Peter Jackson, the visionary director behind the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “King Kong” is a master of taking the imaginary into reality. Jackson was able to spend a few minutes to explain the inner workings of his genius
Valley Star: So my question is, a kind of a behemoth like “Lord of the Rings,” has its own challenges for adaptation. So what sort of challenges or struggles presented themselves in adapting this novel to film?
Peter Jackson: Well, one of the things that I’m beginning to learn, because you know I’m not hugely experienced at doing this, that – and you’re learning all the time. Like every time you make a movie, it’s going to film school each – and you go to class at film school every day.
But I’m realizing that when you adapt a book, you can only really put half the book into the film. So you know and average-length book, like The Lovely Bones, it would be a four- or five-hour-long movie if we were to include all of the characters that Alice wrote about, and all the subplots that she wrote about.
So, one of the challenges that we’re discovering now is that, when you’re adapting, you know you’ve got to – you’ve got to realize that you’re only going to get half the book into the movie, and you’ve got to start making decisions about what the most important aspects of the book are. And you quickly realize that you – you know you have those two or three main characters, and whereas an author of a book can write subplots, they can have secondary characters, and they can delve into other storylines that aren’t connected to the main story, and it works very well in a novel. It doesn’t work so well in a film. And so you tend to focus on just two or three main characters and really stick to the central plotline of a film.
So, it’s making those decisions. And it’s you know – and it’s seeing passages of the book that you really liked, that you assumed you’d put into the movie, but you suddenly haven’t got time for them. And it’s having to say goodbye to characters and to scenes that you were looking forward to doing. But when you start writing the script, you realize that there’s no room for it.
VS: This is your fifth big-budget film and your fifth adaptation. What attracts you to bringing other people’s visions alive and stories alive? And in the future, do you see yourself working with more original materials?
PJ: Well, I’m happy to do either. I’m happy to do – well, I mean, we’re not really setting out to find novels to adapt. But you know what’s interesting, when you do read a book, and I read novels like anyone else, just for recreation and for fun, is that I often start imagining a movie in my head.
So as I’m – and I’m sure most people do this. As you read a well-written book, you start imagining what these people look like, and you imagine the locations and the action. And before too long, you’ve got this little movie playing in your head.And then it doesn’t take much for me to get excited about the little movie that’s being inspired by the words in the book. At – you know to want to think seriously about the idea of putting that little movie in my head onto film and showing it to other people, which is ultimately what we end up doing.
So, I guess novels have a – have a tendency to do that with me, whereas an original idea is a whole different thing. Because an original idea, you’re sort of either waiting for a bit of inspiration to pop into your head, or you’re sitting down in front of a blank sort of paper, thinking now, what do I really want to make a film about, and let me think of some ideas.
And that’s actually harder, I think, I would be fair to say that, unless you – unless you’ve got an incredibly inspired idea for something that’s no one ever seen before, it’s difficult to come up with fresh and original and new you know original ideas. Novels at least have a head start.
So I found them a bit easier to make, because half the work is done for you at the beginning. But I don’t really have a plan. I don’t have a plan to do one or the other. It’s – I just follow my nose.
I literally don’t know what we’re going to be doing in two or three years, you know. I will just wait and see. It’s part of the fun of being a filmmaker like this, is that it’s pointless following a big, grand plan. You just go from one film to the next and wait a
VS: I am a big fan, and your films often focus on a blend between reality and fantasy. So I was wondering, how do you balance the two realms artistically in your films?
PJ: Well, you do – within a movie, you follow what you think the movie needs. And so, The Lovely Bones was a particularly interesting, because it’s – it is a very fascinating mix of reality and fantasy.
I guess, because the fantasy segments referring to the afterlife, the sequences with Susie, because you know one of the attractive things about The Lovely Bones is the – is it’s an opportunity for me to make a movie, which says things about what happens to our soul after we die. And that’s obviously a question that we all wonder about.
And so, you know it’s on the – it’s in the back of everybody’s mind. And, especially if you lose people who are close to you, you wonder what’s happened to them, and are they still around, and can they see you and hear you? All those sort of questions are fascinating questions. And they’re emotional questions.
And it’s that stuff that the movie really gets into. And so, you know even calling it fantasy, I guess is not really true, because we try to you know – we try to present a case of, this could be what happens to you, and possibly, after you – after you leave your body, your soul divides and lives on.
And so the movie is a – it was fascinating in the sense that there’s a reality to the film, which is Susie’s parents and her sister and her murderer. There’s a storyline that’s about them, you know and they live a perfectly real life, and continue to do so. There’s nothing at all fantastic about that storyline, and in fact, we you know we tried to make that as real as we possibly could.
And in the other half of the movie is, we’re following Susie’s point of view. And her point of view is being told you know from the point of view of her – of her soul, which is living on after she dies. And how she reacts to that, and how she wants to see her killer punished, and is it really – is punishment what she – what she wants? Is punishment what she should be after? You know, we’ve asked those sorts of interesting questions.
And you know it’s not a ghost movie. So she doesn’t operate on the rules that you see in normal ghost movies. She can’t make doors slam, and she can’t sort of you know – she can’t do any harm to anybody, yet she wants to try to get the guy who killer her to court, because he’s getting away with it.
And so, it was a fascinating mixture of the two. And that was one of the, I guess, the challenges of the film is to be – is to be stepping in and out of both of those points of view, the real and the fantastic.
And the balance of it, I – you know, you’ll have to see for yourself when you see the movie if we succeeded with the balance. That is the trick, though, getting that balance right, so that it’s not – it just is a sort of a you know – keeping the story told, keeping the momentum going, making sure that it’s delicate, not heavy-handed. That was – all of that was the challenge of making this particular film.
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