CT: Whole generations of children have grown up on The Chronicles of Narnia.
DG: “I was the first!”
CT: What was your childhood experience of Narnia?
DG: I first heard “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” read to me by my mother when I was about seven-years-old, in upstate New York. There was an advantage to that because in the winters in that part of the country it snows three-feet deep every year and so you get this beautiful snowy landscape.
We (Douglas, his mother Joy Gresham, and older brother David) moved to England when I was about eight, and I actually lived in Oxford at the time when some of the last ones were being written and published. I am one of the few people who actually grew up in Narnia because I moved into The Kilns (the Oxford home of CS Lewis).
The wood behind the house was the basis of it all. I expected to see a dryad any minute or a fawn pop out from behind a tree, and in my own imagination of course, they did.
But I was completely enthralled in it. The fascination of it all baptised my imagination and my thoughts, and The Chronicles of Narnia, as they proceeded to be published, were my favourite reading for many years – still are, some of them.
CT: It sounds like the books really came off the pages for you.
DG: Yes, they did, and they still are off the pages. I’ve wanted to make these films since I was a young teenager; it’s been a lifelong ambition. When we were filming The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe I went up to New Zealand to see the beginnings of the principal photography and I was delighted to see how beautifully they were bringing it to life and how magnificently they were doing it. When you’ve had a dream that long and it suddenly starts to spring into existence it’s a huge, huge emotional experience.
CT: How do you think CS Lewis would feel seeing his books come to life on the big screen?
DG: I think and I hope he would be thrilled - otherwise I have just wasted the last 20 years of my life! But Jack (as CS Lewis was nicknamed) had a problem with cinema in his day, and I can completely understand that. He saw this wonderful visual technology emerging but was horrified by the uses to which it was being put. I think he would be quite ready to have said that the devil has taken over the cinema. Well I think it is high time that we took it back, and we are.
