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 • more
Stirred by his childhood remembrances, Adamson started from the premise that Narnia had to come off as 100-percent real— no matter what it would take cinematically to achieve. “What is Narnia?” he asks. “That’s an interesting question and key to our approach. I don’t see Narnia as just a figment of the children’s imaginations, a place that they retreat to in their minds to escape World War II. Rather, I believe in Narnia as a true alternate universe. There are many parallels to our world and there are many differences, but the main point is that it is real.”
He continues: “So my approach to the movie was that it’s not quite like ‘The Wizard of Oz’ or ‘Peter Pan,’ where you realize in the end that the story all happened in someone’s imagination. When Lucy goes through that wardrobe and steps into a world, I wanted that world to be completely believable, as if it was another country you might visit. It had to be a whole Narnian reality unto itself.”
It was clear from the start that Adamson’s ideas for the film were vastly ambitious, but Adamson was only further excited by the risk of tackling one of the most massive projects of his, or anyone’s, career—one that would demand constant creativity in every aspect of filmmaking. The director began on the page—by collaborating with screenwriting partners Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (who went on to write the Emmy®-winning “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers”) and polishing the original screenplay by Emmy® winner Ann Peacock, putting the emphasis first and foremost on storytelling.
“We approached it as a story that is very much about themes of betrayal, forgiveness and loyalty. It’s about a family who feels disempowered by the terror of World War II and then finds their power again in Narnia,” Adamson remarks. “It’s a story about four kids who enter this land where they’re not only empowered, but where they’re ultimately the only solution to the war in that land. And it’s only through unity as a family that they can actually triumph. And that’s where we began.”
As they re-read the book, the screenwriters were surprised to find that the text of the story itself was actually far more brief than they had remembered. “Most people recall it as a denser, fuller book than it actually is. That’s a tribute to Lewis. He was a master at tweaking kids’ imaginations enough where they could generate the rest of the story themselves,” explains McFeely. “So we needed to flesh parts of it out, take the image we had as kids and make that feel very real.”
Adamson adds: “I too remembered it as this epic story. So the first thing that I did was to write everything that I remembered from reading it as a child—how I imagined the battles, how the mythological creatures might fight with each other, who the characters are, right down to the color schemes. I put down a stream-of-consciousness of everything I thought the movie should be and extrapolated from there.”
The ideas, however, were all sparked directly by the writing itself, by Lewis’ endlessly imaginative frame. “All the themes, all the messages that were important to C.S. Lewis are present in the movie, and it is, I hope, a faithful envisioning of what Lewis was imagining when he wrote the book,” he comments. “It’s both an epic story of a battle between good and evil, and an intimate family drama about a fractured family that has to mend itself.”
Movie Database
In Theaters
