Interview with Narnia Conceptual Designer John Howe

That was directly following on LOTR and the company called Walden Media, which I believe is associated with Disney, wanted to make all seven movies. They hired Andrew Adamson who was riding very high on the Shrek popularity. I worked with him for about six months with the same art director from LOTR, Grant Major. Then eventually Grant had to stop his participation in the project. Then the whole art department changed, so of the work I did I think actually very little made it into the final movie.

I remember we used a lot of late Renaissance armor for the minotaurs. I recall, I can’t quite remember, very classical influence for the armor. Peter’s armor for example I designed. Very much straight out of Medieval England and then a few things his sword with the lion head there is a pretty good description. I used sort of a 12th century crusaders weapon as a model for that and then on like that, but it was fun. I really enjoyed I really like Andrew he is a great human being.

I mean Narnia was a direct follow up from LOTR. The desire to make the Narnia movies. I believe there is a TV series coming up now. I heard from the grape vine that it is in the works. It is probably better adapted to a television series than to feature length film because the books are so unequal in length and scope and type.

Yes and no, I think it is worthwhile starting fresh, but you don’t want to reinvent the wheel into something that doesn’t work as well as something round. I think it is worthwhile, it would be worthwhile revisiting the Narnia series, revisiting it entirely. Yes, I would definitely have an original approach. Times change. We don’t quite see things the same way now as we did even ten or fifteen years ago, so it worthwhile taking that into account.

I am contributing to the Amazon project. I have been working on it for a while and we will see how it continues, but I really can’t tell you very much about it.

Designing second age is going to be a challenge. The show runners are determined to remain faithful to the existing trilogies and the spirit of the books. It is a huge project and a very different project from a feature film.

In the concept design process not really, no. It is the same job. It takes a different form when it goes into production. The initial work is very similar. We need to create environments and sets and all of that. And that is the same whether it is for movies or television. I suppose the major difference is partially budgetary but not aesthetic.

Narnia is very different. I mean Narnia is kind of a patchwork world of many many influences. They import some of the elements from classical Greece. There are centaurs and minotaurs and the architecture itself I recall working working quite a lot on places like Cair Paravel and all of that, but none of it made it into the movies because there was a change of art directors part way through, but Narnia is more of a collection of reflections of our own world that somehow coexist fairly harmoniously without a lot of change whereas LOTR is really a universe apart. Entirely separate and the influences in Tolkien are much less direct. He doesn’t have any classical creatures. He invented things like Balrogs and fell beasts. There are no minotaurs or unicorns. Nothing, very little, nothing from our world. They are quite different. Stylistically they are very different. I think we compare and associate the two because they were friends and colleagues, but if they hadn’t known each other I am not sure those two worlds would have been significantly different. We might not compare them so much. Every time you think Tolkien you think C.S. Lewis and Narnia, but on the other hand C.S. Lewis had a much more varied output. Many different literary forms. Tolkien was more highly recreational storytelling, language inventing. Quite different characters.

I think that Narnia is relatively straightforward in many senses. If you imagine because of the elements Lewis describes you imagine a sort of marvelous middle ages of some kind some kind of Medieval period with magic and talking lions and classical classical creatures. Weaving that into something coherent is a challenge and making it all have the same world is where the challenge really lies. I think that is not at all an impossible thing to do.

Lewis is very helpful. I mean his texts are pretty clear and his inspirations are quite clear and I think he is in a sense easier, more direct, to illustrate than Tolkien which demands a little more, a little more, a little more, I shouldn’t say originality, but a different form of original approach. I’m just trying to think about there are some amazing images in Narnia the wood between the worlds and a lot of the images from VDT many of the cities are fascinating HHB. It is a portal fantasy where things pass from that world into ours heroes go from our world into theirs and have adventures and come back. There is this in the stories themselves there is a direct connection between the two. The magic I think in Narnia is quite a different form of magic. There are no magic wardrobes in LOTR that kind of magic is not part of that world. This idea of this magic portal that you go through when you are a child is something totally foreign to Tolkien.

Excellent question! I guess mostly European landscapes. A lot from The Alps. A lot from Switzerland. Quite a bit from northern Europe and Scotland. The coasts of England. Very little from Canada. I don’t feel that Canadian mountains do it for LOTR. They don’t feel right, but paradoxically a lot of imagery from Patagonia I find very inspiring for mountainscapes. For me that really feels like it’s out of the first age. Otherwise a lot of just a lot of English landscapes really the more familiar parts.

British landscapes have been influenced by humans for so long now that it all looks amazing and picturesque, but it is actually a human garden that has been created and beyond that fits very well with the shire. That is what we tried to emulate when we went to New Zealand when Hobitton was built.

No, there are specialists who do that. You know with something like LOTR you need to befall into the company of people who devote their entire leisure time to studying Elvish writing or Dwarven scripts or languages in Middle Earth or any subject in Middle earth in a totally obsessive way. They are such experts that you really can’t get anywhere, you just ask them what they think. There is no point in trying to do it. I did the map that was on Amazon. We did a big map of Númenor we made two mistakes. I was working with Tom Shippey, a Tolkien scholar, a very solid historian who reads Norse and Icelandic. He is really a serious scholar and actually knew Tolkien. Curiously enough actually met him when he was a student in Oxford when he was a professor in retirement. So Tom worked so hard researching all these elements that we needed to integrate into this map because in the second age Tolkien didn’t really give us a map of the second age. We have a map of Númenor and a map of Middle earth. We have a map of Middle Earth in the third age but it is not the same as in the second age so we spent a lot of time trying to figure out where there were bridges where there were fords where there were roads what they would have been called in what language and we made two mistakes. The map went up on Amazon on Twitter on Instagram and literally probably 20 minutes later somebody was writing a letter to Harper Collins signaling that something was wrong with the map and it is extraordinary, so to have those resources at your fingertips is these people absolutely passionate about it is a real gift. So you want to be really careful with all of that and we made mistakes. If you imagine the map is this big [a meter] we made mistakes where something was this far [a centimeter] from where it should have been and someone spotted it immediately.

It is amazing the scholarship that the fans are actually involved in. They are so passionate. I think it probably comes from the fact that you can with Tolkien be passionate about it because his sources are serious sources. You can become an expert on Narnia or Game of Thrones but not in the same way it is not quite the same. You look at the number of books that have been written on LOTR there are hundreds and hundreds of books. Far more than what has been written on Narnia.

It does! His dragons are quite different from the ones in Narnia or in Middle-Earth. I mean the dragon in C.S. Lewis’s dragon is very much a storybook dragon. It is kind of cute. In a sense it is almost cute. So he is really a book from childhood. I mean a dragon from childhood stores. Tolkien’s dragons are a lot darker, a lot more dangerous, a lot more serious, and directly inspired by the creatures from Beoulf or from the Nibelungen and Norse/Icelandic dragons. George Martin’s dragons are fully modern dragons. They are literally the Medieval equivalent of the atomic bomb because they are a weapon. An invincible weapon more or less in the hands of humans because you can control them, but not entirely. I quite admired his very slow use of dragons the patience he displayed in bringing them into the books first with the eggs and the tiny little dragons. It takes him hundreds of pages to bring the dragons right up to the front of the novels and then you realize why he called his saga The Song of Ice and Fire because it is this battle between the dragons and winter.

This one I think is a fairly straightforward translation of a book and this book came out quite a while ago I can’t read the date of it. I think in 2004, so it is not a new book and it is a more general book. I’m happy to see it in print again, but the one I am happiest to see and the one that I did a lot of work on was this one here:

I wrote an introduction for the Chinese public at the request of the publisher and the book itself I think is beautifully produced. It is a little different from the original edition there are more pages. The whole beginning of the book is different.

I have no idea who that is. No, of course it’s Peter. Peter is sort of like Tom Bombadil he is kind of a figure apart in Middle Earth, but I have recently done a different Bombadil.

That is a little more modern Bombadil, a little more rugged, a little more dangerous.

Bombadil is a curious character because Tolkien spends his time making us think he is something he’s not. He makes him sound funny he talks in rhymes he says silly things. He is always singing and dancing and hopping about, but he is a serious character and that is kind of a disguise that allows him to conceal his true nature which is he is literally the eyewitness of the history of the whole Middle Earth. Bombadil was there before, Bombadil doesn’t get involved. He flips the ring in the air and he makes it disappear. Tolkien never explains how he can do that and it has no hold over him. Bombadil will still be there when Middle Earth becomes our world, so he is an interesting character.

The Barrow-wrights I enjoyed drawing. I regretted that they weren’t in the movies. Peter I think they probably thought of putting them in LOTR. For a while in The Hobbit, there was the idea that they would go thought the Barrow-Downs and something would happen. The location scouts found this marvelous location somewhere in the north island New Zealand extraordinary landscape, but they got written out of the script, so I always wanted to illustrate.

Poor Tom got written out of everything because even in Bakshi’s move, the Ralph Bakshi movie he was written out. He got written out for the same reason that Old Man Willow did and all of these episodes where Tolkien was kind of trying to figure out where his book was going. Everything that people complain about in The Fellowship is that it starts off so slow. You can’t do that in a movie. You can’t spend your time stopping and starting stopping and starting and I think it became clear to the screenwriters very quickly that they could not put Bombadil in. For the same reason they did not put in The Scouring of Shire because there is an ending in the books. The end of the black gates and then Mordor is destroyed. That’s the end. There is a second end because there still is still a little war going on in the Shire with Saruman and it doesn’t really work. You can’t have that story arc. You can do it in a novel. You do it in a movie and people have just gotten through this astonishingly compelling story arc and then you do a little story tacked on the end. You can do it in a book, but you can’t do it in film. It would not really work, so there were many decisions that were purely cinematographic that this would not work. You could probably do it easier in a series because you could do it more by episodes and also rather than having, you know in a movie you have one story arc because you have one movie. In a series you can have ten if you want. They can compose an arc themselves but they can be independent.

I just had a big exhibition in Switzerland the first time in about 10-12 years. I hope to take this exhibition elsewhere. I would love to. This is a fairly big exhibition for me. Probably the biggest one I have done in a long time and I should say in passing that I think it is beautifully curated. The curators did a fantastic job. The people from Century Horizon worked very hard to make it happen and to bring a lot into it. I was initially very reluctant about the idea of displaying my life because it is not something that I am especially eager to put forward in an exhibition, but that was part of the request and I think it was beautifully done and all of the lovely, lovely things they did the logo for example I am really pleased so there is a lot of work involved but the end result I am very pleased.

I don’t have very much any more I had a few pieces.

I have worn a lot of different suits of armor both recreated ones and real ones. You get a better sense of how they work and how they function and how they are constructed inside. We do a lot of historical reenactments. We haven’t done very much recently because it takes a lot of time and energy. Mostly time which I don’t have but it really has been a big influence on my work. When you have worn all of these costumes and you know how they function it is easier to draw them in a convincing way. The way far to many illustrators have no choice but to sort of put on a bed sheet and hold a broom, but that is not the same. It’s not the same at all. So you learn a lot from spending time with serious researchers and scholars who have taken that to heart and made it into something physically present.