ComingSoon.net recently got a chance to talk to producer Mark Johnson about the third installment in the “Narnia” franchise, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which Fox Walden will release in theaters on December 10, 2010.

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“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” the third in the epic series of films based on the bestselling books by C.S. Lewis, will begin principal photography on location in Queensland, Australia, today – July 27, 2009. The production, a joint venture between Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Walden Media, continues the franchise which commenced with

The spectacular, Oscar®-winning 2005 release, “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and its 2008 follow-up, “Prince Caspian,” whose combined global box office gross tops $1.2 billion.

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Producer Mark Johnson, who is currently working on many projects including The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, was recently on the other side of the camera for the third time.  He previously appeared in Good Morning, Vietnam and The Notebook.  He was also a producer on both films.  Most recently, he appeared as Uncle Pervis in the film My Sister’s Keeper.  For those who don’t know what the film is about, it is an adaptation of a novel of the same name, by Jodi Picoult.

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While most of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is likely to be shot in Queensland on the Gold Coast in Australia, it’s possible that some of it could be shot in New Zealand.  Producer Mark Johnson told The Dominion Post last year that neither he nor Andrew Adamson had ruled out shooting some scenes in New Zealand.  Adamson is acting as a producer on the third film, as Michael Apted has stepped into the role of director.

Film New Zealand could not say whether The Voyage of the Dawn Treader had made any decision about shooting there, however, stating that Queensland’s studio facilities serve as a reminder that they need similar facilities to attrack film-makers to New Zealand.

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Producer Mark Johnson has spoken about how they were putting the promotion together for Prince Caspian and what thoughts they had for how to capture a wider audience for the film than the first had.

When Mark Johnson was producing “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” released in 2005, he and Walt Disney Pictures were careful to hew to a PG rating.  ”We were always concerned that we didn’t want to make it too young, and were worried in our campaign about exposing some of the talking animals. We thought an older audience might say it’s just for little kids,” Johnson said.

He found the problem reversed for last year’s film sequel, “Prince Caspian.”  ”The second was accused of being too old. What happened [is that] it was less about the Narnian creatures than human creatures,” Johnson said.

The second film grossed $420 million at the global box office, while the first raked in $745 million.

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All of this talk about Disney bailing on The Chronicles of Narnia, and we finally have a comment from one of the creative team that is part of the series.  That of producer Mark Johnson.  I had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours with Mr. Johnson in New York last may, a couple of days after having seen Prince Caspian for the first time.  He’s a genuine person, and someone that I feel will do a great job with the series from here on out, should it continue.

He’s commented, though, on Prince Caspian:

“We may have made a mistake in doing PRINCE CASPIAN as the second one,” Johnson said. “Unfortunately, PRINCE CASPIAN is one of the lesser-liked books. We also made a slightly more adult, darker story, and we shouldn’t have.”

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The Lord of the Rings series opened up a world of possibilities for the fantasy genre, not least of which was the ability for filmmakers to realize arching storylines that span years or, as in the case of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, generations. It has also shown audiences that children’s films can be dark and dramatic, yet still prove box-office hits.

“The beauty of these fantasy films, like Lord of the Rings and like Narnia, is it’s almost like opera, it’s bigger than life,” says Narnia’s producer, Mark Johnson. “It will take you to a world where there are talking animals and giants and pure evil to overcome.

“And the beauty, in the case of Narnia, is that it asks [children] to save the day. So with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, we really went out of our way to make sure the audience knew what was going on in England during World War II. These children felt so powerless. So powerless because they were sent out of the city, away from their mother and father. Then all of a sudden, they find themselves in a world that’s looking to them to save the day. So it’s so much about empowerment.”

Lion, which proved a massive worldwide hit, bringing in well over 700 million dollars at the box office, was originally produced to be a one-off film, with the vague hope it would become a franchise, with all seven of the original books by C.S. Lewis being realized as feature-length films.

But with a high-profile producer such as Johnson (Rain Man, Diner, My Dog Skip and Good Morning, Vietnam, among others) and director Andrew Adamson (Shrek) on board, why not take the route Peter Jackson did with Rings?

“What New Line and Bob Shea did with Lord of the Rings, basically green-lighting three movies at once, is unheard of. And in today’s Hollywood, it will never happen again. I just cannot imagine it,” Johnson said. “It’s too much of a financial commitment, and everybody will say, ‘Let’s just see if the first one’s successful first.’

“So, when we made The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, that’s all we were going to do. But then when it became as successful as it did, everybody immediately looked at Andrew Adamson and me and said: ‘OK. Where’s the next one? Let’s get going.’ I think once you start to look beyond the movie you’re making, you get in real trouble. You have to make that movie well first and then look up and say, ‘Let’s do another one.’”

The next one, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is already on the way and is in preproduction. The third in the series, which is chronologically the fifth, picks up three years after Prince Caspian, and sees the return of characters such as Lucy (Georgie Henley) and Edmund (Skandar Keynes), as well as Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes). Unlike Lion and the new Prince Caspian, the next film, slated for a May 2009 release, will take place on a boat. Contingent on ongoing success, according to an announcement by Johnson at the San Diego Comic-Con, the series will continue with new installments coming out every May.

“The challenge, in a sense, is how to connect it to the previous one, so you don’t feel like you’re seeing a completely different movie. So you want to make sure the audience feels it’s a part of this so-called franchise,” Johnson says.

“[But] you don’t have to worry about repeating yourself. I look at Harry Potter, for instance–I understand they’re all very different and all very successful–but, I’m sure one of the challenges is, ‘How do we make it different?’ We’ve got the same characters wearing the same costumes, they’re in the same school. How do you open it up and make it different so it doesn’t feel like it’s the same?

“In our case, C.S. Lewis has done such a good job of saying, ‘Look at this one [Prince Caspian]: This one takes place 1,300 years after the first one. Narnia’s completely different. It’s no longer pristine, it’s no longer in springtime. It’s gotten old and corrupted and been under siege.”

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Disney Channel Latin America constantly shows news and interviews of The Chronicles of Narnia and in NarniaSpain we recorded everything.

This time, dear Mexican journalist Carla Medina interviewed most of the cast and the producers of Narnia in the premiere of New York.

In one of the interviews Carla Medina asked Mark Johnson about the rumor that they would film the next film in Latin America and it responded that is truth, and that probably would film some scenes in our dear Argentina! In any case this still is doubtful.

In addition, as all we know, the pre-production in Mexico already began, and this was the cool new in Mexican newspapers. In them it was commented:

“80% of the film “The Chronicles of Narnia 3″ will be filmed in the sets of Popotla in Rosarito as the next year, and it will have a considered cost of 100 million dollars. Oscar Escobedo, representative of the tourism secretariat, affirmed that they are working with Walt Disney to make the film.”

Escobedo explained:

“Disney offers us the opportunity to Baja California to be recognized as a destiny for filmic projects: from Titanic, a so important event had never arrived.”

During a eighteen months, the team of “Narnia” will work in Bajos Estudios (before pertaining to Fox), where already “Titanic” and “Pearl Harbor” have been made.

“Some days ago it initiated the preproduction. With Narnia, we would be finishing around one hundred projects, between cortometrajes and shootings”.

video : http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=p_89H0Mrw68
entre: 3:07 and 3:23

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This is the fifth interview in the NYC Prince Caspian series. In this interview, we have producer Mark Johnson talking about the challenges that they faced with bringing Prince Caspian to the screen. He spoke of the difference between the filming of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and Prince Caspian, and the possibility of combining Caspian with Dawn Treader.

Mark Johnson: Who have you already talked to?

Paul Martin: Almost everybody

Mark Johnson: So, you all saw the movie last night?

Paul Martin: Yes, very much enjoyed it.

Mark Johnson: Oh, good, perfect.

Reporter: Tell me about the challenges going into a second one. The first is always hard because there are no expectations, but now you have so many expectations. What are those challenges?

Mark Johnson: You know, the first one we were so mindful of the readership, the loyal readership to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and didn’t think we could make a lot of changes. Because we almost felt that the audience was sort of daring us to make a movie that was faithful to the book. I’ve done a lot of movies based on books, from The Natural to Donnie Brasco to My Dog Skip to The Notebook, and a lot of them: we’ve made big changes. We made big changes to The Notebook and The Natural, for instance. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe we just didn’t feel that we could do it. And we were very, I felt, very faithful to it, and that’s what the audience told us. Even to the degree they’d say things like ‘gosh it was so great that you were so true to the book, loved the scene in the frozen waterfall,’ which of course is not in the book, but it just felt that it was in there. On this one, two things: one, we felt that we had the trust of the audience, that they knew that we were not trying to bastardize the books in any way. And we also felt that Prince Caspian the book didn’t really lend itself to a movie. Didn’t lay out as a movie. We were really perplexed. Andrew and I talked, briefly, about possibly combining it with The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. So we made some structural changes and elaborated on some things that are in the book. But I think we’re still very faithful to the characters, the journey of the characters, and to the themes of loss of faith and regaining faith that are in the book. But the readership is so strongly loyal and these books are so vivid in so many people’s minds that you just have to be careful about not playing around with them.

Reporter: Did you ever run into any licensing problems using the books? Or how does that work?

Mark Johnson: No, because the C.S. Lewis Estate works sort of hand in hand with us. And, in fact, Douglas Gresham, who is C.S. Lewis’ stepson, is a co-producer of the film with us. So they’re very involved. And they read all of the scripts and are involved in casting and luckily, we have a wonderful partnership with them and we like working with them a lot.

Reporter: You also have a partnership with Walden Media, with the travelling show with the costumes, and what have you. Why did you see a need to keep this going?

Mark Johnson: I’m not involved in that. I know that there’s, right now, a sort of exhibit, I think at Disney World. I’ve never been to it, but I’ve seen what it is. It’s supposed to be as much promoting the books as the movies. And the world of Narnia. And, as it turns out, these movies will be.. in a perfect world every two years we’ll have one out there. So it also keeps them alive.

Reporter: Were you surprised by how much money the first one made? Because there’s a good movie, and there’s a great movie, and then you go beyond into the stratosphere. How surprising was that for you?

Mark Johnson: I know.. I know.. It’s always surprising. People said ‘Oh, you must have seen it coming.’ You didn’t really. That’s a lot of money. We did three quarters of a billion dollars worldwide box office, you know, and we were successful everywhere. You can’t and I can’t take it for granted on this one. People said ‘Oh, of course you’re gonna do fine, you’re a sequel to a successful movie.’ I don’t think that’s true, and there are examples of movies that weren’t that successful. You still have to make a good movie. That kind of money is pretty staggering. But then again, I just heard that Iron Man did thirty-eight million dollars yesterday, so it’s sort of like… numbers.. it’s all sort of relative. You know… who knows. Most of the films I’ve produced have been successful, but nothing on that level. Rain Man did probably about four hundred million worldwide, or something like that, but most of them are much more modest than that. So all of a sudden to happen to do one in those numbers is both exhilarating and a little scary.

Reporter: Do you have a Narnia jet?

Mark Johnson: (laughter) Well, my yacht says The S.S. Narnia. No, there’s no yacht. No, a lot of people share in the success of it. For me, I’ve never done a movie like that. I would see some of those big fantasy effects films, and say ‘how do they do that? how do you do a second unit and a third unit, and visual effects where you have a character talking to a two-inch mouse which is really just a tennis ball on a wire that somebody’s moving around like that, you know. And so I just wanted to do it. And then I just fell in love with the world of Narnia. And what’s great about the franchise is that each book is so different from the one that preceded it and the one that follows it.

Reporter: You mentioned all the things you have to deal with, the CG effects and everything. How important is it to have somebody like Andrew who knows all that stuff?

Mark Johnson: Well, it’s remarkable, because often a director will be involved in a big visual effects film, and he or she will say to the visual effects supervisor: ‘can I do this?’ or ‘can I do that?’ Andrew knows those answers better than anybody. He has a great team around him, but he knows those answers. So that he is invaluable. And yet at the same time, I was telling somebody earlier, the most important thing is that you not… it’s all about characters. It’s all about characters in the story. And so the effects can be great, and the locations are great, but at the end of the day, those are the side-dishes. So what you have to keep mindful of, when you’re looking at dailies there on the set, is ‘do I really care? Is this moment coming across?’ Because it’s so easy to get distracted and say ‘oh good, that explosion went off beautifully there, and the camera moved like this and that.’ But it’s really in the face of an actor and whether or not that actor shows, or can somehow give you the feeling.. the sensation that you want out of him or her.

Reporter: I have no doubt this film will do well, but it is coming out in a summer that is ridiculously overloaded with potential blockbusters. The first movie came out over Christmas. Was there any kind of hesitency to release it in the summer? Especially like this one?

Mark Johnson: Well the first movie made sense for Christmas, and not just the snow. Father Christmas and all of that. It was very much a Christmas film. We were told at the time we were gonna get stomped by King Kong. And we ended up taking care of the big ape. Ironically, the only place in the world that King Kong did better than The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is in New Zealand. Which.. Andrew Adamson is from New Zealand, as is Peter Jackson, so I don’t think Andrew took it well. (laughter) But, you know, it’s ideally, I think the adage, or what people want to believe, is that successful movies beget successful movies, so people start going to the movies again, and yeah. It’s really scary. I look at Iron Man is going to do over a hundred million dollars this weekend, and next weekend is Speed Racer. The next weekend is us. The next weekend is Indiana Jones. And there’s The Dark Knight, and a bunch of really good movies coming out there. So hopefully we’ll stick around. There’s no doubt that Indiana Jones will be number one movie of Memorial Day. So we’ll see. It is scary.

Reporter: Because you mentioned the worldwide success of the films, do you notice more of a fervency in the fanbase in England as opposed to the United States? Or is it pretty common across the board?

Mark Johnson: I think it’s pretty common across the board. You know what’s interesting: New Zealand, when we did The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, all of our crew members had read it as children. C.S. Lewis was one of the staples. It’s not quite as across the board in the U.S. But in England and Australia and New Zealand, everybody has read those. And I don’t know if that’s true of just fantasy books in general. And a lot of people have said to me over the past six months, ‘aren’t you worried that fantasy films are falling apart?’ And there are a couple of movies that they could point to. And I always think that those movies just didn’t have the characters, and consequently the heart, that hopefully we have. Because at the end of the day, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the scene that’s most important to me is not the big battles, and flying this and talking lions. It’s really Lucy meeting Mr. Tumnus, and you say that’s sort of the heart and soul of the movie and that’s why the movie works.

Reporter: Andrew said that he had signed on to produce the next one, too. Will you still be a producer, and how do you feel about the next director?

Mark Johnson: Well I think that the perfect person to direct the next movie would be Andrew. And Andrew’s not going to do it. So you say, alright, who’s the perfect person after Andrew? And Michael Apted is a director I admire a lot and he’s very strong with performances and consequently story. And I think The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a perfect movie for him to be doing. And, I think, it’s not that he hasn’t done big visual effects films – he did a James Bond film – but I’m excited about that. And of course Andrew will still be involved. One of the smartest things they did on Harry Potter was have Alfonso Cuarón direct the third one, and in many ways he was not a likely candidate; he had just done Y tu mamá también. He and I had done A Little Princess together, so I knew that he would be perfect for that, but I’m not sure that the world did.

Reporter: What was it about Ben Barnes that fit the role of Prince Caspian?

Mark Johnson: I think it’s…in a strange way you needed to buy him more, as a character who wasn’t sure of himself – who didn’t think he was a prince or a king – than, when at the end of the film, when he becomes that person. In many ways, the key moment is when Aslan says ‘rise kings and queens of Narnia’ and the four Pevensies get up and Caspian stays down, and he says, ‘all of you’ and Caspian says ‘I do not think I am ready.’ I like that Caspian, and that’s what we needed in it. We didn’t need just a good-looking, heroic, self confident young man, but a man who was, I guess, vulnerable. And we saw hundreds and hundreds of actors for that part. And Andrew had originally thought that the Telmarines would be this pirate race, so he liked the idea that they had a Mediterranean accent. Spanish, Italian, French – somewhere in there. So we saw a lot of boys and young men from Spain, Mexico, Italy and it was hard. You need the character, you need the physicality, you need the vulnerability, you need the ability to play that accent. And then, also, in some cases, also be able to speak English well.

Reporter: With the success of the first movie being so huge, was there ever any danger of this one having too much money available to you?

Mark Johnson: Well, that’s an interesting.. there’s never enough money, no matter what you do. I executive produced a film called Ballast that won the Sundance Best Director award, this year, and we did it for nine hundred thousand dollars, and there wasn’t enough money there, and all of a sudden you’re doing a movie that’s seemingly hundreds of millions of dollars and there’s never enough money. But the beauty of making films and not having enough money, from a producer’s standpoint, is that it forces you to be resourceful and inventive, as opposed to, ‘okay, we’ll just sort of throw money at the problem.’ And yet, when you are in this world and you are creating characters, believable characters, it just unfortunately costs a lot of money. There are people who do it, you know, people I’m constantly trying to learn from. I’ve become good friends with Guillermo del Toro because Pan’s Labyrinth was made for a lot less money, and it’s visual effects were pretty remarkable. But, you know, Aslan has to be completely believable. If you don’t believe that’s a real lion, I guess until Liam Neeson’s voice comes out of his mouth, then we’ve failed.

Reporter: At the end, I was getting ready to scream, because ‘Where’s Aslan?’ You guys were really able to milk it, and keep the movie exciting to the very end! Because I was looking for this lion to come.

Mark Johnson: I know… I know… I’m really pleased to hear that. It’s in the book. It’s a hard one, because Lucy’s sister and brothers may be dying in the middle of a battle, and yet she’s having a conversation in a field, you know, with Aslan. And yet, he comes in and wakes the trees and saves the day.

Reporter: Thank you!

Mark Johnson: Thanks everyone, and so long!

Up next, the final interview in the series, before we move onto the next day in the NYC Prince Caspian series. Look for the interview with Ben Barnes, Prince Caspian himself, soon!

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Going to New York City for the first time can be pretty overwhelming. Going to New York City to see Prince Caspian for the first time is another thing entirely. Friday started out with a stroll through the city, learning where things were, which way it is to the cinema and figuring out where to go in the meantime.

It was all very surreal, as I was excited to see the film, but still overwhelmed by the size of the city.

We arrived to the film about an hour before the scheduled showtime. I wasn’t scheduled to check-in until 6:30, so we waited around a while. I met a bunch of people while we waited, including Barbara Vancheri: the Arts & Entertainment Writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She was easy to talk to, and not at all like most of the critics that I had met previous to this.

After a short while, we were able to check-in, and were given our passes. Up a couple of escalators, we found our way into a huge screening room. There had to be nearly 1000 seats in that auditorium. The entire middle section of the screening was taped off for us to sit, and I found a spot toward the center of a row at eye level.

It was there that I met Fantasia-kitty from NarniaWeb, sitting one row in front of me. We started talking, which was cool, because my friends went up to sit with the crowd from TRL. She was really nice, and easy to talk to. She pulled out a notepad, but never wrote a thing. A little while later, someone asked if I’d be willing to move up, as they needed the row that I was sitting in for something. I moved up, and a little while later, something incredible happened.

In walked Peter Dinklage. Trumpkin, himself! But that’s not all. Many more members of the cast started to file into the row behind. Ben Barnes, Georgie Henley, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell… it seemed to never end.

Looking to the left, there was Mark Johnson: the producer.

A few minutes later, director Andrew Adamson walked to the front with Mark Johnson to introduce the film. I had expected, perhaps, a video introduction, but the man himself was standing before us. And he announced that he only finished the film two days before, and it would be the first time that the cast has seen it. He said that they were pretty apprehensive about it, as this was the first real test of the film in its’ final form.

He sat down and the lights went out and the film began. Two and a half hours later, the lights came up and I sat there, trying to figure out what I had just seen. I knew that I loved it, but that’s all that I knew.

I took a stroll down to introduce myself to the director. I don’t know it if I was starstruck or what, but after I introduced myself to him, he asked me what I thought and I could say nothing. I was so impressed with what he had created that I could barely figure out the vocabulary to express my thoughts.

He was clearly delighted. You’ll have to read my full review on Friday.

Talking to him for a while, he was a very genuine man, and very kind. I also met Mark Johnson and by then I was finally starting to figure out my thoughts. Next, we made our way out of the auditorium, where we met none other than writer Christopher Markus. A true gentleman and a very hilarious man, he quipped: “You’re not supposed to know who I am!”

We talked a bit about the film and then Andrew walked over and said that a shot was missing from one of the reels, and it was the only reel that was missing that single shot. When I asked what that shot had, we joked about how Andrew was trying to be a bit more edgy as a director, and it really was a good thing the shot was missing. It involved a waterfall and the cast, and that’s all that I’ll say here. Needless to say, the shot turned out to actually be an establishing shot or some such. Not nearly as exciting as our own imaginations.

After this, it was back to the hotel to get some sleep before press interviews would start at around 9am.

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