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To be a friend of Caspian

Narnian citizen Douglas Gresham has been welcome on the other side of the wardrobe ever since he met C.S. Lewis, who would eventually become his stepfather before his mother, Joy Davidman, died of cancer. In a recent interview, Douglas Gresham, a producer of the Narnia films, spoke with Good News editorial assistant Elizabeth Turner about what it takes to be a friend of Caspian. Prince Caspian comes to theaters May 16.

Good News: Do you think that the Kilns was an especially fruitful place for Jack in crafting Narnia?

DG: Well I think certainly walking through the woods and around the lake behind the Kilns, would stimulate anyone’s imagination, particularly to do with nature and the lovely mythical creatures that inhabit nature—fauns, centaurs, dryads, all those people almost haunt the Kilns and the wood and lake to this day.

What was it like when you met him for the first time?

Well you have to remember a few things , get the backstory on this: I was a little American boy from upstate New York and I had read the Narnia chronicles—those that had been published by that stage—I had read the legends of King Arthur and the knights and all of that sort of thing and I was fascinated, so when I got to England at the age of eight and found everyone to be very strange, incidentally, compared to what I was used to, I sort of expected Jack to be a tall, stalwart man wearing silver armor and carrying a sword. Because this man was on speaking terms with High King Peter and the Great Lion Aslan of Narnia. But then of course when I did meet him, he was a stooped, balding professorial looking gentleman, with long, nicotine-stained fingers and teeth and shabby clothes. He was nothing like the image, the sort of phantasm I had erected in my own mind. But his enormous vibrant personality soon eradicated any disillusion I might have, any disappoint I might have in him. And I lost an illusion to gain a friend. Because he was such a wonderful man to be with, you couldn’t be with Jack for more than four or five or ten minutes without roaring with laughter, he was a man of great fun all the time. So I was delighted when I got to know him, though initially I was just a little bit disappointed.

He seems to have had a particular talent for comforting those in different kinds of battle, in his BBC radio addresses, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe beginning with children being removed from London, and the Screwtape Letters in a spiritual way. Knowing that he himself was a combat veteran, how do you see the battles in a story like Prince Caspian?

As you point out Jack had been a veteran, but more than that, he had fought through six months or more of one of the most horrible conflicts that man has ever inflicted on the planet. He knew the absolute desperateness of being in the trenches, of living in the trenches. In the First World War you went to the battlefield and there you stayed and lived and died—months, years sometimes. Jack had learnt an awful lot through that experience, but then of course he was no stranger to personal battles. Before that even, he had lost his mother when he was nine, to cancer, he had been sent away from his beloved northern Irish home to England, to a school which was Dickensian to say the least. He’d been through the mill, he understood what pain was, he understood what temptation was, and he was able to use all of those experiences in the writing of fiction, and it comes through very strongly in his understanding of human nature

Do you think some of those personal battles fed into his understanding of children’s desire to be taken seriously?

Yes I think they probably did. And I think that did affect his whole attitude toward the adult world and therefore enabled him to understand and portray much more accurately the trials and tribulations of children, which come through very strongly in the Narnia Chronicles.

I read once that you and others found him to be extremely “available.” How do you see that posture related to faith, whether it’s Lucy availability to see Aslan, or our availability to the transcendent?

Well I think that they’re portrayed very well in various characters throughout the Narnian Chronicles, and particularly in Prince Caspian, with Reepicheep for example, and with Lucy. But I think the availability of people, of one human being to others, is an essential part of what’s availability to God. Which is to be a Christian—and I don’t use that term lightly—I mean someone who really wants to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, believes not only in Jesus, but also believes Jesus. But the first thing one has to learn is to be available to his work. And once one has learnt that, and made oneself available, all sorts of other things flow from that. And Jack’s sense of availability in his protagonists throughout all his literature is amazing, and extremely educating for all of us.

Do you think that lack of exercise of the imagination hinders the development of character and virtue?

Yes, very much so. And I think the lack of imagination throughout one’s upbringing results in such regimes as the Third Reich and the People’s Republic of China and places like that, where totalitarianism takes over. In other words, instead of imagining things, and devising things in one’s own mind which will guide one through the morass of difficulties involved in learning ethics and morality, one simply doesn’t learn to function.

Many of our readers are very devout in reading scripture. What are your thoughts on the creative, artistic value of taking truths from scripture and portraying them in the mane of a lion or the sweater of a little girl?

Well I think the imagination applied to such things as scripture is desperately important, because we are presented in scripture with a lot of scenarios which we do not actually have a complete grip on because we live in a very different time and world to that in which the scripture were written. Imagination and imaginative fictional renditions of these things allow us to get much, much closer to grips with the realities that lie behind them. The situation’s were facing with today such as drugs in our streets, and gun crime, and all of these sorts of things, are things that haven’t happened for a long time and didn’t happen in biblical times. But the same temptations that affected those men back in the biblical times are the same temptations that affect us today. So a fictional rendition of how this works is enormously important to us. And I think the Narnian Chronicles, particularly Prince Caspian, and later the Dawn Treader, are wonderful, wonderful exposees of how this happens. And what to do about it.

What’s your hope for transforming these books into movies? What’s your hope for what they will do for children growing up in our world today?

Well I hope, sincerely, and I think the first already has to a great extent, but I hope they will baptize children’s imaginations, they will provide children with the realization that those great qualities of chivalry, and courtesy, and personal responsibility, and personal commitment, and honesty, and justice—all of those things—are not something that are simply out of date, because we talk in the 20th century as if they no longer matter to us, but are vital to the lubrication of human society. To educate children into the ways that people should behave in the world is I think enormously important. So I hope these movies will give children a great deal of hope, a great deal of faith in the fact that their future is very important. They – the children of the world – are the most important people in the world, because they are the only future the world has. So I hope that they will get greatly entertained, and by that entertainment greatly educated at the same time.

Anything else you’d like to express on your hopes, or your relationships with the man and his characters?

You know I’ve lived in so many countries that when people ask me today, where do you come from, I almost invariably say, “Narnia.” Because that’s the place that’s closest to my heart, in a sense. And I think that all people who go to see these movies will develop a longing to be in Narnia, and they’re absolutely right to do so. But my hopes for the movies? I really hope that people enjoy them enormously. People from all ages and from all backgrounds.It is also my ambition to make sure that each of our Narnian films is better than the last.

Elizabeth Turner is editorial assistant at Good News.



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