expectations, you know you always want to do better than you’ve done before. You know you want to improve as a filmmaker. You hope you’re growing with your films, so all of those pressures. It’s a very loved series of books, so there’s the pressures of people like this gentleman over here (gestures to me). (laughter) But to some degree, I’ve sort of really felt that on the last three films the first trip was kind of under the radar, it was, nobody knew what it was. The second trip was a lot of expectations. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was probably the most beloved of the series of books, so that carried those expectations. But the movie was successful, so then this one carried those expectations. So, to some degree, the last three films felt kind of pressured.
[When he talks about three films, he’s including Shrek 2.]
Reporter: Did you expect the first one to do as well as it did?
Andrew Adamson: Now you obviously hope it will do well, but no, I didn’t. I didn’t really. It exceeded my expectations.
Reporter: Were there things that you wanted to do in the first, that for any reason you couldn’t, that ended up in this one?
Andrew Adamson: Mainly the amount of location work. I’d intended to shoot a lot more of the last film on location, because I’d scouted through central Europe and I’d found these beautiful winter locations. Luckily, my production – Philip Steuer, the production manager, the line-producer and producer, was largely responsible for talking me out of it. Because if you take an eight year old child and put them in minus forty degrees temperatures, you don’t get a lot of takes. So last time, because of those logistics, we wound up doing a lot more on stage. This time though, because I wasn’t dealing with the limitations of winter, I really wanted to shoot a lot of locations. And it meant shooting the New Zealand summer and then going to Europe and shooting the European summer in order to get a lot more time outdoors. And that was sort of , I’d say, the biggest thing. And then on top of that, probably, there’s a lot more creature work on this one. A lot more CG and prosthetic creature work, because I wasn’t putting as much money into the backgrounds and generating backgrounds as I would have. I put that money into the characters.
Reporter: Do you have to direct the actors doing voice-overs as well?
Andrew Adamson: Yeah, but I enjoy it, I mean that’s obviously what I did all through the Shrek films so that’s something that’s very comfortable. I enjoy it cause I usually work opposite them, I read the off lines and you can just play around, and improv. Eddie ends up being somebody who loves to just improv and I would go in with a script and then we’d just rewrite it as we went and it’s actually a lot of fun.
Reporter: Reepicheep really reminded me of the cat from Shrek, was that intentional?
Andrew Adamson: I know. Well the thing is obviously I was exposed to Reepicheep at a very early age. I read these books when I was about eight years old, and in creating Puss in Boots, I didn’t conciously draw upon Reepicheep, but in retrospect, when I came back to do this film, I just went ‘Oh no!’ (laughter) It’s like I’ve done all of this. And so then it was a matter of finding a very different character. Obviously Reepicheep is not a latin lover, so there was a very discernible difference. But it was a hard character to find because of that, and it wasn’t really until I got in a room with Eddie that we were really able to define somebody who was a very different character from Puss in Boots.
Reporter: Having worked so close with Ben, what is he like as a person?
Andrew Adamson: He’s a really lovely man, I mean that’s in all honesty that’s really the nice thing. He’s one of the most well adjusted people I know, which again I attribute very much to his upbringing. But he’s really self-effacing. He’s just really a gentleman. He has a very youthful enthusiasm. I mean, he’s twenty-six years old, he looks seventeen, and sometimes acts seventeen. (laughter) In a positive way. For a twenty-six year old to want to put on a sword and get on a horse and be Prince Caspian, I think is great and I think he’s hanging on to what’s good about being a child.
Reporter: The writers were saying they’re already working on the next script. Are you gonna be back for the third one?
Andrew Adamson: You know, I’ve been staying involved. Not so much in the last month or so, but definitely I’m not going to direct it. I’m producing with Mark. But I want to make sure that, it’s sort of like what I did with Shrek 3, that we stay true to what I’ve set up. You know, at the same time, Michael Apted is directing it, and it’s his film, it’s not mine. And it’s, again, the letting go process. (laughter) But the thing is to try and help him achieve what he wants to do, still keep it true to the tones, the themes, all of the things that we’ve accomplished, and not step on Michael’s toes and that’s the ballance that we’ll find. But largely it’s gonna be kind of easy because I want to take some time off. So his toes should be pretty free for a while.
Reporter: So doing this kind of means you’re not working on other projects?
Andrew Adamson: No, I’ve actually really really tried not to. There was an experience I remember when I finished high school, when two weeks on I suddenly went ‘I don’t have any homework to do, I’m free!’ I kind of want to regain that feeling, because I’ve sort of overlapped projects since the first Shrek, and it’ll be nice to sort of have a little break.
Reporter: Can you talk about the music?
Andrew Adamson: Yeah, I like it. (laughter) I think I’ve worked with Harry Gregson-Williams on all the films. He did both Shreks and both of these, and actually Shrek 3 as well. I think he’s a fantastic composer and I think this is probably one of his best scores. I think he’s really… the storytelling, in this score.. I’m very fond of the score of the last film, and in some ways the score of the last film was a little more eclectic. The movie went, sort of, more different places tonally. I think this is a little bit more consistent tonally. I think there’s scenes that are held together by the music, that were working on an emotional level but Harry has actually amplified the emotion significantly. I think Caspian’s theme in the opening of the film is fantastic. I mean it just sucks you in and it just tells you that his is a big, exciting movie straight away. So I’m really happy with what Harry’s done.
Reporter: Before they pull you out, can I ask you what you think of the idea of Shrek coming to Broadway?
Andrew Adamson: It’s something, obviously that we talked about a long time ago. I haven’t seen the final production yet, so I’m as intrigued to see it as anyone. You know, it’s a funny thing. It’s a funny thing when they take something that you create and it gets re-purposed and changed and so I’m sort of, cautiously optimistic about it. I’m sure it will be good, because there’s enough people involved that are concerned that it’s going to be good. But I’m still, you know, it’s a weird thing when you see something that you’ve done translated into another form.
Reporters: Thank you!
Andrew Adamson: Alright, thank you very much. Good bye!