Fit for a Prince: Andrew Adamson on 'Caspian'

ANDREW ADAMSON, the director of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," learned a key piece of knowledge from that blockbuster film: "Never do it again."

But here he is, three years later, on the eve of his next impeding "Narnia" blockbuster, "Prince Caspian." He said, laughing, that he had to "put that aside."

The lesson he did apply to this sequel was to make Narnia more of a player in the film. Adamson went back to some classic films, like "Lawrence of Arabia," and looked for what made those films so epic. The biggest key for him was the expansive wide shots.

He coupled that with fewer computer generated environments, instead choosing to construct some giant sets, from a town to a 60-meter-tall castle, which freed up his ability to direct without the constraints of the computer.

"There was a lot I wanted to do more in the camera," Adamson said. "So, when I was shooting, I wasn't thinking about, 'Oh, if I look that way, I'm going to spend $10,000.'"

Adamson, who also directed the first two "Shrek" movies, didn't abandon CG (computer generation) altogether, noting that most scenes included a CG character somewhere.

"There were whole sequences where there was no visual effects, and it was sort of liberating," he said. "I'd like to do an entire improved film that could go completely to the other extreme."

For now, he'll have to settle with using a lot more locations to forgo some CG, and that includes some luscious locales from his native New Zealand.

"New Zealand was discovered relatively late, in terms of mass population," Adamson said. "There's the whole of the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand that's been untouched. They're trees there that are thousands of years old. So, there's a look that comes with that age, of these enormous trees and that natural beauty that you just don't find in a lot of the world."

As for "Prince Caspian," Adamson adapted the story from C.S. Lewis' book, reworking the structure from a lot of flashbacks to a more linear story.

"I really treated it as if this was a real story that happened and C.S. Lewis wrote a kids book about it and I was telling the movie of the real event," he said. "So, largely, it was about taking the ideas from the book and exaggerating, extrapolating, exploring, making them all three-dimensional."

Photo courtesy Disney