He thrives on alternate realities, and with a personal army of in-house effects wizards, his breakthrough films were lavish renditions, kept grounded by clever story and well-realised character think how spectacularly the murderous teens of his Heavenly Creatures conspired against the world from their private universe remember how convincing Michael J Fox was, as a conduit between this world and the next, in the kooky and spooky The Frighteners? Secondly, The Lovely Bones is an otherworldly tale, and Peter Jackson has otherworldliness for breakfast. For starters, he and his cohorts (Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) are no strangers to adaptation – prior to their Oscar-winning Tolkein adaptation, he and Walsh were nominated for reinventing Pauline Parker’s diaries as the Heavenly Creatures screenplay. As a best-selling story of loss, renewal and the minutiae of life, its big screen adaptation was inevitable, and so it came as no surprise that Jackson put his hand up to do the honours. Of this Peter Jackson would have been well aware, when he signed on to adapt and direct The Lovely Bones.Īlice Sebold’s genre-defying tome is narrated by a teenage murder victim, Susie Salmon, as she watches over her fractured family and keeps tabs on her killer, from an ethereal pergola.
Yet take too many liberties with the defining elements of the novel, or fail to articulate the writer’s prose, and you’ll have to answer to more than just the howls of protest from the sniping 'the book was better’ crowd. Adhere to the source text too slavishly, or rely too heavily on voice over, and you’ll end up with little more than the live-action equivalent of a book on tape. The film demonstrated that the pitfalls of adaptation are many and varied. In their acerbic tale of a screenwriter dwarfed by the enormity of the task before him, Adaptation’s complex and clever plot encapsulated like no other, the means by which outstanding books can turn into lousy screenplays. It has been ten years since Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman and Kaufman’s mythical brother Donald created the quintessential film about the perils of adaptation.
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