After four flamboyant epics — the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and a remake of "King Kong" — Peter Jackson has moved to a film that's both smaller and bigger.
"The Lovely Bones" brings Alice Sebold's acclaimed novel to the screen on terms that are personal one moment and universal the next. It follows murdered 14-year-old Susie Salmon into the afterlife, where she watches her family struggle with its shock and grief, and observes her killer, who lives undetected in their neighborhood. Scenes grounded in the mundane reality of 1970s suburban Pennsylvania alternate with vibrant, candy-colored dreamscapes where tall ships in giant glass bottles shatter against rocky shores and day coexists with night.
Even for a director with a rare aptitude for building compelling fantasy worlds, it's a serious challenge. In a recent phone interview, Jackson discussed the appeal of Sebold's novel, how he creates female characters, the difficulty of visualizing heaven and why computer-generated performers will never replace human actors. (Spoiler alert: Plot details are discussed below.)
Q: This is in one sense an intimate personal story and in another way an almost infinite story of life after death. Which of those aspects was most appealing to you, or was it the combination?
A: It was the combination, definitely. We work in an industry that loves to have simple definitions. Simple boxes to put projects into. I'm reacting the other way; I like the provocative nature of this project. It was a dramatic story told from a perspective I'd never seen before, "the in-between," as Susie calls it. We regarded that as not a place so much as a state of mind. So when she's murdered and her spirit and life force is not connected to Earth anymore through her body, she's in this sort of subconscious state of dream. A lot of the story from that point forward is told by Susie from this strange place. I thought that was a fascinating perspective to tell a mystery story from, a crime story combined with the more drama-based story of the survivors who were grieving her. So it was the mix of the genres, the fact that it didn't define itself one way or another.
Q: We're used to seeing stories about the death of loved ones as the mainspring for stories about criminal investigations or revenge, but we rarely see the emotional repercussions.
A: No, and it often doesn't focus on the victim. Or the afterlife, either. (Laughs) What I like about it is the mystery that's at the heart of the story is not the usual one. It's not the mystery of who killed her, which we're also used to seeing. We know who killed her early on. She really doesn't even know what happens to her at the beginning. Susie's story is playing itself out as a murder mystery where the victim doesn't even know they're dead. And she slowly gets these clues that come in this weird, dreamlike language of metaphor and she slowly pieces together what's happening.
Q: Susie is not a classic, passive ghost. She flees from her own murder.
A: She "runs away" at the time she's being killed; as soon as her spirit is disconnected and free she's running, she's racing across the field, racing towards her house to the comfort of her homes and protection of her parents. Later, what happened to her body no one knows but the killer, and she has to confront him through entering his subconscious, seeing his other victims and realizing what a monster he really is. That whole side of it I'd never seen before and I thought, "Wow, this is interesting."
Q: She's remarkable in that she's taken from life at a point where she's young, innocent, optimistic about her future and she retains that well-adjusted optimism even after she's killed.
A: That was a very important thing for us; her lack of self-pity made for a really good character. It was important for the overall tone of the movie. I wouldn't have wanted to make the movie if it was depressing and grim. That's of no interest to me. I can only make movies I'd want to watch, one I could enjoy. I just don't like films about grief and the somber reality of the world and mourning and angst and tears. Those are not my type of films. So all that sense of optimism and life and humor that Susie has, and the overall degree of comfort the movie gives you, that was very important.
Q: In this film and "Heavenly Creatures," a story about an intense female friendship, you display a remarkable sensitivity for the mindset of young girls. How much do you rely on input from your co-creators in that regard?
A: They're very important right across the board, not just in writing characters like Susie. We write as a team, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens and I. I don't really categorize people as male or female in a funny kind of way, maybe because I've spent most of my life working with women. My producer is a woman and I've had a woman first assistant director for 20 years. I like women more than men in a funny kind of way, to where I'd rather work with them as collaborators. They're more refreshing, they're funnier and I find with women there's no ego involved. None of that blokey kind of macho nonsense.
Q: The killer, George Harvey, is one of the creepiest, most malevolent characters I've seen in ages. Was it difficult to cast that role?
A: Stanley Tucci was very reluctant because it's such an odious character and he's a decent nice guy, a family man with three beautiful kids. He hated the idea of George Harvey and yet he knew he couldn't play him as a monster, he had to play him as a real person. That kind of scared him a little, I think. It took us three or four conversations to talk him into it. We never said, "You've got to give us an answer," because we were terrified we'd give him a reason to say no.
Changing his physicality was important. Stanley has an Italian ethnic look and we wanted George Harvey to be a very Pennsylvanian, middle-class white sort of guy. So we wanted blondish, wispy hair and a moustache and blue eyes and pale skin. That helped Stanley because he could go to work, literally put Mr. Harvey on in the mirror, and become this guy. Then at the end of the day he could wipe him off and go home as Stanley and leave George Harvey behind in the rubbish bin at the makeup trailer. I think that was one of the key reasons he agreed to do it.
Q: We're getting to the point where a filmmaker can digitally create anything. If you could create a simulated actor that would perform exactly as you wished, would you?
A: Not if there was no reason to do it. There has to be a reason. I've done exactly what you've described. We couldn't find anybody who resembled the design of Gollum so we created the digital character. I'm a big believer in motion capture as an animation technique where an actor can essentially become the digital animator of a digital character, so you're getting all the qualities of performance an actor has. I'm a big believer in that as a technique, but only to the point that the character you're bringing to life is not a living human being. There doesn't seem to be a great deal of point to do that, to me.
Now, if I was doing a historical movie and I wanted a cameo from JFK or Winston Churchill or somebody, we are at a time where you think, "I can either use an actor who resembles Churchill or we could build an exact digital representation based on photographs and film and bring that digital creation to life." We are at a point where the technology would make you believe a hundred percent you were looking at Churchill or JFK. Those choices are out there and they're interesting ones, but I'd only do it for the reason that there was no other way of achieving the same result.
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.