Adamson bewitched by chance

Andrew Adamson

For someone who doesn't like to read about himself, Andrew Adamson knows quite a bit about celebrity. He had a taste of the mayhem that attends Mike Myers and Cameron Diaz while directing them in the Shrek films. He watched as friend Peter Jackson tried to shuck off The Lord of The Rings fanfare.

So when the hype began to mount over Adamson's big-screen adaptation of C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, he gave his four young stars a pep talk.

Celebrity is a strange beast, he explained, "and any time you guys wanna come over and change nappies you're welcome to".

Dressed casually, long blond hair flopping over his shoulders, a few more wrinkles around his eyes since last time he was home, it's apparent this big-time New Zealand director puts his money where his mouth is.

After three and a half years of toil on a project he has lived and breathed, he's preparing for his next big challenge: the Adamson family.

Less than 72 hours after arriving in the country he's jetting off to London for the premiere, taking along his wife and and their two daughters, both under 3.

"When you have children they demand your attention and you want to give them your attention. It's a form of relaxation and I found it really helps me have a more normal life."

It's no secret that this is the part he considers the least normal, where he becomes the star, fronts up to the press and talks about himself. But he is also confident he's achieved what he set out to.

"I really did try to recreate my memory of the book and the impression that I got from it. I read it at 8. And I do feel like this movie is reflective of that. It's very much what I imagined."

It's not always easy to reconcile this image of Adamson - polite, calm, softly spoken - with the behemoth Disney creation he helped to spawn.

Nor is the irony lost on him that Shrek poked gentle fun at Disney's storytelling conventions.

Producer Mark Johnson says: "If you put him in a room with 20 people and say, 'All right, which one's the film director?' he's not the first one you'd pick.

"But he's a very secure man without being cocky or arrogant. But there was no doubt he was in charge.

"Andrew was at a point early on when it was clear, and not in an argumentative way, that if he couldn't put it together the way he needed to, he was perfectly happy walking away."

Adamson wanted to make a film based on his memories of the book, a tale that is epic in nature yet flimsy in the flesh. "I tried to imagine if C.S. Lewis had written a children's book of a real story, then the film is the real story."

Whereas the book skims over the reasons for the children going to live with the professor, Adamson thrusts viewers into wartime London. And the battle scenes of Narnia, fought and won within a few pages of the book, are realised on screen in Brave Heart proportions. Viewers might also be surprised to see Father Christmas haul up in his sleigh and give the children presents fit for a medieval army, a cameo Adamson found alarming as a child.

Later he learned that Santa's inclusion in the book almost ended Lewis' friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien. "But he's there because Lewis felt so passionate about it."

He also injects a sense of personality and fun into the Enid Blyton-style British characters.

It's strange to think Adamson might have ended up as just another Narnia fan going along to see the movie. When he says he started film-making by accident, he means it.

He was 11 when his father got a job in Papua New Guinea, and the family moved. Adamson has fond recollections of a "very free" upbringing, the motorbike rides through the bush.

At high school he was good at both arts and sciences, and decided on a career in architecture. He was so keen to take both maths and art subjects that he had to miss classes on alternate weeks. "I guess they assumed that you wouldn't do both."

Then everything changed. The day before he was to enrol for an architecture degree, he broke his leg in a car accident. And that was the end of his dream - until his mother spotted an ad for an animation school in the paper.

"I've always been someone who's liked a lot of things but never particularly excelled at any one thing because I've always got the hang of it and then moved on to other things.

"Film-making kind of allows for that. I get to deal with music, imagery, people, storytelling, writing. It's appropriate for people who don't have a big attention span because you get to do a little bit of everything."

Although much has been made of the risks involved in hiring Adamson - this is his first feature film working with people, not animated characters - Johnson says he never doubted Adamson could pull it off. Aside from the clever animation and heartfelt performances the Shrek director roused from Myers, Diaz and Eddie Murphy, the sequel, last year's No 1 box office hit, proved he had the mettle to turn one triumph into two.

"I knew from the very beginning that he was the man because he told me the story of what he wanted the movie to be, the movie that he described to me was definitely the movie that I wanted to see," Johnson says.

"I wasn't sure how the book was going to translate into a movie. And he told me how he would do it."

Originally, Adamson planned to shoot the whole film in central Europe during winter - before realising he couldn't really have an 8-year-old in freezing temperatures for any length of time.

Then it clicked. He could create the magic of Narnia in his home country and film chunks of the film in Czechoslovakia where the snow would be deep. Aside from New Zealand's beautiful scenery, the enthusiastic, well-trained crew from The Lord of The Rings and a 12.5 per cent rebate scheme for big-budget films - there were plenty of personal benefits. The children's grandparents would be around.

But as the excitement mounted once again in the little industry that could, Adamson was privately fighting his fears. On occasions he was "terrified", a feeling that intensified when he realised just how high everyone's expectations were. Then there was the prospect of actually working with the children.

"I didn't know if I'd like it, whether I could relate to them, whether they could relate to me, all those things you need to be able to do as a director."

Although intensive workshopping helped them to bond, there were other frustrations. It rained for several weeks without stopping. Even sheltered in the studio warehouses in Auckland the rain would pound noisily on the tin roof.

"As a director you like to have control, and you just have no control over that. It can change the entire movie. Suddenly you don't have enough time to shoot the scene. You take a scene that was designed for summer and you're shooting it overcast."

It wasn't until Adamson saw the first cut of the film, that his worries dissipated.

"I thought, okay, this film's going to work. I've got to make it better, but at least it doesn't suck. That's a big moment for a director. You kind of go, phew."

No one wants to say how much they expect the $NZ219 million film to gross.

The film would at least need to break even for another of the seven chapters to be made, says Johnson, modestly downplaying expectations for it to double that outside the US, where the books are better known.

Decisions are yet to be made over whether or not another film will be made, and if Adamson will direct.

It's likely, Adamson says, but things would need to change were it to be shot here.

He'd want proper sound stages for one thing.

But for Adamson, success will be measured by how closely his vision matches that of fellow Lewis fans.

If that happens, is he likely to follow in Peter Jackson's footsteps and overhaul his image? "No. I mean you probably have to be more careful because people are watching but I try and just be who I am.

"If people don't like it, too bad. As I say, I don't read much of it so I don't really know if people like me. I don't want to know."