MovieWeb Interviews Howard Berger
Howard Berger and Aslan
MovieWeb has posted an exclusive interview with Howard Berger, who recently won the Academy Award for Achievement in Makeup for “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” In this interview, Berger discusses Narnia and other upcoming projects for KNB EFX such as Sin City and Hostel sequels. Here is a clip:
Q: On a film like The Chronicles of Narnia, do you come in with specific ideas for how you want the film to look? Do you read the script and then go, “Where do I begin?” Or, did you draw a lot from the C.S. Lewis book?
Howard Berger: Well, it’s a lot of everything to tell you the truth. What we did was, WETA Workshop in New Zealand, Richard Taylor’s company, had been hired almost a year and a half prior to our involvement. So they had done a lot of design work and conceptual artwork for Andrew Adamson, so when we came on that was already there, but we needed to still take that artwork and redesign it to kind of fit in the real world. It was a combination of illustrations from the original book and WETA’s original artwork.
The two big things for me were Andrew Adamson’s recollection of the characters in the book when he was a child and he read it. That was a really, really big influence and I wanted to recreate that world that was in his mind when he was small; and also my three children had a lot to do with it because they were such gigantic fans of the book. I did not want to disappoint them and I utilized their imagination and their purity as far as designing a lot of the characters as well.
