Lovely Bones

Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens are to develop the Alice Sebold novel The Lovely Bones as their next film after King Kong. Though “The Lovely Bones” is not on the order of a major fantasy trilogy, Jackson said the book has its own complexities. The book opens with the revelation that 14-year old narrator and main character Susie Salmon was raped and murdered. From heaven, she watches how the people left behind handle her tragedy. “It’s the best kind of fantasy in that it has a lot to say about the real world,” Jackson said. “You have an experience when you read the book that is unlike any other. I don’t want the tone or the mood to be different or lost in the film.” The most perplexing problem, said Jackson, is how to convey Susie in heaven. “It’s cleverly not described that well in the book, because Alice wanted your imagination to do the work and decide what Susie’s heaven looks and feels like,” Jackson said. “We will have to show something on film. It has to be somehow ethereal and emotional.”