The first trailer for Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew arrived yesterday, and the most revealing moment of the day came after it screened. Netflix debuted the trailer at an IMAX theater in New York, where Greta Gerwig, whose last film was Barbie, is adapting C.S. Lewis’s sixth Narnia book, the prequel that tells how Narnia itself began. After the screening, Gerwig sat down with Stephen Colbert, who hosted the conversation. Colbert told the audience his own introduction to Lewis came through the author’s Christian writings rather than the Narnia stories, and he asked her how Lewis’s faith played a part in her film.
“For me, film and faith have always gone hand in hand,” she said, as the Associated Press reported, calling both communal experiences. In NarniaWeb’s account of the conversation, she reached back to growing up in the church, where people gather to sing in choirs and worship together, and said she sees the same quality in a movie theater, strangers gathering in one room to share a story. She described the act of making movies itself as an act of faith.
It is not a new theme for her. Gerwig, 43, was raised a Unitarian Universalist in Sacramento, California, attended an all-girls Catholic high school, an upbringing she drew on for Lady Bird, her film about a Sacramento teenager, and grew up singing in the church choir. Faith, she said at the event, “has been a thread through all of my films.”
She prepared for Lewis the way she describes everything about this project, completely. “I read or re-read everything Lewis wrote. Then I tried to read everything he read,” she said, and she retraced his steps through Belfast, where Lewis was born, and through Cambridge and Oxford, re-reading his autobiography Surprised by Joy along the way. She wrote out the lines from his books that gave her goosebumps, and she spoke about how much the Lewis family’s support for the project meant to her. She even found small confirmations in the casting. David McKenna, the newcomer who plays Digory, the boy at the center of the story, happens to come from Belfast, which she had not planned and took as “a sign.”
“I would not be who I am without these books,” she said. “They created me.” That reverence is baked into the film’s story, the creation of a world rather than its destruction, and into how the film was physically made. Gerwig and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey shot it on 35mm film rather than digitally, and she arrived at the event wearing a silver pin of Aslan, the lion who sings Narnia into existence, crafted from the film’s own celluloid, as USA Today reported. “I only know how to make personal things,” she said.
Colbert told the audience he has already seen a cut of the film and praised it as visually spectacular and emotionally overwhelming. Everyone else gets their look when Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew opens in theaters February 12, 2027, with IMAX previews beginning February 10, before arriving on Netflix April 2, 2027. If Gerwig is right that film and faith belong together, her Narnia is about to test the idea on the biggest screen Netflix has ever given a movie.