Between work and screenings and settling into the new place, I haven’t had any time to blog for the past few days. But here are a few items related to The Golden Compass that came up while I was otherwise occupied.
First, and perhaps most trivially, there is a new featurette on Dakota Blue Richards, the girl who was picked out of thousands of would-be actresses to play the lead character Lyra Belacqua, at Yahoo! Movies and YouTube.
One or two of the interviewees mention that Richards had no prior experience in front of a camera and didn’t really want to be an actress — she just wanted to be Lyra. Hearing those words, I thought it might be neat if Richards never played another character again — kind of like how Carrie Henn, who played Newt so memorably in James Cameron’s Aliens (1986; my comments) when she was nine years old, has never appeared in any other film before or since. It would preserve a certain mystique. But I see that Richards is already working on another film, The Secret of Moonacre — which, incidentally, is being directed by Gabor Csupo, whose last film was Bridge to Terabithia. Ah well.
More substantially, MTV Movies Blog has posted the first part of a weekly interview with writer-director Chris Weitz, and right off the bat, he deals with the religious issues. Some excerpts:
So, how does one go about adapting a book that has controversial elements into a film that a very wide variety of people can enjoy, without betraying the original? One tries to be clever about it. I realized that the overt stating of some of the themes in “The Northern Lights”/”The Golden Compass” would never — this is important to make clear — never EVER get across the goal line. There isn’t a wide enough audience for that — yet. If I wanted to popularize this series of extraordinary books and open them to a wider reading public than ever before, I was going to have to make some compromises. But I also knew that as a filmmaker one has more means of expression than dialogue, and that dialogue is a more subtle business than characters saying exactly what the characters say in the book. Sometimes I transpose elements – for instance, the biblical ideas that Asriel addresses towards the end of the book are voiced in a different context (and at shorter length) by Mrs. Coulter at Bolvangar in the film. Sometimes I turn textual or narrative arguments into visual ideas. . . .
Now, one thing that some of the extremists who have attacked the film are right about is that I would be happy if it made more people read the books – not because I am pursuing any sort of atheist agenda (this is a ridiculous idea), but because they are great works of literature, beautiful, permanent, and unassailable. They’re not going anywhere. And as for those who are concerned that I have not used the word “Church” but only the word “Magisterium” for the bad guys, and that sort of thing, I would advise them to do a little research into the meaning of the word “Magisterium” for starters. Some people will only be satisfied if the film I’ve made is an outright attack on religion, which to me shows that they have misapprehended the meaning of Pullman’s books as much as the “other side.”
It’s true, though, that “The Subtle Knife” and “The Amber Spyglass” tread in territory that is much more controversial than the first book. This is also addressed by a bunch of questions that I will lasso under the heading “what next?” Well, though I saw it as my duty to build the franchise of “His Dark Materials” on as solid a grounding as I could, it would all be in vain if the second and third films did not have the intellectual depth and the iconoclasm of the second and third books. The whole point, to me, of ensuring that “The Golden Compass” is a financial success is so that we have a solid foundation on which to deliver a faithful, more literal adaptation of the second and third books. This is important: whereas “The Golden Compass” had to be introduced to the public carefully, the religious themes in the second and third books can’t be minimized without destroying the spirit of these books. There is simply no way to adapt them without dealing with Lyra’s destined role, her secret name, and the war in the heavens. I will not be involved with any “watering down” of books two and three, since what I have been working towards the whole time in the first film is to be able to deliver on the second and third films. If I sense that this is not possible, there’s no point my continuing to work on them. . . .
I have to say, I completely respect and understand the way that Weitz is trying to remain faithful to his source material while satisfying the studio and broadening the story’s appeal. He seems more like Peter Jackson than Andrew Adamson in that regard. But quotes like these just confirm, for me, what I have said before: I hope The Golden Compass is a great film, and I hope it flops.
Finally, MTV News has a story on the reasons behind the decision to move the original ending of The Golden Compass — which has already been filmed — to the beginning of The Subtle Knife.
UPDATE: Oh, I almost forgot, it was also announced that Kate Bush has recorded the song ‘Lyra’ for the movie’s soundtrack. The recording apparently features the Magdalen College Choir, Oxford, which if I’m not mistaken would be the same Oxford college where C.S. Lewis taught for most of his professional career. Hmmm.
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