Uncovering the Bones: About the Story
In 2002, a novel came out of nowhere to become a near-instant classic of our times, resonating deeply with readers and critics around the globe. Alice Sebold’s second novel, The Lovely Bones, appeared on the surface to be a dark tale of modern crime about an ordinary suburban child’s haunting disappearance and murder. Narrated from beyond the grave, the story of The Lovely Bones offers a unique and very personal take on the notion of the afterlife. It is a tale about death that is filled with unexpected light, beauty and hope.
At the heart of the book is the endearingly honest, funny and brave Susie Salmon, who, after having departed this life at far too young an age, watches over the living from a mysterious personal realm where she can have anything she desires or imagines, except to be back with those she loves. From this world once removed from our own, Susie watches her family as they come to grips with overwhelming loss. As the family grapples with grief and growing frustration over the police’s failure to solve the crime, Susie tries to guide her father towards uncovering the identity of her killer. Strengthened by the love and compassion she feels for those she left behind, Susie eventually comes to understand that she must move on to enable her family to come to terms with her death and find some measure of peace.
The novel was hailed as a “triumph” by Time Magazine and a “stunning achievement” by the New Yorker and became one of the most talked-about and widely read books of the last decade. Among the millions of readers immediately taken with the story of Susie Salmon and her family’s search for justice and grace was one of today’s most imaginative filmmakers: Peter Jackson. “Alice Sebold’s novel is one of those great books where you don’t know what to expect; it is a tough, thrilling, emotional story. As a filmmaker, that’s terrifically interesting,” he says.
Jackson has a reputation for spellbinding storytelling on screen. He is best known for having written, directed and produced The Lord of the Rings trilogy, creating an indelible screen life for the fantasy world forged by J.R.R. Tolkien. Combined, the three films have grossed almost $3 billion at the box office, been nominated for 30 Academy Awards, and won 17 Oscars, including Best Picture for the third film, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Jackson took home Oscars for his direction and for the screenplay of The Return of the King. In 2005, he went on to direct, co-write and produce a contemporary adaptation of one of the best-known stories of all time: King Kong, which grossed over $500 million and won three Oscars. Earlier in his career, CityplaceJackson wrote and directed a darkly emotional, critically acclaimed film that was based on a true story, called Heavenly Creatures.
It was while Jackson was still in post-production on The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers that he first read The Lovely Bones, given to him by his longtime filmmaking associates Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, who were ardent fans of the novel.
“People were starting to rave to me about this book and so as soon as I could, I grabbed it. I wanted to see what the excitement was about,” Jackson recalls. “I found it to be a tremendously powerful and evocative story. On the face of it, the novel is about every parent’s darkest fear – the loss of a child. Yet, ultimately, it grows into a story about the redeeming power of love, which is why I think, so many people are drawn to the book.”
Jackson’s interest was piqued, but in order to proceed the team needed both the rights to the book and Sebold’s blessing. The novel had already been optioned in unfinished manuscript form thanks to the smart good taste of Aimée Peyronnet, a producer from Wild Child Films, and also James Wilson, who was then an executive at Film4. Jackson, Walsh and Boyens’ huge passion for the book eventually led them to Film4’s door, at a time when this exciting collaboration became possible. “There was a real connection when we met Alice,” recalls Boyens. “She’s a funny, generous, open-hearted person who is brutally honest with a dark sense of humor. We felt so lucky when she came back to us and said we were the right people to tackle the book.”
Wingnut and Film4 formed a partnership and Ken Kamins, the team’s longstanding manager, took Peter, Fran and Philippa’s script – which was written on spec – to the market where it landed at DreamWorks. This is when Steven Spielberg, who had been in love with the novel since its publication, came aboard as executive producer, joining Tessa Ross from Film4, along with Kamins and James Wilson. Ja“Steven had a genuine respect for the book and a real desire to see this film made,” says Jackson. “It was a natural fit for us to work together and he was full of ideas in developing the screenplay and beyond. He provided great support any time we needed advice.”
Jackson, Walsh and Boyens all collaborated, as they often do, on the screenplay adaptation. Though the trio has re-envisioned iconic characters and classic literature in their previous work, this project would present an entirely fresh set of challenges. “We all like puzzles and I think we saw The Lovely Bones as the ultimate puzzle for screenwriters,” says CityplaceJackson. “How do you take CityplaceAlice’s very intricate, poetic book, which doesn’t in any way scream `I’m a movie’ and structure it as a film? We became obsessed with how to move the pieces around to tell this story on the screen,” he explains.
Boyens credits Walsh with finding a way in. “Fran always had an innate idea of what the story could be, why it was worth telling and how it could be told with a mixture of magic and the chaos of reality. She saw how it could weave multiple film genres together,” she says.
“It’s an especially tricky story to adapt,” Boyens continues. “It’s so incredibly layered and emotional and it’s not linear, so it was an ongoing process, step by step, of finding our way through. It’s a story that is darkly funny, it is brutal, surprising, gorgeous and full of emotion.”
A big part of that challenge was determining how to depict the story’s highly unconventional main location: the place which Susie refers to as “The In-Between.” From the start, Jackson, Walsh and Boyens knew that they wanted Susie’s experience of the afterlife to be completely personal and specific to Susie’s understanding of the world. They wanted it to transcend religious traditions and celestial imagery – and for it to reflect instead Susie’s inner-consciousness and emotional life. Most of all, they wanted it to feel like the quintessential dream world; influenced by earthly events yet limitless in its possibilities to conjure anything and everything that might Susie might choose to experience or imagine.
“What we attempted to do is to present an afterlife that is evocative, elusive and ephemeral. It is a place which reflects the eye of the beholder; it isn’t filled with any particular religious iconography,” Jackson notes. “I wanted to keep it mysterious and intangible. It’s called `The In-Between’ because Susie is basically caught in the ‘blue horizon’ – the space she refers to as being between Heaven and Earth. `The In-Between’ is not a literal Heaven so much a place where Susie stops to take spiritual and emotional refuge, before she is ready to move on.”
Susie’s “In-Between” is a mix of breathtaking beauty and frightening darkness; it is comforting and sad, beautiful and strange, and it is profoundly connected to events that unfold on Earth.
Jackson, Walsh and Boyens focused Susie’s emotional investment in solving her own murder, which fuels her rage and desire for revenge. She is all too aware that her killer, the eerily normal Mr. Harvey, appears to have gotten away with an act of sheer evil – but she has no obvious means of leading her family or the police to her murderer’s door.
“The story is also a thriller,” points out CityplaceJackson, “and Mr. Harvey is a fascinating kind of character because he’s an Everyman. He mows the lawn, he chats with the neighbors, he knows the value of appearances and Susie starts to wonder if this man might actually get away murder.”
Yet, the suspense of the film is woven into a bigger, more stirring story about the human capacity to find joy, no matter. “l like to think of the movie as an ’emotional thriller,’ Jackson says. “It’s about an evil man who takes pleasure in murder and it’s also about a family trying to figure out how to rebuild their lives in the face of overwhelming loss.”
Boyens notes that part of the film’s ratcheting tension is created by the audience’s ever-increasing hope that Susie and her family will each find their own path out of the dark woods of fear and anger. “One of the brilliant things that Alice Sebold originally did with this story is to invest the reader in Susie escaping from this in-between state,” she says. “You yearn for the entire Salmon family to reach the point where they can let go of what happened, without letting go of love.”
Susie too eventually comes to understand that she must face her own death in order to transcend it. At the end of the story, Susie lets go of the vengeance and anger and hate. She lets go of her life and is finally able to ‘see the world without her in it’. In effect, she grows up without ever growing old.
Sums up Jackson: “The story begins with Susie’s murder and there is grief and loss and unimaginable pain, but the strength of the Salmon family prevails through all of it; somehow they survive, somehow they find a way to rebuild and carry on and keep Susie in their hearts as a living memory, which is a tremendously hopeful place to leave the story.”
Hearts and Bones: Casting the Salmon Family
Though the story of The Lovely Bones is lit with magical, surreal elements, Peter Jackson says that, at heart, it’s a simple and starkly real story of a family grappling with how to love each other in the face of loss and a completely unpredictable world. He always saw the Salmons as the very skeleton of the story, and he and his team scoured the globe for a cast that could bring each family member to life in all their foibles, needs and hopes.
The character at the center of it all – the 14 year-old girl left in an ethereal limbo by her own murder, Susie Salmon – proved to be the most challenging role to fill. Jackson was searching for someone who could not only embody Susie’s girlish exuberance and innocence, but also had the courage and skill to expose her raw emotions as she confronts the aftermath of her departure from earthly life.
“A lot of teenage girls turn up at auditions with a pre-packaged screen persona,” CityplaceJackson comments, “but for Susie, we wanted the opposite, someone who would give the sense of being a very ordinary and real 14 year-old girl. What we didn’t expect is that we would find our teenager from CityNorristown, StatePA in country-regionplaceIreland.”
In a flood of casting tapes, Saoirse Ronan’s audition quickly rose to the top. Raised in pastoral County Carlow, Saoirse followed in her father Paul’s footsteps and pursued a career in acting. Best known for her role in Joe Wright’s critically acclaimed film Atonement, Ronan went on to garner an Oscar nomination for her performance in the role of Briony, along with a nomination for a Golden Globe.
Producer Carolynne Cunningham was the first to see Ronan’s audition tape for The Lovely Bones. “I was knocked out,” she recalls. “It was a homemade tape done by her father, an actor himself, and there was something very special about it. He did a tough scene with her, and then at the end there was a lovely touch with him simply filming her playing very innocently in the garden with her dog. It just had real heart.”
Once Jackson met with her, there was no turning back. “Saoirse has a natural instinct for drama, he says. “She’s intelligent and fresh and she’s fiercely original. She’s the real thing – a born actor – and you don’t see that very often. Beyond that she was a dream to work with. Saoirse was a gift to this movie.”
Says Ronan: “What I loved about playing Susie was that she was just a normal teenager, with dreams and hopes for the future, full of life and love. And though she is taken away from her family, her dreams are as alive as they ever were, even though she is haunted by the nightmare of her murder.”
Ronan immersed herself fearlessly into a role that made huge psychological and emotional demands on her as actor, something she says she could not have done, without the support from the filmmakers. “Working with Peter, Fran and Philpipa was a fantastic experience. They are so down to earth and, being parents themselves, I knew they had my best interests at heart. They understood what the loss of a child could do to a family, and their love and support helped me so much to portray Susie. We talked a lot about the struggle Susie was going through in the afterlife, letting go of her family and the world they live in, so she could finally move on and enjoy her beautiful new life.”
As Ronan sees it, Susie’s greatest challenge is to learn how to let go of the things she has lost. “The Salmons were a very close family and, when Susie watches helplessly as they fall apart, she wants so much to help them get over her death and move on with their lives before she can think about doing the same herself. One of the things I love most about the movie is that, even though Susie can’t give her Mom a hug or tell her Dad how much she loves him in person, she discovers that they can still feel it from where she is.”
It might seem ironic but, during the course of production, Ronan also grew very close to co-star Stanley Tucci, who plays Susie’s chillingly cold-blooded murderer. Perhaps, she reckons, neither could have taken their roles all the way without that kind of deep, underlying trust. “Our scenes were so intense that we needed to be comfortable with each other,” she explains, “and the great thing was that we got on really well. He’s got kids of his own and I knew that he didn’t like doing these scenes. Knowing that he’s really a great guy helped. Still, what’s scary about CityplaceStanley is that he plays Mr. Harvey as such a normal guy, and you see how someone like Susie really wouldn’t be too suspicious of him.”
When Susie Salmon fails to return from school on that fateful, December day, her family is forever changed by the events that come after. Susie’s father, Jack, overwhelmed with guilt and grief, sets out on a path to bring Susie’s killer to justice. He enters into a spiraling vortex of obsession, which is fueled by the feeling that he failed his daughter and that somehow he must now try to put things to right.
To play Jack, the filmmakers chose Mark Wahlberg, who came to the fore as an actor in a series of unpredictable roles, ranging from a Desert Storm soldier in Three Kings to a beleaguered adult film actor in Boogie Nights to a seaman battling for his life in The Perfect Storm. He recently was honored with Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations as a Boston cop in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed.
Jackson was excited to give Wahlberg an opportunity to play the kind of family man he is in real life. “This is a film about love and one of the strongest connections in the movie is that between Jack and Susie as father and daughter,” says Jackson. “Jack is filled with a sense of failure that he wasn’t there when Susie most needed him – and Mark has a male energy that is perfect for the role. He’s protective and real, but also very vulnerable. I saw in Mark all the things I know I’d be feeling in Jack’s situation.”
Wahlberg was intensely moved by what Jack goes through as he comes to terms with a father’s most unimaginable tragedy. “When Susie doesn’t come home, there can be no resolution for the family. There’s no body, no evidence of what happened, so of course Jack is obsessed with figuring out what became of his daughter,” he explains. “He can’t sleep. He can’t eat. He can’t do anything until he finds out who it is that took this tremendous love from his life. He’s obviously justified in his feelings, but he goes a bit mad in his methods. He starts accusing anybody and everybody, until he can no longer really function as a husband or father. For Jack, as for each of the characters, this is a very emotional journey.”
The emotions nearly overwhelmed Wahlberg as he tried to put himself in Jack’s shoes. “I really tried to live as Jack, and he just broke my heart,” he admits. “I would watch the news and see family tragedies and start to really wonder `what are the parents feeling?’ It was not always fun, and incredibly challenging as a parent myself, but it was rewarding as an actor.”
Some of Wahlberg’s toughest scenes were those in which Jack senses that his dead daughter is with him in spirit. Wahlberg had to find a way to play these scenes as if Susie was a physical presence in the room. “In those scenes, I would just picture Saoirse’s big, blue eyes and a lot of times she’d be narrating just off camera, and that would move me to tears,” he explains. “Sometimes Peter would say `let’s try one without so many tears, mate’ and I’d say `well, then you’ve got to stop Saoirse from reading.’ It was powerful stuff and it affected me deeply.”
Wahlberg found his relationship with Jackson interesting as well. “He’s a completely different kind of director from any I’ve worked with,” he remarks. “I trusted him completely. I didn’t feel scared to let it all hang out, because I knew he would always reel it in. There’s so much love there with him, Fran and Philippa, and there was the feeling that as emotional as things got, Peter was going to make people feel good when they walked out of the theater. With his imagination, that’s what he’s able to do.”
Jack Salmon’s guilt and grief compels him to actively involve himself in solving Susie’s murder, but for his wife, Abigail, the grieving process is entirely different. Overcome with doubts about her ability to function as a mother and wife, she shuts down emotionally and eventually flees the family home. Playing Abigail is Rachel Weisz, an Academy Award winner for her role in The Constant Gardener.
“Abigail is not a sentimental character,” Jackson observes, “”She’s a woman trying to hold her family together and, at the same time, hold herself together. Rachel’s challenge was to play a character who for her own good reasons leaves her family when they need her most. She has to do this and retain the sympathy and understanding of the audience, which is no easy task. I think Rachel achieves that and more. She delivered a terrific performance and she was an absolute revelation to me as a director.”
Weisz started exploring her character by thinking about what Abigail’s life was like before her whole world collapsed. “Abigail is a stay-at-home mom in the early 1970s, and I think part of her wishes there was something more to her life than that,” Weisz explains. “I think she’s frustrated. When this tragedy befalls the family, everyone reacts in their own way. At first, Jack is the one who becomes dangerously obsessed with finding their daughter’s killer. Then, Abigail starts to fall apart.”
She adds: “What I like about her is that she’s not a heroine. She’s someone very human, very fallible and quite flawed; and she’s trying to figure her life out in spite of all that.”
That basic humanity, says Weisz, flourished through Peter Jackson’s mix of the everyday with the magical and unknowable. “Peter has an incredible sense of character and drama, but at the same time he has this gift with magical fantasy worlds. This film is a marriage of those skills,”
The Salmon family has a second matriarch who is equally important to the family dynamic: Grandma Lynn is played by Susan Sarandon, whose prolific screen career includes winning the Oscar in the role of Sister Helen Prejean in Dead Man Walking, provides both comic relief and an unwavering family backbone.
“Susan is very funny and she needed to be funny as Grandma Lynn, who is a constant reminder that in the face of tragedy you’ve got to get on with life, and also that life is full of humor,” says Jackson. Adds Boyens: “Grandma Lynn is a fantastic creation, an inappropriate, outrageous woman who has this wonderful energy and ability to cut through stuff and get to the heart of the matter. Susan plays the role beautifully because she is smart and her sense of comedy is impeccable.”
“Grandma Lynn has probably been an alcoholic for most of her life. She smokes. I don’t think I ever said a line without a cigarette and a drink,” observes Sarandon. “And it’s great because she’s so strong. She’s completely egocentric. She says what everybody’s thinking but she’s the only one insensitive enough to actually say it. She doesn’t worry about people’s feelings. And, consequently, she’s really funny.”
The character evolves in the course of the film as her life, too, is altered by the tragedy that has befallen the Salmon family. “What I love about Grandma Lynn is that she has to completely change,” says Sarandon. “She has to try to vacuum and clean and do the laundry. And she does it terribly. At the same time, she manages, literally, to open the curtains and let the light in and say, `OK, enough is enough. Now it’s time to live. You can’t continue to close off your emotions and your life.’ She’s a small part. But she’s very necessary for them to move on.”
Rachel Weisz loved having the chance to work with Sarandon. “Susan was fantastic as the drop-dead sexy, manicured woman who is also a difficult and overpowering mother. It’s a very funny role yet Susan brings not only humor, but glamour, strength and complexity to her character.”
The strength of the Salmon family is also evident in Susie’s fiercely intelligent younger sister, Lindsey, who grows into a young woman over the course of the story. To find an actress who could take Lindsey from childhood to the cusp of adulthood in a singular performance, the filmmakers held auditions in London, Los Angeles and New York. Ultimately, though, they found Rose McIver, who made her debut at age 5 in Jane Campion’s The Piano, in New Zealand.
Says Boyens of McIver: “Rose has a toughness that masks a vulnerability which she is not afraid to show on screen. Lindsey has a complete lack of self-pity, which is an attitude Kiwis understand very well, a sort of `OK, let’s get on with it.’ We searched a long time for the right actress to play Lindsey, and it turns out Rose was always on our doorstep.”
Adds Jackson: “Rose handled the transition of Lindsey growing up fantastically well. She is a natural actor, much like Saoirse, and everything she does comes from her heart and feels completely real.”
McIver found herself drawn in by how proactive Lindsey becomes, even as her family nears the edge of self-destruction. “Lindsey is a headstrong girl and as her family starts to fall apart, she understands that if nobody else is going to be the glue, she’s going to have to do it,” she says. “The role really affected me because the idea of losing a sibling is terrible to imagine.”
Perhaps the greatest challenge for McIver was the transition from a traumatized 11 year-old girl into a fearless 18 year-old young woman. “It’s an entirely different mindset between 11 and 14 and 18,” McIver observes. “I worked a lot with ideas about self-consciousness and awareness of your body and how that changes as Lindsey ages.”
In one of McIver’s most heart-pounding scenes, an increasingly suspicious Lindsey breaks into Mr. Harvey’s house, risking her own life in the search for incriminating evidence. “Lindsey is quite intuitive and once she becomes suspicious of Mr. Harvey, she feels it very strongly,” McIver explains. “It’s something that’s long been simmering inside her, the hope that she’ll be able to help her family get the answers they need.”
The Bone Collectors: Mr. Harvey and Detective Len Fenerman
The close-knit structure of the Salmon family is undone in an instant by a man driven by the basest instincts of predatory evil, a man who uses his very ordinariness to mask the darkness of his soul. George Harvey is a quiet and solitary builder of doll houses; he is, as Susie says, a ‘good neighbor,’ an unremarkable man, who does not seek or attract the attention of others. Thus he is able to lure Susie to her death and quietly slip back into anonymity without inviting suspicion
Peter Jackson felt strongly that bringing The Lovely Bones fully to life on screen would hinge on finding a brilliant actor to play Mr. Harvey. His choice was both unexpected and fortuitous: stage and screen veteran Stanley Tucci. Though Tucci is a two-time Golden Globe winner for playing two equally complex historical figures – controversial radio broadcaster Walter Winchell in Winchell and Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann in Conspiracy – his most recent roles include the comedies The Devil Wears Prada and Julie & Julia. Stanley is an actor we’ve wanted to work with for a long time, and he deserves credit for the courage of taking on this role,” Jackson. “We actually had people say they’d never take this role because they couldn’t imagine spending months walking in the shoes of this man.”
Once Tucci committed to the role, there was no looking back. But playing George Harvey came at some personal cost. “I think Stanley hated inhabiting the skin of this character,” remarks Jackson. “He tried each night to shower off the reptilian stuff he carried around all day. But he had the sheer guts to take on this role and he was completely fearless. He looked into the abyss – the void that is George Harvey’s soul and the abyss is what you see reflected back on screen. It’s a profoundly scary performance. Mr. Harvey actually says very little in the movie and yet Stanley conveys volumes about the character’s inner life through the smallest gesture or a subtle shift in facial expression. Stanley implicitly understood that real horror is internal, real horror is implied and never seen.”
Philippa Boyens adds: “One thing Stanley really got was the stillness of this character. In public he operates with a level of charm and intelligence, but when he’s alone he can be himself and he is almost always still. When Mr. Harvey is interacting with others he’s always manipulating people and always alert. Even when he’s in the background, you see his mind working, assessing the situation, calculating his next move. Stanley brought all that intelligence to the role and he made George Harvey so much more dangerous.”
In order to give Tucci an entirely different persona from his own, Jackson suggested a total “makeover,” including lightening his skin, lending him some extra girth and adding false teeth, contact lenses and a mustache.“You don’t look at Mr. Harvey and think `Stanley Tucci,’ and this is a good thing because I think this gave Stanley the leeway to safely separate himself from the role.”
Tucci says the decision to take the role was agonizing. “I thought the script was beautiful but, to be honest with you, I almost didn’t do it. It would have been very hard to say no but it was equally as hard to say yes,” he confesses. “I grappled with a lot to play a guy like Mr. Harvey. But the thing that really interested me as an actor was how somebody could be this very banal person, whom we see everyday in ordinary situations, and then commit the most awful acts, right underneath our noses.”
Tucci worked with behavioral science consultant and criminal profiler, John Douglas, to gain deeper insight into the abnormal psychology of real-life serial killers. He read blood-curdling transcripts and viewed confidential interviews of their confessions. He found the research at once invaluable and almost impossible to stomach. “It was hard,” he admits. “You do all the research but then you try to remove yourself from it at the end of the day.”
It helped, says Tucci, that he also literally removed his hair and makeup at the end of each day, giving credit to what he calls hair and makeup supervisor Peter King’s brilliance. “The hair and makeup for the role were absolutely crucial,” Tucci continues. “I always felt that if I couldn’t find the look, I couldn’t find George Harvey. It all had to come from the outside, and once I saw Mr. Harvey in the mirror, I could be him because I could remove myself just enough.”
Working with Saoirse Ronan also eased Tucci’s way through the psychological thicket of the role. “Saoirse has a wonderful depth and a kind of magical quality. We got along incredibly well.”
Mr. Harvey evades the police even as world-weary Detective Len Fenerman doggedly searches for Susie’s killer. Playing Fenerman is Michael Imperioli, familiar to many for his long-running role as Tony Soprano’s hot-headed protégé, Christopher Moltisanti, on HBO’s The Sopranos.
“Michael does a great job playing a small-town detective who is failing in his efforts to catch the bad guy,” says Jackson. “He has a real ability to earn the audience’s respect and sympathy.”
Imperioli says that one of the things that most struck him about Len Fenerman is that, over the years, he becomes an integral part of the Salmon family. “He really gets to know them and they all become quite close. I think he wants to be a pillar of strength for them,” he says. “But it’s a sticky situation because Len sees Jack’s obsession as interfering with the investigation.”
Complicating things further is Len’s relationship with Abigail. “There’s a connection that happens,” Imperioli comments. “Working with Rachel Weisz was a tremendous experience. She comes on like a freight train with all her emotions and is very, very present.”
Say Weisz in turn of Imperioli: “You really believe him as this `70s cop who wants to be so professional yet has a lot of tenderness underneath his mask of professionalism. Michael brings a lot of compassion and integrity to the role, and also a real moral backbone that you can feel.”
Rounding out the cast are a number of rising young stars, including Nikki SooHoo as Holly, Susie’s unexpected companion in the in-between world; Reece Ritchie as Ray Singh, Susie’s first love and Carolyn Dando as Ruth, Susie’s offbeat classmate who has a supernatural connection with Susie after her death.
Fusing Heaven and Earth in the Film’s Visual Design
For Peter Jackson, one of the most intriguing aspects of The Lovely Bones was the way Alice Sebold’s story opened up the reader’s imagination by fusing real life on earth with the mystery of what comes after. The otherworldly elements of The Lovely Bones allowed Jackson to play in a new way with the kinds of fantasy realms he is renowned for creating. And yet, at the same time, the movie is perhaps his most cinematically spare and starkly emotional film to date.
Jackson says, “One of the reasons I wanted to do this film was to try to tell a story and keep things very simple. Of course we have some amazing visuals for Susie’s `In-Between’ world, but many of my favorite scenes in the film have an utter simplicity to them.”
He continues: “For example, the scene in which Lindsey breaks into Mr. Harvey’s house – there’s nothing super clever about it but I love that scene for the way it’s all about focusing on sound. It’s the way the tiles on the roof creak and the wind moves and the door squeaks that make it so effective. It becomes all about the tiniest moments, right down to the turning of the pages of a journal or the click of a floorboard falling into place. A scene like this challenged me to shape the drama in a far more spare and economic way, and I found it quite refreshing.”
Throughout The Lovely Bones, mood and atmosphere were just as much a valued a part of Jackson’s toolkit as special effects and CG wizardry. From the beginning, he wanted to draw a distinct visual line between the Salmon family’s everyday, earthly struggles and Susie’s magical experience in the world of “The In-Between.” To do this, Jackson worked closely with a team of artists, many of whom had helped conceptualize the various landscapes and environments of The Lord of the Rings and King Kong.
Director of photography Andrew Lesnie, an Academy Award winner for The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King, switched gears and used a grittier, more naturalistic lighting style for The Lovely Bones. “Andrew and I have a great shorthand,” says Jackson. “We always like to shoot with two cameras – one that you rehearse and plan for and another that I call the `lucky strike’ camera, which might grab a different bit of detail to add to the master shot. We always keep a Steadicam standing by.”
In addition, Jackson and Lesnie sometimes shot Stanley Tucci with a tiny lipstick camera, no bigger than a matchbox, to capture the narrow focus of Mr Harvey’s world. One of the film’s most important scenes in the film is that of Susie’s death. “The cornfield sequence was key because, in a sense, this is the most important thing Susie will go through in the movie, says Jackson. “It is scene in which she loses her life; this is the event from which she flees and which eventually she must face.
He continues: “I wanted the scene to be creepy, but also banal, because this guy is attempting to lure Susie away right out in the open. At first, you see kids playing on the soccer field and people preparing dinner in their houses. Then, there is the very intimate, intense scene in the underground room where Susie realizes she’s made a terrible mistake. The violence that ensues is only implied and it’s almost entirely off screen, which was our intent. You see the build-up to the moment of Susie’s murder and then everything that comes after. I had no interest in showing the murder itself.”
With so many different tones – from murder mystery to family drama to a meditation on the afterlife – woven into one piece, Jackson also took a new approach to editing on The Lovely Bones. He asked editor Jabez Olssen to stay on set through the entire production. Through technical advances, Olssen was able to begin editing on the fly, on the streets of Pennsylvania and in the forests of New Zealand, feeding Jackson new ideas as he was working.
“It was something I’d never done before but I found it very useful,” notes Jackson. “Often, while I was waiting to shoot a new scene, I’d have Jabez near me with a laptop and we’d be editing scenes that we shot a day or two before. It kept us in a rhythm and by the time the movie was finished shooting, we already had a reasonable chunk of the movie cut together.”
Later, when the team adjourned to the editing room, the process kicked into creative high gear. Jackson explains: “Editing on this film was crucial because it’s not a linear story and it’s a story that plays with conventional time. We tried out a lot of different ideas, and Fran Walsh was in the cutting room a lot as well and was very integral in the process of shaping the storytelling.”
For Olssen, the experience was unlike any other. “We did a great deal of experimentation in the editing room and much was discovered,” he says. “One of the fun things we did editorially was to really work the tension and suspense, and also to experiment with the story structure and tone. It’s not a film that fits easily into one genre. It’s not merely a whodunit or a police procedural, but something both more complex and subtle than that. It’s really about a family figuring out who they are and how to move on with their lives.”
Imagining What Comes Next: Creating Susie’s Heavenly Limbo
When it came to creating the limitless realm of “The In-Between,” Jackson elected to use visual metaphor to reflect Susie’s hopes and joys and innermost fears.“’The In-Between is driven by Susie’s emotions,” the director explains. “It alters and shifts depending on whether she’s happy or sad; it’s entirely a reflection of Susie’s mood and the culture that surrounded her when she was alive. There are moments that are idyllic and moments that are very dark.”
Helping CityJackson to conceptualize an afterlife full of such infinite possibilities was VFX art director Michael Pangrazio, a highly regarded matte painter who has worked with Jackson on the conceptual design of a number of different projects. “The best way for us to find it was through art,” says Jackson. Michael would draw 10 or 12 different sketches to show us what a certain tree or mountain could look like and, in this way, he was able to take the sketchiest idea and make it tangible and real. Other artists at Weta, and our VFX supervisor Christian Rivers, also contributed conceptual art. We had so many great ideas you could make an entire movie out of the ones we didn’t use.”
Pangrazio drew for several months before even meeting with the filmmakers and says those first drawings led to some intense creative brainstorming. “The afterlife is so open-ended that we decided to go for something that would be very unusual, surreal and pushing the envelope visually, yet without being too specific,” says Pangrazio. “I had to think entirely outside the logical box and put together things you wouldn’t normally put together visually. I really enjoyed the creative latitude.”
Charged with bringing the final illustrations of Susie’s heavenly world to life were two men renowned for digital wizardry at New Zealand’s award-winning Weta Digital production house: VFX supervisor Christian Rivers and senior VFX supervisor Joe Letteri.
Rivers quickly realized that they would be venturing into unexplored territory. “I knew that Peter and Fran wanted to see something very cinematic, but there was no reference for what we were doing. The look we came up with is what I would call super-real; it’s heightened and vibrant and has more life than the normal world, which has a grittier feel,” he explains. “You never sense any physicality to Susie’s in-between world. Peter and Fran’s wish was that it would feel like the stuff of dreams.”
Earth Seeps Into Heaven: Susie’s Motifs
— As surreal and magical as it is, Susie’s in-between world is also populated by a series of touchstone items from her life on earth that continue to hold her in limbo, including:
— The mall gazebo where she was to meet Ray Singh in her first romantic encounter
— The ships-in-a-bottle she used to build with her father
— The cornfield where Susie lost her life
The gazebo appears in multiple incarnations, from a shining beacon in a watery glade to a splintered, crumbling structure in a stormy wood. “We approached the gazebo as something Susie always kept in her mind as a place to go,” explains Joe Letteri. “It was always her safe place.”
Also of great emotional importance were the ships-in-a-bottle that were her father’s beloved hobby. In Susie’s heaven, those same miniature paper ships have become life-sized schooners on a turbulent sea, smashing themselves on a rocky beach as Susie witnesses her father’s breakdown.
Letteri describes how these giant keepsakes were created. “We wanted to walk a fine line so that the ships wouldn’t look like blown-up miniatures but so that they also wouldn’t look quite like real ships. We worked to come up with just the right look,” he says. “And then we came up with animation that would allow them to smash apart like real ships run up onto rocks.”
The cornfield where Susie is murdered also shifts in her heaven, transforming into a lush, fertile, golden barley field that morphs into a waving sea into which Susie is submerged. “Peter had seen some artwork early on where Susie was running through a field that became an ocean and he fell in love with that,” recalls Rivers. “So, we had to come up with a way to create that! Ultimately, we shot Saoirse in a water tank splashing around, then we created the whole rest of the image digitally.”
Rivers adds: “I love that sequence because it has elements of reality, but as she sinks into the barley and floats down into her bed, it’s all extremely dreamlike.”
Jackson and Lesnie shot the live-action sequences for Susie’s in-between world entirely in the paradise-on-earth that is the South Island of New Zealand, lending the visuals a wholly different feel from Pennsylvania. Virtually the whole island was scoured to find the most awe-inspiring, serene and idyllic settings; and most of the shooting took place in the tourist ski village of Queenstown, replete with plush forests, a pristine mountain lake and a stunning alpine environment.
Certainly one of the most fun days on set was when 20 joyous dogs race through Susie’s heaven as Susie and Holly watch Lindsey experience her first kiss. Special guest star dogs included Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh’s pugs Stanley and Fergus, VFX supervisor Rivers’ golden retriever Honeybunny and director’s assistant Matthew Dravitzki’s French bulldog, Claude.
Back Down on Earth: The Pennsylvania Production Design
As soon as CityJackson secured the rights to adapt The Lovely Bones, he felt compelled to visit Alice Sebold’s native Pennsylvania. After seeing firsthand the communities in Chester County, 25 miles outside of Philadelphia, with their signature architecture and landscape, he knew that he had to make his film adaptation of The Lovely Bones in the place that inspired the novel, the first time CityJackson ever shot a film on location in the eUnited States.
“Shooting in Philadelphia just felt so right,” says producer Carolynne Cunningham. “It was dark and cold and wintery, and perfectly set the mood.”
In their first collaboration together, Jackson worked with production designer Naomi Shohan (I Am Legend, American Beauty) to ground this story of heaven and earth in an evocative, 1970s suburban reality. “We wanted Earth to have a fairly innocent feel, an atmosphere of safety and security that we don’t always find anymore. That was my foundation. And in that world, the Salmon house needed to epitomize that tone of the particular family whose story is the heart of the film,” says Shohan.
From the start, Jackson had a strong picture in his mind of what the Salmon neighborhood would look like, but finding a real neighborhood to mirror that was a major task. With the help of detailed maps, The Lovely Bones location manager Patricia Taggart scoured more than 100 neighborhoods until she and Shohan discovered Malvern, a small borough dating back to Victorian times with a population of about 3,200 people. `We got good at judging the vintage of a neighborhood by the shapes and layout of its streets,” says Shohan. “In Malvern we struck gold. There we found a pristine pocket of ’50s-era homes that had miraculously preserved what we were looking for (and was in fact exactly how it was described in the story). It gave us a great foundation of suburban simplicity, the atmosphere of a real neighborhood that felt and was completely authentic,” she comments.
To age the community back to 1973, Shohan’s crew added siding and wide asbestos shingles, and aged the exterior of local houses. Residents parked their modern cars elsewhere, and vintage vehicles were moved into their driveways. Recycling bins were replaced with metal trashcans.
In Malvern, the filmmakers also found the perfect stand-in house for the Salmon family abode. “Our neighborhood centered around a little rise where the perfect proxy for the Salmon family house just happened to stand. It was very important to have a house where you could see a lot of the neighborhood from one point of view and that’s what we found,” notes Shohan. “It was even the right color. Then, in an even eerier coincidence, just a few doors down and with a sightline to the Salmons’ front door, we found an identical house in green, just as Mr. Harvey’s house is described in the novel.”
The interior of the Salmon home was constructed in a warehouse in Hatfield, PA. Here, Shohan worked with Saoirse Ronan and Rose McIver to handcraft teenage girl rooms that reflect the characters’ personalities. Susie’s glistens with bright pinks and blues and a purple shag carpeting, with walls adorned by pictures of David Cassidy and a Snoopy poster, as well as a haunting print of painter Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World.” By contrast, Lindsey Salmon’s more contemplative room features portraits of her heroes – Joan Baez, Neil Armstrong, Mark Spitz, and Billie Jean King – a Love Story poster and John Lennon’s face emblazoned with the words “Give Peace A Chance.”
Says Shohan, “The interior of the house is very reflective of Abigail, her personality and relationships. There are loads of tiny details packed in there, and we spent a long time sort of squeezing the life of the house into being. It was the hardest set to create because of its simplicity and familiarity.”
George Harvey’s house is, in every way – from color to emotional tenor – the polar opposite of the Salmon abode. “Mr. Harvey’s house looks as if he studied women’s magazines to figure out what normalcy looks like,” Shohan points out. “And his colors are a reflection of his walled-off, psychopathic soul, with a much murkier, sadder palette of greens.”
Another vital detail for Shohan was recreating the distractingly sweet dollhouses Mr. Harvey so meticulously crafts. “There’s a creepy relationship between his dollhouses, which are images of total perfection, and his actual house, which is sterile and functional and lacking personality,” Shohan explains.
Another intriguing task for the art department was recreating a 1970s shopping mall – which they did inside the defunct, vacated MacDade Mall, built in 1970 in Ridley Township, PA. Designing the interior was like taking a trip back in time. The movie theatre marquee advertising Jesus Christ Superstar and Jonathan Livingston Seagull is prominently displayed through a bookstore window, while the appliance store features a newfangled microwave, almost as big as a refrigerator.
Shohan designed a grimmer and more macabre world for Mr. Harvey’s underground hideaway where he lures Susie in her parka and pom-pom hat. Lit by candles that throw off eerie shadows, the room is decorated with ornaments that become increasingly menacing. At Jackson’s request, the underground room was made entirely from found timber, Shohan says. “It’s a very small space, but we wanted it to be interesting wherever you looked, so we used the timber to cast shadows and built in a number of niches and ledges. The walls were finished with a mixture of concrete and soil. When you were inside the set, the smell of earth was very powerful.”
Shohan’s team later utilized numerous practical locations in New Zealand, including an old tuberculosis hospital that became Jack Salmon’s office and a 1940s, all-wooden-interior police station, which becomes the office of Len Fenerman.
Throughout, Shohan says Jackson’s openness to ideas was a constant inspiration. “He has a free-flowing working style and every day he comes to work with new concepts,” she says. “What’s delightful about Peter is that it always feels like he’s making his first film – he retains that sense of excitement, passion and creative freshness that makes things unexpected.”
Earthly Costumes: Hair and Makeup
Adding more layers of atmosphere to the Salmons’ 1970s suburban reality was the work of costume designer Nancy Steiner (Little Miss Sunshine, Virgin Suicides), who grew up in the ’70s herself. Steiner’s aim was to capture the feel of the era without slipping into the overstatement and campiness that can often accompany it. Looking for authenticity, she scoured vintage shops, rental houses, and the internet to find items that evoked the real East Coast suburban style of the times, from winter coats to track suits. “We wanted to reflect the period without being loud about it,” she explains.
Steiner’s costumes work hand in hand with the artistry of hair and makeup supervisor Peter King, who previously worked with Jackson on The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong. King explains their mission: “We had many conversations with Peter about how important it was for audiences to get a feeling of the passing of time in the Salmon family. We see this in the physical transformation of characters like Grandma Lynn, Lindsey and Abigail. We did loads of subtle things with the cast’s appearances trying to let people know that they’ve moved on in time and Susie’s still stuck there.”
Perhaps Steiner and King’s biggest challenge was the wholesale transformation of Stanley Tucci into Mr. Harvey. “Stanley was very collaborative,” says Steiner. “We all made a choice not to use the twisted side of Mr. Harvey in his wardrobe, but the fastidious, anal side of him. Mr. Harvey wants to be known as the guy next door. He doesn’t want to stick out. His life is about routine and precise planning. Thus, he wears very understated, practical, bland versions of the same clothes all the time.”
Meanwhile, King rendered Tucci’s face and body essentially unrecognizable, giving him cloudy, light blue-colored contacts for his eyes and false teeth implants that altered his facial structure. Tucci even dyed his body hair to match the dirty blonde receding wig that was handmade for his character. “We changed his appearance completely. There were a lot of trials; a lot of ideas discussed,” recalls King. “We wanted to create the kind of person you don’t really notice.”
Switching gears to someone full of zestful life, Steiner and King had fun with Susan Sarandon’s Grandma Lynn, who, in her fur coat and lavish makeup, is a self-possessed feast for the eyes every time she enters a room. The costume designer says she was inspired by the strong women heroines of the ’70s, “women such as Jackie O., Faye Dunaway and Liz Taylor.”
Adds King: “Grandma Lynn arrives with this fiery late-’60s look with false lashes and lots of glamour, but as the story progresses, that look changes as she becomes more like the mother figure of the family.”
For Susie’s afterlife outfits, as well as those of her newfound companion Holly, CityJackson brought in country-regionplaceNew Zealand designer Kate Hawley to create a sharply contrasting look. Hawley says the look in the afterlife was motivated by dreams and influenced by designs ranging from London’s Carnaby Street to 1970s Vogue layouts. Summarizes Hawley: “The costumes reflect the girls’ fantasy of how they might look if they’d had the chance to grow up. It’s their dream idea of what adulthood would be.”
Listening to the Bones: About the Sound
Sound was as key to Peter Jackson’s vision of The Lovely Bones as the visuals, and he collaborated closely with a sound design team that includes re-recording mixer Michael Hedges, sound designer Dave Whitehead and supervising sound editors Brent Burge and Chris Ward. “With this film we’ve tried to use sound that evokes emotions and psychological reactions,” says the director. “We’ve played with both unnatural sounds and organic sounds, the levels, the mixtures – everything you can conceivably do with sound, we discussed it.”
Comments Hedges, “All of Peter’s films have been challenging, but this was the toughest, as we tried to mix heavenly sounds and atmospherics with powerful emotional moments.”
From the rustling of a cornfield to the turning of a page in a moment of stark suspense, every noise emitted in the film became an opportunity to build a growing web of suspense and emotion. Says Whitehead: “The sound design helps to bridge the gap between heaven and earth, connecting sounds on both sides of the divide in a fluid way. For Susie’s in-between world, we tried to come up with a fusion of all the sounds people associate with an afterlife – birds, chimes, bells, whistles. Sounds like wind and water also become a kind of connecting bridge, sounding one way on earth and another for Susie.”
The lively aural atmosphere of the movie is completed by a soundtrack from Brian Eno, the former leader of the seminal pop band Roxy Music and a pioneer of ambient music. Fran Walsh had suggested early on to Jackson that Eno’s entrancing, dreamy music might be the perfect counterpoint to the story of The Lovely Bones, but his participation was much greater than anyone expected.
“We knew we wanted the music to feel centered in the ’70s but we didn’t want it to be full of hit pop songs,” explains Jackson. “We started by listening to some music Eno had recorded in the ’70s and then we asked him if we could license it – but as we started talking to him, he said, `I think I’ve got something much better for that.’ So 90 percent of the score ended up being completely original Eno recordings done for this film. Fran did a lot of the hands-on work with Brian after she and I talked a lot about what we wanted the music to be.”
Michael Hedges was thrilled to work with Eno’s music, blending it into the sound fabric of the film. “The score became a fantastic vehicle to bring out all the emotions this movie touches upon,” he summarizes.
For Jackson, no singular element of The Lovely Bones stands out, but rather it is the interplay between sound, vision and performance that he hopes brings Susie Salmon’s quest to set things right on earth vividly to life.
“I always like to think we handcraft our movies,” Jackson concludes. “We move through this pipeline from inspiration to script to editing and try to keep things very organic, very flowing and always open to exploration. We work away at our stories, chip away at each element, and most of all, we put a lot of care and love into them.”
Production notes provided by Paramount Pictures.
The Lovely Bones
Starring by: Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Michael Imperioli, Saoirse Ronan
Directed by: Peter Jackson
Screenplay by: Peter Jackson, Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh
Release: December 11, 2009
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic material involving disturbing violent content and images, and some language.
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $44,114,232 (47.1%)
Foreign: $49,507,108 (52.9%)
Total: $93,621,340 (Worldwide)