Tilda Swinton plays the White Queen in The Chronicles Of Narnia. The film, which opens Friday, is based on the classic childrens series by C.S Lewis.

NEW YORK -- Forgive Tilda Swinton if she engages in flattery of the filmmakers behind The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe.

Fiercely independent, highly educated and outspoken, the English actress is known more for her withering analysis, not her praise, of the Hollywood dream machine.

"Most big-budget, industrial films are such rubbish," she tells the Sun in a private interview after a morning of round-table sessions with dozens of media. "What I don't understand is why this film isn't."

But the key, Swinton says, is the magical spell cast by New Zealand director Andrew Adamson (celebrated for his animated hits Shrek and Shrek 2). Adamson, drawing on his childlike enthusiasm for a book that had enchanted him at the age of eight, makes his live action directorial debut with The Chronicles Of Narnia.

"I think it was very, very clever that he was asked to make it," Swinton says of the genesis of the new film, which opens Friday. Walt Disney Pictures executives hope this is the first in a franchise that will rival the success of The Lord Of The Rings and the Harry Potter series, both inextricably linked to the original Narnia books by the late C.S. Lewis.

"I truly believe honestly, gloves off, that he has made a classic film," Swinton says of Adamson. "I think that it is a classic children's film. And it is for this reason: As a special effects master, he knew what children need is not a virtual world but a 'real' world. They needed to see real 3-D children interacting with a 3-D world."

Swinton, the film's villain, plays the White Witch, a manipulative, cold-hearted monarch who, in Lewis lore, is also known as Jadis and as the last Queen of Charn, a world she herself destroyed. In The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, Jadis is the one who lures human boy Edmund Pevensie into her sleigh, offering him an endless supply of Turkish Delight if only he betrays his three siblings.

All four Pevensie children, led by the youngest Lucy and including Susan and Peter, end up in Narnia by entering this mythical land through the back of an old wardrobe.

"I don't know how Andrew managed to make a film that feels as fresh (as this one does)," Swinton continues.

"But the secret may rest in the books of C.S. Lewis. The story is a lean and mean machine. The structure of the story is so profound that, as long as one kept on track and hit those marks in the story, it was never going to go stale."

Despite being an avid reader, Swinton came to The Chronicles Of Narnia late in life -- literally when she was being cast as the White Witch. Now she is a convert, and reads Narnia and other fairytales to her own twins, a boy and a girl now approaching eight years old. For her own edification, she also has been reading a biography of Lewis.

"He (Lewis) knew very well what it was like to be a child alone," Swinton says. "After his mother died, he and his brother grew up in a rather non child-friendly house through endless wet, English summers with nothing to do -- except with Anglo Saxon texts to thumb through and their imaginations to draw upon. He also knew so well, as all good fairy storytellers do, that the imagination is where we live when we're eight or nine."

In the Narnia books, the Pevensie children are obliged by circumstances to succeed, sometimes alone and sometimes in concert with their siblings, without adult assistance. That is a crucial part of the Narnia mythology, Swinton says, and why she thinks the stories still have universal relevance.

"Children's lives are so circumscribed. They kind of have to be. We have to socialize them. We have to disillusion them that they are the centre of the universe.

"But, in balance with that, a child's inner life is so important at that age when they're beginning to work out what they're going to do into the world alone, eventually. They're slowly beginning to work out that mommy and daddy aren't always going to be there. They're slowly beginning to work out that they might grow up one day.

"That's what all those fairy stories are about. And I think that's what your imagination is for -- keeping you in that lonely place where you can really learn stuff about yourself and, most importantly, learn that you can survive!"

When she met Adamson during casting, she realized that he knew all that and yet simultaneously had a boyish thril over just telling the story as if he was still eight years old.

"It was definitely that that caught me," Swinton says. "I thought: 'Wow, he has been making this film for 30 years, in his head, and I want to be there to help him.' "

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