Page 1 of 2
In a press conference for The Lovely Bones, we didn’t get a chance to ask Peter Jackson about The Hobbit films. Still, it’s Peter Jackson talking about filmmaking. The Lovely Bones is based on Alice Sebold’s novel about a murdered girl watching over her family from the afterlife. It’s got heavenly visual effects and a human storyline that captured Jackson’s imagination.
Q: What drew you to The Lovely Bones in the first place? Was it a challenge to do an intimate character study after doing four big effects-driven stories?
Peter 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 easy and familiar – I shouldn’t say easy, actually, that’s the wrong word - but 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.
Q: How did you come up with the movie’s portrayal of Susie’s limbo world?
Peter Jackson: Susie’s world of the in-between. 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. So we have that 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. 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. We used things like the flower, the blooming flower; that flower is really Susie and her life force, so it’s withered and it’s dead as far as her father sees this flower, but it blooms in his hand when she’s trying to communicate with him and say “I’m here dad,” and he imagines that flower blooming. Then, when she opens the safe, which is ultimately we reveal later that’s where her body is, but when Susie first opens the safe, what does she see there but the flower, the bloom of the flower which is again supposed to be her. And it’s the first clue as to where she is. The Gazebo was representing unfulfilled love because that first date she was going to have with Ray, he said “meet me in the shopping mall by the gazebo.” So that gazebo represents the date she never had and she sees him off in the distance in the in-between and she tries to run there and she can’t run because the ground turns to water and mush, which is a very common dream image that we all have. 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 subconscious and not supposed to be particularly clear, but it was designed as a way of working within the metaphor and image system of dream because we thought and 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.
