Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely the two writers that shared duties with Andrew Adamson on translating Prince Caspian from a book into a screenplay. This two gentlemen were an absolute joy to talk to and I hope to see them again soon. They’re really intelligent and definitely know the world of Narnia at least as well as the most die-hard of fans, if not better. This interview does feature some book/movie spoilers, so if you don’t wish to know the fates of some of the characters, you’d be better served by avoiding those areas.
Stephen McFeely was the first to enter the room, as Christopher Markus was indisposed at the moment.
Stephen McFeely: If you give me a microphone, I can go in there.
(laughter)
Stephen McFeely: Where are you all from?
NarniaFans.com’s Paul Martin: Michigan
Stephen McFeely: Yeah?
Paul Martin: NarniaFans.com
Stephen McFeely: Oh Really!?
Paul Martin: yeah..
Reporter: He’s really going to take you to task, then.
(laughter)
Stephen McFeely: No..hey, I have much love for NarniaFans and Narniaweb and that’s fine.
Paul Martin: It’s fun stuff!
Stephen McFeely: It is thorough stuff.
Christopher Markus: Now that I’ve come out of the bathroom to a room of reporters… I am mortified.
(laughter)
Christopher Markus: But you’ll get better answers this way. (looks at me) Hello, again!
Paul Martin: Hello! (explaining) We met last night.
Christopher Markus: We met last night at the screening!
Stephen McFeely: oh okay.
Christopher Markus: It terrified me to meet the internet in person. He just came up to me and knew who I was, which scared me.
Reporter: You mentioned having much love for the websites, I mean, how when you have a book like this that is so beloved by so many people: how great a task is that to have to bring that to the screen?
Stephen McFeely: Oh you mean to worry about the fervor. You know, you try not to worry. And when I say I have much love and I know of the websites.. I will be honest I used to check them half way regularly.. and then when I would read something about how I was an idiot for doing whatever, it would ruin my day… ‘come on, you’re thirty-eight, why are you doing this? Be a regular person, don’t look at that.’ So I stopped looking at it for along time, and then just recently looked up things again, so… Glumpuddle… I have issues with you… (laughter) We can only do.. we can only concentrate on page seventy-two, you know.. and if we worry about everything, and Lewis fans and movie fans and box office and all that stuff that we have zip-o control over: I think we’ll go down in a ball of flames. So we are workers, worker bees working on page seventy-two, then page seventy-three and so-forth.
Reporter: Is it ever a helpful resource, though, like if you’re at a point where you have to decide what piece you’re going to keep and what piece you have to get rid of, is it a helpful resource to have all of that out there?
Christopher Markus: You know, potentially, but that’s a risky road to go down, because then you are putting the story in the hands of the public which is where it will wind up and where it should wind up. But…
Stephen McFeely: I would argue it’s not the public, because the movie has to serve several masters. As important as die-hard fans are casual fans, so that if you take a sampling, a really small sampling of die-hard very vocal fans on a particular website, you’re gonna know that group whose faces I don’t know and whose names they don’t give, you know, and they’re a resource that I have to trust implicitly. Well, you can’t. You can’t trust people with no names implicitly. You get a vibe, absolutely, so you know that certain changes, okay: that group is gonna have a problem with that, but I really hope if they just watch all the way to the end, they’ll be cool with it. Obviously, because there are some that are strict Lewis textualists and if you change a word, you’re betraying something, and you know, it’s a movie and it’s gotta get changed.
Christopher Markus: One of these days we’ll make a movie exactly as how he wrote it and then we’ll see how much you’ll like it. (laughter) But in the end the ultimate master is..
Stephen McFeely: Andrew
Christopher Markus: ..is the story.
Stephen McFeely: Oh, yeah, the story.
(laughter)
Christopher Markus: And if it’s not working in the structure we’ve set up, it’s gotta go, because it’s going to throw the machine off kilter. Because the book, you could put anything in the book, and it will not suffer. And it’s infinitely variable and you can have anything you want in there and imagine anything you want in there and everyone whose read it has imagined a different thing. We are, for better or for worse, and this is changing as DVDs and the internet come along, but we are making a fixed version of it, and somebody’s baby is going to be tossed out. And we apologize before hand.
Stephen McFeely: The baby stays though.. in the film.
Reporter: How do you guys work together on this as co-writers? How do your visions come together?
Stephen McFeely: We’re pretty obsessive-compulsive.
Christopher Markus: I’m pretty, he’s obsessive-compulsive.
(laughter)
Stephen McFeely: As we work on anything, and it worked this way with Andrew too, just as sort of a third triangle. We outline the heck out of everything, so that, particularly in an adaptation like this, every scene and every half-way interesting line is a card on the dining room floor. And then those are all moved around and you’re trying to find thru-lines and see how many characters are in each scene, etc., which scenes duplicate each other, you know and so we’ve gotta pick one of those because that’s just killing us, and where you need to add and where you need to subtract. And so once we have an agreement on an outline, and that agreement is between us and amongst us and Andrew and the powers that be with the pocket-books, we then will write the first draft, and that’ll be an ugly sort-of Frankenstein draft where we repeat things and we’re boring cause we split stuff up. So I’ll take one through six and he’ll take seven through twelve. But once we’re done with that, then we’re revising the heck out of it together and that’s just, sort of, the long, painstaking working over each other’s shoulders and re-writing. And that’s all complicated, in this instance, by Andrew.
Christopher Markus: Enhanced!
Stephen McFeely: Enhanced. So we would spend long summer months in 2006 in his office. Andrew’s at a laptop, I’m at a laptop, Chris is at a laptop and we’re sort of just doing this on one particular scene and then..
Christopher Markus: I was checking my e-mail..
Stephen McFeely: And then that gets sent around the aether and by the time we’re done with the day, the scene might be close to done and it’ll have, you know I don’t know who wrote what line anymore and I have been working with Chris for like twelve years and I don’t know what lines I write anymore.
Reporter: Since there was a precedence as far as the film is concerned did you feel any added pressure when you sat down to write this?
Christopher Markus: Well, I mean you don’t wanna make a worse movie. For this one I didn’t feel added pressure, I felt actually kind of, it was exciting in that we’d never written another movie about the same people before. We got to consider that entire experience as back story and see how it would effect the mental state of the characters in this one. So it’s not like kids go on another adventure, they fight another bad guy… it’s what happens when you had that first movie happen to you and then you went home. And that was the really fascinating thing and that was a kind of treat to be handed that. It’s like, okay, probably never again in my life am I going to have a character who’s a king for fifteen years and now is fifteen years old again.
Stephen McFeely: So that was our jumping off point, character-wise, for when they get back. Some are relieved, some are resentful, we always wanted to make the four kids, even though they have to do the same thing and have the same goals, we always wanted them to react differently, or to varying degrees of the same thing.
Reporter: What were the main themes you wanted to bring out?
Stephen McFeely: Well, Lewis is big on what happens when you’re not vigilant about faith and I think Narnia falls away and is available to be invaded by Telmarines because they lose Aslan. He fades into their rear-view mirror. So that’s certainly in there, and that’s important to Doug Gresham and important to the book.
Christopher Markus: For the kids, particularly Peter and Caspian, it’s pride. They think they should be in one place and they are in another, and they are trying to figure out, as we all are, ‘am I not there because people are keeping me down, or am I not there because I’m not that guy yet?’ And that’s an interesting place to be where you’re biting off more than you can chew. And then as Peter does in the movie, and Caspian does, failing at it. And that’s meaty character stuff.
Reporter: How tough is it when you have two heroes like that? You have to balance who gets what victory and who has the most screen time.
Christopher Markus: It’s tricky and plus you throw Edmund, Susan and Lucy in there.
Stephen McFeely: Who’s gettin’ the short shrift?
Christopher Markus: But we were sittin’ in the hotel last night with Anna and the rest of the kids and we realized that Anna has the highest body count in the movie. You know, you have three big action hero boys and the girl has killed more people than anybody else.
Stephen McFeely: (laughs) Where were you, last night?
Christopher Markus: Well, you went off, I had just a wild night with movie stars. But it is tricky and we tried our best to embrace that because normally you wouldn’t get two..
Stephen McFeely: People occupying the same ground.
Christopher Markus: Yeah, occupying the same ground and we decided to embrace that and have them tussle over occupying the same ground.
Stephen McFeely: Because in the book, I think Prince Caspian is maybe thirteen, I mean it’s a much younger version and for a couple of reasons it made sense to make him closer to Peter’s age. A: for this sort of rivalry which we thought was interesting and B: you’re gonna do Dawn Treader, you know, the fifteen year old captain of a ship whose gotta fall in love with the girl on the island… I mean, the whole thing needed to be aged up for purposes of believability and commerce. And by the way, although I love all of our actors, the older an actor you get, the better an actor they usually are. And I think everyone is really good this time. So that’s why, for any particular fans, that’s why he’s been aged up. And by doing that, you’ve got two guys who occupy the same space and want the same thing, and then you have to deal with that. They’re gonna rumble.
Christopher Markus: We have three kings, two queens.
Reporter: You mentioned the next movie. How deep into that are you guys, I mean with the mention at the end so we already know whose gonna be in it and whose not gonna be in it. How deep into that are you?
Stephen McFeely: A couple drafts in.
Christopher Markus: Half-way across the ocean, somewhere. You never know until you’re done.
Stephen McFeely: Let’s say our feet are wet.
Reporter: Does it get easier each time? I mean, did you find it easer going into this one a second time?
Stephen McFeely: Well, a little less nerve-wracking. I mean, when we got the job for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I allowed myself to be petrified for a good forty-eight hours and then sort of had a mental break and decided that the page was everything and I was gonna do page seventy-two and that was it.
Christopher Markus: Which is why page seventy-one: terrible.
Stephen McFeely: It’s terrible. Seventy-two is shiny. But you’re comfortable. All the same people are back. I liked working with Mark and Andrew and everyone.
Reporter: Not Mr. Tumnus.
Stephen McFeely: Oh Mr. Tumnus, oh, those people. You know, by virtue of a thousand years, unless you cryogenically froze Mr. Tumnus under the ice.
Christopher Markus: It could happen!
Stephen McFeely: James McAvoy was gonna go on and do some other sexy things.
Christopher Markus: And he seems to have done well for himself.
Stephen McFeely: But certainly that question comes up. Can you do anything to have his long lost brother twice removed a thousand years later and it’s just.. no. And the people involved in this movie are pretty good about not doing that kinda thing and say ‘listen, we’ve got seven big books. Let’s do ‘em the best we can. They’re good enough. You know, if we lose this beloved character, you’re gonna get a whole… I think Peter Dinklage steals every scene he’s in, you know… so you’ve got a new one.
Christopher Markus: Particularly, I mean, in terms of does it get easier, the books are so different is part of what will make this, hopefully long-living, series different from other franchises if you will, is that they really are pretty different movies. Different tones, each one. This is a bigger, more violent, more conflicted movie than the first one, which is a sort of idealic kind of thing. Which is from the books. And then you have Dawn Treader, which is on the ocean, it’s a completely different setting. So each one has proved to be a different task.
Reporter: Is Dawn Treader the last one that involves the kids?
Stephen McFeely: They introduce their cousin, I mean they sort of swap out, but yes, Lucy and Edmund for all intents and purposes, it would be their last go around and they bring their annoying cousin, Eustace, on the boat. And then they leave and then in Silver Chair, which will be the fourth one, Eustace comes back and he brings a new friend, Jill.
Christopher Markus: But then again, when you get to The Horse and His Boy, that takes place during their original reign from the first one. So you’d need to somehow feed the kids some sort of drug that would prevent them from growing which I don’t think is legal anymore.
Stephen McFeely: That’s why you shoot in New Zealand.
Christopher Markus: Exactly. And then Last Battle everybody comes back.
Stephen McFeely: Yes.
Christopher Markus: So, it’s always kind of rotating around. We’ll figure it out.
Reporter: What was the budget on this one?
Stephen McFeely: Oh no..
Christopher Markus: I have no idea.
Stephen McFeely: I have no idea.
(laughter)
Paul Martin (to Stephen): Nice to meet you.
Stephen McFeely: It was nice to meet you, take care.
Paul Martin (to Chris): Good seeing you again.
Christopher Markus: Sir! Say good things.
Paul Martin (to Chris): You know I will.
After the interviews, we were handed a bunch of Narnia things including the soundtrack, official movie companion, a t-shirt, a copy of the book and one of the toy swords: Prince Caspian’s. Ben Barnes hadn’t yet gotten one, so he took the chance to get one, and then he promptly swung it at my neck. We joked around a bit and it was really fun. It’s too bad I didn’t get a picture of that, but I did get one picture with him.
For now, I’d like to direct your attention to a room I spent a lot of time in. Upstairs, there was a room dedicated to the Narnia Exhibition that is opening in Arizona on June 7th. This thing is going to be awesome.
You’ll also be given the opportunity to lift up the armor of a Telmarine soldier with the help of someone there. The armor is really pretty heavy!
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