By Summer Rogers

Daily Titan Staff Writer

Peter Jackson is the man known most notably for his epic blockbusters, including The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong (2004).

His final film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King won him three Oscars in 2004 for Best Director, Best Picture and Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay.

He has been on a directing hiatus for four years, but he assures he has been keeping busy. He stepped into the role of producer for director Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) and is producing a movie version of the Belgian comic strip Tintin due in 2011.

Jackson’s current project is another adaption of a novel, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

This film choice strays from his previous films in that The Lovely Bones deals more with reality rather than the whimsical worlds of elves, hobbits and giant apes.

Jackson kindly took a moment from his busy schedule to discuss his directing hiatus, the challenges of adapting a film from a novel and what attracts him to sci-fi and fantasy genre films.

Daily Titan: What sort of challenges presented themselves in adapting The Lovely Bones from novel to film?

Peter Jackson: Well, one of the things is that I’m beginning to learn, because you know, I’m not hugely experienced at doing this, and you’re learning all the time.

Like every time you make a movie, it’s like going to film school. I’m realizing that when you adapt a book, you can only really put half the book into the film.

One of the challenges when you’re adapting is that you’ve got to start making decisions about what the most important aspects of the book are.

DT: After directing The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong so closely together, how is the process different, being able to take your time with The Lovely Bones?

PJ: I really (enjoyed) doing Lord of the Rings and King Kong so close together. I was very … I wouldn’t say I was tired of big-budget fantasy films, but I certainly felt that I had to have a break from those type of films, and The Lovely Bones was a project that we partly chose because it was so different and it would keep us on our toes because there’s no doubt that the way that you stay interested in what you’re doing is to keep trying new things and to do things you’ve never done before.

DT: What attracts you to the sci-fi and fantasy genre?

PJ: I always make the movies that I’d want to watch, so whatever I make does reflect my personal taste. And the movies that I like watching are escapist movies.

I have no interest in seeing movies about people like me or you or people who have regular jobs or live a regular life.

I like being swept away into an adventure that I know I’m never going to have in my real life, seeing and meeting characters that I’m never going to meet because they’re so outrageous or things that happen on screen, and they’re never going to be part of my real life and that whole escapist element, to me, is what’s appealing about films.

DT: How do you balance the two realms of reality and fantasy in The Lovely Bones?

PJ: The Lovely Bones was particularly interesting because it is a very fascinating mix of reality and fantasy. The Lovely Bones is an opportunity for me to make a movie, which says things about what happens to our soul after we die, and that’s obviously a question that we all wonder about.

You know even calling it fantasy, I guess is not really true, because we try to present a case of, this could be what happens to you, and possibly, after you leave your body, your soul divides and lives on. It was fascinating in the sense that there’s a reality to the film, which is Susie’s parents and her sister and her murderer.

There’s a storyline that’s about them, and there’s nothing at all fantastic about that storyline; and in fact, we tried to make that as real as we possibly could. In the other half of the movie, we’re following Susie’s (storyline), which is being told from the point of view of her soul, which is living on after she dies.

It was a fascinating mixture of (fantasy and reality) and that was one of the challenges of the film was to be stepping in and out of both of those points of view, the real and the fantastic.