Narnia film-maker Andrew Adamson is keeping a promise to his wife and returning to live in Auckland.
Over the past seven years Adamson, 41, has chalked up one of the greatest box-office batting averages of any director in Hollywood - beating even Steven Spielberg.
Now he is handing over the third movie in Disney's Narnia franchise, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to veteran filmmaker Michael Apted, known for Coal Miner's Daughter and Gorillas in the Mist.
Adamson years ago promised his wife that they come home to Auckland, where he was born, when their eldest daughter reached school age, the Globe and Mail newspaper reported.
Isabel turns 5 next month.
So in a few weeks - after Adamson has finished his publicity responsibilities on Caspian, his second Narnia film, and the couple and their daughters Isabel and Sylvie have spent some time in Tuscany winding down - they will move home.
And back in Auckland, Adamson says he will begin the process of unhooking his brain from the Hollywood machine.
"I may never work again," laughs Adamson, sitting on a high floor in a hotel suite overlooking New York.
His feature debut, which he co-directed, was an unassuming animated film known as Shrek, which pulled in a relatively measly $US484 million ($NZ642 million) around the world.
He followed that by co-directing Shrek 2 ($US920 million) and then single-handedly helming the live-action triumph The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ($US745 million).
And most recently, he premiered in New York the first Narnia sequel, Prince Caspian.
In Prince Caspian, the four Pevensie children from the first Narnia adventure find themselves once again plucked out of wartime England and parachuted into an enchanted world of lush landscapes and talking animals.
But though the children have only been away from Narnia for one year of their lives, they return to the kingdom at a point in time 1300 years after their departure.
In the interim, the Narnians have been hounded out of their homes and their land has been all but destroyed.
For Adamson, returning home ties in with his own childhood, when his parents and three siblings moved to Papua New Guinea.
He was 11 years old and his father's two-year university post turned into seven years.
"We all loved it," he said. "I had a very free upbringing. At 13 years old, I'd jump on my motorcycle and ride off into the bush."
But PNG has changed, which helped him grasp what a devastated Narnia would mean to the Pevensies.
"The high school I went to doesn't exist any more," he said. "Now there's curfews, political instability, other problems."
Prince Caspian opens with a thrilling sequence involving the attempted assassination of the title character, the young leader of the Telmarines, by his corrupt uncle, King Miraz, who has designs on the kingdom.
When Caspian escapes and is given shelter by the Narnians, Miraz incites a war that he hopes will finish them off, by falsely reporting that they have kidnapped Caspian.
"I think there's a lot of good stories in fear," said Adamson.
"Whether it's politically advantageous to create that sense of fear, wherever it's coming from, I've found there are places you can get away from it," he said, laughing.
Back in one of those places he will continue his contact with the Narnia franchise as a producer, but he'd really like to let go and work on something costing less than $US100 million.
"It's hard to be experimental when your days are costing so much. You can't afford to try things out and make mistakes," he said.
"I want a different kind of challenge. And I'd love to do something I could shoot in eight weeks as opposed to eight months."
He told New York Magazine:
"I've been overlapping films since the first Shrek. I've been telling my wife I've been going to take a year off since then.
But largely, I want to get back to that feeling of the day I first left high school and realised I didn't have any homework, and I just had a clear head".
And he recaptured some of this feeling when shooting a "gorgeous, primordial lake with waterfalls" in one Caspian scene, near Haast.
"That was my favorite day of shooting.
"I was operating one of the motors in our raft with my right hand and the radio control with the kids' boat to help them steer.
"And I was directing. It was like I was a student again, student filmmaking with just 20 of us making a film."
- NZPA
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