He is an Oscar winner, refuses to leave his native New Zealand and went from low-budget splatter comedies to the Oscar winning director of the one of the most acclaimed film trilogies of all time. Peter Jackson has emerged as one of the world’s most revered filmmakers and his latest film, The Lovely Bones, from the bestselling novel, takes him back to his Heavenly Creatures days.

The film tells of a dead teenage girl caught in an in between pseudo heaven while she comes to terms with her death at the hands of the chilling Mr Harvey. Jackson talked at length about the film, answers its critics and justifies the film’s lack of violence.

What were the challenges of adapting this? What did you have to leave out? "We shot some scenes. Any film that I’ve done, you shoot scenes that don’t end up in the final cut. In my mind, there’s no such thing as a perfect adaptation of a book. The master work is the book. Alice Sebold’s novel is The Lovely Bones. That is the work that has got everything in it, every character, every subplot and that’s the way that you should experience the story in its most pure form. A film adaptation of any book, especially The Lovely Bones in this example, it’s only ever going to be a souvenir. It’s going to be an impression of aspects of the book."

"To me, to adapt a book is not a question of producing a carbon copy of the book. It’s impossible. To include everything, the film would be five or six hours long. It’s a personal impression that basically Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh and myself, the three of us wrote the screenplay and we read the book. We responded to aspects of the book, especially emotional themes, the comforting value of the book and things it had to say about the afterlife and that aspect of it, which is very personal to anybody."

"That’s what we responded to and our adaptation is very much just elements of the book restructured following our interests and our takes. To me, no adaptation can ever be perfect. It’s impossible. You don’t make a movie for the fans of the book. You just can’t do that."

Why was the choice made to give Mr. Harvey those peculiar contact lenses? "Yeah, I think the eyes ... I’ve done a lot of movies with contact lenses in actors’ eyes. To me, they change the color of your eye. If there’s something that’s going on with the character’s eyes, it’s because of the performance. You know, as a filmmaker, I like shooting extreme close-ups of some characters occasionally because that is a technique that you use to really get inside of somebody’s head. Stanley was playing a very dangerous and frightening character, so getting close to his eyes were a way of increasing the menace because Stanley’s performance was giving that to us."

What were your reasons for choosing to eliminate the rape part of her murder from the book? "Yeah, there are artistic and they are more reasons and there are practical reasons. There are a variety of reasons that I should just talk about. The film is about a teenager and her experiences of what happens. She’s murdered, she goes into an afterlife experience, her in between and we wanted to make a film that teenagers could watch. We have a daughter, Fran and I have a daughter who’s very similar to Susie’s age. We wanted Katie to be able to see this film. There’s a lot of positive aspects of this film and it’s not something that I think I wanted to shield our daughter from. So it was important for us to not go into an R rated territory at all."

"Also, I never regarded the movie as being a film about a murder. Yet if we shot any aspect of that particular sequence in any way, then it would stigmatize the film. Movies are such a powerful medium with the music and the effects and acting and performance, the editing and the lighting and camerawork that to show a 14-year-old girl being murdered in any way, even regards no matter how briefly, it would completely swing the balance of the movie and it would frankly make it a film that I wouldn’t want to watch. I mean, I would have no interest in seeing that depicted on film and I would not want to see the film. Every movie that I make is a film that I want to see. It’s very important. I make movies that I know I would enjoy seeing in the cinema and that would not be one of them."

"So the movie that we did make, we wanted it to become something that was the - - it was almost like a mystery, a crime mystery of what happens when you’re in this world of the subconscious, the world of the afterlife and Susie has to deal with the mystery of what happened to her. There’s a positive aspect to it in the sense that she’s immortal and saying there is no such thing as death. All of those aspects and themes were what interested us. Not the murder, and also I just could not, I have no interest and I’ve shot some pretty extreme things in my time with Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles and Brain Dead. There’s a certain style and a sense of humor that I believe you can do to get away with that but to do anything that depicted violence towards especially a young person in a way that was serious, to me I would have no interest in filming it at all. It would be repulsive."

"So there was a variety of reasons but we felt very determined from the beginning that the film should be PG-13 because it was important. I mean, how much murder and killing do you need to see to be satisfied? How much to make somebody happy? I mean, one of the things we did which was different from the novel but now the way we restructured the screenplay is we have her fleeing from her murder, and we really liked that aspect of sort of the way that bit of the story was told in the sense that at the point that her spirit becomes disconnected from her body and she’s running. She’s running across that field, she’s running into the street, she’s running home, and Susie doesn’t know what’s happening to her. She’s literally confused and now she finds herself in the in-between, which is essentially the world of dream, of subconscious, of this confused state, and she has to start to put the pieces together like a mystery."

"So that really dictated very strongly that even for all of the other reasons, seeing any form of murder was not something that we wanted to do because of the way that we restructured the story. She herself is confused and has to put the pieces of the puzzle together as the story continues."

Peter, what drew you to The Lovely Bones in the first place? It is an intimate character study after doing four big effects-driven stories. "It’s not a challenge to direct a different style of film in terms of the acting because you’re always dealing with a screenplay and a screenplay has particular needs and a style that is appropriate and it’s my job obviously to attempt to shoot the script that’s appropriate for that particular role. But to answer your question, the only thing as a filmmaker that I am scared of or fear is repetition. I have no interest in doing the same thing over and over again, and that’s not to say that I wouldn’t do another fantasy film or I wouldn’t do another splatter film one day or another film with puppets. But it would be different, and certainly it’s great to have a break and it’s great to turn your mind to something different, and The Lovely Bones was a challenge."

"One of the things like I’m sure most of the people in this room would appreciate that things are immediately much more interesting and enjoyable if they’re difficult. If you’re attempting to do something or if you decide that you’re going to take on a project for the next year or two years, if it’s easy and familiar – I shouldn’t say easy, actually, that’s the wrong word. But if it’s familiar and if it’s treading on the same ground that you’ve gone before, immediately it’s going to be less interesting than taking on something that has new demands and a fresh challenge."

"The Lovely Bones is a wonderful puzzle, it’s a terrific book that affects you emotionally, but the book doesn’t have a structure that immediately makes a film obvious in your mind. The book affects you on an emotional level, not a story level as such, and you delve into it and as a filmmaker you figure out a way in which you can tell the story on film as I said at the very beginning, not necessarily the perfect way, and not the way that other people would do it. You take 20 different filmmakers and give them a book like this – any book, really, but especially Lovely Bones – and you’ll have 20 completely different films, which is interesting. So the idea of certainly doing something that was a challenging new topic was absolutely of great interest to us."

Did all of you agree with how justice was carried out in the film, or about the ending? "Well, what I like about the ending, are you talking about Mr. Harvey and what happens to him?"

Her decision between the boy and what’s in the box? "Well that was one of the things really that we loved about the climax, the fact that she has this moment through the use of Ruth, who is a girl with genuine psychic ability, Susie finds that she has a few seconds back on earth again, a few seconds where she’s inhabiting a body rather than being this sort of free spirit, and in those few seconds she could decide to say, “call the police! That guy out the window is the man who murdered me. You’ll find my body inside that safe. Quickly, get to a phone and call the cops.” But she doesn’t do that. She has that choice, but in those few seconds, she decides to have the kiss that she wanted to have and she makes that her choice."