INTERVIEW
WITH ANDREW ADAMSON
Q: Can you talk about your vision
for this film and how it's different from the first one?
AA: Believe it or not, this one I
wanted to be bigger and I am regretting that decision now (laughter).
The first film really was set in a new world. Narnia had been created
approximately 900 years before the last film took place. This is now
another 1300 years later. Narnia has been oppressed by Telmarines for a
large period of that time. It's a dirtier, grittier, darker place than
the last world was. When the kids come back in, they bring a lot of
nostalgia with them. They think they are going back to the place they
knew and instead they've come back to a very changed world. For
instance, the set we are at now, Aslan's How, this is where the Stone
Table once was. It fell as the earth subsided and the Narnians built a
huge, sort of, almost burial mound over it and then that has fallen
into ruin and disrepair as Aslan and all of that has been forgotten. So
what you are seeing there is actually about 60 feet tall [pointing to
the set of Aslan's How]. The How itself, in the final film, will be
about 2 1/2 times that. In general, I wanted the scale, the movie to be
bigger than the last film.
Q: What made you decide to shoot
in Prague and what problems have you had out here, weather etc?
AA: Yeah, we were expecting
slightly better weather. We sent people all over the world for
locations first of all and we used some locations both in Czech
Republic and Poland in the last film that I wanted to reuse, so we did
visit some of the same places. On top of that, there are very
experienced crews here, there's one of the largest stages in Europe,
and the cost of construction is really good here so we can build bigger
sets. We built an entire castle courtyard, which is just cost
prohibitive in other places.
Q: Has anything given you a
particular challenge on this film?
AA: Apart from the weather?
(laughter) I feel like with most interviews on any film, apart from the
Shrek films, I talk about the weather (laughter). You know, the
battles, both the raid sequence in the castle and this final battle,
are more complex than last time. And again, every time, particularly
because we are revisiting a similar world you want to give yourself new
challenges. So we deliberately made things more complicated. On top of
that there've been a lot of films that have come out 'til now that have
also raised the bar. So we wanted to make sure we were doing something
new and fresh, and this battle has some really innovative things that
people haven't seen before that—well, that I don't want to
give spoilers on but there's a whole event that takes place at the end
of the battle that is entirely new and is very complex. You probably
will get to see a little bit of it without knowing how it fits in when
you go to second unit later on.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about
what you learned from the first film and what you tried to take on
board on this one?
AA: I learned never to do a film
with locations, children, animals and visual effects (laughter) and so
I decided to do that again. I mean, you always hope that after each
film you've learned a little and you've improved as a filmmaker. I
always feel like this is just an ongoing learning experience and it
will hopefully be that throughout my career. I think the reason that
this film is bigger than the last one is because I learned to do things
last time. So in order to create new challenges for myself, I made this
more complicated and bigger, which hopefully the audience benefits from
as well.
Q:
Do you miss the computer-animated stuff at all? Do you ever see
yourself going back to it?
AA: In the last few
weeks—and I'm going to mention the weather
again—I've definitely thought that animation has its
advantages. I don't ever want to be just doing one type of thing. So
there are other projects I've developed with DreamWorks that I'm still
involved in that I may or may not direct. It's definitely something I
still want to keep involved in because it's an art form that I really
like and I think it allows you to do very different things than you
can't necessarily do in this medium.
Q: We spoke with Richard Taylor a
moment ago and he was talking about how you are using models and paying
homage to that. Why is it important to use models in a film like this
and what does using modeling give you that you can't get from CG?
AA: You know, it doesn't
necessarily give anything you can't do. It's just that, in certain
instances, it's more practical to do it that way. I think something
very different between live action and animation is happy accidents.
There are things that happen in live-action that just happen because
you've got a group of people together and things work out a particular
way. We were out here the other day about to shoot a scene and we had a
lightning storm. And were I not doing a visual effects film with
hundreds of creatures in blue pants, I would have just shot the film,
shot the scene because it would have looked fantastic in a lightning
storm. But, those kinds of things don't happen in animation. You design
everything. To some degree, that's the same with the difference between
miniatures and computer animation. To do atmosphere and particular
stuff and so on, things crumbling and things breaking in CG is very
complicated. And with a miniature, it's relatively achievable so you
can play with more options. So really, it does just come down to what
you are trying to achieve as to which is the best technique.
Q: Have you noticed the children
have grown as actors, both physically and emotionally?
AA: I think they have grown as
both. They had a lot of experience in the last film and they've done
stuff since then that they've brought to this film. We did a scene with
Ben Barnes and William Moseley the other day, which was a very intense
argument between the two of them. William has brought so much more than
he had on the last film. The last film was the very first film he had
done. Since then he's done a little theater work, he's been doing work
on his own and then he's had the whole experience of the last movie to
bring. So it's kind of like the nostalgia and experience that he had as
an individual having lived through the last film really goes with what
the character has gone through; from being in Narnia last time to this.
So I think he has really grown as an actor, which I think is true
across the board.
Narnia
- The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The
Chronicles of Narnia - Prince Caspian
The
Chronicles of Narnia - LWW
