It's the big film this Christmas, the first cinema version of CS Lewis's classic 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'. Donald Clarke talks to its makers.
Cliveden House, in Buckinghamshire, has all the things you expect of a great English stately home: ornate paintings the size of snooker tables, grounds whose boundaries lie invisible beyond the curvature of the earth and, crucially, a fountain roomy enough to accommodate frolicking bright young things. It was here in the early 1960s that Christine Keeler and other party-hearty swingers made the connections that would ultimately cause the resignation of John Profumo, Britain's minister for war.
Odd, then, that the massive pile, with its history of decadence, has been chosen to host the press junket for an adaptation of a work often regarded as an analogy for the Christian story. Dozens of hacks from around the world are gathered here to talk to members of the cast and crew of the first episode in, it is hoped, a lavish series of films based on CS Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.
Andrew Adamson's movie, which cost somewhere in the vicinity of €130 million, works quite nicely. Friskier than the Lord of the Rings films and considerably better paced than Harry Potter's adventures, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe should offer children and parents an enjoyable few hours' refuge from the ghastly Christmas streets.
Many of the journalists' questions are, however, about matters unrelated to the picture's appeal as a work of escapist fantasy. Inevitably, given the political climate in the US, its moralistic tone and perceived references to resurrection have seen the film, even before its release, being brandished as a weapon in the culture wars.
The picture tells how four children, evacuated during the second World War, happen upon a wardrobe that offers entry to a magical kingdom. A conflict is brewing between evil forces led by a white witch and jollier centaurs, satyrs and beavers under the command of Aslan, a talking lion with more than a hint of the Messiah about him.
Lewis, an eloquent Christian writer and critic who was born in Belfast in 1898, always denied that he intended any biblical analogies. But, should you feel so inclined, Aslan's resurrection from the dead could certainly be used to elucidate certain aspects of the Christian myth.
It has been reported that Disney, which produced the picture with a company named Walden Media, has been employing some of the marketing techniques used by the makers of The Passion of the Christ to promote Narnia to a Christian audience.
Whether or not this is true, the picture is certainly being dragged into the debate between the secular left and Christian right in the United States. Mark Johnson, the film's producer, sighs wearily when the issue is raised. "I am really disturbed by this," he says.
"We just tried to make a film that was faithful to the book, and the book means different things to different people. Hopefully, faith-based readers will find in the film what they found in the book. But we certainly didn't set out to make a religious film. People just needed to have something to write about before they saw the film. We had a big marketing meeting recently, and I would say just 5 per cent of the marketing budget is dedicated to selling the film to the religious communities."
One of Walden Media's principal backers, a socially conservative Presbyterian billionaire named Philip Anschutz, is said to be on a mission to promote morally uplifting films. "That part is true," Johnson says. "Phil Anschutz formed Walden Media because he was disappointed in the moral character of modern films, but nowhere at any point did anybody there try and put forth a religious agenda. They just want films that support family values."
Johnson, an apparently equable man, has clearly found the constant speculation surrounding the production hard to bear. "When we went scouting locations, Andrew Adamson, who has long blond hair, was seen coming out of a helicopter, and somebody was convinced they saw Nicole Kidman," he says, laughing. "If I were Nicole I would be rather upset. It was then reported she was playing the white witch. Then it was expanded, and she was being paid $115 million [ €100 million] to narrate all seven stories. We don't even have a narrator."
Suggestions that the resurgence of Christianity in the United States might be responsible for The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - first published in 1950 - finally making it to the big screen are certainly wide of the mark. As the film- makers readily admit, it was, in fact, the success of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series that made the project viable. Comparisons with the first of those two series are inevitable. Adamson is, like Peter Jackson of the Lord of the Rings films, a Kiwi. Large parts of both projects were filmed in New Zealand, and the same special effects house, Weta, was used for Adamson's beavers and Jackson's orcs.
The projects look quite different, however. As anybody who has glanced at the trailer will attest, Narnia's great final battle takes place on verdant meadows beneath fresh blue skies. All the fisticuffs in The Lord of the Rings seemed to be carried out in muddy fields in the pelting rain. I wonder if Adamson, the director of the Shrek films, was steering his designers and special- effects boffins away from images and atmospheres that had already appeared in Jackson's films.
"That was partly a conscious decision," he says, "but more the fact that Narnia is just an airier place. A journalist said to me the other day that Middle-earth is a dying world and Narnia is a new world. I think that is a very important point to make. One of the reasons for employing Weta was to make that distinction. People said: 'Aren't you afraid that they will make it look like Lord of the Rings? But they know exactly what to stay away from - what might subconsciously remind us of The Lord of the Rings - so that actually helped us create a new world."
It has been two years since the release of the final Lord of the Rings film, and, in that period, Hollywood has experienced something of a slump. Disney in particular has had a grim time. Following a summer devoid of any major blockbusters, the company has invested a great deal of hope in the performance of two films. Chicken Little, Disney's first in-house computer- generated feature, has opened well at the box office. If The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe does equally good business, then the occupants of the Mouse House will be entitled to enjoy their collective sigh of relief. Disney depends on you, Mark Johnson.
"I don't think that is strictly true," Johnson says, laughing. "Disney co-produced the film. Their level of investment is about $100 million [ €85 million], which is certainly substantial. You can't worry about things like that. Every step of the way you are just worrying about the film. You don't have time to read the newspapers. So I wasn't quite aware of what was going on with the Walt Disney Company as I was making it."
Still, he must be conscious that if the film rakes in serious dosh, Disney, whose subsidiary Miramax reportedly turned down The Lord of the Rings, will have that most valuable of commodities on its hands: a family-friendly franchise. The seven books in the Narnia series could mean many happy Christmases ahead for the studio.
When it comes to the status of the proposed next film, based on the book Prince Caspian, Adamson and Johnson are, however, not quite singing from the same hymn sheet. What sort of business does The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe have to do to guarantee production of the second film? Johnson, a veteran producer who has worked on most of Barry Levinson's films, chooses his words carefully. "I don't know what the Disney figure is," he says. "Our film The Notebook did $85 million [ €72 million], and that was a big hit. But if this film did that, then, clearly, we would be disappointed. I have yet to work out a figure in my own head that we are looking for. You know, we don't have a script [ for Prince Caspian] yet. And if this film were not deemed commercially and artistically successful, then we would not make it. It is not a foregone conclusion."
When the irrepressibly jolly Adamson is asked if he will stay on as director for later episodes, he appears to contradict Johnson's line. "All seven of them? I think I would like to work on something else in my life other than Shrek and Narnia. But I suspect I will be involved in others. I think the studios have committed to another one. They are very happy with it, and they have expressed an intent to make another one."
With all the talk of business, politics and religion, it is easy to forget that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is at heart just a big, loud fantasy. Tilda Swinton is characteristically terrifying as the white witch, the kids are charming without straying too far into cuteness and the special effects are easy on the eye.
Adamson, a Narnia fan since his childhood, has come up with an interesting theory about why we are all striving for cinematic escapism in this decade. "It is partly that the technology has allowed us to visualise what is in our imagination, but I also see it as a reaction to all the reality TV we have been seeing over the past decade. I see the 1990s as disaster-movie time - twisters and so on - and we deal with enough of those disasters in real life. Then, in the early 2000s, it was all Survivor and Extreme Makeover. Now we have these fantasies. It is nice to escape to another world."
So if I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! has erased your will to live, you know where to turn.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens on Friday