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books were written 50 years ago, that message had a much more allegorical message and now it’s something that looks really cool,” Barnes claims, “But I think that’s there if you choose to see it. I think the Miraz tambourine imagery is very strong. You got eagles, which is a very Nazi-esque kind of look to it, but it’s only there if you look to see it. You got this faceless race with this ethnic accent and it’s set during World War II.”

Sergio [Castellito] would be the first one to tell you that he thought Miraz was a kind of Hitlerean figure,” he adds, “You look at Caspian and his uncle has murdered his father and thinking whether vengeance is the best policy. Pop quiz, which Shakespeare play does this remind you of? So there’s a lot of good sort of interesting moral messages about humility. There’s a lot of different messages in there if you choose to see them and if you don’t, then there’s cool battle scenes.”

An element that makes Prince Caspian particularly different is its medieval-style battle sequences. We asked Barnes whether he felt doing the battle scenes was more work or play for him.

“Half and half,” he replies, “I really enjoyed choreographing them and rehearsing them and once you get to do them actually, it’s 4:00AM and raining and you’ve got a pathetic tennis elbow and it can be quite grueling. But it’s really satisfying when you have eight guys come at you and you’re like, ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and done.’ And you can’t lose because you’re in the next movie.”

A particular difference between the book and the film version of Prince Caspian is how they display the relationship between Caspian and Susan Pevensie when she kisses him as they part ways.

“I was worried about it actually, if I’m being honest,” he says, “Not doing it, that was fine, but I’ve done screen and stage kisses in almost everything I’ve done, so that part of it is fun. But I was actually worried about it because it wasn’t in the book and as a Narnia fan, I knew it wasn’t in the book. Actually, there’s a much more massive scene between Caspian and Susan that’s not in the movie. It will be in the deleted scenes, but it’s not in the movie.”

”And I think that it helped a lot that it wasn’t in the film,” Ben adds, “I understand why they took it out. Actually, when I saw it, that’s one of the things I was most relieved about, because I thought it was something that felt very real. There’s glances between them and they go through this thing together and they don’t really talk about anything because they’re in the midst of doing other stuff. And they say goodbye and she walks away and she’s thinking, ‘You know what? I’m not coming back, why not?’ And it felt like a real moment and that’s thanks to Anna [Popplewell] and to Andrew.”

Ben ...

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