Walden Media’s Plans for Narnia

Infuze Magazine has interviewed Walden Media’s Bob Beltz about filming Prince Caspian and the subsequent Narnia films. In exciting news, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has already been greenlit, with plans to release it only one year after Prince Caspian. Read the full interview at Infuze Magazine. Thanks to Aslan’s Homeboy for the heads up!

Now that some of the projects you’ve been working on for awhile are seeing the light of day, what are you working on for the future?

Probably the biggest project we’ve got in the hopper at the moment is that we’ve started on the second movie on Chronicles of Narnia which would be Prince Caspian. That’s been in development for a year now and will start photography sometime in February, so it’s getting close to starting at least shooting. It’s scheduled to come out in May 2008. We have a couple more films coming out this year. We have another one based on a prize-winning book called Bridge to Terabithia that comes out the week before Amazing Grace.

Can you let us in on what’s happening with Prince Caspian. Is the script completely finished? And is it sticking closely to the book?

It’s pretty close. Andrew Adamson is gonna direct again. Most of the same crew is working on this one. Mark Johnson will produce again. A lot of the cast and crew will be the same. Now, I don’t think that will the case for all seven. I don’t think Andrew Adamson wants to spend the rest of his life on this one series.

But the script… let me put it this way: All of the elements from the book are present. It’s not as easy of a book to adapt as The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe was simply because it has a little bit of a different structure and Andrew wanted to rearrange some of the elements for dramatic effect. But everything that is in the book will be in the film.

What are some of the changes we can expect to see?

I can’t talk about that.

(Laughs). Just thought I would try…

(Laughs). They’re real good, let me just say that.

What about using the children? Obviously, children grow up so fast on camera…

And we’re actually using the same four kids and I know that three of them actually look almost the same as they did. Skandar [Keynes] who played Edmund has grown about seven inches and looks like a full blown adolescent now. In the Lewis story, there’s only a year that has taken place between the first and second book and I think that will just get left a little open ended. The big challenge is going to be Edmund I think.

And you’ve already greenlit the next one?

Yes. The next book after that will be The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and we’re going to try and film the next two in a way that it won’t have to be two and a half years between them. We’ll be able to bring them out sequentially a year apart.

Is Adamson attached to that project?

I think whoever actually directs the project will be under Andrew as sort of an overseer on the thing.

So you will begin shooting Dawn Treader right after Caspian wraps?

Yeah, the way I understand it is that it takes six months to do the live photography on Caspian and then a full year of post-production with all of the effects and computer generated things that have to get done. In theory, what we’ll do is as soon as they are done filming Caspian and into post-production, then we’ll have a new crew to do the filming part of Dawn Treader. Then when that one goes into post-production, we’re hoping to go into The Silver Chair, which would be the next book into production.