[IMG:L]Prince Caspian could be starting a trend. Producer Mark Johnson says if the second installment of The Chronicles of Narnia series does as well as the first, fans can expect one every May until the seven-part series is complete. “As long as the audience still loves them,” they will keep making them he says. “If the audience doesn’t like this one then we may be in trouble doing all of them. That’s why the intention is to do all seven. Whether or not we do, will depend on the audience.”
Hollywood.com: With the success of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe did you feel like Prince Caspian had to be bigger and better?
Mark Johnson: The assumption is that you’ve got to be bigger. You know the first one was really successful and I just heard myself in a film piece we did say “Oh, it’s got to be bigger or better than the last one.” It’s got to be as good certainly. You don’t want to make a movie that’s not as satisfying, but I think bigger is probably wrong. I don’t know if an audience expects [there to be more] effects or more complicated, but it’s like anything else you still have to make a good movie.
HW: Will there be a darker, grittier tone to this movie?
MJ: I think that’s true…this is a little bit darker. It’s a little bit more adult. It involves some tricky stuff, some things that Caspian discovers about himself and about his uncle and so it is by definition a little bit darker and then I think Andrew [Adamson] wanted to test himself. I think that he did a somewhat traditional telling of the last one and I think he wanted to explore a little bit more and so he used the fact that it was a little darker as a jumping off place.
HW: Are there differences between the book and script? Did you like one more than the other?
MJ: I think the book was hard, a third of the book takes place in flashback and we just realized that couldn’t happen in the movie so we restructured it and, not that I want to say we improved upon it, we didn’t. But for a movie, I think it’s slightly different and I think I’m going to find the movie a little bit more satisfying than the book. And you know obviously there are seven books, you can’t like them all the exact same amount and some are better than others.
HW: Do you think fans of the book are going to be happy with the movie?
MJ: I think so because…it’s not like we’ve done terrible injustice to it …I’ve done a number of movies based on books and some of them we made big changes to. I did this movie called The Notebook and we changed it a lot. My Dog Skip and even The Natural were criticized for changing the ending. I don’t think any of them were as faithful to the source material as The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe… and the same thing with Caspian.
[IMG:R]HW: What do you think the fans will be most excited about?
MJ: It’s a lot of action; it has lots of thrills to it. I think the last one was really charming and sort of magical and I think this one is a little bit more in your face. And we’re still telling a Narnia story so it’s not like we’re doing something more adult just to be adult, but I think the trick is embracing this book and still making it a part of, not just the chronicles, but the mythology of Narnia and respecting all of that because it’s all interconnected and all of the characters have precedence in the other books.
HW: What can you tell us about the new characters?
MJ: We haven’t even seen the character that’s probably going to be the most memorable…Reepicheep, who’s this 2-foot-tall mouse. So we don’t even know who’s doing his voice yet but he’s a great character. And the challenge is Reepicheep is a very honorable character who is offended when anybody says “Oh what a dear little creature,” and because as far as he’s concerned, he’s 6-feet-tall and as noble and as sort of heroic as anyone else. So I think you’ve got to be careful that you don’t play him, the character, for laughs but that what he ends up doing is very funny.
HW: With a franchise like this, do you always find yourself looking ahead?
MJ: Well, here’s the crazy thing, I’ve been on the set of Caspian and we shot for 105, 106 days. I’ve maybe missed 15, but I just missed some because I went to Malta and Spain to scout locations with Michael Apted for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. So I’m a little schizophrenic right now. It’s like which characters? And I’m talking to William Moseley and Anna Popplewell who play Peter and Susan and they’re not in the next one. And so I’m starting to talk to them about it and “Oh, that’s right, you’re not there.” And then I catch myself. It’s almost like I’m teasing them…Yeah, you’re aware of it and there’s certain things that you want to do. I was desperate because I so love Mr. Tumnus in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Andrew and I talked about was there any way in the world to put him in Prince Caspian? And you can’t. It is 1300 years later in Narnia. There’s no way to say, “Oh, he’s still alive.” So then we thought, “Could his great, great, great grandson…” and no, not really. And so in that sense you’re aware of the whole fabric of the seven books.
[IMG:L]HW: How do you feel about Michael Apted directing the third film?
MJ: I’m really excited about him. I’ve been a fan of his for a while. And I think if you look at his strengths, they’re very different from Andrew‘s strengths and I think that’ll work for it. I think one of the best things to happen to the Harry Potter movies is to switch directors, Alfonso Cuaron and Mike Newell were very different and each one I think in a way even better than one…I just think they got better. They benefited from it.
