You would have thought The Lovely Bones, which tells the story of a raped and murdered 14-year-old girl named Susie who watches over her family as they mourn and try to find her killer, would have the ‘violence’ and ‘suffering’ boxes well and truly ticked. However, according to Reuters early test screening showed that people were not satisfied, and wanted more.
Possible spoilers:
Jackson told Reuters 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,” Jackson said, so the “Lord of the Rings” director went back to the editing room to “basically add more violence and suffering.”
Yet, with a higher level of violence, it may have earned an “R” rating, meaning it would be seen mostly by adults. So, when shooting one death scene of a man falling to his death, Jackson chose to simply have him disappear off the edge of a cliff and not show the gruesome details of his fall. “We got a lot of people telling us that they were disappointed with this death scene, as they wanted him to see (the character) in agony and suffer a lot more,” he said. “They just weren’t satisfied.”
Jackson said he and his filmmakers were perplexed because they had already shot much of the movie. They had to go back to the editing room and use digital effects to add shots where (the character) bounces against the cliff on the way down. “We had to create a whole suffering death scene just to give people the satisfaction they needed,” he said.
So if you see The Lovely Bones next January (or February if you’re in the UK) and you witness a character bouncing off a cliff, you’ll know it’s because some people (with possible mental conditions) wanted it.
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