Jackson plays down murder in Lovely Bones

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Director Peter Jackson says he wanted his adaptation of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones -- on the rape, murder and dismemberment of a 14-year-old girl, Suzie -- to be about love.

"We didn't want it defined as a murder film," he told Channel 4 TV in Britain, while promoting the film, which premiered in London yesterday.

"To us, it wasn't a film about a murder -- it was a film about the events that happened after the murder," said the Wellington film-maker.

The film has drawn mixed reviews, with The Guardian reporting that Jackson has made a PG-certificate film by leaving the murder unseen and the rape unmentioned.

"His reward is a blushing mainstream entertainment that was tonight deemed fit to be introduced to polite society at a royal premiere in Leicester Square," the newspaper said.

Sebold's novel looked the central horror in the face, but the screen version was "so infuriatingly coy, and so desperate to preserve the modesty of its soulful victim that it amounts to an ongoing clean-up operation".

Jackson had cut the dismembered body part that alerted the family their daughter's fate, her anguished mother's adulterous affair with a detective, and all mention of what really transpired in the cornfield.

"Jackson turns up with his eyes averted, spraying cloying perfume to the left and right," said the newspaper. But Jackson told Channel 4 he wanted the film to qualify for a PG-13 or 12A rating: "We set out with that in mind.

"We also didn't want the film to be disturbing," he said.

Earlier this week, he told Reuters that 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," he said.

He re-edited to "basically add more violence and suffering" but agreed yesterday the film is far less explicit than in the book.

"It was always important to us that the film be a film about love, about Suzie's adventure and about the way people have to relate to the fact she's dead and readjust their lives," he said.

Adapting Sebold's bestseller -- "an incredible book" -- was more difficult than he had expected.

"It was a challenge to figure out how to re-organise the events in the book so that they were more film-friendly.

"Adapting the book was one of the hardest things we've ever had to do in our lives," said Jackson, who worked on the script with long-time writing partners Fran Walsh and Philipa Boyens. "If you were to take a book and be faithful to every character, every sub-plot, you would have a movie five hours long.

"Adapting is always reduction, in our experience.

"You try to preserve what it was that's so powerful about the book because it's so easy to see it slip away," he said.

Asked how it felt to view the film as a parent, he said it showed how quickly a disaster could come upon a family.

"But we feel that the movie is a positive movie for young kids to see," he said. "We have a daughter who's 12 and we showed her the film and she said: `Dad, if it was me, I would have gone down there with Mr Harvey (the killer) too." She was already thinking about how she would act if she found herself in that kind of circumstance: "It's good that that particular aspect of things can be portrayed".

"Ultimately, we wanted to have the film feel positive, that was important," he said.