Close to the Bones

Peter Jackson. Photo / Supplied

It's Monday so this must be Wellington. Peter Jackson has just completed a long-haul short-visit promotional trail for The Lovely Bones Up Over and back.

It took him to Rome for the first time. Just for 24 hours, he sighs, but enough time to see the Sistine Chapel where he was able to experience a rather different heavenly vision than the one he's spent the last couple of years creating in his visually-extravagant adaptation of the Alice Sebold novel.

The book - and the film - is driven by the narration of Susie Salmon, a 13-year-old raped and murdered in Pennsylvania in 1973 by a neighbour and looking down from "The Inbetween" at the lives of her grieving family, friends and assailant Mr Harvey.

It's a film which has already polarised reviewers, many saying Jackson's interpretation of the book is too wrapped up in Susie's visual effects-heavy heavenly adventures rather than the grim reality of her death and the world she observes from on high.

At the same time, Jackson has said American test screenings for early cuts of the film made him add more violence - to the scene when Susie's murderer Mr Harvey meets his demise, after audiences felt they needed to see him suffer.

Such are the travails of adapting an unconventional book, one which has many layers, subplots and character arcs. Some of those disappeared at the writing stage with his regular writing team of partner Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, while others were excised during the film-editing stage. With a budget of US$58 million ($79m) , it's also Jackson's first non-blockbuster since The Lord of the Rings and King Kong - if Kong was an encore to the Tolkien trilogy, this is the first film utilising the creative freedom that success delivered.

It's also his 10th feature as director and, in his now-traditional cameo, he is seen in a 1973 camera shop testing out a super 8 camera, just like the one he had when he was about Susie's age in the same era.

But tell him his feature output has reached double figures and Jackson is initially disbelieving until they are counted off ...

... And the Lovely Bones makes 10.

No, you're right. I hadn't thought I would ever make 10 movies. Because the thing that always amazes me is you have someone like Hitchcock with 50 films - what an unbelievable body of work. I am quite intrigued the way that people like Ridley [Scott] and Clint Eastwood go. They have these creative bursts where they do a couple of films a year or like one every year; so I am thinking at some stage, once The Hobbit is under way, I might try to do a film or two - just quick and easy, something simple and fast. I've been doing that with these little short movies like the one I did for the Canberra War Museum. We shoot a 10-minute film in three days and you think you could do a feature like this and that would be fun. So I have that in the back of my mind

So after the blockbuster years comes the freedom to do what you want?

Yeah it was. This is definitely a movie where I just thought, well I can do something that isn't trying to be anything more than an interesting little movie - "little" obviously being a subjective term. It cost US$58 million which is not too bad and I kept it low-ish so the expectations from the studio perspective don't have to be too great and we can be risky.

How broad an audience is it going to reach? Some might just think "murdered kid" or even "serious metaphysical book"- not exactly the feelgood hit of the summer'.

I don't think it is going to reach a hugely broad audience but that is the beauty of keeping the budget down - it doesn't particularly need to. Put it this way - if I wanted to get a broader audience, I would have shot it differently and it would be a little less of a challenge.

We didn't want it to be sort of a simplistic Hollywood style film nor did we want to make an esoteric art film, either. It is weird because on one level I always say I always make films for myself and you have to - you have to ultimately make a film that you want to see or you shouldn't be doing it.

But at the same time you always have in the back of your mind that you have to get a film to an audience that has to be in proportion to the budget, really. Obviously there are decisions we made based entirely on the audience. Like we don't film the rape and the murder. I don't think anyone would want to see it. I wouldn't want to see it so it wasn't a difficult decision to make.

And it was also a film about a teenage girl and we thought we should be making a movie that teenage kids can actually see. Having two teenage kids ourselves, Fran and I did feel that we wanted to make a movie that our kids could actually get something out of. And the strongest responses we have been getting is from that exact audience - hugely positive response.

Your own daughter Katie appears in the film as another of the murderer's victims.

She was. She wanted to do it.

Considering what the film is about, did that give you pause?

No. The kids have to put up with their mum and dad being filmmakers. They have to put up with lot of crap, just all the nonsense surrounding us. So that's fine.

Would you take your daughter to this movie if you weren't you?

Yeah, completely. We wanted to make a PG13. We deliberately made the film for teenagers and up. There is nothing negative in the film to my mind, unless I am missing something. There is nothing that is harmful for children and to me there are many interesting and positive ideas that they can take away and think about. You are not hammering a message home to teenagers but giving them something to think about - ideas about love and grieving and the afterlife and what it means to make the most of every day and how fragile it all is. I think kids can handle that at the right age. It might not be good for an 8-year-old, but give kids a bit of credit. I often think adults are too protective.

You have already talked about how the American test screenings upped the violence in the demise of Mr Harvey, which in the book is very offhand. How do you reconcile that with toning down the the murder and rape?

I have no interest in filming a murder and rape. I have zero interest in filming it and zero interest in watching it. It wasn't even a decision that was hard. It does intrigue me when there is a review that criticises us for being gutless for not showing the murder and the rape - and I think "did this reviewer look forward to that scene and we haven't delivered?" And it's usually a male reviewer. Was he looking forward to watching the 14-year-old girl get murdered on screen and we didn't give him satisfaction?

You can't treat any murder or rape on screen in any way that is offhand in a film. It's either is going to be there or it's not and a movie is such a potent medium ... and it would stigmatise the film. It would do disservice to the movie because it is not what we made the movie for. We were not interested in a murder and a rape; we were interested a bunch of other things.

Among the other choices you made, which those who know the book might find curious, is that there is no affair between [Susie's mother] Abigail and the detective investigating the case.

That was another decision. We shot bits. There were several little subplots that we filmed bits of and we knew we had a time limit. And we tried to keep the script to around 125-126 pages. We shot a couple of scenes of the affair and a scene of them kissing and not much else.

When we came to look at that stuff in the cut and experiment with different cuts and edits, it was cluttered and distracting because we hadn't done enough of it. The affair is a good example. If you are going to show that, the only way the affair works is if you can spend the time to justify Abigail's need to have this affair - not just make it look completely heartless. You need probably 10 or 15 minutes of screentime to do it and we had one minute or two minutes. It didn't feel like it was helping us, so we decluttered it all. We took out some of these subplots on the basis they were under-developed from a filmmaker's point of view and it became easier to focus on Susie and the narrative of her story. The interesting thing with adaptations is there no right or wrong - I am not telling you we made the right decision.

It seems there are two different kinds of adaptation. There's an adaptation where a studio adapts a book in a way that pleases the most people possible. Maybe that is what the Harry Potter movies are like, I don't know. Maybe Twilight is like that; I have not read the books.

But then there is an adaptation we fall into the category of - we have read the book, we responded to certain aspects of it when we read the book. Things interested us more than others and we focused on those. So you get more of personal kind of approach. You would basically need five hours to put everything that is in the book on screen.

There is also a fair amount that is on screen, which isn't literally in the book, with the visual design of The Inbetween. What shaped how it looks the most?

I would say it was the script. Sensibility-wise, most of it was in the screenplay. Most of the imagery was created in the script in the sense of the reasoning behind it. Things like the flower we thought would represent Susie's life force ... so all of those ideas are in the script. But the actual kind of imagery - the background for it - we created with the conceptual art and everything else. We went to Dali and Magritte - those surrealist artists - to try to get ideas because it was very much a dreamscape idea.

We just tried to create an image system where everything has a reason for being.

After your "boy's own" previous films and this coming to you via Philippa discovering the book and giving it to Fran, were you outvoted by the female members of your creative team?

Not really, because I've got to shoot the movie at the end of the day. I do have a lot of women who I work with which I think is interesting but I do think of them as people I work with. But I also like that because they tend to be less ego-driven and less aggressive. When I think about it, I do like women better than I like men - in an over-generalised kind of way. The film industry, in particular, attracts some men - the cliche of the gold chains and the cigar. And Hollywood does attract those kind of guys, not that we have many of them in New Zealand, but there is a male energy in the film industry that doesn't interest me.

This is your first "American" film. How was that?

Ha ha. You mustn't put that on on us ...

Well you shot there ...

We shot on locations in America but we shot locations in Queenstown and it's not that different, really. Apart from eight weeks of location shooting, everything was done here - apart from Brian Eno recording his music in London. I liked some aspects of the American industry. I could appreciate the advantages they have over New Zealand in very practical ways, The sheer depth of infrastructure and support you have. Like the 1970s - they have warehouses full of 70s props. They have big companies that rent stuff to movies which we don't have here - and amazing equipment.

All that cool stuff was good but, at the end of they day, there was a spirit that you get in New Zealand that we didn't get over there. One of working with a crew who are all my buddies.

It was a strangely schizophrenic thing.

We came back here after eight weeks in Pennsylvania, had Christmas, then shot for another five or six weeks and shot with all the Kiwi team again.

It was weird because the Americans didn't know what the Kiwi half of the film was and the Kiwis didn't know what the American half of the film was.

Lowdown

What: The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson's adaptation of the Alice Sebold best-seller starring Saoirse Ronan, Susan Sarandon, Rachel Weisz, Mark Wahlberg

When and where: Opens in New Zealand on Boxing Day.