Peter Jackson: 'I wouldn't change Lovely Bones'

Peter Jackson at a press conference for The Lovely Bones in Wellington. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Celebrated movie man Sir Peter Jackson has been brought to task about his movie The Lovely Bones which comes out next week on DVD but he has told an American news channel he makes no apologies for the movie.

"I wouldn't change the film. The film is very much what we set out to make," he told CNN this week.

In a phone interview from Wellington, where Jackson is working on the pre-production side of The Hobbit that will be directed by his friend Guillermo del Toro, he admitted he doesn't know what he would do differently to the film.

"I wouldn't change anything in the film. I think it's a difficult film... To actually go to the movies is a particular thing that you make a decision to do, and to go and see a film essentially about a 14-year-old girl who's murdered - I can imagine that's not necessarily going to be at the top of everybody's list as a must-see film. In a way it was always going to be a difficult film from that point of view.

"Hopefully on DVD it'll have a slightly easier audience, because watching a DVD doesn't have the monumental decision that going out to the movies has.

"But certainly I wouldn't change the film. The film is very much what we set out to make. I don't know what I'd do differently," Jackson said.

The story is set in Pennsylvania in 1973 and involves the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl played by Saoirse Ronan.

She watches her family grieve for her from an afterlife called the "in-between".

Her father (Mark Wahlberg) becomes obsessed with catching the killer, whom he suspects is a neighbour (Stanley Tucci). Her mother (Rachel Weisz) moves out and her siblings and friends struggle with the tragedy.

Reviews for the movie - based on the acclaimed novel by Alice Sebold - were mixed.

Ty Burr from The Boston Globe declared: "It's as if the filmmaker, faced with an endless series of daunting creative choices, proudly took the wrong road each and every time." Ouch.

It's fair to say the movie has been a flop for the director and producer dubbed the man with the golden touch.

His Lord of the Rings trilogy grossed almost US$4 billion worldwide at the box office and won 17 Oscars.

King Kong and District 9 were also box office successes, which is why movie critics question what went wrong for Bones.

Jackson told CNN the small scale of Bones appealed to him because he didn't want to focus only on blockbuster movies.

"I didn't really ever want to be branded as being this big-budget sort of fantasy filmmaker".

The setting of the movie appealed too.

"It was fun," he said, "because we're contemporaries of Susie".

"She was 14 in 1973, Fran was 14 in 1973, I think. I'm a year younger. I was 13, but I remember 1973 very well. Live and Let Die came out - my childhood is marked by James Bond films and that was the year of Live and Let Die. And it was fun, since we were recreating the shopping mall full of the stuff that we used to look at when we were going to malls with our parents. It was our time. It was our era".