For director PETER JACKSON, adapting ALICE SEBOLD’S best selling novel, THE LOVELY BONES, was a a bit of a challenge. Not exactly structured for film and featuring tonal changes, the book needed to be broken down and decisions made as to what stayed and what got cut. During our recent interview with JACKSON, he talked about how this could have been a very different film in the hands of other directors. Listen in below:
THE LOVELY BONES is in theaters now
TruthinBooks
December 21st, 2009 at 1:38 pm
I thought Peter Jackson did a great job with this story. The Lovely Bones was such a mesmorizing book I didn’t want it to end. Skirting the borderlands between human reality and the imagined wonders of heaven, I felt I had been introduced to a world both startingly tangible yet ethereal all the same. Since then, I have been looking for further excursions into the afterworld, but I haven’t found much, until now.
If you loved this book and are looking forward to this movie, you should really check out Gita Nazareth’s Forgiving Ararat, as this book too explores the interconnections between the land of the living and the land of the dead. As a publicist and a fan of this book, I’m interested to see what parallels are drawn between the two.
P.C.
December 30th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
In the book, Sebold keeps teasing the reader into thinking the suspense/thrills will arrive, hinting at important clues (as when the murderer shows up at a school event), and even bringing the killer back for a possible attack on the victim’s sister. None of those ever pan out, though, and Sebold just lets them fizzle into pointlessness.
In the movie, all the extra effects covered the absence of big ideas that were in the book.
If truthinbooks was to compare Forgiving Ararat to Lovely Bones, I’d definitely go for the former.