Lovely murder (From The Northern Echo)

Lovely murder

12:16pm Thursday 18th February 2010 in

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Peter Jackson admits to Steve Pratt that he’s seen ghosts and believes we have spirits, ensuring The Lovely Bones is in safe hands.

ASK The Lord Of The Rings director Peter Jackson if he believes in the afterlife and his reply seems a little noncommittal.

“I think I do,” he says.

His reasoning is that some stories he’s heard have been “really compelling” and given him pause to think there has to be something once we die.

“I guess where I land in the whole thing is that I don’t believe in religion particularly, but everybody should be free and able to believe in whatever they want. It’s a fundamental right that people should have,”

he says.

“I can’t believe that we’re who we are because of brain cells or whatever it is. There’s some kind of energy that’s a spirit or a soul or whatever you want to call it that survives after we die.

“What it’s like, I have no idea.

There’s a version of it in the movie but I can’t swear that it’s 100 per cent accurate, what we showed in the film.”

His latest film, The Lovely Bones, has prompted this line of questioning. Based on Alice Sebold’s bestseller, the story centres of a murdered 14-yearold schoolgirl keeping an eye on her grieving family – and her killer – from heaven’s waiting room.

Jackson surprises by announcing that he once saw a ghost. “A genuine, real experience,” he says. The ghostly encounter happened in the apartment of his girlfriend Fran about 20 years ago.

“I woke up in the morning and there was a figure in the room.

She was really scary, she had a screaming face, like a silent scream,” he recalls. “She was a lady, about 50 years old, and it was terrifying actually. She was at the end of the bed. She glided across the room and disappeared into the wall. I sat in bed and wondered if I’d really seen that.

“Fran came in and I said ‘I think I’ve seen a ghost’. I swear I’d never spoken with her about this before, but the first thing she said was, ‘was it the woman with the screaming face?’. Fran had seen the same woman in the same room about two years earlier.

“And then three or four years ago there was a theatre being renovated across the street from the apartment. It was about 100 years old and they talked about the legend of the woman who committed suicide in the theatre when she was booed off the stage. The newspaper story said that this woman manifests herself, she’s seen in the theatre dressing rooms as a spectre with a screaming face.

“So that’s three different experiences all with the same ghost in the same area over a period of about 17 years. It was something weird.”

After The Lord Of The Rings and his King Kong remake, The Lovely Bones marks a change of pace for the film-maker but adapting the book proved more difficult that he anticipated.

“It’s an incredible book that affects you emotionally when you read it, but the book itself is not really structured like a film.

So it became a challenge to figure out how to reorganise the events in the book,” says Jackson, who co-wrote the screenplay with regular collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens.

“The story is one of those wonderful stories that defies a genre, this is a so-and-so film or a horror film or a thriller.”

The crime at the heart of the story – a schoolgirl killed and the body hidden by a neighbour – is a terrible one, but it was always important the film should be “about love, about Susie’s adventure and the way that people have to relate to the fact that she’s dead and readjust their lives.

“We didn’t want the film to be defined as a murder film, and we also wanted it to be a PG-13 or 12A, so we set out with that in mind. We didn’t want the film to be disturbing in that way.”

Jackson sees it as coincidental that several of his films have young female characters in turmoil. He points out that Heavenly Creatures, which he made before The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, was based on a famous New Zealand murder story from 1954 and The Lovely Bones is based on a book.

“They’re very different source materials, and they just happen to be the characters involved.

The Lovely Bones came out of reading the novel and being profoundly affected by it and thinking it could be a terrific movie.

“The other factor was coming out of The Lord Of The Rings – three movies – and King Kong, and just feeling like we had a pipeline in place that was reasonably well oiled and comfortable for doing big budget effects films. So we were certainly looking for something smaller and more drama-based at that time because it’s a challenge to do something that’s completely different.”

He’s currently working on a new Tolkein project, The Hobbit, to be made as two movies. He’s writing the script with Fran, Philippa and director Guillermo Del Toro.

“It was an interesting experience because in the eight or nine years since we wrote any of The Lord Of The Rings screenplays, I was worried that it would be weird or hard or uncomfortable to go back there.

But as soon as we started writing the scripts it was fun actually – it was easy, it was like old friends.”

■ The Lovely Bones (12A) opens in cinemas tomorrow