Posted by: @azog-the-defiler

 

Also, is there a thread you could direct me to where I might learn about Douglas Gresham's involvement in the new films?

When Netflix's Narnia was first announced, Gresham was listed as an executive producer for series and producer for features. Though, last we've heard publicly from him was end of 2019, saying he "hasn't heard a word" from Netflix.

Much regarding that initial failed production remains a mystery so it's still not clear what kind of holdover there is. One would assume (and hope) the Lewis Estate will continue to have some level of involvement in Narnia adaptations.

Posted by: @azog-the-defiler

Posted by: @icarus

Peter Jackson was 38 when he started shooting on The Lord of the Rings.

Greta Gerwig is 39.

 

I'm referring to the fact that PJ lived in a time without CGI and the modern conveniences of movie-making.

Sorry, but I must defend my fellow-Kiwis. Peter Jackson made his earliest films without CGI, but by the time he was shooting LOTR he and Richard Taylor had the infant Weta Digital making all sorts of clever effects.  Have you heard of 'Massive'? It's the program Weta developed to depict a crowd scene with each individual acting separately. It was a huge gift to LOTR. And every film had hugely increased numbers of special effects scenes using CGI. Green Screen (or Blue Screen) had also been in use for some years by LOTR.

Posted by: @coracle  Have you heard of 'Massive'? It's the program Weta developed to depict a crowd scene with each individual acting separately. It was a huge gift to LOTR. And every film had hugely increased numbers of special effects scenes using CGI. Green Screen (or Blue Screen) had also been in use for some years by LOTR.

I feel a major tool that could help make the show at a reasonable budget is Unreal Engine. Typically used for video game development, it's ability to render hyper realistic worlds and backgrounds has made it plausible for use in film. I believe HBO has already been using it for some time, among others. 

Does Gresham have any upcoming public speaking events? He might reveal what he knows then, if anything. 

@the-mad-poet we understand that Mr Gresham will be less involved now he's in his late 70s, but I'm sure the Estate will be keeping a good eye on it. 

Posted by: @tigryph

As for the feminist first remarks- I should have stated that it was my way of compiling her sentiments through multiple interviews. She is quoted as saying, "“In the films I’ve made and the films I hope to make, I hope that there’s a 16-year-old girl watching them, saying, ‘She’s got it all wrong, I’ve gotta make my own!’” she says. “That it sort of gives a passport to whoever the next group of artists are. I still get infuriated when I look at lists, not just of filmmakers, but of musicians, novelists, painters, and it’s just, ‘Guy, guy, guy, guy.’ I love so many of them, but I want more. I want more of my gender expressing what it means to them to be alive.” (Source) She seems to focus first on gender then on qualifications- it's hard to find her discussing her work without eluding to it.

Part of me wants to ignore this comment because, similar to what Icarus posted, I'm wearied of how much film discussion nowadays has to be about gender politics, but...earlier in the discussion, The Rose-Tree Dryad mentioned she really liked a quote from Gerwig about Louisa May Alcott to which I alluded, but she didn't consider it feminist. I actually don't think I referred to that quote as being feminist myself. I wouldn't really describe it that way either. However, I did say that I got the impression that part of Alcott's appeal for her was that she was a female artist, and this quote does sum up why. I wouldn't be as harsh as to say that she puts gender above qualifications but from interviews, she clearly wants her movies to be defined by being feminine. She doesn't just want to tell stories about characters who happen to be women because there's no reason they shouldn't be women. She wants everyone to think about the fact that they're women as they watch. That's not to say that only women enjoy her movies or relate to her movies or even that she doesn't write juicy roles for male actors. All three suggestions are demonstrably false. But she doesn't want gender to be incidental to them either. 

And I do think her script for Little Women reflects this-which is fine! (When I said it was well worth a read, I actually meant the whole thing, not just the introduction which explained her relationship to the source material.) I mean, the title has the word, women, in it. Why shouldn't it be about gender? You do get the vibe from reading it that Gerwig wanted to explore being a female artist specifically. I'd argue that a lot of the experiences of the artist characters in it are also relatable for male artists, but that's what I'd argue, not what Gerwig says. In behind-the-scenes interviews, she talks about the story specifically being about women making art. That's what resonates with her about it. A minor but telling example of this is a brief scene in the movie where a character reads from The Mill and the Floss by George Eliot, a female novelist. If Gerwig just wanted to include a writer who was a big influence on Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson or Charles Dickens would have been equally valid or superior choices. But, no, she went for one of the few female Victorian novelists. Which is fine. I think the quote works wonderfully in the context of the movie and Eliot could use the publicity.

But I really am baffled as to why Gerwig would choose to direct two Narnia adaptations when it would fit in so much better with her inclinations to adapt another female author (I'm sure there are ones she loves besides Louisa May Alcott and even if there aren't, Alcott wrote books besides Little Women even if they're less female driven) or, better yet, do another original story she could write herself. It's all too easy for me to imagine her expressing her frustration with C. S. Lewis within the script itself in some meta way and critiquing it for not being feminine enough instead of exploring the themes that are actually in the Narnia which have little or nothing to do with gender. 

I really wish she were adapting Lewis's novel Till We Have Faces instead since gender actually does play a large role in that book and a huge part of it is about relationships between women.

As I wrote toward the beginning of this discussion, I'm sorry if I'm putting this director/screenwriter in a box but it seems like a box she's happily made for herself. 

I hope we'll be getting a podcast episode regarding the news soon 🙂

@rilianix 

I think the Talking Beast Podcast has a plan for an episode about that. It should be interesting to hear what the reaction to the news is on there. 

I don’t know how much Greta Gerwig was interested in Narnia and C. S. Lewis before being chosen to direct the Narnia films. I hope that she has a deep love for the books and their author. Perhaps she will now be motivated to know much more about the books and their author. Of course if she made a good film about Little Women she must have had much knowledge of Louisa May Alcott. Her experience in adapting children’s novels to film will be helpful in making Narnia films.  

So just listened to Greta Gerwig's interview on the Inside Total Film podcast and she was asked about Narnia:

"Oh my gosh, yes. I mean I haven't really started wrapping my arms around it, but I'm properly scared which feels like a good place to start. I think when I'm scared it's a good sign. Maybe when I stop being scared, it'll be like... maybe I shouldn't do that one, but yeah I'm terrified of it. It's extraordinary and its exciting. I hope to make all kinds of movies in the course of the time I get to make movies, which is a long time but it's also limited so I wanna do big things and small things and everywhere in between, and having another big canvas is exciting and also daunting"

The interviewer then asked her about possibly doing a James Bond film, and Gerwig jokes "we're just gonna stick with some lions and some dolls for the moment, but you never know."

Here's a link to the podcast episode: https://audioboom.com/posts/8337701-greta-gerwig-cillian-murphy-christopher-nolan-barbie-and-oppenheimer

@rilianix Thanks for sharing. It's nice to finally have a quote from her specifically about adapting Narnia. 

Thanks for sharing @rilianix! If the past 3 weeks has been any indication, it's certainly going to be a new experience anticipating this release with such a popular name attached! The home page is busy 🤩 

You know, the fact that Greta Gerwig specifically mentions lions in that quote PrinceRilianIX shared makes me wonder if The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the first one she plans to do. It might very well not be since there's at least one lion in every Narnia book. Still, LWW is the one that specifically mentions a lion in the title like it's one of the main characters and it is the most famous of the seven entries in the series. 

If that is what she does that would be...kind of anticlimactic after all the discussion on Narniaweb about the possibility of Netflix starting with a different book. Still, it would make a certain amount of sense. Whichever book Netflix starts with is going to be many people's introduction to Narnia and I am an advocate of reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe first or at least before The Magician's Nephew. I'm not going to be able to help feeling a little disappointed if Gerwig and Netflix start with LWW but I can't say I'll be angry. Wishing them the best of luck.

Previously in this topic, I've written some rather long posts explaining why I don't think Greta Gerwig makes sense for the role of adapting Narnia. It turns out I needn't have bothered because Gerwig herself has summed it up for me in an interview with the finesse of a true wordsmith. In an interview I saw on YouTube about The Barbie Movie, she said that although its genre is different from her previous movies, it explores the same themes she keeps coming back to in all her movies, mainly intergenerational conversations between women and people having ridiculously high expectations they need to make more reasonable. Neither of which is remotely related to Narnia. Like not at all. Way to sum it up, Ma'am! You really made my case for me.  

Posted by: @col-klink

Peviously in this topic, I've written some rather long posts explaining why I don't think Greta Gerwig makes sense for the role of adapting Narnia. It turns out I needn't have bothered because Gerwig herself has summed it up for me in an interview with the finesse of a true wordsmith. In an interview I saw on YouTube about The Barbie Movie, she said that although its genre is different from her previous movies, it explores the same themes she keeps coming back to in all her movies, mainly intergenerational conversations between women and people having ridiculously high expectations they need to make more reasonable. Neither of which is remotely related to Narnia. Like not at all. Way to sum it up, Ma'am! You really made my case for me.

I feel like at least part of your argument is predicated on the belief that Lucy is not the primary character of LWW, which I would have a hard time agreeing with.

To start with, the main narrative structure of LWW is built around Lucy's journey (she's the one who accepts the "call to adventure" for example), but also even just a simple word count on character references within the book's text has her well ahead of anyone else in terms of mentions.

For reference, by my count, the scores are:

• Lucy - 220
• Edmund - 191
• Peter - 147
• Susan - 113

Lucy also has most of he big iconic visual moments in LWW (such as meeting Mr Tumnus) and has the closest relationship with Aslan of any child protagonist in the entire series.

The pivotal "Lewis Trilemma" scene with the Professor is also emotionally centred around Lucy's perspective on not being believed by her elder siblings.

But even if you could put together a compelling counter-argument as to why Lucy is not the main character of LWW (and I would genuinely be interested to hear counter points in that regard) I really don't see how it's much of a stretch to see that Greta Gerwig probably agrees with me - that LWW is Lucy's story.

Therefore for a director with an interest in both stories about childhood, and stories about the female experience, it seems a pretty straightforward extrapolation to see why she would be interested in a book like LWW. 

Sure, she might pivot the story even more in the direction of Lucy than previous adaptations (even though both BBC and Walden also gave Lucy top billing so to speak), but either way I don't feel it's a radical reinterpretation of the book in any way.

@icarus While you believe that childhood, specifically girlhood, is the main recurring theme of Gerwig's work and there's a good argument to be made that you're right, the themes that she herself mentioned in my quote were intergenerational conversations between women (I guess that works when one of the women is a child) and unreasonably high expectations. If anything, the moral of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the Narnia stories in general is "raise your expectations." The Pevensies never expected to find a magical world inside a random wardrobe or to become kings and queen, yet those things happen. I guess there are multiple generations of women in the story in that there's a twelve-year-old and an eight-year-old.  

Posted by: @icarus

both BBC and Walden also gave Lucy top billing so to speak

I don't actually remember either of those adaptations focusing on Lucy particularly. If anything, I'd say the Walden Media adaptation (of LWW) turned the spotlight from her to Peter and Susan. Peter had the central character arc of the movie and Susan, who was the least developed Pevensie in the book, went from being the character who tried to be rational and calculating the most to taking a leap of faith and telling Lucy that Aslan "must have known what he was doing" when he let the Witch kill him. 

I know I just totally went off topic. I'm sorry, it's just that I don't really have much to say about Netflix future Narnia movies. It'll be a while before Gerwig describes her vision for them in interviews. Since I can't say anything specific good or bad, I'm just more drawn to discussions about the BBC and Walden Media adaptations, both of which I've seen more than once.

P.S.

The interview with Gerwig I mentioned was actually an advertisement of sorts for The Barbie Movie in Dolby Digital or something like that. 

It's hard to fully comprehend what she's going to do with Narnia and seeing as she herself has stated that she's yet to wrap her arms around it, I think it's incredibly difficult to try and shape what her Narnia film could be but I do personally feel her exploration of certain themes in her films doesn't necessarily mean that's going to carry over to quite the same level in a different project. So far her themes and her approach to them has been more than understandable. Lady Bird, Little Women and Barbie. All these films and their stories are obviously varying levels of approach to a female perspective, but I also don't think she neglects other aspects or perspectives. From what reviews have said, Barbie isn't a film that neglects Ken for example, neither does Little Women neglect Laurie and I personally don't think Gerwig is gonna neglect other characters and perspectives so that she can shape the stories of Narnia into what fits her supposed sweet spot. I just don't think she's that kind of filmmaker.

That's not to say she won't imbue the main female characters of Narnia (in whichever stories she tells) with the weight that she has done before, but again that's only one aspect of what she can do with these stories, and while I see where some are coming from given her filmography, given how we know how much she wants to explore as a filmmaker and a writer, I don't think we should be assuming that she would limit herself and wouldn't be interested in exploring all characters and their stories, whether a girl or a boy, a professor or a fawn. It's not lost on anyone who and what Narnia is about, and I don't think it'll be lost on Gerwig either.

I'm not saying anyone shouldn't be hesitant or should personally feel that she's right for it 100% but I do think we should keep an open mind and avoid putting her into this box of what she's done before because I do really believe she's capable of exploring much more than just that.