CHAT: Weitz knows his Materials

LITTLE ROCK — Chris Weitz might seem an unlikely choice to direct The Golden Compass, New Line's $200 million fantasy based on the first volume in British novelist Philip Pullman's beloved and controversial trilogy His Dark Materials. While Weitz was nominated for an Academy Award for adapting Nick Hornby's novel About a Boy to the screen (he also directed it), he's probably best-known as the guy who, with older brother Paul, founded the American Pie franchise.

"It's not just convincing them I could do more than comic set pieces involving pies," he says. "It's also the sheer size and logistical weight of a movie like this that one would rather trust to someone who's been through it before ..."

And Weitz had to convince himself he was up to the task. After New Line gave him a crack at the project, he spent some time with Peter Jackson on the set of King Kong to acclimate himself to the rarefied air of blockbuster filmmaking. Then he resigned from the production, citing technical challenges. He rejoined after an interim director ran into difficulties with New Line, but Weitz was still concerned about the difficulties the film posed.

"If you're making About a Boy, you know you have to find some locations, but all those locations are there in London," he says. "You just find the right street that suits you, you don't build an entire street. Whereas here we do ... and if we need an Arctic background and we can't get our 12-year-old star to the Arctic at night, we'll manufacture it out of photography of glaciers made by our helicopter crew in Norway which is laid over virtual geometries made by the effects houses. So I had all kinds of resources in this film that I never had before."

Weitz brings an interesting academic background to bear on the material; a bit of an Anglophile, he was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied English literature. So he knows the milieu that produced English fantasy writers like Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Pullman - and, in an alternate universe, the plucky 12-year-old heroine ofThe Golden Compass.

A self-described lapsed Catholic with Buddhist sympathies, Weitz was attuned to Pullman's anti-hierarchical message about the dangers of blind faith and the power of free will. (His Dark Materials has often been posited as a refutation of Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia.)

"Some friends recommended [Pullman's] books to me, " he says. "I really had no idea of making a movie; I was just reading them for pleasure. And I wasjust really astounded by them. They were books that were ostensibly young adult fantasies but had this incredible intellectual, philosophical depth to them that was really exciting ... it was a few years later that I found out they were going to make a movie."

The result has been criticized by people - few of whom have seen the film - on both sides of the religious debate. The film has been called atheist propaganda even as it has been attacked for diluting Pullman's rejection of organized religion.

"The balancing act here was to preserve some of the intellectual elements that readers of the book really enjoy while at the same time making it a big tent movie, which it had to be, in part because of the size of the financial gamble," Weitz says. "I certainly didn't set out with any kind of agenda or to insult anyone, least of all a theatergoer who is a religious person ... The idea was just to make something that was enjoyable for children who were going for a grand story and also to have a certain amount of intellectual content for grownups who wanted to think about some of the things that Pullman thinks about."

New Line wants - expects - the film to become a tentpole franchise, but Weitz admits that plans for the next two films haveyet to be finalized.

"We won't know whether the next two will go into production until we see how this film does," he says.

So New Line will know by tonight whether they've got a hit?

"They'll probably know after the first showing," Weitz says.