Peter+Jackson

Production Companies
Director: Peter Jackson **The Lovely Bones is a particularly great example of the idea ** **that if you gave the book to 20 different filmmakers, you’d get 20 completely different ****films – Peter Jackson ** ** PARK ROAD POST Cinema post production facility. New Zealand. Property of Wingnut films **
 * [|WingNut Films]
 * [|DreamWorks SKG]
 * [|Film4] (funding)
 * [|Key Creatives]

LOVELY BONES As of January 10th according to the Box Office Mojo site, it had grossed only $444,000 in the US and just over $3 million elsewhere in the world. Reportedly, Paramount has $155 million riding on this film, in production and marketing costs. On Christmas Eve, the //Los Angeles Times// reported that Paramount had decided – in the wake of poor reviews, poor word of mouth and ‘weak” takings at the three theatres concerned – to scrap its original plans to put the film into wide release straight after Christmas. Instead, they would be using the delay to January 15th to devise a new marketing campaign aimed at the one and only tested group that seems to like the film – teenage girls.

critical reviews: "The Lovely Bones" is a perfect storm of a movie disaster: You've got good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects. The result is an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material. David Byrne once sang, "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens." There's way too much going on in Peter Jackson's heaven -- and yet it isn't nearly enough.  **Claudia Piug**

 **[|Jackson] and his tag along writing team strip back the complex story of this probably unfilmable book to a core plot of whimsy and sentimentality. In an adaptation such as this, you have to cut and cut ruthlessly, but this film flails at the various plot threads and catches none. Readers of the book will wonder what happened to the more interesting themes, and newcomers will be confused by the unexplored. ** Pure movies: UK  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0380510/usercomments

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0906/S00203.htm Peter Jackson (Director)Interview on Lovely Bones http://www.onfilm.co.nz/editable/JacksonLovelyBones.html

Peter Jackson(Producer) interview excerpt on: DISTRICT NINE

 A SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT. PRODUCER: PETER JACKSON  http://www.sonypictures.com/homevideo/district9/ Here is an excerpt of an interview where Jackson was asked about **District 9**

The context for the remarks is the question of originality in special effects films.

GB: Certainly, it's a place to introduce the new and celebrate the past, but I suppose what I was suggesting is that these days it seems difficult to make a big special-effects film unless it's based on some pre-existing, known quantity in pop-culture, such as a novel, comic book, video game, TV show, toy line or previous movie. You look at the //Harry Potter// films, "//Iron Man//," "//Star Trek//," "//Transformers//"...  PJ:I mean, personally I think that’s one of the most depressing things about the film industry generally today. The writers and directors should be blamed just as much as the studios because really everything seems to be a remake or adapting a 1970s TV show that was never particularly good. Why anyone thinks that it would be a good feature film now, you know, goodness knows why. And I guess it’s easy to say it's security that you know a studio is only prepared to put $150 million or $200 million into something if it’s a known quantity. But at the same time I’m also aware that audiences are getting fed up with the lack of original ideas and original stories. And if you look back to the great days of "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" and those sorts of movies, they weren’t based on TV shows, they weren’t based on comics. They were inspired by them and they had DNA in them which came from years of Flash Gordon and various things in the past but nonetheless they were original. And yet we seem to be incapable as a general industry, which includes not just the studios but the filmmakers and writers and directors, we seem to be incapable of doing that now for some reason. It’s a little bit depressing. But hopefully it’s a cycle. Everything in the film business tends to be cyclic and hopefully this all drains itself out in a couple years and we’ll be back into original stories again. GB: I think there's also a sense now that special effects have finally made it possible to successfully adapt the great past works in literature that couldn't be realized visually on a screen in the past, such as your own "//Lord of the Rings//" series, "//Alice in Wonderland//" and the //Narnia// films. Those sort of properties are a bit different than making a movie about a bestselling toy... PJ: There are perennial stories like "Alice in Wonderland" and Sherlock Holmes and those sorts of things, which have been around since almost as long as film, and Frankenstein is another one. They’re perennial favorites, which get remade every 20 years and that’s OK. We almost expect that but it is really the making and putting huge resources into something that was never that good in the first place, which I guess nonetheless is a brand name. And I guess one of the most cynical ones is when people can take toy lines and turn them into films. To some degree I was very dubious of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" idea -- taking a theme park ride and turning into a film -- even though they seemed to end up being quite fun films.