“Unlike Tolkien, who was very specific, Lewis left a lot to your imagination. So we had the enormous challenge of not only creating Narnia, but of trying to fulfill people's expectations, to bring the film up to the level of their own dreams and fantasies.”

-- Director Andrew Adamson

To take on this first live-action cinematic telling of C.S. Lewis’ masterpiece, the producers knew they would need an unusually creative – not to mention hugely energetic – director; someone who could seamlessly marry the real world with a fantasy realm of tremendous scope in a way that would be at once believable and emotionally powerful. It would require someone with definite savvy in high-tech filmmaking, someone with a vivid fantasy-oriented imagination, yet also someone with the sensitivity to evoke a tale that is at heart, about children, family and the powerful notion of bringing good back into the world. Most of all, it would require someone with a passion for Lewis’ highly distinctive style of fantasy storytelling – at once simple, magical and resonant.

At first, the search naturally focused on some of today’s best-known directors, but then along came an utterly unexpected candidate: Andrew Adamson. One of Hollywood's preeminent animation directors and visual effects artists, Adamson’s directorial debut, the animated global hit “Shrek,” had captivated audiences with its fairy-tale charm, humanity and visual imagination. Despite the fact that he had never directed a live-action film before, Adamson came to his first meeting bursting with a storm of creative ideas that left the producers wowed by his personal passion for the project. He seemed to have a deep inner connection with Lewis’ Narnia that the producers knew was essential to imbuing the film with magic.

"He talked so passionately about the emotion and the themes of the piece," Cary Granat recalls, "and from those conversations we knew he was the guy. I've worked with a lot of different filmmakers but I have never seen somebody who was so completely in tune with a specific vision for a movie. After one meeting with Andrew, Perry and I were both in agreement that this was the right person."

Adamson’s excitement was inspired by his own memories of being an 8 year-old boy who was whisked into Narnia and was never quite the same again. “I read all seven books continuously over a period of a year or two, just read them over and over,” he recalls. “I basically existed in this world of Narnia for a time. I remembered it as this huge, vivid story with a massive battle between good and evil and a whole menagerie of mythological creatures – and I wanted the chance to bring that world to the screen."

Stirred by his childhood remembrances, Adamson started from the premise that Narnia had to come off as one hundred percent real – no matter what it would take cinematically to achieve. "What is Narnia?” he asks. "That's an interesting question and key to our approach. I don’t see Narnia as just a figment of the children's imaginations, a place that they retreat to in their minds to escape World War II. Rather, I believe in Narnia as a true alternate universe. There are many parallels to our world and there are many differences, but the main point is that it is real.”

He continues: "So my approach to the movie was that it’s not quite like 'The Wizard of Oz’ or 'Peter Pan,’ where you realize in the end that the story all happened in someone’s imagination. When Lucy goes through that wardrobe and steps into a world, I wanted that world to be completely believable, as if it was another country you might visit. It had to be a whole Narnian reality unto itself.”

It was clear from the start that Adamson’s ideas for the film were vastly ambitious, but Adamson was only further excited by the risk of tackling one of the most massive projects of his, or anyone’s, career -- one that would demand constant creativity in every aspect of filmmaking. The director began on the page -- by collaborating with screenwriting partners Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (who went on to write the Emmy winning “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers”) and polishing the original screenplay by Emmy winner Ann Peacock, putting the emphasis first and foremost on storytelling.

"We approached it as a story that is very much about themes of betrayal, forgiveness and loyalty. It’s about a family who feels disempowered by the terror of World War II and then finds their power again in Narnia,” Adamson remarks. “It’s a story about four kids who enter this land where they're not only empowered, but where they're ultimately the only solution to the war in that land. And it's only through unity as a family that they can actually triumph. And that's where we began."

As they re-read the book, the screenwriters were surprised to find that the text of the story itself was actually far more brief than they had remembered. “Most people recall it as a denser, fuller book than it actually is. That's a tribute to Lewis. He was a master at tweaking kids' imaginations enough where they could generate the rest of the story themselves,” explains McFeely. “So we needed to flesh parts of it out, take the image we had as kids and make that feel very real."

Adamson adds: “I too remembered it as this epic story. So the first thing that I did was to write everything that I remembered from reading it as a child -- how I imagined the battles, how the mythological creatures might fight with each other, who the characters are, right down to the color schemes. I put down a stream-of-consciousness of everything I thought the movie should be and extrapolated from there.”

The ideas, however, were all sparked directly by the writing itself, by Lewis’ endlessly imaginative frame. “All the themes, all the messages that were important to C.S. Lewis are present in the movie, and it is, I hope, a faithful envisioning of what Lewis was imagining when he wrote the book,” he comments. “It’s both an epic story of a battle between good and evil, and an intimate family drama about a fractured family that has to mend itself.”

Sums up producer Mark Johnson: “I think audiences will take away the most positive messages of belief, strength and family. But, in the process, they will also go on an original, exciting, unexpected ride. People ask it is like 'Lord of the Rings' or 'Harry Potter'? The answer is no, it is its own world, and yet I think the sensation of seeing those movies will be akin to the sensation one will feel in seeing this movie."