Hey, Peter! Your new movie, The Lovely Bones, is based on a book about a little girl getting brutally murdered by a serial killer. Nice subject matter. Er, what attracted you to it?
It was 2002 and I was in London working on the music score for The Two Towers, the second Lord Of the Rings film, and Phillipa Boyens [Jackson, Boyens and Fran Walsh write all the screenplays of every film that they make] came to visit us, and she bought the novel at the airport to read on the 30-hour flight from New Zealand. She raved about the book, and so Fran borrowed it and read it, and then I grabbed it off Fran.

Bit of light reading, then? We’re assuming there’s a cool car chase in it?
We were all very affected by the book’s story — we weren’t looking for a movie
to make, we were just reading it as a book. But it made me cry when I read it.

So, you’re really just big sook, then?
I think it’s a very personal story because it deals with the loss of loved ones and what it means for people to die, so I think you tend to put your own life experience into it to a certain degree. Anyway, we made an enquiry about the film rights and a couple of years went by, and we were working on King Kong, and we were told it was available if we were interested. We said yes — we still loved the book. So we went on and started developing the screenplay in 2004.


Tell us about Susie, the film’s dead girl.
Susie is the narrator of the film. The movie starts with her saying, “I’m Susie Salmon,
I was 14 years old when I was murdered in 1973”, so immediately you go, “woah!” because you’re not expecting that.

Why choose 15-year-old Irish actress Saoirse [Soar-shuh] Ronan to play her?
We wanted someone that was young, but who had this lovely old-soul quality about her, plus, a terrific actress — otherwise, the entire film would be doomed. No matter what I did as a director, if you didn’t like Susie, or she wasn’t well-acted, the movie would be a train wreck.

Woo-hoo! Train wrecks are awesome! Still, we’d prefer car chases...
Saoirse had sent us her own audition tape — her dad had filmed it in her back garden in Ireland. We were in Los Angeles auditioning young American actresses and were actually really happy with what we were getting, but suddenly Saoirse’s DVD shows up and instantaneously we knew we’d found Susie.

So it was fate? How touching...


To read the rest of ZOO's interview with Peter Jackson be sure to check out this weeks issue of ZOO Weekly.

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