Into the wardrobe

Helmed by “Shrek” and “Shrek 2” director Andrew Adamson, the film is a faithful re-telling of Lewis’s World War II-era epic about four British children (played by Georgie Henley, William Moseley, Skander Keynes and Anna Popplewell) who wander through an armoire into a wintry wonderland where the evil White Witch Jadis (played by Scottish actress Tilda Swinton) battles for control against the messianic lion Aslan, (a great, computer-generated beast voiced by Ballymena native, Liam Neeson). Once they are through the wardrobe, the children find themselves caught up in a terrifying battle between the forces of good and evil.
Shot in New Zealand, England and the Czech Republic, the film is the first big-screen adaptation of the 1950 novel, which has sold more than 85 million copies worldwide and served as the inspiration for both a radio and a BBC television series. Although Douglas Greshem, the late author’s stepson and a producer on the film, has hoped to make a major feature version of “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” for years, it wasn’t until he talked to Adamson and the folks at Walt Disney Pictures that he was certain he had found filmmakers that would not only respect Lewis’s story, but also employ the cutting-edge technology that would bring to life a fanciful tale full of mythical creatures and magical happenings.
“Douglas Gresham was, first and foremost, a huge cheerleader,” Adamson told the Irish Echo in New York recently. “He had been wanting to make this movie for 15 years. He had been wanting to find someone who was going to make the film in a way that he felt was true to what C.S. Lewis had intended. We shared that in common, so we tended to agree on most things. He was a huge asset and there were times when we were adapting, particularly in the writing process, that I could call him up and say, ‘Look, does this take away from what Jack intended or does this addition change things too much?'”
“The story of ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’ is so true, so honest, so straightforward, we felt certain that the less we messed around with it, the better movie we would make,” said Greshem, a native New Yorker who moved to England as a child and now lives with his family in County Carlow, Ireland, acting as the creative and artistic director of the Estate of C.S. Lewis. (The relationship between Greshem’s poet mother, Joy, and Lewis was the subject of the 1993 film “Shadowlands,” starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.)
Describing Greshem as very involved in the film-making process, Adamson admits he occasionally butted heads with Lewis’s step-son, particularly when he wanted to change some of the lines of dialogue from the book that he felt reflected a dated — sometimes even sexist — view of the story’s female characters.
“The way I actually got around it was by saying, ‘Look, he wrote these characters before he met your mom,'” the director recalled, pointing out how he had just spent years empowering youthful female moviegoers by giving them strong women characters like Princess Fiona in “Shrek.”
“And if you look at his books after he met Joy,” Adamson added. “There are a lot more strong female characters. I think [Lewis] had more exposure to strong female characters after that point.”
“There weren’t any knock-down, drag-out fights,” Johnson agreed. “There were a couple of lines here and there. We were so faithful that, at some points, only the purists will know.”
Although “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” was an enormous undertaking, with loads of intricate costumes, computer-generated creatures, special effects and sweeping battle scenes, Adamson said it was the ideal project to mark his debut directing a primarily live-action feature film.
“I think I was the natural choice,” Adamson said. “I think what [the studio] saw was that with ‘Shrek’ I had taken a fantasy story with animated characters and imbued it with a lot of human qualities and I think they thought that’s what this story should be — a big, epic fantasy story, but it’s ultimately a story about human characters with human values. … I talked to them about what I wanted to do with the film. I said that I didn’t want to contemporarize it. I said that I wanted it to stay in the period in London. I expected them to want to contemporarize it, to Americanize it, and they wanted to stay really true to the book, which was what I wanted from reading it as an eight-year-old.”
So, was it tough to stay true to the novel once he got going?
“I actually set out really not to make the book, but my memory of the book,” Adamson clarified. “Because I realized in reading the book as an adult that it’s kind of like the house that you grew up in: it’s much smaller than I remembered and I wanted to capture the more epic story that I remembered, which I think, was expanded by my experiences over the past 30 years and by the fact that I read the rest of the books and the world actually expanded over the seven books in the series.”
Although “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” is already being compared to “The Lord of the Rings” franchise because of its scope and even “The Passion of the Christ” because of its Christian themes, the producer said the work that had the biggest impact on the “Narnia” movie involves a certain youthful wizard who hails from the United Kingdom.
“The movie I think that is most important to us is ‘Harry Potter’ because U.S. studios were reluctant to make any movie that had British kids and British situations at its core,” he explained. “They didn’t think that world audiences, particularly American audiences, would tolerate that. In fact, when I made ‘A Little Princess,’ it was set in London, but we had to reset it in New York for Warner Brothers. And when ‘Harry Potter’ came along and, obviously, was as successful as it was, I think that allowed this movie to get made as faithfully as it did. You know, Paramount was developing the project at one point and set it in present-day Brentwood. In fact, instead of Turkish Delight it was cheeseburgers that Edmund was lured by. They never made it.”
The decision to adapt the other books in the “Narnia” series will come once the film opens the studio evaluates its reception. Chances are if it makes any where near the money the “Harry Potter” films have or earns the acclaim the “Lord of the Rings” movies have, the answer will be “yes.”
“We’ll decide to do ‘Prince Caspian’ when this one comes out,” Johnson confirmed. “If it’s a critical and financial success, I guess we’ll do it. This is the only one where all the kids appear — and the next one – and then the two older kids disappear. There is another one with the two younger kids. The only character that recurs in all of them is Aslan.”

Liam the Lion
Because so much hinges on the audience’s relationship with Aslan, a character whose noble sacrifice frees his people, casting the right actor to “play” him was essential-and, as it turns out, not so easy to do as one might expect.
Although Neeson has been making a habit of playing sage advice-dispensing counselors in blockbusters like “Kingdom of Heaven,” “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace” and “Batman Begins,” Scottish actor Brian Cox was initially cast in the role of the messianic lion.
When Cox didn’t work out, the filmmakers listened to hundreds of actors, finally choosing Neeson after he launched a campaign to snag the role.
In fact, the human actors on the film didn’t even know Neeson’s would be the voice of Aslan until after they returned home from shooting the movie in New Zealand. Neeson was somewhat appropriately absent from the recent “Narnia” press junket in New York, adding to the mystery of his character and the isolation he must have felt in bringing him to life alone in a recording studio away from the other actors.
“We first cast Brian Cox for the voice of the lion. We thought he would have been great and then we put him with the lion itself and we couldn’t reconcile it. We couldn’t make it work,” Johnson revealed.
Does that mean the “Troy” tough-guy and “Manhunter” man-eater didn’t make for a beatific beast?
“I wish I could be more descriptive. It just didn’t sound right. He didn’t have the strength and the kindness and understanding,” he noted, adding that the filmmakers listened to several hundred actors and made Neeson try out before finally casting the “Michael Collins” and “Kinsey” actor in the part.
“His agent saw the movie and said, ‘Liam never auditions for a role,’ but he did because the idea of playing Aslan was really attractive,” Johnson said. “What happened was we did it all wrong with Brian. We made the lion and then cast Brian; what we should have done was cast the actor, then made the lion.”
“It was an interesting and challenging character to cast,” Adamson said. “To create an omnipotent being that was still accessible, so you felt the vulnerability of when he dies. We started initially with Brian Cox, and Brian called himself our starting point. He says he helped me find the character and it’s really true. When I started with Brian, I really didn’t know who the character was. Then I started working on the character and one of the things I realized is that you have to see Aslan on his day off. I wondered, ‘What does he do when he’s not king?’ And, so, that’s one of the reasons why I gave him a little bit of humor.”
When Neeson pursued the project, Adamson and Johnson were happy to hear his take on it.
“Even on the phone, there was this resonance, but mainly this warmth that was really ideal for the character,” Adamson observed. “He has been doing a lot of wise characters lately. It might be an age thing. He’s reached the age of sage.”

“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” is in theaters now.