The task was even more challenging since the book doesn't conform to any standard structure. The story is told from the point of view of Susie Salmon, a teenage girl who is brutally raped and murdered at the outset. Despite coming to such a violent and ugly end, as Susie watches her family from a place beyond death, she sees beauty in the connections and new beginnings the demise of her earthly body creates. It's this juxtaposition, that Sebold somehow made work on paper, which created such a strong reaction in readers. Many took great comfort in the author's vision of the afterlife, though Sebold wrote it from an agnostic perspective, which caused the devout to complain about her seemingly godless (and judgment-less) heaven. Others rejoiced in her ability to subvert the darkness of humanity, and in her capacity for finding light where there should be nothing but night.
There was therefore a difficult balancing act that was intrinsic to the success of the movie. The book was criticized by some for being too saccharin, yet if Jackson departed too far from its strangely uplifting tone he risked alienating its large and loyal following. Conversely, graphically depicting the rape and murder of a teen could easily be perceived as being gratuitous on screen, yet acknowledging that such a cruel and tragic event had happened was essential to the core of the piece.
Jackson worked on the screenplay with Lord of The Rings collaborators Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh (who's also his partner in life). Though the psychedelic dream/afterlife sequences allowed the team to draw on their familiar fantasy filmmaking background, the gritty, true-to-life segments, set in the suburbs of Philadelphia in the 1970s, have overtones from Jackson's earlier work - namely Heavenly Creatures (a period movie released in '94 that Jackson co-wrote with Walsh, which explored the 1954 Parker-Hulme murder).
Thus the movie will not necessarily appeal to Jackson's Lord of The Rings film fans, nor will it sit well with all who loved Sebold's book. Jackson is prepared for a mixed reaction however. Here he talks about The Lovely Bones' journey to the big screen, and his reasons for making the choices he did.
Question: What were the challenges adapting the book for the film?
Peter Jackson: In my mind there's no such thing as a perfect adaptation of a book. The master work is the book. Alice Sebold's novel is The Lovely Bones. That is the work that has got everything in it, every character, every sub-plot, and that's the way that you should experience the story in its most pure form.
A film adaptation of any book - especially The Lovely Bones in this example - is only ever going to be a souvenir. It's going to be an impression of aspects of the book. To me, to adapt a book is not a question of producing a carbon copy of the book - it's impossible. To include everything the film would be five or six hours long. It's a personal impression.
Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh and myself - the three of us wrote the screenplay. We read the book, we responded to aspects of the book, especially the emotional themes and the comforting value of the book, and things it had to say about the afterlife, that aspect of it, which is very personal to anybody...Our adaptation is very much elements of the book restructured following our instincts and our taste. So, to me, no adaptation can ever be perfect. It's impossible. You don't make a movie for the fans of the book. You just can't do that.
Q: One of the major changes you made from the book is that the book featured a rape and murder. I'm sure you had artistic reasons for choosing to eliminate the rape. Could you share your thought process?
PJ: They're artistic, they're moral reasons, they're practical reasons. There's a variety of reasons which I should talk about. The film is about a teenager and her experiences of what happens; she's murdered, she goes into an afterlife experience, or in-between. We wanted to make a film that teenagers could watch. Fran and I have a daughter who's very similar to Susie's age, and we wanted Katie to be able to see this film. There's a lot of positive aspects to this film and it's not something I wanted to shield our daughter from, and so it was important for us to not go into R-rated territory at all.
Also, I never regarded the movie as being a film about a murder, and yet, if we shot any aspect of that particular sequence in anyway it would stigmatize the film. Movies are such a powerful medium...and to show a 14-year old girl being murdered in any way, no matter how briefly, it would completely swing the balance. And it would frankly make it a film that I wouldn't want to watch. I would have no interest in seeing that depicted on film. I would not want to see the film, and every movie that I make is a film I want to see.
I make movies that I know I would enjoy seeing in the cinema, and it would not be one of them. So the movie that we did make, we wanted it to become something that was almost like a mystery, a crime mystery of what happens when you're in this world of the subconscious, the world of the afterlife. Susie has to deal with the mystery of what happened to her and there's a positive aspect to it in the sense that she's immortal. It's saying that there is no such thing as death. All of those aspects and themes were what interested us, not the murder.
I've shot some pretty extreme things in my time with Bad Taste, and Meet the Feebles, and Braindead, and there's a certain style and a sense of humor that I believe you can do to get away with it. But to do anything that depicted violence towards especially a young person in a way that was serious, to me, I would have no interest in filming it at all. It would be repulsive. So there was a variety of reasons, but we felt very determined from the beginning that the film should be PG-13 because it was important.
Q: Yes, actually showing the rape and murder would be completely superfluous to the story as you've told it.
PJ: I mean how much murder and killing do you need to see to be satisfied? How much to make somebody happy?
One of the things we did which is different to the novel in the way we restructured the screenplay is we have her fleeing from her murder. We really liked that aspect of the way the story was told. At the point where her spirit becomes disconnected from her body, she's running. She's running across that field, she's running into the street, she's running home, and Susie doesn't know what has happened to her.
She's literally confused and now she finds this out in the in-between, which is essentially the world of dreams, of subconscious, of this confused state, and she has to start to put the pieces together like a mystery. So that really dictated very strongly that, even for all the other reasons, seeing any sort of murder was not something we wanted to do because of the way we restructured the story, so that she herself is confused and has to put the pieces of the puzzle together as the story goes on.
Q: After doing four of the most epic fantasy films probably ever pulled off, what drew you to The Lovely Bones. You have a lot of digital effects in this film, which you utilize in your depiction of the supernatural, but it's a really intimate story. What appealed to you about this?
PJ: The only thing as a filmmaker that I am scared of, or fear, is repetition. I have no interest at all in doing the same thing over and over again. That's not to say that I wouldn't do another fantasy film or I wouldn't do another splatter film one day, or another film with puppets, but it would be different.
Certainly it's great to have a break, and it's great to turn you mind to something different, and The Lovely Bones is a challenge...Things are immediately much more interesting and enjoyable if they're difficult. It you're attempting to do something, or if you decide you're going to take on a project for the next year or two years, if it's easy and familiar - I shouldn't say easy actually, that's the wrong word - but if it's familiar and it's treading the same ground that you've gone before it's immediately going to be less interesting than taking on something that has new demands and a fresh challenge.
The Lovely Bones is a wonderful puzzle. It's a terrific book that affects you emotionally. The book doesn't have a structure that immediately makes the film obvious. In your mind the book affects you on an emotional level not on a story level as such. You delve into it, and as a filmmaker you figure out a way in which you can tell the story on film. As I said at the very beginning, it's not necessarily the perfect way or the way that other people would do it. You take 20 different filmmakers and give them a book like this - any book really - and you'll have 20 completely different films, which is interesting. So the idea of certainly doing something that was a challenging new topic was absolutely of great interest to us.
Q: Brian Eno did the score. What qualities from him did you want to augment what you were doing on screen?
PJ: Brian Eno was a wonderful surprise for us, a delightful surprise that happened. Interestingly enough, we had made a decision earlier on that we would possibly have no soundtrack composer on the movie. We thought that it would be interesting to do what Martin Scorsese does...have a soundtrack that was composed of songs of that period, and choose songs especially that would be suitable for particular sequences in the film. When we were compiling a list of songs as we were writing the script, we would write them into the screenplay. We'd actually identify the names of songs in the script that we thought would be appropriate. There was two or three of Brian Eno's existing tracks that made it onto our list. "Baby's On Fire" was one that we always thought would be great to accompany the scene where Mark goes into the cornfield with the baseball bat. There was an instrumental that he did called "The Big Ship" which was another beautiful piece of music that we had planned on using, in addition to a lot of other pieces by other composers.
So we got to the point, pretty much at the beginning of postproduction, where we had to start to ask permission to use these tracks. We contacted Brian and explained what we were doing and could we use these couple of songs of his, and he asked us about the film. He rushed out and grabbed the book to read it, he was curious, and he said to us, "Have you got a composer to do the soundtrack?" We said, "Well, no, not really. We think maybe we might not use one." And he said he would be really interested in doing it if we wanted to go that way. He sort of volunteered, which was amazing because to us, we never even thought to ask him because he's done a couple of movies, but it's not something that he really devotes much of his time to.
He was great to work with and [it was] an incredibly different experience because we're used to working with composers who take a final edit of the movie and they compose music to exactly the cut of the film that you give them. To the final actual seconds and frames, it's all perfectly lined up. Brian didn't want to see the rough cut of the film. He didn't want to read the script. He wanted to see conceptual art, he wanted to see imagery, he wanted to be inspired by emotion, he wanted to see photographs of the set, and then he started to compose. We were just communicating with him over iChat. We were in New Zealand and he was in the U.K., and he started to send us these long pieces of music. Beautiful, instrumental, emotional sort of pieces which might be seven or eight minutes long and would have all sorts of interesting shapes to them. He just basically said that we should edit these pieces of music as we saw fit, and combine them and blend them, and that's how he worked. It was a completely different way to how we've ever worked with a composer before, but for this particular movie, both the sound and the style of working really ended up suiting the film.
Q: Can you talk about how justice was carried out in the film, and how the film's message affected the ending - particularly Susie's decision between the boy and the box.
PJ: Ahh. Well that was one of things that we loved about the climax. The fact that she has this moment through the use of Ruth, who is a girl with genuine psychic ability. Susie finds that she has a few seconds back on earth again, a few seconds when she's inhabiting a body rather than being this sort of free spirit as it were. And in those few seconds she could decide to say, "Call the police. That guy out the window is the man who murdered me. You'll find my body inside that safe. Quickly, get to a phone and call the cops."
In terms of the very end, what I like about what happens to Mr. Harvey is that it confirms I think a hope that we all have that even if the police or the legal authorities don't ultimately do their work that there's a form of natural justice that happens. That was very much the concept behind what happens to Mr. Harvey.
Q: Susie's limbo world, how did you find the right look and texture for it on screen.
PJ: Well, the key thing to us was just the concept that it wasn't a physical place. We were not saying that when you die, you're going to go into this afterlife, and in this movie we're going to show you what that afterlife is like. That's not what we attempted to do. We wanted to base it on Susie's subconscious. So at the point that she is no longer anchored to earth through her body...her mind is in the world of dreams. At night she dreams, as we all do, but now that she no longer has a living body, she's permanently in this world of the subconscious, which is essentially a dream world. And so a lot of the imagery that we used - everything's a metaphor in a dream world. Everything means something else. But it's not a literal thing. So we used image systems that the audience are not really supposed to obviously understand...but as scriptwriters we put it into our screenplay, and the overall impression that it creates hopefully gives the audience the idea of what is happening.
People say when you dream about a house, that a house really represents a person, when you analyze dreams. So the house that she imagines that she sees in that empty field with the lighthouse sticking out of it, that house represents Mr. Harvey. She's using the metaphor of the house to represent the killer. And, as we said earlier, she flees from her own murder so she doesn't know where her body is and the only person that does is Mr. Harvey. Mr. Harvey himself keeps a souvenir, a charm bracelet. He throws most of the charm bracelet away because of the evidence, but he rips off one charm, which happens to be the house, and that house is Susie, using the same image system. So he's now keeping control of Susie. It's her fear of Mr. Harvey that he still has over her that prevents her from leaving this world of the in-between. I mean, she's trying to get to heaven but she's stuck. So the concept of her finding out the answers to these questions of where her body is, she has to confront the man who killed her, and she does that symbolically by going through the door of that house. And in doing so, she enters his subconscious. So I love the idea that she goes in there, she sees his previous victims, which are images that only he has in his mind, so now her subconscious is entering Harvey's subconscious.
And we used things like the flower, the blooming flower. That flower is really Susie and her life force. It's withered and it's dead as far as her father sees, this flower, but then it blooms in his hand when she's trying to communicate with him...He imagines in his mind's eye that flower blooming.
The gazebo was representing unfulfilled love. That first date that she was going to have with Ray, he said, "Meet me in the shopping mall by the gazebo." So that gazebo represents the date that she never had. She sees him in the distance in the in-between and she tries to run there but she can't run because the ground turns to water and mush, which is a very common dream image that we all have, that we're trying to get to a place and the ground is turning to syrup or glue and we can't make it there.
So everything that we did in that in-between world, and again this is all working on the basis of the subconscious, it's not supposed to be particularly clear, but it was designed as a way of working within the metaphor and image system of dreams. We liked the idea that in those sequences we were inside Susie's subconscious and it wasn't a physical place that we were showing.
Q: Despite your explanation about the subconscious, I think most people's observation is that it's Susie looking on at her family from the afterlife. As a non-believer I've always considered the afterlife a copout, a religious concoction to get people to behave in a certain way for some reward. I'm wondering in terms of putting the script together and trying to understand how people interpret this, what did you discover about the need that people have to believe in the idea of souls living on.
PJ: Well, it's an interesting question and it's one that I think everyone has obviously their own points of view about it...Certainly what we felt very strongly with the movie is that we didn't want to make a film that cast judgment on people's religious beliefs because that wasn't at all the motivation for making the movie. We didn't create the in-between being Susie's subconscious for that reason. To us it wasn't about her existing in a world that had some form of religious control around it. It was literally, she is disconnected from her body for that period and she is in this weird hallucinogenic state.
What we do in the movie is...there's that scene in the end with the field...There's a golden light there, which is supposed to be wide heaven, as Susie calls it, and as Alice Sebold called it, and that's a golden light. I shot that in a deliberately clichd recognizable way that people get the idea that heaven is there. That is indeed the goal, which Susie has, to get out of this weird, trapped place that she is [in] and to actually move on; That golden light represents where she and everyone else moves on to. The idea is that you can put whatever you choose into that golden light and if you are religious, then obviously that's what you put in there. If you're not religious, you can imagine something else. And if you don't believe there's anything there at all, then probably it's not the movie you should go see.
I personally think that, all religious things to one side, which is a completely different topic, I do think that there is some energy that we have inside us. I have experienced a couple of people that have been very close to me dying and I have been there, and I've held their hand. There is a feeling that when somebody passes on, that they leave. There's a sense of departure that's very, very strong. It's so strong that it has made me believe in the fact that there is a form of energy inside us that continues to survive after death. Science, physics, tells us that energy cannot be destroyed so it has to go somewhere. It doesn't evaporate.
The Lovely Bones opens in cinemas nationwide on Friday Jan 15.
all i can say is read the book. jackson and his screenwriters created unnecessary holes in this wonderful story.
like in the book he got rid of the safe at the same time as the bracelet, why move that to the end? and there were so many misquotes and stupid changes that if you read the book, it made it unwatchable.
i guess now i know how my harry potter loving girlfriend feels every time she watches one of those terrible book-to-movie adaptations. <3