Greta Gerwig has explained her decision to cast Meryl Streep as Aslan in new movie Narnia: The Magician's Nephew.
The Barbie director is helming a series of new adaptations of C.S. Lewis' beloved children's books and the first film will hit cinemas in February next year and she's now revealed why she chose The Devil Wears Prada star to voice the lion - insisting she wanted the character to be portrayed by someone who is "profound but not pretentious".
Greta told Empire magazine: "I wanted someone who was profound but not pretentious, who had gravitas but not morose self-seriousness.
"Someone who could communicate depth and pathos as well as joy and delight. I wanted someone who was older than 70, so there was a wisdom of experience, but who also had the capacity of fresh wonder, like a child.
"And also to be one of the greatest actors to ever do it. That list is not a long one."
Aslan has a red-striped face in Greta's version of the tale and she told the publication she drew a lot of inspiration from late music star David Bowie.
She explained music has a big place in the film and she wanted it to feel a "rock opera".
Greta told the publication: "David Bowie saved my life. Paul McCartney saved my life. David Gilmour saved my life. Pete Townshend saved my life. Jimmy Page, Robert Plant.
"When I heard their music, I had this deep sense of [thinking]: 'You’re gonna be OK' ... Narnia is literally a world made out of music. It is a world sung to life by Aslan, and rock ’n’ roll to me felt like a world made out of music."
Narnia: The Magician's Nephew also stars Daniel Craig, Carey Mulligan, Ciarán Hinds, Emma Mackey and Denise Gough.
Greta previously hailed the project the "honour of a lifetime". She said in a statement: “I was a child when I first read The Magician's Nephew, and I fell in love with the gorgeously improbable but completely brilliant concept of a cosmic lion singing the world of Narnia to life.
"I didn't know that I would grow up to make films, but a universe built out of music is an idea that always lived in my heart.
"It is the honour of a lifetime to be asked to imagine it into being. Because of C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, I believed in magic and hidden worlds and adventure.
"I believed that anywhere could be enchanted and that anyone could be swept up into an epic. That wonder and awe was available to everyone, even ordinary people like me."
Greta will also serve as writer and producer, as well as director.
The Magician's Nephew, which was published in May 1955, was the sixth book published in the seven-novel series but in recent years has served as the first volume in the tale.
It is set 1,000 years before the events of the most famous of the stories, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and tells of how Aslan the lion created Narnia.
