Oscar winning effects supervisor Richard Taylor on Prince Caspian, Narnia and being a momentary expert.
You’re an expert in design, anthropology and anatomy. What is your true love?
“We call all ourselves momentary experts, because you’ve got to get this incredible wealth of knowledge for a very short moment in time and then the moment the movie finishes — because your cup is in overflow, your cup of a brain — you can only get more drips of water to flow if you let something flow out … My particular love is the creative arts and that’s if we have any business plan it is that – pursue the creative first and hopefully good business will follow because if everyone is inspired by the creative journey then good stuff will come along and there is no great plan to it really. I love sculptural arts as you see around you (pointing at the collectibles on the shelves). Everything that we do ends up in some way being conceptualized sculpturally in the work shop now. I always dreamed of being surrounded by sculpture and the workshop now is dense with sculpture.”
When you created Narnia, did you draw first from the book or from the script?
“Narnia was a really interesting film to design. People say often after Lord of the Rings, Narnia surely would be a bit of a dawdle, but of course it is not because CS Lewis comes from a very different place … It interests me the first place that we went was to the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. I had grown up on this little farm in New Zealand and the one piece of art work that I had was the triptychs Garden of Earthly Delights above my bed and I used to fascinate at the incredible inventions of Hieronymus Bosch and so when we came to make the movie and design this whole world and Andrew referenced Hieronymus Bosch it was like a door opening back to my childhood.”
You also used the idea of world design with Lord of the Rings. How was this different?
“It is different from Lord of the Rings too, because Lord of the Rings is a completely lived in world. You’ve got to feel like when you entered the world it is existed for thousands of years before. Everything is worn, is in some way worn out or starting to feel aged. But in Narnia things are fresh and new and bright and the spring is coming and you have to give the feeling that the children are experiencing a world that is just beginning to bud and that was a delightful challenge.”
Every project presents a new challenge, what was it on this project?
“Prince Caspian was surprisingly challenging at a design level, because in the first film the core of the world was the Narnians and the miracle and the creative excitement of delivering this group of highly-sophisticated speaking animals and putting them into believable armor that was emblazoned with their culture. Then you had Prince Caspian and all that’s gone that’s been swept away by bitter in-fighting and political intrigue and men overbearing the natural world and all the motifs he wrote of so beautifully. Suddenly your initially developing a war movie, making a movie about war and factions and all of the ceremonial pomp and arrogance that goes along with a dominating race of people.”
Was it hard to let go of the first film?
“It was a challenge not to keep thinking and reminiscing on everything that was the Narnians, when we came to approach the Narnians we had to draw them right back to a guerilla fighting force, so they are primitively armored at times, they are crudely equipped and that was a challenge psychologically of letting go of those beautiful characters that had been developed so much. I thought that Prince Caspian as a film was astounding. I love it. I’ve seen it twice now, the second time with my six-year-old boy who is completely enraptured by the world and I felt that the movie, the second film was a very strong and forward movement from the first film. I thought the children had found a completely believable place in the world and I found it to be a very adult movie, I loved it. I found it to be very sophisticated and didn’t trivialize the motifs we were trying to communicate.”