Other Titles • The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) • The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe • The Chronicles of Narnia
Sums up Gresham, for whom the journey to bringing his stepfather’s work to the screen was profoundly personal: “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. The first and most important thing about getting this movie made properly was to get the right people involved. Finding Andrew Adamson and bringing him on as director was key.”
“Unlike Tolkien, who was very specific, Lewis left a lot to your imagination. So we had the enormous challenge of not only creating Narnia, but of trying to fulfill people’s expectations, to bring the film up to the level of their own dreams and fantasies.” —Director Andrew Adamson
To take on this first live-action cinematic telling of C.S. Lewis’ masterpiece, the producers knew they would need an unusually creative—not to mention hugely energetic—director; someone who could seamlessly marry the real world with a fantasy realm of tremendous scope in a way that would be at once believable and emotionally powerful. It would require someone with definite savvy in high-tech filmmaking, someone with a vivid fantasy-oriented imagination, yet also someone with the sensitivity to evoke a tale that is, at heart, about children, family and the powerful notion of bringing good back into the world. Most of all, it would require someone with a passion for Lewis’ highly distinctive style of fantasy storytelling—at once simple, magical and resonant.
At first, the search naturally focused on some of today’s best-known directors, but then along came an utterly unexpected candidate: Andrew Adamson. One of Hollywood’s preeminent animation directors and visual effects artists, Adamson’s directorial debut, the animated global hit “Shrek,” had captivated audiences with its fairy-tale charm, humanity and visual imagination. Despite the fact that he had never directed a live-action film before, Adamson came to his first meeting bursting with a storm of creative ideas that left the producers wowed by his personal passion for the project. He seemed to have a deep inner connection with Lewis’ Narnia that the producers knew was essential to imbuing the film with magic.
“He talked so passionately about the emotion and the themes of the piece,” Cary Granat recalls, “and from those conversations we knew he was the guy. I’ve worked with a lot of different filmmakers but I have never seen somebody who was so completely in tune with a specific vision for a movie. After one meeting with Andrew, Perry and I were both in agreement that this was the right person.”
Adamson’s excitement was inspired by his own memories of being an eight-year-old boy who was whisked into Narnia and was never quite the same again. “I read all seven books continuously over a period of a year or two, just read them over and over,” he recalls. “I basically existed in this world of Narnia for a time. I remembered it as this huge, vivid story with a massive battle between good and evil and a whole menagerie of mythological creatures—and I wanted the chance to bring that world to the screen.”
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