Director Michael Apted reveals how the “episodic” novel was bulked up for the film version
As anybody who’s ever read The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader will know, it’s not got the most cinematic storyline. Great fun through it is, the book is bascially a linear sequence of set peices, with not much of a through story. So when it came to making the third movie in The Chronicles Of Narnia series, the scriptwriters and new director Michael ( The World Is Not Enough ) Apted (who’s taken over from Andrew Adams on the first two films) came up with an ingenious solution.
Speaking exclsuively to SFX for a feature in an upcoming issue, Apted reveals, “We were able to steal, really, from the book CS Lewis didn’t write, which is the one that would have gone between The Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair . He starts The Silver Chair with the witches building up an army underground to attack the above world, and Caspian, having married The Blue Star of is an old man with a son, and he married the Blue Star of Ramandu. In other words, a lot of things had happened between the books. So there were elements that we were able to draw out of that non-existent story and inject into this story to give it a bit more sense of purpose. And the CS Lewis estate didn’t seem to mind that, because there is a big hole in the story if you’re going to be literal about it. Whereas Star Wars and Harry Potter are a bit more attentive to that flowing stream of franchise narrative, Mr Lewis wasn’t so keen on it. But it enabled us to find a stronger reason for the journey, since there is no real reason for the journey as it stands.”
