By Jenny Halper in New York City

When I met Andrew Adamson on the set of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” last fall, he was surrounded by stone statues, tangled electronics, and countless crew members. The voice of Aslan hadn’t yet been cast, he’d been working on the movie round the clock, and he seemed- to put it mildly- like he was carrying the weight of an entire fantasy world on his creative shoulders. This November, a much more relaxed Adamson basked in the anticipated released of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” and took time to talk to press.

Q: What made you choose this film for your live action debut?

ANDREW: The fact that I grew up with it as a child, I fell in love with this story, this world. I read the book at eight years old, and I read all seven of them and reluctantly got the end of the last one thinking ‘I’m going to have to start all over again.’

Q: Had you seen the animated version?

ANDREW: I saw that when I was young and I went back and saw it again as an adult. I wouldn’t say it was well made, but they made some decisions that were strange and yet I understand- for instance, Mr. Tumnus was dancing around on the lamppost being incredibly silly- and at the same time I know the goal was to liven up the story, which is a somber book in many ways. I had the same challenge. What I found reassuring was that it still worked on an emotional level. You get to the point where Aslan is going to his death, and as crude as that animation is, you still feel the emotion. And that was reassuring. It was going to be hard to screw it up, basically.

Q: You’ve said your goal was to tell the story as you remembered it. Why?

ANDREW: Before I reread it, I sat down and wrote down everything I could remember about it from reading it as a child. It was kind of like going back to the house I grew up in. The book was smaller than I remembered it. C.S. Lewis wrote in a way that he relies on your imagination. As a child, you fill out the imagery. And it was that imagery that I wanted to put on the screen. The battle is very brief, it’s basically Peter telling Aslan what happened when he was away. And yet somehow in my mind I had this impression of this great battle- probably because I read all of the books. I remembered it as an epic story, and I wanted to tell the movie as an epic story.

Q: Was it intimidating to adapt such a beloved story?

ANDREW: Film is such a visual medium, and if you’re in the position where you have to live up to or exceed people’s expectations, it’s always a scary thing. There’s always a fear that my impression or my imagination made it different than someone else’s. Am I limiting, meeting, exceeding everyone else’s expectations? It really comes down to the question- should this be made into a film or not? For me personally, it was too good of an opportunity to be able to realize some of my boyhood dreams, and also to share my impressions of the book. But I have been reassured by people along the way that I am meeting their expectations. Even Douglas Gresham, C.S. Lewis’ stepson, who’s lived with this book all his life, would come on the set and tear up at times and say ‘this is exactly how I imagined it.’ So I tried as much as possible to tap into as much of the universal impression of the book as I could.

Q: You worked on this film for years. What was it like to finally see the finished project?

ANDREW: This is the sad thing about making the film yourself- you never get to completely enjoy it as a naïve experience. You never get to walk in and believe it because you know all the elements that went into it. That being said, I still feel the emotion of watching the film even now. And there’s certain moments- I don’t know if it’s because I know the children and I know their emotional state- like the moment Lucy comes and finds Mr. Tumnus turned to stone and she cries, I know that was Georgie (Henley) projecting her impression of what would happen if James was turned to stone. So I know that emotion was real, and I tear up. Some of the other things- Aslan’s death on the stone table- I find hard to be emotional about because that’s a very technical scene and I’ve watched that scene hundreds of times. Sometimes with an audience I can still have that experience, but most of the time I’m going oh, I wish I’d done different lighting on that bauble in the background. So it’s harder for me to enjoy it that way. Maybe ten years from now I will. I caught “Shrek” on TV one day, I was flipping through the channels and I saw some colors that looked interesting and I stopped and said, “That’s why I like those colors, I put them there!” And I watched the film and really just enjoyed it as an audience member for the first time in a number of years.

Q: Would you consider Narnia a fairy tale?

ANDREW: Some people saw them as fairy tales, I never saw them that way. I don’t know if it’s because I was exposed to them at a very young age, but I always believed that Narnia was a real place. And the Hans Christian Anderson stories- maybe because they were smaller and more contained and this is a whole world in over seven books, I never saw Narnia as the same thing.

Q: What makes it such an important story?

ANDREW: The themes of forgiveness and sacrifice, which are universal themes and have stood the test of time. And I think why it appeals to people on a personal level…I had someone say to me the other day when they saw Lucy step through the wardrobe, it didn’t just make them remember what it was like to be a child, it made them nostalgic for their childhood. I think we lose so much of that as we get older, and for an adult reading the book, it’s nice to invoke that. For children, I think, it’s a story of empowerment. They’re not children when they go to Narnia, they’re kings and queens. In England, they’re disenfranchised, and have no control over this war; in Narnia, they’re the only ones who have control over this war.

Q: Big battle scenes have become clichéd- what did you do to make this one special?

ANDREW: It is inevitable that when you have a battle with swords, there’s going to be some commonality, but I was lucky enough to have a menagerie of creatures to deal with. I could have birds and griffins and phoenixes coming down, I could have centaurs fighting men on horseback. All of them were make believe, I designed them and used them in different ways.

Q: Why did you begin the film in war-torn London?

ANDREW: It’s from a line in the book that says “they were sent away from London during the war because of the air raids.” What I wanted to do was set context, give it a sense of reality. Before I took the audience into this fantasy world, I wanted to give them a sense of these children in jeopardy, and explain why they are having problems. Edmond isn’t just a bad boy, he’s a bad boy in the movie because his father’s away at war, his brother’s pushing him around, doing a bad job of being an authority figure. I also wanted to say to the audience at the beginning, this is a different version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. This is a big story. People come into the film expecting to see four kids in a house- that would feel like a small British story. I really wanted to say, “No it’s not,” wake everyone up.

Q: In the Mr. Tumnus/Lucy scenes you had a shirtless guy hanging out with a little girl. How did you make that not creepy?

ANDREW: That scene was the hardest one to write, we wrote hundreds of versions of that scene, and ultimately the thing that made it work was James McAvoy. Mr. Tumnus can be read in the book as a dottering old English guy. James put himself on tape, and he was the only person who understood the moral agenda, the political dilemma. He knew what he should do to save his own skin, but at the same time had this moral dilemma of meeting a human for the first time and realizing that Lucy was good. So it was challenging, but I also think it was because James is a warm person and his warmth comes across, and because Georgie and James had such a close friendship that it doesn’t feel creepy. And I would have kept rewriting that until I heard James read it. And then I went, “we’re going to be ok.” And he was in the middle of a lot of projects. We really had to work to get him over there, to get him fitted, to get all the prosthetics down.

Q: Can you talk about the casting of the kids?

ANDREW: It was my first time working with children, and that was a daunting thing. I wanted very real children, and I went to Pippa Hall, who found Jamie Bell for “Billy Elliot,” did such a great job of casting a real kid who was like the character he was playing. And that’s what I wanted to do- find real children who were like the characters I imagined, so it wasn’t so much about acting as it was about being themselves. It was an eighteen month search, I looked at 2500 kids on tapes, I work shopped 400 kids in groups and 120 more directly. I met William (Mosely) and Anna (Popplewell) right at the beginning- I met Anna when she was thirteen, and she turned sixteen during filming. And I was just hoping they didn’t grow too much. I met Skandar (Keynes) towards the end, Georgie somewhere towards the middle of it. It was challenging, but when I met each kid I knew straight away that they were the right fit for the roles.

Q: What did you do in the workshops?

ANDREW: I started playing with some of the scenes, and then I decided I wanted to do improvisations to keep the spontaneity when it came to shooting the scenes. One of the things is that Skandar is an incredibly resilient child, and I didn’t know if I could ever get him to cry. So in one of the workshops we played out the scene where he ran back to get the photo of his father; I set him and William against each other and just really let them get on each other’s nerves to the point where Skandar got really frustrated. It was a really amazing experience because Georgie and Anna were still there in the workshop watching, and I didn’t know if Georgie wanted to be there and she said she wanted to stay. And Skandar got himself to this emotional state and I let them run into the scene- like an improvisation, running into the scene. And it played really well, and we did the same thing when we shot it. And at the end of it, Georgie was sitting there looking shell shocked and I said, “do you want to give your mom a hug?” And she cried, it was all very emotional, and all the kids came away totally excited. Anna said to her mom afterwards that she would trust me to do any of these scenes. And I think they all discovered that if they could find a place of reality it would carry them through the film. And we did a lot of improvisations, start them off with a scenario and get them to the right emotional state, then go into the scene.

Q: Brian Cox was originally supposed to voice Aslan. What happened?

ANDREW: We both agreed at some point that it wasn’t working. He helped me find the character, because I didn’t know the character when we cast Brian. I always rewrite after I find actors because they inform the roles so much. There was a limitation to the character that Brian was struggling with.

Q: Which was?

ANDREW: Lack of humanity. He’s a very omnipotent character and yet I wanted him to be accessible, I wanted him to be vulnerable. And I hadn’t found that the first time I recorded with Liam, but the first time I recorded with Liam (Neeson) I heard the warmth in his voice, and I said I wanted to find out what Aslan was like on his day off. When he put up his feet and watched TV. Because you have to know someone as a person to feel sympathy for them. Which is why I added some humor for Aslan- small moments, like the one he has with Peter up on the hill. If you can make him more accessible, you can care about him.

Q: Edmond is a bad boy, but the audience has to like him. How did you balance that?

ANDREW: It was something I was worried about, and I have to attribute a lot of that to Skandar. He is a little brat who you really like. But some of it comes down to explaining why he did it. In the book he was one note, he was just a bad boy. But I tried to look deeper and figure out why he was bad. The reasons are there- his older brother is telling him what to do, a year before that they were probably best buddies. Now he’s pushing him around, and he’s not doing a very good job. So resentment is going to build up. I’m a third child, if my brother was doing that to me and some beautiful woman came along and said I’m going to make you king, you can tell your brother what to do, it’s like, “all right, I’m in, I’m going to betray him.”

Q: What’s next for you?

ANDREW: A vacation. I started this movie without a family and now I have two children. One’s two and a half and the other’s two months. I actually deliberately haven’t thought about what I’m doing next because I’ve really overlapped my projects and I’ve never really had the time to have some time to clear my head.

Q: Will “Prince Caspian” be next?

ANDREW: I think that’s likely going to be the next film I will do next, I’m not entirely sure if I’m going to do it or not- I need to have that clear head space first. It is the same four kids, so it would make sense to do that next before these kids get too old.

“The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” opens on December 9th.