Andrew Adamson co-directed the first two Shrek movies, before moving to live action with his hit adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Adamson has now finished his second Narnia adventure, Prince Caspian. “It’s more of an adult film than it is a kids' film,” he tells David Grove.
What did you set out to accomplish with Prince Caspian?
I wanted this film to be two or three times as big as the first film, which is logistically impossible but which I felt should be the goal. The kids in the audience were five or six when they saw the first film, and they’ll be eight or nine when they see this one, and older for the next one, so I feel like the films have to grow as well.
How does the world of Narnia differ in this film?
It’s 1300 years later, and when the story opens Narnia has been under the oppression of the Telmarines for a long time, so this world is a much darker and grittier place than we saw in the first film. Then the kids appear and they’re full of nostalgia for Narnia. They think they’re going back to the same place they visited in the first film, so it’s quite a shock for them to realise that the world has totally changed. The Aslan’s How set, for example, looks completely different. Everything looks different.
Tell us about Reepicheep, the warrior mouse character who makes his first appearance in Prince Caspian…
He looks very dashing, but also a bit dangerous. You know, you want him to look cute, but not so cute that you don’t believe he’s capable of fighting, because he does a lot heavy fighting in the film. Reepicheep has a lot of light moments, but he’s not silly looking, and he has a lot of serious moments as well.
He’s a warrior mouse, so on the one hand he looks a bit funny but he gets real serious when he’s fighting. You don’t mess with Reepicheep. Creating believable CG animal characters is one of the hardest things because they can’t look too cartoonish. They have to look real. We base all of the characters on the drawings from the books, but with Reepicheep and his family, who look very much alike in the books, we’ve given them all different looks and characteristics.
The dwarf characters are much more prominent in this film…
Yes, and that’s because we cast two great actors in the roles. There’s Trumpkin, who’s played by Peter Dinklage, and Nikabrik, who’s played by Warwick Davis. They’re both very good actors and they make the characters seem very heroic.
I thought we made a mistake on the first film by casting little people in the roles instead of real dwarves. They weren’t real actors so there was only so much we could do with them, whereas this time we could do much more because Peter and Warwick are such interesting actors.
The other solution, as they did in the Lord of the Rings films, is to get smaller-sized actors and just shrink them down in post-production, but I didn’t want to do that. It’s hard to find good dwarf actors and Peter and Warwick are both terrific, and they’ve got great make-up. There’s a great dwarf battle in the film.
What influenced the look of Prince Caspian?
Aside from the books, I spent a lot of time talking to production designer Peter Ford about the story and how it should look. The first thing was to look around and find the right castles to film at. We went all over, and finally settled on a castle in France.
We talked about the Telmarines - who now rule Narnia, and have chased the Narnians back into the forest and killed most of them - and the idea that the Telmarines came from pirates. They were pirates a thousand years ago and they were shipwrecked on an island that had a cave, which contained a portal to Narnia. Then we talked about them being Spanish, and so we made the castle a Spanish castle, and just went from there, spinning all kinds of ideas.
The look is very dark and oppressive because King Miraz, the villain in the film, and the Telmarines are obviously very bad people, almost Fascists, which also served as an influence in terms of designing the Great Hall and the banners and flags that are everywhere.What was the biggest challenge in making this film?
The most challenging part was the battle and raid sequences, especially the final battle. They’re more complex this time. I wanted to give myself a new challenge on this film, to raise the stakes, and that meant making everything more complicated. Part of that is the fact that there’s been a lot of other great fantasy films that have been released since the first film came out that have also raised the bar.
The big battle we have is really amazing, very original, and the audience will be very surprised. There’s something that happens at the end of the film, at the end of the battle, that’s very new and very complex.
The other biggest challenge is to just maintain the consistency from film to film. We want the audience to grow with these characters as the characters grow, and so you have to always be careful to make sure that the story is consistent.
The battle scenes are on a pretty large scale…
Huge. In the finished film, there are 5000 soldiers, of which a few hundred are practical. The rest is all digital, which means you have to look at every single soldier in the army to make sure they look good, because if the audience sees anything that doesn’t look convincing, the scene loses all of its power. That’s where it helps to sprinkle in some real soldiers in the scenes, as they did in 300, because it just makes the scenes look more real.
You’re using a lot of models in this movie, as opposed to solely relying on CG?
Yes, but it doesn’t have anything to do with models being more realistic or better than CG. It’s just been more practical for this story. What I like about live action, as opposed to animation, is that when you have real actors performing, you get these happy accidents, these spontaneous moments that can only happen with live action. There was one scene where we had a lightning storm, and I thought, ‘Gee, this would’ve looked great in the film’, but I couldn’t use it because I have hundreds of creatures covered in blue for the visual effects shots.
It depends what you’re trying to do. If I’m filming a crumbling castle, or something breaking, I would probably rather use a miniature because it gives me more options as a director.
The children have grown up quite a bit since the first film…
Yes, they’ve obviously grown physically and they’ve grown as actors as well. Most of them have done other films and some theatre since we shot the last film. There’s a scene in the film between Ben Barnes, who plays Prince Caspian, and William Moseley, where they’re having an intense argument and I could just see that Will had a lot more depth as an actor than he did last time. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was the first film he’d ever done as an actor, but he’s since been doing a lot of theatre and he’s gained a lot of experience.
Same with all of the actors. They lived through the experience of making the first film, which was very hard and very intense, and you can see that in their eyes, that maturity, and they’ve put that into the characters.
What did you learn from directing the first film that helped you on the sequel?
As a director, you’re taught never to work with kids, animals or visual effects, and we did all of that in spades on the first film. So I was pretty much ready for anything this time!
Seriously, I think I’ve grown as a director after the first film, and so have the kids in the cast, in more ways than one. One of the reasons this film is bigger than the last one is that I learned a lot of things from making the first film and that gave me the confidence to do more complicated things this time, to give the audience a bigger experience.
Do you see Prince Caspian as being a much darker film than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?
Yes, I think so. It’s more of an adult film than it is a kids' film, although it’s entirely appropriate for all ages. It has darker themes, darker images, and the violence is more intense. We’re not just seeing creatures being attacked this time, but human characters as well, so there’s a much bigger sense of danger.
Prince Caspian is your last film in the Narnia series as director. How do you feel about turning the series over to other directors?
I think it’s great. I’m proud of the work I’ve done, and I’m looking forward to doing other things, although I’ll always be very involved with the films, not as a director but as a producer and a consultant.
I think it’s good to bring in fresh blood, as they’ve done with the Harry Potter films. I think it’s good for the series to bring in another director, another point of view. Having directed two massive films like these, I can definitely see why George Lucas decided to take a step back after directing Star Wars and just concentrated on writing and producing. The Narnia series will always be with me; I just won’t be directing any more films.
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