The Chronicles of Narnia have begun to make their way into the hearts of a new generation, and one of the reasons for it is the passion of Douglas Gresham to bring the books to the silver screen. Who is Douglas Gresham? Well, first and foremost, he is the stepson of C.S. Lewis, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia series, and Gresham is also the executor of the C.S. Lewis estate. Currently Gresham has been the executive producer of the Chronicles of Narnia films. I had the opportunity to talk to Douglas about the making of the film franchise and bringing The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to life:
About.com: The Chronicles of Narnia hold a beloved place on many of our bookshelves, how important was it to you to bring the books to screen and introduce the series so so many new people through a new medium?
Douglas Gresham: Well, it's something I wanted to do almost my entire life, since I was a teenager. In my teen years I used to dream about someday getting these books made into movies. It's just taken me a very, very long time to get here.
The efforts to make these films has been held up for many years by the spirit of God for two good reasons. The one is that we haven't had, until very recently, the wonderful computer generated image technology that we have today. And we've never been able before to do real justice to the great lion, Aslan, for example, and to characters like Mr. and Mrs. Beaver - and in this movie particularly, the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, to the wonderful character Reepicheep, the beloved mouse. So the Holy Spirit probably held the movies up until such time as that technology had been developed. And he held up the development of that technology probably to a time when right now we need these movies more than we ever have before. This is the right time for them, and I think that is due to the Holy Spirit of God.
So, I'm very, very grateful that I've had the wonderful opportunity to get these movies made.
About.com: You say that this is the right time for [the movies], can you expand on that a little bit?
DG: Sure, in the 19th Century, people believed very strongly, and grew their children up to believe, in things like personal responsibility, personal commitment, duty, honor, chivalry, honesty, courtesy, and so on. Now those wonderful characteristics are the sort of glue that holds the human society together.
In the 20th Century, we in Western civilization, as we euphemistically call our way of living, have decide to throw those away on the grounds that they were old fashioned or outmoded or whatever. As a result, our societies have started to implode. They're falling down around our ears as we look around we only have to read our newspapers in the morning to be depressed for a week - because of what's happening in our society, particularly with young people, actually.
So, we need to get those things back more than ever before - those great qualities of 19th Century thinking - and they are epitomized in the Narnian Chronicles - in the books, and therefore, in the movies.
About.com: Is that what you see as wanting the people who view the movies to take away from them or are there other things that you would like them to take away from the movies that they may also take away from the books?
DG: Absolutely, there are other things. I think those things are very important. That is an incredibly important lesson to our modern society, but also I know each book, each book has a separate, individual specification. It's got a separate meaning, a separate message in it.
The first one [book] is obvious, we've got the death of Aslan for the traitor. The second one, Prince Caspian, was all about the experience the world has gone through several times, and is probably about to go through again, a return to true life, to truth, to true love, and all of the great truths that we need to know after a millennium of corruption. And that may be about to happen in our own world. The third one, which we're dealing with now, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is all about temptation. Once you've returned to the true life, to the true love, and to true being, you are going to get assailed by temptation, and it happens to every single one of us in our own lives.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader shows the temptations reaching out to our people in the movie, our crew on the Dawn Treader, the children (Eustace and Lucy from this world, and of course Caspian from Narnia) and how they deal with it, and how to overcome it, and how to defeat it. Of course you have to defeat temptation, even to discover how strong it can be, you have to defeat it. And the Voyage of the Dawn Treader shows all of these things very, very plainly. At the end of the movie, of course, there is a really powerful message which we all need to observe and some very moving moment on the screen, too.
