Narnia Fans » 2004 » October

“Visual references for beaver dams covered in snow turned out to be surprisingly hard to find, so we had to imagine what it would look like and create our set based on that,” says Jules Cook, art director and designer of the Beaver Lodge set. Much of the inspiration for the beavers’ environment, both in the interior, shot on stage 3 at Henderson Studios and the exterior, filmed as part of a vast snowscape at the sprawling Kelly Park Studio in Wainui north of Auckland, was taken from watching beavers in their natural habitat in the 1988 IMAX film Beavers, directed by Stephen Low. In a climactic scene in that film, a bear tears apart a beaver dam; close examination of the destruction provided a strong basis for the scene in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where a pack of the White Witch’s wolves infiltrates and tears through the lodge looking for the Pevensies.

Beaver dams generally let part of their river’s water through the structure, and Cook acknowledges that particular attention had to be paid to how a flow of water would freeze around the habitat. Chainsaws and Arbortec drill attachments were used to create a unique “chewing” effect on the logs, and as beavers tend to strip the bark off branches, this was done as well. The wood used in the lodge “would have been aged by the river,” Cook notes, and is thus gray and bare of branches.

Set Builder Pete MacKinnon, who constructed all twelve sections of the set with his team of three carpenters over three months, estimates that he used over 4500 sticks, all “between finger thickness and leg thickness,” to create the set. Each stick had to be individually “beaver-ized,” to eliminate all machine cuts, and every screw holding the set together had to be hidden while at the same time maintaining structural integrity. “It was a bit like making giant wicker baskets,” says MacKinnon.

In the film, director Andrew Adamson has envisioned the Beavers as rustic craftsmen, creating their home, furniture and tools from their surroundings, and trading with the local dwarves for other commodities. Many of the props and the general look of the lodge’s interior comes from Pauline Baynes’ illustrations of Lewis’ books, but the general feeling the art department wanted to create, in the words of lead set decorator Kerrie Brown, was that of “a rustic English countryhouse, but beaver-ized.” Accordingly, the furniture is makeshift, the Beavers’ living area is cluttered with miniature tools, fishing rods and collectibles, and Mrs. Beaver’s “homey” touch is responsible for the spun and knit textiles and homemade preserves.

“It’s about a children’s world,” Tilda Swinton said. “I think the real question, and I speak as the mother of two six-year-olds, the real question is ‘What do the parents want to read?’ And it’s lovely to read the Narnia books to children.”

She was referring, specifically, to CS Lewis’ “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe,” the basis for Andrew Adamson’s film adaptation that’s currently filming in New Zealand. As Jadis, the White Witch, Swinton is portraying one of the most terrifying characters in children’s literature. Standing in an Auckland-based production office, the casually dressed, make-up free Swinton looked more like a laid-back mom than an evil witch prone to turning adversaries into stone.

Appearances, as the set of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” proved, can be deceptive. What appeared to be a run-down warehouse was actually a reconstructed forest; what looked like the exterior of a high school gym housed a stunning courtyard filled with “stone” sculptures. During five exciting days on “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” set, I had the opportunity to speak with production team members while visiting various sound stages and production rooms.

Along with other online writers, I watched live wolves film a scene on a wintry sound stage and attended Armageddon, a “home-grown pop culture (special effects) convention” in Wellington. The online press also visited Wellington’s Oscar-winning (for “Lord of the Rings”) WETA workshop, and toured their studios with director and co-founder Richard Taylor. Under Taylor’s direction, the WETA staff was working hard, creating detailed armor and swords with insignia drawn from all seven Narnia books.

Though extensive interviews and in-depth information from my trip to the set of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” will be continually posted as the film’s December 2005 release date draws closer, I will say this: speaking with Swinton my first day on the set, I got the sense that “Narnia”’s production team was more than just devoted to their film- they were thrilled to be making it. And that seemed like a rarity.

Director Andrew Adamson, known for his involvement with the “Shrek” movies, is making his live action motion picture directorial debut with “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” With the help of a seasoned special effects team (interviews to follow…), Adamson is creating a film of near-mythic proportions, filling Narnia with twenty-three individual species including centaurs, wolves, fauns, and a 99.5% CGI Lion. Basing the film on his boyhood Narnia impressions, Adamson’s vivid memories of an extensive battle scene (which Lewis describes briefly) have been incorporated into a lengthy, spectacular battle sequence.

“The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” which Adamson co-scripted with Anne Peacock, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely, also focuses on Lewis’ World War Two setting- an all-important aspect rejected by most adaptations. After a lengthy opening depicting the London blitz, the four Pevensie children (played by Georgie Henley, Skandar Keyes, Anna Popplewell, and William Mosely) travel to Professor Diggory (Jim Broadbent)’s country estate. There, they enter a charmed wardrobe built, in “The Magician’s Nephew,” by a much younger Diggory from the wood of a Narnian apple tree. The unsuspecting children are then transported into Narnia, where they meet Mr. Tumnus, a faun (James McAvoy), a fox (Rupert Everett), Aslan, a lion (not yet cast), and the terrifying White Witch (Swinton), who is eager to rid Narnia of the “Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve” she fears will usurp her throne.

Having missed the Narnia books as a child- which Swinton jokingly attributed to a “pagan upbringing”- the British actress and star of films including “The Deep End” and “Adaptation” is discovering Narnia as an adult, via Adamson’s unique vision. “It’s not like ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’ now, which are pushed down everybody’s throats.” Swinton concluded. “In those days people kind of discovered it. Let’s hope children will still be able to discover it.”

Given the scope of Adamson’s Narnia- and the beloved place “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” has in the hearts of readers young and old- I’m betting that this version of Narnia will be discovered by a whole new generation.

The entire film company moves to the So. Island (Oamaru) on Nov. 1, to begin filming the climactic battle scenes on Nov. 2…three different locations through early December.

This is a very large battle, expanded from a page and a half in the actual book. It should be breathtaking, seeing realistic looking centaurs and minotaurs and other various Narnian creatures in full armor going into battle.

It was a friendship that thrived on a complex fantasy world, created in an English pub, that produced some of the most memorable literary characters ever written. Now a new film by a Scottish-based director will celebrate the real-life fellowship of two literary giants, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis.

CS Lewis: The Man Who Created Narnia aims to ride a wave of interest in Lewis that is anticipated to accompany the rel ease in 2005 of up to seven films based on his Narnia novels. First to reach the public will be the £40 million The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, filmed by Shrek director Andrew Adamson and tipped for the same kind of success as The Lord Of The Rings.

Norman Stone’s 54-minute drama, which starts shooting in Oxford this week, is a more modest affair. The film, being made for the Hallmark Channel will follow Lewis’s life from his troubled childhood to his fantasy workshops with Tolkien in an Oxford pub, where he dreamed up his Chronicles Of Narnia.

It will be linked by the voice of the writer (played by Anton Rodgers) remembering his life story from the trauma of his mother’s death from cancer to the death of the love he found late in life, the American poet Joy Davidson Gresham.

Stone directed the 1985 BBC version of Shadowlands, a film about this last phase in Lewis’s life, which won several international awards. “The whole of his life att racted me initially,” said Stone. “He was a man who wrote wonderfully on the page, telling his own story of losing his mother through cancer when he was nine, and finally falling in love with a woman who has cancer, gets better, then relapses.”

The film will also feature Lewis’s meetings with Tolkien and their much-derided fellow fantasy enthusiasts at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford.

Stone said: “The tiny back room of the “Bird and Baby” was crammed with these “peculiar” people who wrote about fairies, and out of that came Narnia and the Hobbits. In terms of box-office receipts, that must be the most hallowed ground in the world. “Tolkien persuaded Lewis away from atheism after the war. It’s a crucial part of his life, and great to reconstruct. I want to give an insight into the magician behind the magic. Twenty-four years after Shadowlands, this will be the whole story.”

Alongside Anton Rodgers as Lewis, the film will star Diane Venora, who played Lady Capulet in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo And Juliet, as Joy Davidson Gresham , with Robert Hickson as the older Tolkien. It will be shown as part of the Hallmark Channel’s series Heroes, Saints And Sinners.

The screenplay has been written with the assistance of Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s step son. Stone has also asked for the guidance of Lady Jill Freud, who was one of four children who spent time as a second world war evacuee living in Lewis’s house in Head ington, just outside Oxford. The Chronicles are thought to have been partly written for and inspired by these children, who feature as Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter.

The film is based on two of Lewis’s autobiographical books, Surprised By Joy and A Grief Observed, and also deals with his lifelong struggle with his Christian beliefs.

Stone, whose Glasgow-based feature film Man Dancin’ is out on DVD this week, believes the new drama will tap into the fascination with religion revealed by the success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion Of The Christ. “There has clearly been an interest in spiritual films, which has confused the film moguls” he said. “Lewis wrote about God doing experiments on us after Joy’s death, but struggled with heretical thoughts to a strong faith.”

Karen Pascal, producer of The Man Who Created Narnia for the Canadian firm Windborne Productions, said the film’s timing was perfect. “It is almost like Lewis is about to burst on to the scene again, and there is a great deal of anticipation of what is coming in the Narnia films. – This is an accessible biography. Lewis described Narnia as a supposal, and this is a supposal too – what would Lewis have remembered if you had met him as an old man? “We are filming in authentic locations, from the Eagle and Child pub to the home that he lived in for 30 years.”

24 October 2004

The howling of wolves might be something residents of Tuakau, south of Auckland, will have to get used to. Ten wolves have been brought in from Los Angeles for filming on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

The pack, which includes seven males and three females, is being housed at Mark Vette’s Animal Rescue. Two siblings, Ricky and Bob, will play the key characters Maugrim and Vardan.

Production of the film will move south from November 1, when Queenstown, Oamaru and Canterbury will feature.

It was a case of the lion, the witch and the wind storm at Flock Hill Station yesterday, as film makers assessed the damage caused by the gale force winds that swept through the country.

The fierce winds destroyed a huge marquee built for the forthcoming Disney [sic - the film is being made by Walden Media and Disney co-financing] production of the C.S.Lewis classic, which is being filmed near Arthurs Pass.

The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe is being made by New Zealand film maker Andrew Adamson, who directed the successful Shrek movies.

Filming recently moved to the South Island, with locations in Canterbury being used to bring the snow-covered land of Narnia to life.

Story by Helen Murdoch & Lois Watson

This article contains some Story Spoilers, so be wary. Since late June, a new set of yellow “location pointers” have appeared on major intersections in West Auckland, New Zealand. It’s a sure sign that filming is in progress somewhere not too far away, and every morning cast and crew for the project will be homing into that location from wherever they live. These particular pointers are marked “LPP” for “Lamp Post Productions.” If you’ve ever read The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe, you might remember a particular lamp-post which is in Narnia. Sure enough, filming for The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe is in full swing and hundreds of people are converging on this very ordinary corner of the world to create another world which is much more enchanting.

Part of the magic of film – of even the most magical of fantasy films – is the fact that the surroundings can be so un-magical. The Lord of the Rings introduced moviegoers to New Zealand, and it’s true that it did star some locations that were dramatic enough to be called “magical” – stunning mountains, wild forests, strange rocky steppes. But West Auckland, the home of the Narnia films, sits in surroundings that can only be described as “pleasant.” There are nice green fields, little stands of trees, and small hills that can serve for just about any kind of rural backdrop. They’ve appeared in Xena, Hercules, and countless small movies and ads. But so far they aren’t featuring much in The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe. A good deal of the principal photography has taken place in the big sound stages that have been created in some disused apple packing sheds in a run-down industrial area of West Auckland.

Once inside the shabby-looking security fence and dull parking lot, it’s a different story. Hundreds of people are working in a state of calm frenzy at tasks that range from the very large – visualise crews of guys with nail guns and blowtorches who engineer and build the big sets – to the very small, such as the people who hover alertly on the set with a holster-style kit of puffers and brushes for adjusting make-up on the actors.

It’s 1pm on a typical workday on the LWW set, and I’m being given a tour of a bewildering place where past, present and future sets are elbowing for space. Some are just a heap of plywood and styrofoam dusted with fake snow – no telling what they were once. Some are only in 3D sketch form – such as the sound stage they are building which is a hall or courtyard with tall shard-like pillars of ice or icy stone. Maybe it’s the hall Edmund passes through in the Witch’s House: “He found himself in a long gloomy hall with many pillars, full, as the courtyard had been, of statues.” And indeed, just outside that sound stage I saw a great grey statue of a centaur magically petrified. It reared up, frozen in the middle of some struggle, but for now wanting storage space.

But three soundstages are busy today. The first is the Beaver’s house. It’s a set “in the round,” – the camera can move through 360 degree inside it. It’s cosy, with an oval, domed form, comfortable if a little cramped. The inside and outside look convincingly beaver-built out of mud and waterbleached sticks. As I watch, a crew adjusts a paper lantern that hangs in the middle of it. The same sound stage has a litter of fascinating props – a stuffed wolf on a stand, a rack of fur coats, and best of all, the magical Wardrobe itself. It looks like a beautiful antique – reddish wood polished to a high gloss. The door is richly carved with a tree – maybe a nod to Lord of the Rings fans here, because the tree has a similar style to the White Tree of Gondor. The Wardrobe is huge – easily big enough for an adult to get into – but not so big as to be ridiculous. The rack of fur coats stands nearby, and perhaps in the film Lucy will feel her way through them to the back of the wardrobe – which isn’t there. I was told that the camera will look through the wardrobe to a bluesceen where I assume Lucy will get her first glimpse of Narnia, and so will we.

I had a look at another set, built mostly of translucent fibreglass, which is the White Witch’s dungeon. It looks entirely made of ice, with rusty, spiky iron grills covering the openings. The ice appeared to have grown over the architecture so that the doors or windows had an organic kind of shape, rounded and glassy, rather than the clean lines of stone architecture. It reminded me of the creepy, inhuman forms that featured to such effect in Alien . I heard of what seems to be a departure from the book, in that Edmund is imprisoned here and must be rescued by the others at some point. Edmund’s imprisonment was obviously not happy, judging from the muffled shouting I could hear from within.

The third set I visited was all action, and this is where the rest of the Pevensie children were escaping from danger. They’d already met Father Christmas, and were carrying his gifts. In the book, their journey from then on is “a delicious dream,” for Spring overtakes the woods of Narnia in a matter of hours. It looks like the movie version will be more dramatic, with the Witch’s pursuit hounding them much more closely.

In the scene I watched, wolves were chasing them across the ice, while above them a towering, icicle-hung cliff threatened to collapse its weight of snow on them. The White Witch’s endless winter was wearing off, and the sudden thaw was creating some problems for the children. As they ran across the set they came under the first barrage of what could be an avalanche from the cliff above. Worse, the ice under their feet was breaking up. (For this, the set builders had made a clever series of “lily pads” of ice which dipped alarmingly on hydraulic supports as the children started to run across. Water squirted up – not always where expected, and there was some laughter in the crew from that!)

In the finished film, the children will be accompanied here by the Beavers. The Beavers are entirely done by CGI, and so for the purposes of shooting, a guy on the set called out Mr. Beaver’s lines while a small brown sock puppet on a boom bobbed ahead of the children so they could see where the Beaver would be. Meanwhile, somebody else had the job of doing the wolf-howls that pursued the children and lent urgency to their flight. The camera focussed on Lucy, whose expression reflected her terror at the wolves behind her and her fear of the treacherous ice underfoot. I watched the scene on the monitor. Lucy was plucky, but hesitant. The older children knew they mustn’t stop, and pulled her along with them. Peter took on the risk of finding a safe way across the ice. Susan brought up the rear, guarding and encouraging Lucy. It could be a snapshot of the relationship between the children.

Something about all this is, of course, completely ridiculous. Imaginary wolves, grown men doing wolf imitations, sock puppets on sticks. But on the other hand there is something wonderful about watching a group of children throwing themselves totally into the kind of make-believe that we all did at some time in our lives. What child hasn’t whiled away a rainy afternoon with their friends playing “Let’s Pretend”? “Let’s pretend some bad guys are after us and you hit them with your sword.” “Let’s pretend we’re being chased by wolves.” Most of us loved playing those games, and did it until we had to stop and grow out of it. It’s somehow satisfying to see that old and simple game of make-believe taken to its ultimate form, being used to make something that will one day be as realistic and exciting as we always wished our games to be.

McAvoy has been in New Zealand for four months shooting scenes for The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

In the movie version of the first book in the Narnia series, he plays the wily faun, Mr Tumnus.

The errant half-goat, half-man is supposed to deliver the adventurous children, who have stumbled into the fantasy land of Narnia, to the evil White Witch but decides he likes them too much to do so.

And on this rainy Tuesday morning, with his boyish frame, his tousled dark hair, a ready smile on his mildly cherubic face and the beginnings of what will eventually become a two-pronged, faun-ish ginger beard, you can just imagine this Glaswegian lad nimbly prancing on set, devouring crumpets and cracking jokes.

Luckily for him (and possibly us) his hairy legs, complete with hooves, will be computer-generated.

But before they get to see this bestial version of McAvoy in action, viewers are more likely to catch him on the big screen in a new romantic comedy, Wimbledon.

As written by author C.S. Lewis in the second chapter of his 1950 literary classic, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the passage signals the continuation of Lucy’s first voyage through the wardrobe into Narnia, and the introduction of the first Narnian character, Mr. Tumnus, the faun (half-man, half-goat) who befriends the English child under the orange glow of Lewis’ imagined lamppost jutting out of the frozen snowscape.

It also signals director Andrew Adamson’s move out of the first Narnian set, the striking “Lantern Waste” frozen forest built in an old equestrian riding center in the Rodney District north of Auckland, over to Stage 2 at Henderson Studios (home of the 1990s TV series Hercules and Xena), where Lucy is entertained over tea by Tumnus in his quaint but rustic cavern-like home.

The interior of Mr. Tumnus’ house, as illustrated by Pauline Baynes for Lewis’ book, included two lounge chairs, a dining table, a mantle and fireplace, a bookshelf and hutch. Filmmaker Adamson has imagined a setting very similar in his collaborations with production designer Roger Ford and set decorator Kerrie Brown (working with Ford yet again after associations on Peter Pan, Babe, Babe: Pig in the City and The Quiet American).

You may recall from our last set report that the inspiration for the exterior of Mr. Tumnus’ house was a structure seemingly built into rocks in the Czech Republic. For the inside, Baynes’ drawing served as Adamson’s and Ford’s inspiration in envisioning Tumnus dwelling, a cavernous space cluttered with bookshelves (over 30 cartons of vintage books were rented from shops around Auckland), chairs, a table, fireplace and an iron stove.

The dozen or so pieces of prop furniture fashioned for the three-day scene (enacted by nine-year-old Georgie Henley as Lucy and James McAvoy as Tumnus) were created under the supervision of two key Kiwi craftsmen on the project – Roger Murray, who runs the prop making department, and Adrian Bennett, who supervises the prop furniture. With the exception of Mr. Tumnus’ chair (re-fashioned from one found by Brown in a Sydney antiques shop), everything was manufactured from scratch, including the dishes and tea set that adorn the dining table.

The scene also provides a small glimpse into the forthcoming contributions from the film’s composer, Harry Gregson-Williams, who reunites with director Adamson after providing the music for both Shrek movies. Gregson-Williams is also well-known in the world of animation, having also contributed to the music scores for the hit features Antz, Chicken Run, The Tigger Movie and The Prince of Egypt. For the sequence, the composer wrote a brief, hypnotic piece of music that Tumnus plays for Lucy on his flute, a prop designed and built by Richard Taylor’s WETA Workshop (designed by Christian Pearce and built by John Harding).

While Adamson directed his two cast members on the second of over two dozen magical sets designed by Ford, the production designer’s crew was busy removing the lamppost and re-positioning trees and shrubs back in the “Lantern Waste” set in preparation for the arrival of Jadis, the White Witch, and the first scenes before Don McAlpine’s cameras for actress Tilda Swinton (more in our next missive).