The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian DVD & Interview with Howard Berger
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Cast: Ben Barnes, Georgie Henley, Skandar Keynes, William Moseley, Anna Popplewell
Director: Andrew Adamson
Genre: Fantasy
Rated: M
Running Time: 144 minutes
Take a leap back in time once more to the mystical, magical world of Narnia. Join the characters of C.S Lewis' literary masterpiece series, the Pevensie children, as they are transported back from England to Narnia where a thrilling, new, adventure awaits in this next installment The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, available to own on Disney DVD.
Only a year after the unbelievable events of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the young Kings and Queens of Narnia- Lucy, Susan, Edmund and Peter Pevensie, are swept back to the breathtaking landscapes to discover that over one thousand years have passed, and the golden age of Narnia is over.
With its unspoilt beaches, mythical ruins, fearsome fortresses and leafy forests, Narnia, filled with creatures of every shape and size imaginable, faces its grimmest days. With their greatest friend and fearsome ally, Aslan, nowhere to be found and with the Kingdom of Narnia under the control of the ruthless King Miraz, the rightful ruler Prince Caspian desperately needs their help. It will take all of the magical powers of the children to call forth the creatures of Narnia to restore the rightful heir to the land's throne.
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian will also be a journey of self-discovery for the Pevensie children. With intriguing new creatures at their side including Reepicheep the courageous mouse, a Black Dwarf named Nikabrik and Trufflehunter the badger, they will realise that victory comes at a cost and foolish pride can be their undoing, as together they seek the means to restore peace and harmony to Narnia.
With Aslan's supposed elusiveness to all but Lucy, the Pevensie children and Prince Caspian must look deep within as they lead an army of Narnian's into ferocious battles, plus a stunning swordfight showdown that will have families on the edge of their seats to see if good can triumph over evil.
Directed by the talented Andrew Adamson, the original cast is reunited once more for this must-have film on DVD. Don't miss this chance to follow the adventure of the Pevensie siblings, the handsome Prince Caspian and to find out if Aslan returns to the children's side, as they face their most exciting Narnian challenge yet.
With stunning bonus features only available on Disney DVD The Chronicles of Narnia Prince Caspian will also be released in a 2-disc limited edition with never-seen-before added content, making it the must-own DVD of the year.
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THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN
HOWARD BERGER (SPECIAL EFFECTS DIRECTOR)
QUESTION: What in Prince Caspian are you most proud of?
HOWARD BERGER: Character-wise I am very proud of Trumpkin and
Nikabrik our red dwarf played by Peter Dinklage and our black dwarf
played by Warwick Davis. I was proud of them because I really wasn't
happy with the dwarves that we did on the first film. We had cast
little people from Thailand and India and they really weren't actors.
So before we finished that film I went to Andrew Adamson and said
that in Prince Caspian we had two hero dwarf characters and we could
do one of three things. We could go the same route that we followed
in the first film - and I did not feel that was successful - cast
average sized actors and cheat it like they did on The Lord Of The
Rings with the hobbits. Or we cast actors that are smaller people.
I
said I only knew two such actors who were fantastic and they were
Peter Dinklage and Warwick Davis. So right away Andrew started
thinking about that and we started designing things round Peter and
Warwick and luckily we got them. Warwick has been around forever.
When he was 11 years old he was in Return Of The Jedi as an Ewok. He
has so much experience and is so involved in his make-up; he really
nitpicks. He looked at every single make-up and I appreciated that.
He wanted it to be the best. I had wanted to disguise Warwick because
we have seen him do much and I also wanted to give him another tool
to help create his character.
With Peter I did not want to disguise
him. He uses his face so much and he has very expressive eyes and
eyebrows. The first thing I said to Andrew was that we did not want
to cover up his eyebrows. So Peter's make-up ids less elaborate but
it is still pretty gigantic. We shaved Peter's entire head and he has
thick black hair. So we shaved his head every morning and we had to
paint over his five o'clock shadow because his hair grew so fast. If
we had just put make-up over it you would have started to see the
shadow by mid-day.
He also had a gelatin nose and gelatin ears and
scars and then all the hair work. It was a beautiful make-up. Warwick
always uses his hands so we had scarring on them and busted up
cuticles. You may never see that on screen but for Warwick that is
one more tool. It is very important for him.
QUESTION: How important is DVD for your work?
HOWARD BERGER: I try to reference everything that comes out so I have
tons of DVDs. I have all the movies I love and what is cool is that
as my kids get older I can let them see my favorite films. I have
all my favorite films from every era on DVD and watching them is
learning. What is exciting is looking at how they went about making
movies then compared to how we do it now. It is two different worlds.
I was watching my son Travis while he looked at the DVD of John
Carpenter's The Thing and I told him there were no digital effects in
that movie. That was exciting or him.
QUESTION: Which DVDs would you take with you to a desert island?
HOWARD BERGER: Well Jaws, my all time favourite movie, The Empire
Strikes Back, The Godfather II, The Creature From the Black Lagoon
and My Favorite Year, which is my favorite comedy. So those are the
five movies that I would take with me to my island.
QUESTION: Can we expect lots of extras on the DVD of Prince Caspian?
HOWARD BERGER: We shot a lot of stuff that will probably be on the
extras. There are probably scenes that will be deleted from the film
that will be on the DVD. They are definitely structuring a lot more
for the DVD release of Prince Caspian.
QUESTION: Does your job get any easier second time round on the
Narnia series?
HOWARD BERGER: No. Well yes and now. What got easier was that I had
Andrew Adamson's trust…10 per cent. So that was great. But it was
harder because we had a lot to live up to. We had to do better; we
had to be better than we were on the first film. We had an Oscar and
a BAFTA win that we had to live up to. And we had a whole new world;
it wasn't like we were going back to the same stuff all over again.
If that had been the case and it had just been a re-hash I think that
all of us would not have been very interested. But Andrew wanted to
make a whole new film. There were common threads - the Pevensies and
we were in Narnia - but that was all. So it was wonderful to go back
and to try and re-invent the wheel. I had thought that nothing could
be more difficult that working on the first film - but this was much
harder. The working conditions were very difficult.
QUESTION: What were the challenges?
HOWARD BERGER: We had a lot more make-ups to do. In the first film we
split it between men in suits and make-ups. This time we had very few
suits. I think we maybe had 32 suits before we had triple that. We
had a tremendous amount of make-ups, which meant we had a tremendous
amount of hours making everybody up every day. It was about a 150-day
shoot and probably 100 days of that were very heavy make-up days. My
crew and I were doing a good 18 to 20 hours a day - with very little
turnaround from the time that we reached our hotels to the time that
we were back on set. At times it could be three to four hours and
that is murder. Doing a 20-hour day then going home to eat something
and then sleep for two hours before getting up to go back to work.
That was pretty tough!
QUESTION: What were the make-ups you were doing?
HOWARD BERGER: We had a lot of the same species. We had fauns and
dwarves and centaurs and female centaurs. Last time we did background
female centaurs but this time we did lots of different things with
centaurs. For instance we have black centaurs - a whole family of
them and that was fun. We came up with some really cool hairstyles;
one of the sons has cornrows. There were child centaurs and very old
aged ones. We also had older fauns and minotaurs. We wanted to create
the feeling that there had been an evolution and there is a cycle of
life. We didn't want people to think that in Narnia everyone was in
their twenties so they do age. So we also had feature female centaurs
and there is a little thing to look for at the end of the movie
during the crowning of Prince Caspian as King and there is a
procession going through the town. You will see Tilda Swinton and her
family as centaurs. We had a family day and Tilda had told me she and
her family wanted to be centaurs. So I asked if she wanted to fly in
for the day. So Tilda and her son and daughter were made up as
centaurs for the day.
QUESTION: Why was Tilda so keen to be a centaur?
HOWARD BERGER: I think she was jealous not to have been in make-up
and so she got this opportunity. She thought it would be fun so she
and her kids came on early morning and we made them up and they had a
great time. So family day was great and Tilda and her kids were there
and my kids are in the movie. Kelsey and Travis were villagers and
Jacob was dressed as a faun. He is right there at the beginning of
the procession, walking in front of Caspian. So hopefully he will end
up in the film.
QUESTION: Didn't you want to be in the film?
HOWARD BERGER: I did appear but I don't know if it will be in the
movie. It was during a green screen scene and I went behind the
screen put on green pants and a wig and ran out in the middle of the
shot. I ran around crazy and Andrew laughed and said to put on a
tighter lens. It will probably on the DVD bloopers reel. A bunch of
my guys ended up being in the movie as centaurs or fauns and that was
nice.
QUESTION: What did you do about the centaur's legs this time?
HOWARD BERGER: Thank goodness I was able to talk Andrew out of using
any horse bottoms. That worked fine for some shots on the first film.
But all the horse sections this time were done digitally. So they
would be made up and have their wigs done and they would wear green
pants for the green screen that added the horse legs.
QUESTION: What new creatures are there this time?
HOWARD BERGER: Well now the minotaurs are good. They were baddies in
the first movie. Regarding new creatures there is Reepicheep who is
our mouse and Trufflehunter who is the badger. Trufflehunter is going
to be cool. To help the other actors we had full sized versions of
Reepicheep and Trufflehunter on set that they could act to. Ken Stott
is the voice of Trufflehunter and Eddie Izzard is the voice of
Reepicheep. It is very exciting.
QUESTION: Has the advance of science helped you any since the first
Narnia movie?
HOWARD BERGER: We improve things on an artistic level. We found
things that worked better this time around. When we shot the first
film we made lists of what we might do differently. What definitely
helped was having a better understanding of how the digital aspects
would work. On the first film we created a lot of minotaur legs and
faun legs. Some we used and a lot we didn't. But this time Andrew
committed to having the make-up for all creatures stopping at the
knees. That saved a tremendous amount of time and aggravation. The
digital things probably went a lot smoother. We worked as a team,
which was great. A long time ago it was butting heads with digital
versus practical but it worked so well because we all worked together
for Andrew.
QUESTION: What type of hair did you use?
HOWARD BERGER: Each creature has its own sort of hair. The satyrs
have a combination of yak and goat hair and the faces are goat hair.
We did something that is called flocking. We shaved all the fur off
pelts and used a machine called a flocking gun. So you have foam
rubber skin which is painted and glued and then you use this gun to
attach the fur and it stands up on end. So you can lay the hair down
in the fur pattern that you want and it looks beautiful. For the
minotaurs it is all yak hair and the fauns use human hair. The
dwarves also use human hair and some yak hair. We needed tons of
hair. But there seems to be plenty of yak hair. We never had a point
when we were out of yak hair.
QUESTION: Was there anything that you almost ran out of?
HOWARD BERGER: The only thing was that back in Los Angeles we needed
a constant supply of prosthetic faces. We had huge amounts but we
went through them quickly and it was quite stressful as we hoped that
our shipments of faces arrived on time because without them we
wouldn't have any creatures on set. So that was very difficult. It
is amazing how many faun noses you can go through in a week. I kept
count and at the end we did 4,600 make-ups on the movie. We had 42
people working on that. It was a huge amount of work; I did five make-
ups a day, at least. I think the number of make-ups that we did is a
record.
QUESTION: How did you maintain your energy levels?
HOWARD BERGER: I am a great cheerleader. It is part of my job to
rally the troops. Also I am very involved. If I was not doing the
work then it might be different but I don't ask anybody to do
anything that I wouldn't do. I am a very high-energy person. It is
infectious. I tried to keep it funny and light. Yes there were a lot
of tears and anger and aggravation - that happens when you are sleep
deprived. But we kept going and tried to make the best of it and keep
everybody happy. And Andrew is such a happy guy. It might be
different if he was kicking garbage cans and yelling and cussing but
he always has a smile on his face. We also tried top keep a team
spirit. I tried to have dinners with everyone. In Prague we welcomed
the entire team and had a huge dinner with all 42 members of the
team. I wanted to make it one big happy family. If you don't have
that then at 2am it could be hard to get the morale going.
QUESTION: During filming you coped with extreme weather, how did that
impact on your work?
HOWARD BERGER: It affects a lot. You always expect bad weather and
for some reason these films are cursed with bad weather...I don't know
why. The sun comes out and you start to roll and then it starts
pouring. So we had to make sure that we had rain ponchos for all the
characters. As soon as it started raining we ran out there with
wardrobe to give all the creatures a poncho. Otherwise the rain would
matt all the hair and make it look unnatural. So we also had big
tents set up so that everybody could go inside - and it rained a lot.
QUESTION: What about the extremes of hot weather?
HOWARD BERGER: That can be a problem, especially if we are doing
stunt stuff and the make-up can slop off.... noses could melt off.
Luckily everyone was trained in doing things like a faun nose quite
quickly. It was a constant thing of always being prepared.
Ben Barnes The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian Interview
http://www.girl.com.au/ben-barnes-prince-caspian-interview.htm
The Chronicles Of Narnia DVD
http://www.girl.com.au/chronicles-of-narnia-dvd.htm
The Chronicles of Narnia Prince Caspian Book
http://www.girl.com.au/the-chronicles-of-narnia-prince-caspian.htm
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