Devin Brown talks about Narnia Adaptations, Dawn Treader

Dr. Devin Brown, the author of Inside The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, has provided us with five signed copies of the book that we’re going to be giving away in the next few weeks. Last week he was interviewed on Crosswalk.com and gives a very even-handed stance on film adaptation, especially regarding the Narnia films thus far. One thing that is really interesting is how much some of his comments echo those that Michael Apted made in the recent excerpt from the upcoming SFX magazine interview.

Britton: You’ve seen the first two movies and I take it you’re going to be pretty close to the front of the line to see the third, right?

Brown: Yeah, of course. You know I really enjoyed the first two movies and people always love to ask me. … I’ve been really happy with the first two movies. I really think that they were made by people who loved C. S. Lewis’s books and wanted to stay with the books and I think they’ve been very successful.

You can’t make a great film from a great book without making some changes. And you know, instead of turning into one of the Narnia police that nixes things that were changed, you know I try to enjoy the things that are good about the movie. I don’t think you can make a movie just anything you want from a book.

Don’t get me wrong, not any change is acceptable. But at the end of the day, I ask myself is the film saying what the book is saying or have they changed it? In both those cases, they have. And I guess the other thing I look forward to is the movies, when they made LOTR, they took Tolkien’s great big book and had to kind of cram it into three movies. These are pretty small books and it gives the filmmakers a chance to kind of open some doors that Lewis didn’t look behind.

Britton: So what in your mind would make the Dawn Treader a faithful and successful film, seeing how the whole book is really very episodic? What do you think they can’t leave out?

Brown: What connects them I think is the spiritual truths that Lewis wants to cast in his imaginary land to say something about spiritual truth in our own life. And one of the big truths in this book is that the greatest enemy is the enemy within. I’m sure that’s gonna be in this movie, that element, and if you ask me what element needs to be in the movie, that’s the big one. I guess the other one of course is … that Eustace gets transformed into a dragon, which is kind of interesting. The real interesting and more interesting I think as believers is the undragoning. We all act like dragons from time to time. That we have a dragonish nature doesn’t surprise most of us. How do you get rid of it? How do you get undragoned? And I think that story will also be interesting. He gets something that he doesn’t deserve and that’s God’s grace, you know the grace to have his dragonish nature removed when he’s unable to get rid of it himself. The theme of temptation and then the theme of grace, getting something that we don’t deserve.

Thanks to Aslan’s Country for the quotes, and you can read the full transcript there. Click here for the article on Crosswalk and you can watch the interview in video format here.