French Premiere Report
By Philippe Kiener
I had the opportunity to go to Paris, France with my wife, to spend a nice weekend and of course watch the Narnia movie, here is my account of that great night.
The event took place at Les Champs-Elysées in the theater “Gaumont”. After a nice Pizza, we went to the entrance where a crowd was already waiting. There was a snow machine that was supposed to be creating snow at the entrance, but it was not working very well.
The doors opened at 7:30pm and some people were asking who was there tonight. We got into the theater and down to a small hall decorated with trees and snow. The production had reserved 3 different rooms for the projection of the movie and we were in the biggest one with more than 300 seats.
To our surprise, there was a lot of children already there and they really enjoyed the movie. One gentleman from BVI introduced the evening and told us that the movie did really well in the States, Germany, and Spain. He then introduced Andrew Adamson who seemed to be tired but very joyful about the movie. He told us that he wanted to make a movie from his childhood amd that he was a big fan of the chronicles and had wanted to make a movie for a very long time. And he also said that he liked France!
After this introduction, he left the theater and the movie started in English but they weren’t any subtitles in French! After 2 minutes, the film stopped and they tried to make the numeric copy work but they couldn’t do it, so they had to use an 35mm movie with the subtitles. At 9:15pm, we finally entered into Narnia.
The crowd liked the sense of humor of Narnia, we heard them laugh, particulary with the beaver scene. It’s one of the strenghs of this movie, a subtle touch of humor.
A the end of the movie, the crowd cheered and from what I heard, people seemed to be happy about the movie. One french television station was asking questions about how people liked the movie and the answers were very positive.
There weren’t a lot of celebrities, but I spotted: John Howe, the producer of La Marche de L’empereur and Patrick Poivre d’Arvor (a french news anchor).
There were also some examples of armor used in the film.
I had the chance to speak with John Howe and he is a really nice guy.
Here’s a photo of me and my wife at the lamp post:
Phil and his wife at the Frence Premiere
To see more pictures of the event and read Phil’s account in French, please see his website at blog.narnia.ch.
