'The Lovely Bones' stars Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon dish dirt with Peter Jackson

Oscar-winning filmmaker Peter Jackson is best known for directing, writing and/or producing fantasy films, such as the much-lauded "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. So if anyone wonders why he chose to direct a big-screen adaptation of Alice Sebold’s best-selling, tear-jerking novel "The Lovely Bones," his answer is simple: He wanted the challenge of doing the kind of film that a lot of people didn’t expect from him.

"The Lovely Bones," is told from the after-death perspective of 14-year-old Susie Salmon, an American girl who is murdered in 1973 by a neighbor while she’s on the way home from school. In the after-life before she goes to heaven, Susie can see her grieving family and tries to communicate with them so that her murder can be solved and the killer brought to justice.

At "The Lovely Bones" press conference in Los Angeles, Jackson sat down with the film’s stars: Saoirse Ronan (who plays Susie Salmon), Mark Wahlberg (who plays Jack Salmon, Susie’s father), Rachel Weisz (who plays Abigail Salmon, Susie’s mother), Susan Sarandon (who plays Grandma Lynn, Abigail’s mother), Rose McIver (who plays Lindsey Salmon, Susie’s younger sister) and Stanley Tucci (who plays George Harvey, Susie’s murderer). Here’s what they said at the press conference.

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Peter Jackson, Saoirse Ronan and Susan Sarandon at the Sydney premiere of "The Lovely Bones," December 2009

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Peter, what were the challenges of adapting "The Lovely Bones" book into a movie? And what can you say about any footage that was shot that wasn’t in the movie but might be on the DVD?

Jackson: 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. It’s going to be an impression of aspects of the book.

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.

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Stanley Tucci in "The Lovely Bones"

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Stanley and Peter, why was the choice made to give George Harvey those peculiar-looking contact lenses? Was it to make him look slightly inhuman?

Tucci: What contact lenses? No, it was not to make him look slightly inhuman … I didn't think that my eyes were the eyes that should be the eyes of this guy. And also, he needed to be more of, I suppose, quintessentially American, so the skin tone was changed and hair was added. The eyes seemed to be appropriate for him. I think that if you look at the scenes, let's say the scene with Mike Imperioli, when he comes in and starts asking me questions. I think that the eyes there, what I'm hoping, is that they looked sort of normal. I think in those close-ups, in certain close-ups — like the reflection in the mirror when he's sitting in his car — I think then the eyes take on a different quality because of the way it's lit and because of my horrible thoughts behind them.

Jackson: I’ve done a lot of movies with contact lenses in actors’ eyes. And to me, they change the color of your eye. If there’s something that’s going on with the character’s eyes, it’s because of the performance. As a filmmaker, I like shooting extreme close-ups of some characters occasionally, because that is a technique that you use to really get inside somebody’s head. Stanley was playing a very dangerous and frightening character, so getting close to his eyes was a way of increasing the menace, because Stanley’s performance was giving back to us.

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Saoirse Ronan and Rose McIver at a December 2009 press conference for "The Lovely Bones" in Wellington, New Zealand

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Saoirse and Rose, how did you meet and bond as sisters?

Ronan: Well, we met in Pennsylvania, and I had just come off another movie, so I was straight over to meet everyone. I think we met the first day.

McIver: Yeah, we spent a lot of time at the Salmon house where we would shoot. We did a little kind of getting to know each other as a family and getting to know the dog that would play Holiday.

Ronan: We just sort of bonded for those two weeks. And I think because Rose and I are pretty close in age…well, there’s six years of a difference but we feel like we’re very close, we bonded from the off, really. We get on very, very well. She’s one of our best friends.

McIver: And neither of us have sisters so we kind of took each other.

Ronan: Isn’t it sweet? But yeah, it’s great though because even though we didn’t really have that many scenes together in the movie, we got to hang out when I was in New Zealand. And we still keep in touch and everything.

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Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz in "The Lovely Bones"

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Rachel, since there was so much involving your character that was cut from the movie, did you get anything from the book or was it just the script?

Weisz: I think it’s really wonderful to have that. I mean, the script was very beautiful but it’s a huge bonus to have a novel as well which will give you the interior life of your character, give you their back story, their biography. So for me, it was only a huge extra help and great fuel for your imagination. So I went back to the book many, many times to get the feeling of Abigail.

Are there things missing from the movie that are in the book?

Weisz: There are lots of things that we shot that couldn’t make it into the final movie because, as Peter [Jackson] said, it would have to be a miniseries basically if you wanted to get all of the character stories in. So yes, there were things for everybody’s characters that didn’t make it.

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Susan Sarandon in "The Lovely Bones"

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Susan, your character gives the audience to exhale and laugh a little in this movie. Did Peter ask you to jazz the character up to give the audience a chance to breathe in this very chance film?

Sarandon: [She says to Jackson] Did you jazz me up?

Jackson: Well, if we did, you probably didn’t know about it. We slipped things into your martini when you weren’t looking.

Sarandon: [She laughs] That [the 1970s] is just a great period and the designers and everything, it was very collaborative. It was such a really good old time, in terms of style and everything else.

Weisz: You looked so sexy! C’mon!

Sarandon: Oh, thanks. I remember those eyelashes and snapping those in … The fun part was working out, "How do you clean your house with a drink and a cigarette?" That was a new area for me.

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Saoirse Ronan and Susan Sarandon at the Sydney premiere of "The Lovely Bones," December 2009

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Is it all part of her coping with grief?

Sarandon: Well, obviously she’s been self-medicating for years and in anticipation of some grief. But yeah, I think she’s the one, maybe she mourns in another movie but not in this movie because that’s not my job. My job is to keep things moving forward. It’s a really great choice to have somebody that’s completely inept be the one that tries to keep the house going, because if I was a really seemingly solid knitting granny who you would expect to come forward, it’d be really boring. But the fact that she’s throwing ashes simultaneously everywhere she’s cleaning, I think it allows the audience to laugh in an appropriate place, as opposed to having a release ein some place that wouldn’t be welcome.

And I just love the fact that that’s the way life is. When something horrible happens, you do find yourself laughing in weird places in the midst of grief and crying in the supermarket when you see a cereal that somebody used to eat. There’s just no way of guarding yourself one way or another. Everybody grieves differently, and there’s no right or wrong way. My function within the bigger picture was to be hilarious. It was great not having to do what this poor gal [Rachel Weisz] had to do or Mark had to do. I’ve been there in movies. I’ve lost many a child on celluloid, so I was happy that I was once removed, that my job was much more fun.

I guess the big challenge — and I relied on Pete for this — is to make sure it’s not too over-the-top and to throw things away. The lines were so funny, you didn’t really have to hit them too hard. You have to believe the audience isn’t stupid. You can just keep going and do it. So I was counting on them to really make just sure that I wasn’t doing a caricature and she seemed real. That would be the trap on that character.

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Mark Wahlberg and Peter Jackson at the Los Angeles premiere of "The Lovely Bones," December 2009

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Mark, you joined "The Lovely Bones" cast pretty late, since you replaced Ryan Gosling, who dropped out. Why did you want to do the film? And being a father yourself, where do you go emotionally to play every parent’s worst nightmare?

Wahlberg: Well, my biggest reason for wanting to be a part of this was Peter Jackson. I’m a huge fan of Peter’s. Because of the way I approach work, I wasn’t all that thrilled about the subject matter because I have a beautiful little girl and two beautiful boys. I don’t have the God-given talent that Rachel has to just snap into it and have these floods of emotion coming out and then turn it all off. So I basically had to live in that headspace for the entire time. I just thought it would be a beautiful movie and it was too good to pass up the opportunity to be a part of it.

Stanley, was this part in "A Lovely Bones" difficult to do and hard to drop at the end of the day?

Tucci: It was hard in every respect. I was very reticent to take the part at first, for reasons that Mark just explained. I have kids, and I can’t really read anything or watch anything about kids getting harmed. I don’t like things about serial killers. There’s so much serial-killer information out there in documentaries constantly. But a lot of it’s just sort of gratuitous or it’s almost like pornographic, really, the reason for it being shown. This was not that. This was a beautiful story about an exploration of loss.

Pete and Fran [Walsh] and Philippa [Boyens], in the long conversations we had before we started working together, I felt very safe with them. I felt that there would be nothing here that would be gratuitous and that we were going to create a person together in Mr. Harvey that was a real person. The more real he was, the more subtle he is, the more terrifying he is. The more banal he is, the more terrifying he is.

At the beginning, it was very hard to leave it at the end of the day, to drop it, particularly when you’re fresh off your research and the research was repulsive. But eventually, once you understand who he is and you find him, for me, then I could drop him at the end of the day. But there’s no doubt, I will say, without question, it was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done as an actor. I’d look forward to going into the makeup trailer, taking everything off and having a martini at the end of every day — and the beginning of every day, too, as a matter of fact.

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Rose McIver at a December 2009 press conference for "The Lovely Bones" in Wellington, New Zealand

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Rose, why did you want to be a part of "The Lovely Bones" and what was it about your character that resonated with you?

McIver: Well, I’m a New Zealander, so we’re pretty proud of Pete, and the opportunity to work with him was obviously very exciting and a real honor. Lindsey, I read the book when I was 13 and I was a huge fan of the novel myself. I was Lindsey and Susie’s age, really, going into high school. I guess it just was really resonant with me and I never thought I’d have the opportunity to play Lindsey. But when I read her in the script, I felt like she was very much that character that she was in the book. I don't think I’m hugely similar to her necessarily but I really respect and admire her, so that makes her a character that I would love to play. And she got to age from 11 to 19, which was always going to be kind of interesting and a wonderful challenge to take on

Was it tough to tap into those emotions when Lindsey suspects that George Harvey killed Susie?

McIver: I didn’t know it was going to be as easy as it was, because when I met Stanley, I thought, "This man’s too nice. He’s not going to be Mr. Harvey and how am I even going to be scared of him?" But when we were shooting that, it was in New Zealand and it was very contained fear. It was all [scary] and it was fine and whenever we’d cut, it would go back to normal. But I certainly was actually really terrified, I think. The idea of Lindsey putting herself in that position and having already lost her sister, putting herself at stake and being so vulnerable, I ,mean it’s brave but it’s dangerous. I think the nature of that, the nature of the script made it a very easy kind of emotion to tap into.

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Saoirse Ronan and Peter Jackson on the set of "The Lovely Bones"

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Peter, the rape part of Susie’s murder is in the book but not in the movie. Why did you choose not to have the rape in the film?

Jackson: There are artistic, moral and practical reasons. There are a variety of reasons which 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. We have a daughter, 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.

Every movie that I make is a film that I want to see. It’s very important. 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 after-life. 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, not the murder.

And 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 for us, it was important.

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Mark Wahlberg and Stanley Tucci in "The Lovely Bones"

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Tucci: To that, we talked before we shot and when we were just introduced to each other and getting to know each other. We talked about that: how far it should go. There were pieces in the script originally that were a little more graphic. But I think as an exploration of where this movie could go, what you really needed. And in our conversations, we all agreed, "We don’t need to see this." And Pete said, "There’s no way we’re going to see it." I did an interview this morning, and somebody said a lot of people were upset that they don’t see the rape and the killing.

Jackson: [He says in an appalled tone] I find that amazing.

Tucci: [He says in agreement.] I don’t get that.

Jackson: [He says in an appalled tone] How much murder and killing do you need to see to be satisfied? How much to make somebody happy?

Tucci: Obviously, a lot. And I think anybody who’s disappointed in that regard should just go on the Internet, and they’ll find a lot of stuff like that if they need it. It’s so much more nteresting to do what peter did to me. You leave it to the audience’s imagination. Our imaginations of rape and murder are much greater than what anybody can put on film.

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Saoirse Ronan in "The Lovely Bones"

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Sarandon: Also, [Susie’s] the narrator and she dissociates at that point, so to show what happens, you’d lose that whole element of her confusion and her displacement.

Jackson: Exactly. I mean, one of the things we did, which was different from the novel, but 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, 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 has happened 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 so that she herself is confused and has to put the pieces of the puzzle together as the story goes on.

Were there any moments on set where your character’s feelings overtook you and you had to come back to reality?

Ronan: Well, for me there was always one scene that stuck out and that I got very emotional and I kind of did sort of just … I was drowned in the scene for quite a long time. It was the barley field scene near the end of the movie where Mr. Harvey’s victims come to take Susie to heaven. I mean, that’s one of my favorite scenes in the film and definitely my favorite to shoot as well. It was so emotional and touching, and I think we did it for a day or maybe even more. I think everyone on set felt the same way. We were all touched and very emotional, so I always remember shooting that.

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Rachel Weisz at the Los Angeles premiere of "The Lovely Bones," December 2009

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Rachel, as a mother, what was it like for you to deal with this subject matter?

Weisz: Well, as an actor you have to imagine all sorts of things. I imagined I was a young woman in the 1970s. I imagined I was an American. Neither of those are bad things. You know, you imagine beautiful things, you imagine lovely things; that’s my job. And I don’t know, I don’t think in that way that something’s too dark or problematic to go to. I don’t know why, but I just don’t think that way. I mean, I immerse myself in something, but I’ve learned to come out of it. I’m a mother in real life so I can’t go home to my kids in a state of despair and tears. So it’s a skill you learn, like one might learn to juggle, but you learn to turn things on and off, and I sort of have to do that.

I mean, stories since the beginning of time, bad things happened in stories. Oedipus kills his dad and has sex with his mom. Bad stuff has happened in stories since the beginning of time, and don’t I think it’s a new thing to be a storyteller and be in a story where there are bad things. It’s also there are very beautiful, uplifting things about this film and the book, and I knew that going into it, so I didn’t have a hesitation of the sort that you mean. I didn’t have ramifications?

You know what? I guess the uplifting theme of the book and the film, which is to me that life is a treasure and precious and a miracle, and I guess the thing that made me feel as if I wanted to go hug my son tighter when I got home. You know, it’s hard to remember that life is a miracle. We’re just living it and we forget that. So it gave me a kind of positive feeling rather than a depressed one.

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Mark Wahlberg in "The Lovely Bones"

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Mark, were there any emotional ramifications for you once the filming was done?

Wahlberg: I’m still learning to juggle. I would go home and just grab my daughter and hold her and I would start crying and she’d be like, "Daddy, what’s wrong with you?," because she just wanted to play. I would try to talk to her about taking care of herself and not talk to strangers. She was 3 at the time. But thankfully I had another movie to go into that was completely different, and so I was able to kind of shake it after a while.

Tucci: [He says jokingly] Mark, is that why you never invited me over to your house after shooting and stuff?

Wahlberg: I was only kidding about last night.

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Peter Jackson on the set of "The Lovely Bones"

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Peter, what made you want to do "The Lovely Bones" after doing big-budget fantasy films like "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy and "King Kong"?

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" is 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 "The 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.

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Saoirse Ronan in "The Lovely Bones"

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Saoirse, can you talk about doing those after-death scenes by yourself?

Ronan: Yeah, there were quite a few scenes on my own in the in-between, and we actually did go on location as well in New Zealand, which was beautiful. It was a great experience to do something like that. But when we used blue screen, we used different things that they figured out would help me. And, of course, how well-written the script was. Really, everything I needed, or most of it, was in the script already.

We would also play music during the shots, music that would reflect the mood of the scene, so that would help me so much. We would do that all of the time, and Peter would talk to me during the takes as well, and describe what was going on around me. So I was able to react to that. It was nice because I never really felt like I was on my own because I felt like I had my little guardian angel there. But no, lots of things like that, but especially the music helped me.

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Saoirse Ronan in "The Lovely Bones"

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Peter, can you talk about the challenge of coming up with the right look for Susie's in-between world?

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 after-life and in this movie we’re going to show you what that after-life 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 subconscious 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 hopefully gives the audience the idea of what is happening.

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. 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.

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"The Lovely Bones" executive producer Steven Spielberg, Saoirse Ronan and Peter Jackson at the Los Angeles premiere of "The Lovely Bones," December 2009

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We used things like the flower, the blooming flower. That flower is really Susie and her life force. 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. 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. It wasn’t a physical place that we were showing.

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Michael Imperioli, Saoirse Ronan, Mark Wahlberg, Christian Thomas Ashdale, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci and Peter Jackson at the New York City premiere of "The Lovely Bones"

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Peter, can you talk about "The Lovely Bones" composer Brian Eno and the qualities he brought to the film?

Jackson: Brian Eno was a wonderful surprise for us, a delightful surprise that happened. Interestingly enough, we had made a decision earlier on that we would possibly have no soundtrack composer on the movie. We thought it would be interesting to do what Martin Scorsese does, very much inspired by him, and have a soundtrack that was composed of songs of that period and choose songs especially that would be suitable for particular sequences in the film.

And when we were compiling a list of songs as we were writing the script, we would write them into the screenplay. We would actually identify the names of songs in the script that we thought would be appropriate. It was two or three of Brian Eno’s existing tracks that made it onto our list. "Baby’s on Fire" was one that we always thought would be great to accompany the scene where Mark goes into the cornfield with the baseball bat. There was an instrumental that he did called "The Big Ship," which was another beautiful piece of music that we had planned on using, in addition to a lot of other pieces by other composers.

And so we got to the point, pretty much at the beginning of postproduction, where we had to start to ask permission to use these tracks. We contacted Brian and explained what we were doing and could we use these couple of songs of his, and he asked us about the film. He rushed out and grabbed the book to read it — he was curious — and he said to us, "Have you got a composer to do the soundtrack?" We said, "Well, no, not really. We maybe might not use one." And he said he would be really interested in doing it if we wanted to go that way. He sort of volunteered, which was amazing because we never even thought to ask him. Because he’s done a couple of movies, but it’s not something that he really devotes much of his time to, and he’s very busy doing all sorts of amazing projects.

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Prince Charles, Michael Imperioli, Susan Sarandon and Saoirse Ronan at the London premiere of "The Lovely Bones," December 2009

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Brian was great to work with, and [it was] an incredibly different experience because we’re used to working with composers who take a final edit of the movie and they compose music to exactly the cut of the film you give them, to the final actual seconds and frames. It’s all perfectly lined up, and Brian didn’t want to see the rough cut of the film. He didn’t want to read the script. He wanted to see conceptual art, he wanted to see imagery, he wanted to be inspired by the emotion, he wanted to see photographs of the set, and then he started to compose and send us [music].

We were just communicating with him over iChat. We were in New Zealand and he was in the U.K., and he started to send us these long pieces of music, beautiful instrumental emotional sort of pieces which might be seven or eight minutes long and would have all sorts of interesting shapes to them. He just basically said that we should edit these pieces of music as we saw fit and combine them and blend them, and that’s how he worked. And it was a completely different way to how we have ever worked with a composer before, but for this particular movie, both the sound and the style of working really ended up suiting the film great.

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Saoirse Ronan in "The Lovely Bones"

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Saoirse, did you read "The Lovely Bones" book before getting the role, and what was your reaction to it?

Ronan: I waited to read the book. I hadn't heard about the book before I heard about the film because when it came out I was quite young anyway. But when I did get the role, I waited to read the book after I'd made the film because, well, I was just a bit too young to read it. I heard it was a tough read, especially the first chapter, and after reading it now I realize that it is quite tough. But I eventually did read it and it was beautiful, and I thought that Pete and Fran and Philippa did a great job adapting it.

Saoirse, did you find Ireland and New Zealand similar?

Ronan: Oh yeah, completely, completely.

Jackson: Well, New Zealand is full of Irish convicts that got sent over there. Two hundred years . We’ve got the dark side of Ireland breeded into our culture. That was a joke.

Ronan: That’s a sick joke!

Weiz: It’s actually completely true.

Jackson: Well, my partner, Fran Walsh, is directly descended from an Irish embezzler. It’s not even a murderer or somebody cool. It’s someone who fiddled the books in 1780 or something.

Ronan: Anyway! [Laughter] So I did find New Zealand similar to Ireland. The people, obviously. I found that, ironically, although these two countries were very far away from each other, their humor was so similar and their outlook on things was quite similar as well. When I went over there, I felt very comfortable. I'd always felt comfortable with Pete anyway, but especially when we went over there. I think [Peter Jackson] felt more relaxed and then so did I, so I mean I'd move there. I love New Zealand. It's my favorite place to shoot. It's one of my favorite countries to visit. The people, the food, the landscape, everything about it I love.

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Stanley Tucci at the Los Angeles premiere of "The Lovely Bones," December 2009

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Stanley and Saoirse, could you give us a little insight into the acting process for the murder scene. What kind of conversations did you have with one another?

Tucci: I have no recollection of it, so …

Ronan: Yeah, he just blanked. We didn't talk about it that much, really, beforehand. I don't think Stanley would have wanted to. It was quite a few months into shooting before we did the scene, and so I don't know about the crew, but both Stanley and I were quite anxious to get the scene out of the way.

And so we went in on the day, and as I've said before, everything I needed was already written for me, and Pete was there, so I felt very safe. Luckily, Stanley and I are very comfortable with each other and we get on well. And I think that was essential to get that intensity on screen. That we were comfortable with each other, that we could bounce off each other and sort of freak each other out, in a way. Especially him.

Tucci: Yeah, I couldn't wait to finish the scene, to be honest with you. You know, you are concerned, certainly as a parent or just as a person you are concerned when you are working with a younger person with this subject matter. You know that you have to behave a certain way in order to get what you need or get what you need across to fulfill the needs of the screenplay. But after every take, I would say to Saoirse, "Are you OK?' because it just made me uncomfortable. But Saoirse would also ask me if I'm OK, and it turns out that she's the one who really, I think, in some ways made us all feel comfortable. Because she's so mature.

I did ask Pete, "Can we just get this done in one day?" And he said, "I'll try, I’ll try, I’ll try," and we weren't able to. We shot another half day the next day, and then it was over. I kind of breathed a sigh of relief. It was one of the last things I did in the movie, and I was very happy when it was over. But you also, in between takes, you joke around, you have to. Like Rachel said before, it's your job to go and do that thing and then take it off and go home to your kids or go have dinner. That's your job.

Ronan: I know I wouldn't have been able to stay in that place for the whole time, because when the cameras started to roll, it was extremely intense. It was interesting to see, I think Rose mentioned this earlier, first of all Stanley is such a great guy and to see how he changes is frightening. And for someone who certainly gets on well with him, it feeds whatever performance you need to get out. But I enjoyed it. I enjoyed doing the scene.

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Rose McIver in "The Lovely Bones"

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Susan and Rose, can you talk about the scene when Grandma Lynn gives Lindsey a makeover with eggs and oatmeal?

McIver: Well, I think Susan just pushed me to see how far it could possibly go. We rolled and rolled. And I think Pete and everybody was just having a laugh at me, because I think there were about six eggs, seven eggs in the end and a whole pack of oatmeal. She just kind of went to town on it. I think I got some ash in my face, a drink spilled on me. It was a really humbling experience.

Sarandon: I’m going for like an exercise video/makeup advice video. My beauty regiment will be on there. "The Susan Sarandon Eggs on your Face." Then there’ll be a cooking part as you saw. I was also very good at cooking. But I think at that point, I don't know if I’m right or not, but it seemed to me like he really liked physical business and it was a nice respite from all the dialogue. We just had a lot of fun kind of coming up with as many different things as we could.

Jackson: In shooting those scenes, we didn’t want to make it very precise … I just remember setting up a couple of cameras and loading up the magazines, which means they can roll for 10 minutes, putting a bunch of eggs in a bowl. Susan and Rose were there and I said, "Just be funny." And we just started rolling the cameras. And I just let these guys do all the work and I just kept rolling for 10 minutes …

McIver. My skin looked great the next day! I’m an advocate!

Jackson: It was one of those great moments where improvisation is the best way to go, because what they can come up with is a lot funnier than anything I could tell them to do.

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Peter Jackson at the London premiere of "The Lovely Bones," November 2009

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Peter, what did you discover about the need for people to believe in an after-life?

Jackson: It’s an interesting question and it’s one that I think everyone has obviously there own points of view about it. I’m not sure if I’m answering your question correctly, but certainly what we felt very strongly with the movie is that we didn’t want to make a film that cast judgment on people’s religious beliefs, because that wasn’t at all the motivation for making the movie. We didn’t create the in-between being Susie’s subconscious for that reason. To us, it wasn’t about at all her existing in a world that had some form of religious control around it. It was literally she is disconnected from her body for that period and she is in this weird hallucinogenic state.

What we do in the movie is, obviously if you’ve seen it you realize there’s that scene in the end with the field … There’s a golden light there which is supposed to be wide heaven, as Susie calls it and as Alice Sebold called it. That’s a golden light which I shot in a deliberately clichéd recognizable way that people get the idea that heaven is there.

That is indeed the goal of which Susie has is to get out of this weird, trapped place that she is and to actually move on. That golden light represents where she and everyone else moves on to. The idea is that you can put whatever you choose into that golden light and if you are religious, then obviously that’s what you put in there. If you’re not religious, you can imagine something else. If you don’t believe there’s anything there at all, then probably it’s not the movie you should go see.

I personally think that, all religious things to one side which is a completely different topic, I do think that there is some energy that we have inside us. I have experienced a couple of people that have been very close to me dying and I’ve been there, and I’ve held their hand. There is a feeling that when somebody passes on, that they leave. There’s a sense of departure that’s very, very strong and it’s so strong that it has made me believe in the fact that there is a form of energy inside us that continues to survive after death. Science, physics tells us that energy cannot be destroyed so it has to go somewhere. It doesn’t evaporate.

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Susan Sarandon at the New York City premiere of "The Lovely Bones," December 2009

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Susan, since your Grandma Lynn character is comic relief in the film, did you tap into what brings you joy in real life when you were playing the role?

Sarandon: I’m always trying to have a good time on set because that’s when things happen. That’s when you’re playful. I was that way during "Lorenzo’s Oil," so I’m completely irreverent, because that’s just the way I work. I haven’t really been trained or anything and I find that just to keep myself open and I can’t be bogged down all the time, so it’s a habit I’ve formed. But certainly Peter creates — if I may speak for you, Peter — Peter wants to work in a non-anxious set.

I think that everybody that was in this project were people who didn’t have to be miserable to get to a place where they could create, which sometimes people spend a lot of energy doing things in a completely opposite way of working, where they’re antagonistic to get to a creative place. But none of these people that you see up here or that were even on the crew — at least in the United States, I didn’t have the privilege of going to New Zealand — but it was a good crew. I’d worked with a lot of the crew on various projects. Everybody was just trying to do their job and do the best they could. Everyone was supportive of each other. There were dogs, there were families around. I was close to my family so it wasn’t difficult to try to find a place of not joy necessarily but just where you felt secure and where people were having nice conversations, even when things weren’t going on in the midst of everything else.

Because I think, for me, if you get yourself in a state, you try to hold onto that state, you just get numb. You can’t really feel anything anymore. At least I can’t. So even when I have to, in the movies where I’ve had to be really upset, I mean sometimes the crew tries to cheer you up, which isn’t helpful right before you do something. Sometimes they’ll tell you a joke or something. You’re like, "I just need a minute," because they want to make you feel better but it’s right before a take and that doesn’t work for me. But on this one, I think what’s beautiful about the movie is that it tells you to live your life and be joyful when you can and when you have it because the scary thing about this tale is that it happens in such a haphazard way.

And that’s how bad things happen sometimes and that’s the way good things happen, too. Everything’s serendipitous and there’s no way of knowing who’s going to get sick or who’s going to get hit by a bus or who’s going to fall in love and who’s going to get pregnant. All the things that happen, it’s up for grabs, so it’s kind of an exercise in surrender in a way. So I kind of just surrendered to the atmosphere of what was going on. And the words were there, and the cigarettes and booze were there. It’s always more fun to have lots of props and find a way to never let them go.