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How hard is it going to be to step away from this franchise?

Oh, terrible separation anxiety. But luckily, I'm not stepping away entirely. I'll stay on as a producer on Dawn Treader and still be there for the kids if they need me.

What will that producer role look like?

I think it will look like being on a beach and just getting a phone call every now and again! I don't entirely know yet. I'm helping to get script into shape, helping to be true to the book—to keep the tone, the characters, to stay as true with those as possible. I feel like it's important for me to keep a fairly firm hand in that way. That being said, I don't want to step on Michael Apted's toes in any way, but it's important to make sure we continue in the way we started, that we don't sort of go off in a different direction and suddenly disappoint a whole audience that we've so far satisfied.

I imagine you're looking forward to spending more time with your wife and kids?

Yes, a lot. I haven't had a real break since the first Shrek, and I've been promising my wife I would have one since then. So I think if I want to keep my family, I'd better have one!

Sounds like you owe your wife a nice dinner and a vacation?

I think I owe her a nice long series of dinners and several vacations! On this film, I've been a lot stricter about my family time. With the first film, I had a lot harder time balancing family time to work time. But on this film, several times I've said to myself, At the end of a day it's a movie, and my kids are my kids. The movie will get made, but I'm not missing out on this thing with my kids.

Anything else you want to say that we didn't cover?

I think your readership is very happy in general with what I did with the last film, and will feel similarly about this film. But I think you can also take Doug Gresham's word for that, because he is really coming into it as much as an audience member as a producer.

We showed it to an audience for a first time recently, and it went very well. Doug had this huge smile on his face, because it was the first time he'd seen the film intact. You never know how somebody that's grown up with this—that loves every word of the book—is going to react. So that was a huge reassurance to me.

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