Film needed more violence, Jackson says

Wellington film director Peter Jackson says he has had to take his movie The Lovely Bones back to the editing room to "basically add more violence and suffering".

Instead of the common problem filmmakers encounter in having to cut scenes to qualify for a United States movie rating aimed at teenagers, Jackson found test audiences wanted him to go the other way.

Based on the 2002 bestselling book by Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones will open in New Zealand cinemas on Boxing Day.

It tells the story of a raped and murdered 14-year-old girl named Susie (Saoirse Ronan), who watches from her heavenly vantage point while her family on Earth mourns her loss and tries to find her killer.

Jackson told Reuters he was taken aback to find that in early screenings audiences "were simply not satisfied" with a scene of one character's death.

"They wanted far more violence," Jackson said.

Partly filmed in New Zealand and partly in the US, The Lovely Bones is among this year's most widely-anticipated films, because the book was such a bestseller and because Jackson took the beloved Lord of the Rings tales and made films that were both true to their source material and fun for movie fans.

Stanley Tucci plays the man who rapes and kills Susie, which is no secret. "The mystery is, what's going to happen to him," Jackson said.

The director said it was important the movie receive a PG13 rating in the US from the industry group that deems the kind of audiences to which films are generally acceptable.

A PG13 rating, which advises that a movie is aimed at over 13 year-olds rather than younger groups, is generally believed by Hollywood studios to appeal to the widest possible audience, and Jackson said he wanted The Lovely Bones to generate broad interest.

Yet, with a higher level of violence, it may have earned an "R" rating, meaning it would be seen mostly by adults.

So, when shooting one death scene of a man falling to his death, Jackson chose to simply have him disappear off the edge of a cliff and not show the gruesome details of his fall.

"We got a lot of people telling us that they were disappointed with this death scene, as they wanted him to see (the character) in agony and suffer a lot more," he said. "They just weren't satisfied."

Jackson said he and his filmmakers were perplexed because they had already shot much of the movie. They had to go back to the editing room and use digital effects to add shots where (the character) bounces against the cliff on the way down.

"We had to create a whole suffering death scene just to give people the satisfaction they needed," he said.

Fortunately for Jackson, the movie still retained its more youth-friendly rating for US audiences, and even before its release, it is once again generating Oscar buzz for Jackson.

But the director said that his best director and best picture Academy Awards for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, satisfied his dreams of Oscar glory.

"I do feel I don't need to prove anything any more. But winning and even being nominated for an Oscar is still an enormous privilege and big thrill," he said.

"The great thing about having won is that you do feel, no matter what happens in your career now, you've always got that Oscar and it's a nice thing to wake up to in the morning and go to the office and see them sitting there on the shelf."

- NZPA