After two epic blockbusters, “The Lord of the Rings” and “King Kong,” Peter Jackson gets a bit smaller (well, $70 million) with “The Lovely Bones.” Based on the 2002 best-seller by Alice Sebold, it's the harrowing story of a raped and murdered 14-year-old girl (played by “Atonement’s” Oscar-nominated Saoirse Ronan) who watches from her heavenly vantage point of “the in-between world” while her family on earth mourns her loss and tries to find her killer.
Jackson talked with TheWrap about Oscars, adapting an unadaptable book and dealing with Ryan Gosling's age.
There’s already quite an Oscar buzz around “The Lovely Bones.” How important are Oscars to you?
Well, they used to be far more important to sell movies, as they used to take an average-performing film and really give it a big box office boost. I think there’s far less impact on the box office now. But winning and even being nominated is still an enormous privilege and big thrill. The great thing about having won is that you do feel, no matter what happens in your career, you’ve always got that Oscar and it’s a nice thing to wake up to in the morning and go to the office and see them sitting there on the shelf.
Well, they used to be far more important to sell movies, as they used to take an average-performing film and really give it a big box office boost. I think there’s far less impact on the box office now. But winning and even being nominated is still an enormous privilege and big thrill. The great thing about having won is that you do feel, no matter what happens in your career, you’ve always got that Oscar and it’s a nice thing to wake up to in the morning and go to the office and see them sitting there on the shelf.
How did “The Lovely Bones” happen?It took quite a while. I write scripts with my co-producers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens and we all read the book while doing “Lord of the Rings.” We all found it very powerful and began inquiring about the rights. At that point the rights were with Film Four, with the film already in pre-production, the script was being written and Lynn Ramsey directing. We registered our interest and left it that if it didn’t work out, to please get in touch with us.
We didn’t really expect anything to come of it, and a year or so went by -- just as we were about to start on “King Kong” -- and we suddenly got a call. It turned out that it’d fallen apart.
It seems like it would be a hard book to adapt.
It’s definitely been the hardest adaptation that we’ve ever worked on – much harder than “Lord of the Rings.” The tough thing was finding the essence of the story that Alice Sebold is telling, and then figuring out how to put that into a three-act structure of a film -- we’re big believers in structured screenplays.
It’s definitely been the hardest adaptation that we’ve ever worked on – much harder than “Lord of the Rings.” The tough thing was finding the essence of the story that Alice Sebold is telling, and then figuring out how to put that into a three-act structure of a film -- we’re big believers in structured screenplays.
The book had made all us cry when we read it, and we wanted to find out why we’d reacted that way. It was like decoding the book – it was a big puzzle, but a very enjoyable one, to have to figure out.
So while it’s based on the same story, there was a lot of the book that we couldn’t put in -- and we restructured it a lot. Most of it will be familiar to readers of the book, but they’re not in the same order
And with us it’s always a work in progress.
