Dakota Blue Richards stars as orphan Lyra Belacqua in The Golden Compass.
Photo: Courtesy of Laurie Sparham/New Line Cinema View Slideshow 
Editor's note: This story is an extended version of a piece that appears in issue 15.12 of Wired magazine.
Somewhere in England a cowboy and a witch are flirting on a balloon.
"It's a flying boat," clarifies Sam Elliott, the weather-beaten character actor who plays Texas aeronaut Lee Scoresby. Indeed, the airship looks like a dinghy held aloft by multiple balloons, a visual detail not mentioned in The Golden Compass, the first book in the wildly popular His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman.
"One way to go is the traditional wicker-basket balloon," director Chris Weitz says. "But the kids want more these days." He's wearing a black T-shirt, a tan sweater with rolled-up sleeves, and aqua corduroys. He ambles around the soundstage, casually observing at the production he's responsible for. The budget for the film adaptation of The Golden Compass is $180 million, and almost no element of its production has been simple. "It's really hard to make a movie," Weitz says. "It's hard enough to make a small, bad one — trying to make a big, good one is definitely a challenge to your physical and mental stamina."
Eva Green, who plays the witch Serafina Pekkala, gets ready for the scene, flexing her jaw, adjusting her dress, quietly saying her lines to herself while she makes delicate figures with her left hand. Then she and Elliott climb up a 20-foot-high platform and into the ship. The walls all around them are a punishingly bright shade of green, useful for both burning your retinas and letting digital artists superimpose CG backgrounds later.
A technician turns on a humongous fan, on loan from the farm of Henry Braham, the largest producer of industrial hemp in England, who just happens to also be the film's cinematographer. With the actors' hair artfully blowing back, the balloon-ship begins to rock and sway. Its motion is controlled by another technician, who's wielding a toy plastic spaceship mounted on top of a joystick. A Panavision camera affixed to a SuperTechno 50 crane does an elaborately choreographed dance around the balloon while Green and Elliott look into the distance, which at some point in the future will be more than the color green.
Green says, "There's a prophecy about that child, Mr. Scoresby. She'll decide the war which is to come." Then Elliott muffs a line.
"Sorry, sweetie," he says.
The shot gets set up again. Green looks down at the technology surrounding her. "I feel like I'm in a computer game," she says, cheerfully enough. If she were, it's not clear whether the game would be winnable.
Set in a world of shape-shifting animals and armored polar bears, The Golden Compass was aimed at kids, but it has also been devoured by adults. Drawing in equal measure from Grimm's fairy tales and Milton's Paradise Lost, Pullman's trilogy has become wildly popular over the past decade, selling more than 5 million copies in the US alone. The Golden Compass won an assortment of awards and was dubbed "the most ambitious work since Lord of the Rings" by New Statesman.
In the wake of the success of the Lord of the Rings and Narnia franchises, it might seem like a no-brainer to use His Dark Materials as the basis for another series of epic fantasy movies — but this franchise comes with so many extra degrees of difficulty, it seems unbelievable that it ever even got a green light.
First is the sheer scope of the book: The action shifts from Oxford to London to the frozen northern wastelands of "Norroway" to a hole ripped in the sky underneath the Aurora Borealis, a portal to other worlds. Then there is the notion of "daemons," one of Pullman's great literary inventions. Humans in The Golden Compass have an externalized soul in the form of a talking animal. Children's daemons can change forms at will, but when they reach adulthood, the daemon's flesh becomes fixed and reflects the personality of its human: A servant might have a dog, a sailor might have a dolphin, and an Arctic adventurer might have a snow leopard. The daemons stay in close proximity, which means that every single scene in the movie could potentially have CG squirrels and golden monkeys scampering around. "It's like making two different movies," producer Deborah Forte says.
All those effects are the principal reason why the movie's got that gargantuan price tag. "It really is a lot, a lot, a lot of money," Weitz concedes. "Fortunately, it's more money than I can really understand, so that's helped me not to worry about it."
But most daunting of all, perhaps, is the trilogy's antireligious theme. The book's primary villains are the Magisterium (a renamed Catholic Church) and the Authority (known to you and me as the Lord Almighty). As Pullman once baldly put it, "My books are about killing God." That's not the traditional recipe for boffo box office at Christmastime.
New Line Cinema brought in bargeloads of cash with The Lord of the Rings, but lately it has had more middling success; its big summer movies were Hairspray and Rush Hour 3. The Golden Compass is the most expensive movie the company has ever made. If it doesn't do well, it won't just be a bad year on the balance sheet — the entire division could find itself folded in with its corporate big brothers at Warner Bros. Back in 1998, the heads of New Line essentially bet the whole company on a fantasy trilogy: an audacious wager that paid off as Peter Jackson's tale of hobbits and the Ring brought in billions of dollars. Now, almost a decade later, they're betting the house again.
Weitz wouldn't seem like the most logical candidate to helm The Golden Compass. He's best known as the co-creator of the American Pie franchise of raunchy teen comedies, and His Dark Materials is notably short on scenes of coitus with apple pies. But after reading the books while shooting About a Boy in 2001, he became a huge fan. "I think it's the greatest work of fantasy in English," he says. "I say that as someone who loves Lord of the Rings, but I find more that moves me as an adult in this than in Tolkien."
Weitz was such an admirer that he wrote a 40-page treatment of how he would approach a Golden Compass script, even though Tom Stoppard had already completed a screenplay. It worked: In May 2004, New Line hired Weitz as director and screenwriter.
But in December of the same year, Weitz quit the project. "That was purely the sheer scariness of the size of this movie and my relative greenness about the technology," he says. He remained as screenwriter when Anand Tucker came on as director — but Tucker lasted only a matter of months before quitting himself. A year and a half after he stepped down, a more confident Weitz took back the director's chair. "I often regretted my decision to step off," he says. "I'm in a really good romantic relationship now, which means that I have a relatively stable psychology." Weitz had gone down to New Zealand to watch Peter Jackson film King Kong so he could see the mechanics of putting together an effects-heavy blockbuster; it sounds like he could have just as easily put the money toward couples counseling.
The two biggest names in the movie's cast are Daniel Craig (as Lord Asriel) and Nicole Kidman (as the scheming Mrs. Coulter); unfortunately, their movie together this summer, The Invasion, was an unmitigated flop. Both of them are in supporting roles, however; Lord Asriel becomes a crucial figure as the trilogy progresses, but he spends most of the first book offstage. The protagonist is the orphan girl Lyra Belacqua, stubborn and prone to lies, played here by the previously unknown 13-year-old Dakota Blue Richards. She projects a willful air on camera; off it, she seems unfazed by the scope of the production around her. "It's kind of weird pretending that you're somewhere when you're not," she says sensibly.
The production did some location shooting in Norway and Oxford, but the bulk of it was filmed at the soundstages of Shepperton Studios, just outside of London. "I came in wanting to be the in-camera guy," Weitz says, meaning that he originally hoped to use as few digital effects as possible. "The first time I pitched for this job, I said it'd be much better if we go shoot in actual Arctic locations. But of course, it wasn't possible to take a 12-year-old girl, who can shoot for only four hours a day in the best of circumstances, by law. You can't expose someone like that to Arctic conditions. I don't think you could expose Nicole Kidman to that either — she probably wouldn't be too excited about it."
Kidman did, however, quickly adapt to the particular demands of simulating her daemon, an alluring but vicious golden monkey. "Our version of the golden monkey was a green beanbag on a stick," Weitz remembers. "She was hugging and caressing it, and I almost had a laughing fit." He giggles at the memory. "I was thinking, 'What the hell am I doing?' But she was great doing those serious scenes with a beanbag."
The purpose of fantasy is to stimulate the imagination by immersing us in a world that is not our own: In other words, it's like all fiction, only more so. But the interests of its authors will inevitably emerge, even if dressed in chain mail and funny hats. J.R.R. Tolkien's real passion was for philology, and so The Lord of the Rings is saturated with his invented languages. C. S. Lewis used his Narnia series to deliver lessons about Christianity, alternately comforting and priggish. In His Dark Materials, Pullman builds a fictional Republic of Heaven, encouraging us to make the best possible material world rather than to wait for the afterlife. "Where we are is always the most important place," Lyra says toward the trilogy's end.
"I disagree with the answers that Lewis supplied, the salvation — if you like to use that word — that he offers his children in the Narnia books," Pullman says. "But I can see that he was engaging with great, important issues: What is right and what is wrong, does God exist, what happens after we die? He was seeking an answer that would satisfy emotionally and intellectually, and I respect that struggle." And Tolkien? "For all its length and intellectual complexity, I think Lord of the Rings is an essentially trivial work. It's not about anything important."
If Pullman's theology is couched in fantastical terms — daemons and Dust rather than souls and salvation — that doesn't make his anticlerical themes any less acute. While the technology in The Golden Compass is roughly Victorian, with dirigibles and "anbaric power" (i.e., electricity), the Church is approximately at the point of the Inquisition. A key plot point in The Golden Compass is the Church's General Oblation Board developing a plan to sever the link between children and their daemons, with horrific results.
As Pullman put it bluntly on his Web site, "All too often in human history, churches and priesthoods have set themselves up to rule people's lives in the name of some invisible God (and they're all invisible, because they don't exist) — and done terrible damage. In the name of their God, they have burned, hanged, tortured, maimed, robbed, violated and enslaved millions of their fellow-creatures, and done so with the happy conviction that they were doing the will of God, and they would go to heaven for it. That is the religion I hate, and I'm happy to be known as its enemy."
So when Weitz let it be known that in his version of The Golden Compass, the Magisterium would be more generalized and as much political as religious, there must have been sighs of relief at New Line. But there were also howls of protest from fans worried that the book's themes were being neutered. After all, doesn't the trilogy climax in The Amber Spyglass with the death of a "demented and powerless" God?
Weitz says, "We're not dealing as directly as the books with a parallel-Earth version of the Catholic Church, which some fans probably see as a massive wimp-out, but I see that as actually a broadening of what the film is about. I had a bunch of conversations with Pullman about this — as far as he's concerned, it really is a statement against dogmatic authority of any kind. I think people who appreciate these issues in the book won't be disappointed with the film. I honestly do."
"Religious tyranny is one form of tyranny," Pullman agrees, stoutly backing up Weitz. "It's tyranny that's the bad thing. Totalitarian ways of thought are just as bad when they're inspired by religion or by some other body of doctrine. Religion is at its best when it has absolutely no political power."
"I'm saying so much more than anybody at New Line would want me to say," Weitz says. (The studio has already had to engage in preliminary spin control; after the Catholic Kidman was criticized for taking part in the movie, she said "I wouldn't be able to do this film if I thought it was at all anti-Catholic.") He laughs ruefully and continues, "The story has to get to a Miltonic place, to a second Fall." (He's referring to the third book's reenactment of the Original Sin in the Garden of Eden.) "There was a medieval concept of the felix culpa, the happy fall — which means that without the fall of man, there would be no room for Jesus to do the good stuff, so it was all part of a generally positive story." Steam condenses on Weitz's breath. It's a rare tent pole movie that leads its director to medieval mythology, but The Golden Compass is an unusual best seller. "People are going to get at me for taking the religion out of His Dark Materials," he concludes. "But they'll be wrong."
Eight months pass since Elliott and Green are seen flying in their airship, during which the movie gathers some negative buzz: You can practically see the flop sweat on the brows of New Line executives. But a 10-minute reel of highlights shown at Cannes and Comic-Con is genuinely thrilling, full of vaulted Magisterium buildings, witches sailing through the air, epic battles on the frozen tundra.
Weitz calls from London, sounding remarkably calm. "Well, 'calm' and 'exhausted' probably sound similar," he says. He and his wife now have a 4-month-old baby boy; in addition, he's about to lock down the picture and move on to the sound editing. "It's a bigger sound-mixing deal than I've ever been involved in," he says. "Usually for me, it's 'Raise the footsteps of the guy walking along the street.' And here it's bear growls and armored creatures smashing into each other and things exploding."
That bear is a major character: Iorek Byrnison, the deposed king of the armored polar bears. "Iorek works," says Weitz, "which is just a fucking huge relief. Next to Gollum, he's the most fully realized CG character. And he has to work, otherwise the whole thing falls to pieces — if the bear looks silly, ever, we're screwed."
Several months into editing, Weitz discovered that one of his fundamental decisions wasn't working. When Lyra uses the alethiometer — the truth-knowing golden compass of the title, he wanted the audience to see only Lyra and the compass's spinning dials. "But it became obvious that you needed sequences where you went inside Lyra's trance state," he says. "Just showing her face meditating doesn't cut it unless you're making the world's most expensive art film. You want to be brought into her inner world."
Pullman has commissioned an alethiometer of his own from an Oxford jeweler. "I'm convinced it will work," he says. "If it doesn't, I will take it back."
New Line doesn't have that same privilege with the Golden Compass movie, of course. But if Compass is a hit, the next two movies will be rushed into production; Weitz would presumably be invited to stay on, although he says he's "worn to a nub" and can't look past the December 7 release date. So what has he learned in postproduction? That fantasy can quickly become a reality. "There was no effect we aimed to do that was not possible for our guys," he says. "It just comes down to how many nerds times how many processors in the render queue."
FEATURE 
Making a Movie About Killing God Is Not as Easy as Pie 
Daemons, Alethiometers and the Fall of Man: Inside the Film Adaptation
