Jackson series a novel idea

Logan Lerman in 'Percy Jackson Sea of Monsters'.

Chris Columbus is fresh from the producer's chair of yet another teen film spectacular, writes Stephen Jewell

Chris Columbus must have wondered if he was tempting fate. For after helming the first two Harry Potter installments, the Home Alone director opted to bring another popular young adult fantasy series to the big screen in the form of Rick Riordan's bestselling Percy Jackson saga. Now after 2010's inaugural outing Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, the teenage demigod has returned in the more succinctly titled Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters.

"I've just seen the film and it's terrific," says Columbus, who is serving as a producer on the sequel after vacating the director's chair for Diary of a Wimpy Kid's Thor Freudenthal. "He's done a spectacular job and I almost like it more than the first film, which I directed. It's really fast paced, clever and exciting."

While both take place in school settings, Columbus believes that adapting the American adolescent's mythological adventures for the cinema has been a very different proposition to J.K. Rowling's iconic boy wizard. "In the books, Percy starts out as a 11-year-old boy who goes off to Camp Half-Blood with all the other human/god offspring but what works on the page doesn't easily translate to the screen," he explains.

"I thought that it was absolutely necessary that if the story was going to have some weight and gravitas, Percy should be about seventeen in the film. That's when the film became something really exciting for me because before that I thought it was just goofy to have a bunch of eleven-year-olds running around with swords. That wasn't going to look real or have any sense of fun about it."

Again starring Logan Lerman (The Three Musketeers) as Percy and Alexandra Daddario as Athena's daughter Annabeth and Brandon T. Jackson as the incorrigible satyr Grover Underwood, Sea of Monsters is hitting movie theatres almost four years after The Lightning Thief's release. However, Columbus insists that the long gap hasn't overly affected the young actors' youthful appearances. "The films were actually shot about two years apart, so all three of them are pretty much the same," he says. "But it doesn't really matter as it gives the film a greater sense of depth and importance when they're a little bit older. But that wasn't the case with Harry Potter, which in many ways was about that loss of innocence so those kids had to be 11 in (first film) The Philosopher's Stone. With Percy Jackson, there are probably 100,000 fans who will argue that point with me but I thought that the movie was better because the kids were older."

Based on Rick Riordan's 2006-second volume in the five-part Percy Jackson saga, the film's set around a quest to track down the fabled Golden Fleece. "I wasn't particularly faithful to the first novel on The Lightning Thief and we haven't been that faithful to the original novel on this film either," says Columbus. "With other films that I've made from novels such as Harry Potter or The Help, I've been very faithful to the source material but with Percy Jackson we've needed to slightly remove ourselves from what already existed in the books if the films are going to stand on their own."