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Topic: The Lovely Bones (Read 2716 times)

Rhune
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The Lovely Bones
« on: Dec 11^th, 2009, 11:58am »

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http://www.cinematical.com/2009/12/10/peter-jackson-interview/

Interview: Peter Jackson
by Todd Gilchrist Dec 10th 2009 // 9:15PM

Trying to figure out why people do what they do, even when you're interviewing them, can be a monumental task – as much for them as for you. Spirits are moved, muses are called upon, and in Hollywood, careers must often be maintained, but getting to the heart of what motivates filmmakers to take on challenges can be confounding because one suspects that it's not altogether different than what prods us in our daily lives – basic interest, casual discovery, or even arbitrary whim. Thankfully, however, with folks like Peter Jackson, there's almost enough information on how he does what he does that dissecting the reasons why seems redundant, or at least unnecessary.

Jackson's latest film is The Lovely Bones, an adaptation of Alice Sebold's acclaimed novel of the same name. Suffice it to say that the reasons precisely why this project would become his follow up to four of the biggest and most epic fantasy films ever made – the Lord of the Rings films, and a remake of King Kong – remain hovering somewhere in the ether; but Jackson's technical and artistic clarity at the film's recent press day leaves no mystery how he mounted a production of one of the year's most-anticipated films.

What were the challenges of adapting this? What did you have to leave out? And how much consideration was given to satisfying the fans as you determined what to keep and what to change or discard?

Peter Jackson: [With] any film that I've done, you shoot scenes that don't end up in the final cut. 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 subplot 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, it's only ever going to be a souvenir. 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 that basically Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh and myself, the three of us wrote the screenplay and we read the book. We responded to aspects of the book, especially emotional themes, the comforting value of the book and things it had to say about the afterlife and that aspect of it, which is very personal to anybody. That's what we responded to and our adaptation is very much just elements of the book restructured following our interests and our takes. 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.

What drew you to The Lovely Bones initially? Particularly since it's more of an intimate character study and your previous films were driven more by spectacle.

Jackson: It's not a challenge to direct a different style of film in terms of the acting because you're always dealing with a screenplay and a screenplay has particular needs and a style that is appropriate and it's my job obviously to attempt to shoot the script that's appropriate for that particular role. But to answer your question, the only thing as a filmmaker that I am scared of or fear is repetition. I have no interest in doing the same thing over and over again, and 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, and certainly it's great to have a break and it's great to turn your mind to something different, and The Lovely Bones was a challenge. One of the things like I'm sure most of the people in this room would appreciate that things are immediately much more interesting and enjoyable if they're difficult. If you're attempting to do something or if you decide that you're going to take on a project for the next year or two years, if it's familiar and if it's treading on the same ground that you've gone before, immediately it's 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, but the book doesn't have a structure that immediately makes a film obvious in your mind. The book affects you on an emotional level, not a story level as such, and 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, not necessarily the perfect way, and not the way that other people would do it. You take 20 different filmmakers and give them a book like this – any book, really, but especially Lovely Bones – 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.

Why did you elect not to film or show the act of violence that propels Susie on her journey?

Jackson: There are artistic and they are more reasons and there are practical reasons. There are a variety of reasons that I should just talk about. The film is about a teenager and her experiences of what happens. She's murdered, she goes into an afterlife experience, her in between and we wanted to make a film that teenagers could watch. Fran and I have a daughter who's very similar to Susie's age. We wanted Katie to be able to see this film. There's a lot of positive aspects of this film and it's not something that I think I wanted to shield our daughter from. So it was important for us to not go into an R rated territory at all. Also, I never regarded the movie as being a film about a murder. Yet if we shot any aspect of that particular sequence in any way, then it would stigmatize the film. Movies are such a powerful medium with the music and the effects and acting and performance, the editing and the lighting and camerawork that to show a 14-year-old girl being murdered in any way, even regards no matter how briefly, it would completely swing the balance of the movie and it would frankly make it a film that I wouldn't want to watch. I mean, I would have no interest in seeing that depicted on film and I would not want to see the film. I make movies that I know I would enjoy seeing in the cinema and that 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 and Susie has to deal with the mystery of what happened to her. There's a positive aspect to it in the sense that she's immortal and saying there is no such thing as death. All of those aspects and themes were what interested us. I've shot some pretty extreme things in my time with Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles and Brain Dead. There's a certain style and a sense of humor that I believe you can do to get away with that, 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.

One of the things we did which was different from the novel but now the way we restructured the screenplay is we have her fleeing from her murder, and we really liked that aspect of sort of the way that bit of the story was told in the sense that at the point that her spirit becomes disconnected from her body and 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's happening to her. She's literally confused and now she finds herself in the in-between, which is essentially the world of dream, 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 of the other reasons, seeing any form of murder was not something that we wanted to do because of the way that we restructured the story. She herself is confused and has to put the pieces of the puzzle together as the story continues.

How did you determine what Susie's afterlife world would look like?

Jackson: Well, the key thing to us was just the concept that it wasn't a physical place. We weren't 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 and so at the point that she is no longer anchored to earth through her body, she is basically permanently her mind is in the world of dreams, like you know, 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 self conscious, which is essentially a dream world. So a lot of the imagery that we used and a lot of the metaphor – everything is a metaphor in a dream world; everything means something else. But it's not a literal thing, so we used image systems that the audiences is not really supposed to obviously understand all of this, but as script writers we put it into our screenplay and the overall impression that it creates is 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 sort of analyze dreams, and so Mr. Harvey's, the house that she imagines, that she sees in that empty field with the lighthouse sticking out of it, that house represents Mr. Harvey, so she's using the metaphor of the house to represent the killer. 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, and Mr. Harvey himself keeps a souvenir of 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 happens to be 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 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 is images that only he has in his mind, so now her subconscious is entering Harvey's subconscious.

More at this link...

http://www.cinematical.com/2009/12/10/peter-jackson-interview/

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battionailla
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Re: The Lovely Bones
« Reply #1 on: Dec 14^th, 2009, 11:08pm »

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It was adventure and it was drama what do you think of this imaginary movie by Peter Jackson movie was now released with the name called The Lovely Bones and it does have appear as a good faction drama don’t you think it was one of the best on the released and some thing to be highlighted download movies I got to see it and it was wonderful too

« Last Edit: Dec 15^th, 2009, 12:00am by Isle_be_back »

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Rhune
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Re: The Lovely Bones
« Reply #2 on: Dec 15^th, 2009, 8:33am »

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I haven't seen it yet, but I am interested in it. It seems to be getting very mixed reviews though.

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