Narnia Fans » Jack’s Life

Hey, Narnia Fans! Welcome to “Behind the Wardrobe” an Interview Series with Douglas Gresham. Join me as we find out about CS Lewis, Narnia and more in this interview series.

Special thanks to Paul Martin (The Webmaster for NarniaFans) and to Mr. Douglas Gresham himself for this amazing opportunity. And an even bigger thanks to Mr. Gresham for putting up with a few of my impossible questions. Thanks for being such a great sport about it!

For this week: On Jack’s Life, “The Dark Tower”, and other matters.

JS: I read your book,Jack’s Life. I have to admit it was one of the best biographies I’ve read about him.

DG: Thank you.

JS: I felt at times while reading it that I was reading on of Jack’s own stories as it felt a lot like one in terms of how you wrote it. Was that your intention?

DG: Not at all, but it is a very fine compliment and I thank you for it.

JS: I’m assuming you used secondary sources to get the information on his childhood and everything up to the point of his meeting with your mother. What sources did you use?
DG: The Hooper/Green Biography, The George Sayer Biography, and the Companion and Guide by Hooper, but mostly merely to check dates and details for accuracy.

JS: How come no one has yet to make a “good” bio-pic on CS Lewis, meaning a film that accurately portrays his life?

DG: How do you accurately portray 65 years in less than 65 years? But I think that someone sooner or later will attempt to do so and when they do I hope I am still around to help.

JS: I read one of Jack’s short stories ” The Dark Tower”. Are you familiar with it?

DG: Of course.

JS: There is a huge controversy about that story as there is some debate as to whether or not it is a “true” Lewis tale. Do you think it was?

DG: Of course it was. The whole controversy thing was engineered for very personal reasons by a lady who is now dead. Her fanciful theories have been pretty thoroughly discredited.

JS: Do you ever remember him talking about it?

DG: “The Dark Tower”? No, but another of her targets, “The Man Born Blind” (originally working titled “Light”) Jack read to me when I was but a lad.

JS: I have read “A Man Born Blind” as well as the rest of Jack’s short stories and that they would make great made-for-TV movies ( or episodes of a TV show like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits). Have you ever given much thought into having those adapted from stories to the screen? I know I’d enjoy them!

DG: I haven’t actually thought of that, partly I suppose because I am not exactly short of projects already.

JS: Another one of his short stories that intrigued me as “After Ten Years”, a fragments of a novel about the journey of Menelaus and Helen of Troy. Why didn’t he finish it?

DG: He died first.

JS: Do you think it needs to be?

DG: Not unless Jack comes back to do it.

JS: So, I take it if a currently living author were to approach you asking if they could complete “After Ten Years” or even “The Dark Tower”, you would decline the offer?

DG: Absolutely.

JS: A bit of a trend in Christian fiction is for writers to do a book “in the style” of The Screwtape Letters (meaning a correspondence between a senior devil and a more inexperienced tempter) such as Randy Alcorn’s Lord Foulgrin’s Letters. Are you familiar with that book or any others like it?

DG: I am actually a fan of Randy Alcorn’s work, but I haven’t as yet read that particular one. The Screwtape styled books I have read I have not found to be particularly encouraging.

JS: One book I have in my library is a comic book adaptation of The Screwtape Letters that was put out by Marvel Comics and Thomas Nelson back in 1994 ( they had done similar with Bunyans’ Pilgrim’s Progress and Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps). Did you serve as a consultant for it?

DG: To be honest, I actually don’t remember.

JS: Is there the possibility Narnia Fans could ever see graphic novels ( or comic books)of all seven Narnian Chronicles and the Space Trilogy? Again, it is something many fans would enjoy. Would you encourage or endorse such a project?

DG: That would depend very much on the quality and standards of the project concerned.

JS: One of my friends wants to try and get his four year old brother into reading by reading him the Narnian Chronicles, however the lack of pictures doesn’t interest his brother. I recommended The World of Narnia series by Deborah Maze ( the four volume series based on TL,TW,TW ) as a good introduction. ( He didn’t want to use the movie story books as he felt then he may as well show him the movie). Are there any other children’s books based on Narnia that you’d recommend as a means of introducing younger readers to the world of Narnia, and thus perhaps get them more interested in reading at a younger age?

DG: He could try The Giant’s Surprise by Hyawin Oram. But the Chronicles themselves would be best read as bedtime stories one chapter at a time when he is a bit older. Four is probably a little too young for them.

JS: I’ve heard that there is a film version of The Screwtape Letters in the works. Is this true?

DG: Yes. I am one of the Producers.

JS: How are they going to adapt it into a film ( if they are in fact > doing this)? The book is largely a collection of letters!

DG: We are working that out right now.

Come back next week when we discuss the Narnia Film project!

Hey, Narnia Fans! Welcome to “Behind the Wardrobe” an Interview Series with Douglas Gresham. Join me as we find out about CS Lewis, Narnia and more in this interview series.

Special thanks to Paul Martin (The Webmaster for NarniaFans) and to Mr. Douglas Gresham himself for this amazing opportunity. And an even bigger thanks to Mr. Gresham for putting up with a few of my impossible questions. Thanks for being such a great sport about it!

For this week: On The Shadowlands…

JS: What was your opinion of the play The Shadowlands?

DG: I think it a wonderful play, but then I am biased. I have been a consultant to Shadowlands in all its varying inceptions ever since Brian Sibley and Norman Stone first wrote the concept script about 20 odd years ago. Incidentally the play is being revived and will shortly open again in London’s West End. I don’t know though whether there are any plans to move the production to America though.

JS: How did you feel about how they portrayed Jack?

DG: I have seen so many productions in which the portrayals always depended on the actor playing the role that it is hard to remember a specific portrayal. The play itself portrays not C.S.Lewis, nor Jack, but a fictional character based on him. Remember that Shadowlands is not supposed to be an Historical documentary, but is a very beautiful love story based on real events in the lives of some real people.

JS:Thank you for the clarification that The Shadowlands is not a historical documentary. In a class I took in college it was, more or less, portrayed as a historical documentary to us.

DG: It was never intended to be so, and I would have though that it is pretty obvious. After all there are only four characters based on real people in the whole movie, all the rest are entirely fictional.

JS: Have most people mistaken the play for a historical documentary?

DG: I don’t think so, I haven’t come across too many folk who have.

JS: Notably one of the major differences was the absence of your brother David. How did you feel about this change?

DG: This change was made for very straightforward theatrical and dramatic reasons and so when I fully understood the reasons I had no problem with it.

JS: Would you be able to elaborate a bit on what the theatrical and dramatic reasons for the exclusion of your brother from the play were?

DG: It is very simple really, first, if you have two children each reacting differently to the same situations, you automatically have two subplots. In the first TV version of Shadowlands this was done, and on studying it later, it was discovered that having the two subplots actually detracted from the main theme of the piece rather than complementing it, so it was decided to drop one child for the Stage play version. Also contributing to that decision was the fact that for stage work each child character has to be played by two child actors as there are legal restrictions on how many performances a child actor may make without a break. This was seen to work very well and thus for Dick Attenborough’s version the one child policy was adhered to.

JS: How about some of the other changes they made to the story? For example Lewis driving, your character asking for Jack to sign a copy of Magician’s Nephew, of Jack as a Roman Catholic.

DG: As far as I know Jack was never portrayed as a Roman Catholic, but as for the rest I didn’t care hoot.

JS: How did you feel about Anthony Hopkins’s and Debra Winger’s portrayals of Jack and Joy in the film version?

DG: Tony was faithfully presenting the role he found in the screenplay, and not trying to be C.S.Lewis or Jack, and I think that is a pity because I think Tony could have portrayed the real Jack very well indeed. Debra on the other hand was superb as my mother. However if one is going to talk about the film, one has to say that Dick Attenborough is one of the finest directors ever to walk the planet (and one of the finest English Gentlemen as well) , and his fine touch and gentle hand made what I consider to be a classic movie with which I am very proud to have been associated.

JS: How well did Joseph Mazzello do at portraying you in the film?

DG: Very well indeed, but as I told him on set one day, for him it was easy, after all he had a script to follow, I had to ad-lib the whole thing.

JS: The funny thing for me with the film of “The Shadowlands” is that I forever associated both director Richard Attenborough and Joseph Mazzello with their roles as John Hammond and Tim Murphy in Steven Speilberg’s Jurassic Park.

DG: Knowing them both personally made a big difference I suppose.

JS: Though it could be worse. I even had a friend who had a hard time watching the film as she associated Anthony Hopkins with Hannibal Lecter!

DG: I think that a lot of people had that reaction to him in Remains of the Day rather than in Shadowlands, but I know what you mean.

JS: Have you ever considered playing Jack in a production of The Shadowlands?

DG: I really don’t think I could do it justice (the role I mean), I am too emotionally involved in the whole thing.

That’s it for this weeks installment. Come back next week when we discuss Douglas’s book Jack’s Life , CS Lewis’s unfinished novels “The Dark Tower” and “After Ten Years”, the film of The Screwtape Letters and some other matters.

He may have the image of a dour, cloistered Oxford don with little knowledge of ordinary struggles. But C.S. Lewis, who wrote of epic struggles between good and evil in the imaginary land of Narnia, actually had a humorous side, his stepson says.

Douglas Gresham, 60, is co-producer of the film adaptation of “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” which opens Dec. 9. His biography of Lewis, “Jack’s Life,” was published last month. (Friends knew Clive Staples Lewis by his nickname, Jack.)

He also helps oversee the Lewis estate and is unofficial guardian of his legacy, believing the man and his works are often misunderstood.

“He was a very funny man, very joyous,” says Gresham, who spent “the most formative decade of my life” — ages 8 to 18 — in Lewis’ company.

Gresham recently spoke at the third annual C.S. Lewis Festival in this northern Michigan town, where schools, churches and community groups paid tribute to the beloved British author, scholar of medieval literature and Christian apologist.

He said Lewis experienced war, career ups and downs, family troubles, love and heartbreak.

A bachelor most of his life, he married Joy Gresham in his late 50s but lost her to cancer four years later. Grief-stricken, he cared for her two sons, Douglas and David, until his death in 1963. Their brief romance is portrayed — touchingly but somewhat inaccurately, Gresham says — in the film “Shadowlands,” starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.

As “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” movie was developed, Gresham watched closely to make certain it faithfully represented the book and its underlying values. He’s satisfied that director Andrew Adamson, who also directed the “Shrek” films, met the challenge.

“My job, I suppose, was as resident Narnia guru, to make sure everything Narnian was Narnian in the film, to make sure there weren’t anachronisms and incongruities,” Gresham says. “But to be honest with you, the team that we have had on this film has been so good that there’s been very little that I’ve had to complain about.”

[Read the rest at the Quad-City Times]

The dreams C.S. Lewis had that began in the late 1940s were different. Some were frightening and some were beautiful and, as he described them to family and friends, they involved lions, especially a giant lion that had a regal, yet wild personality.

Soon, Lewis began weaving these images into a story that also included a strange dream that he had at age 16. In it, he saw a faun holding an umbrella and some packages, standing in a snowy wood near a lamppost.

“He told people, ‘I’d like to make a story out of that image because it has been in my head all of my life,’ ” said Douglas Gresham, the author’s stepson. As Lewis would say, the great lion “Aslan simply leapt into the story and dragged all the rest of the Narnian Chronicles along with him. I believe that all of this was a gift from God, of course.”

These dreams became “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” the cornerstone of a seven-book fantasy franchise that has sold 90 million copies over 55 years, establishing itself as one of the most beloved works of Christian fiction of all time.

“Many people ask, ‘Why are they coming back?’ The answer is that these books never went away,” said Gresham, who has served as co-producer and the spiritual conscience of the movie project.

Gresham enters this story because his mother, poet Joy Gresham of upstate New York, began corresponding with Lewis in 1950 about literary and religious matters and they struck up a long-distance friendship. This relationship grew, over time, into a marriage complicated by her battle with cancer, a poignant romance described in a play and two movies entitled “Shadowlands.”

Unlike other Lewis biographies, “Jack’s Life” does not try to dig inside his psyche or offer a detailed map of his career as a scholar or apologist for traditional faith. Gresham said he simply wanted to tell the story — using images and language that would be accessible to children — of the “finest man and best Christian I have ever known.”

Thus, this biography begins: “If you are about eight years old, then you are the same age I was when I first met the man who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia. If you are eighteen, then you are the age I was when he died.”

Like Gresham, Lewis suffered the trauma of losing his mother when he was very young. Gresham notes that, when Lewis’ father died years later, Jack and his older brother Warren returned to Belfast to clean out the family home. They put all of their toys and other childhood memorabilia into a trunk and buried it in the garden.

Nevertheless, Gresham stressed that Lewis never “lost the intimate memory” if what it was like to be a child. While the scholar claimed that he was not good with children, his stories, letters and experiences late in life suggest otherwise.

“In my experience, he was excellent with children,” said Gresham. “He didn’t talk down to us. He may have brought himself down to our level, but he never talked down to us from above. – Jack was always conscious of the fact that children are people. They may be small and unformed, mentally and emotionally as yet, but they are people with all of the same trials, tribulations, frights and foibles as other people.”

Gresham paused, remembering. “In a sense, the child in him lived with him the rest of his life. … For anyone who is writing for children, that is an important thing.”