“It was a bummer”: the movie Peter Jackson stole from right under Lynne Ramsay’s nose
Four features in 18 years is not the output of a prolific filmmaker, but the lack of quantity in Lynne Ramsay’s filmography has been handily offset by the quality, with the writer and director one of modern British cinema’s most distinctive auteurs.
The filmmaker hasn’t helmed anything since 2017’s searing We Need to Talk About Kevin, but that’s about to change in the near future. Ramsay’s next film will star Jennifer Lawrence as a new mother who experiences postpartum depression that pushes her towards the edge of sanity in Die, My Love, in what sounds like a perfect match for artist and material.
Of course, Ramsay is no stranger to developing a project for an extended period of time only to watch it evaporate into nothingness as the Jane Got a Gun saga displayed, and she was equally powerless when a director who had almost complete freedom to make whatever they wanted swooped in to snatch away a story she’d been honing into shooting shape for years.
After sweeping the board at the Academy Awards with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Peter Jackson’s first port of call was that of self-indulgence. Once he’d scratched that itch by remaking his favourite-ever movie, King Kong, he went on the hunt for his first non-blockbuster flick in a decade.
The end result was an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones, which was largely greeted with disappointment. Stanley Tucci did earn an Oscar nod for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, but the supernatural drama felt like an ill-suited fit for Jackson’s established sensibilities.
The rights to the book had been snapped up before it was even published, with Ramsay set as the director of The Lovely Bones in February 2001. She worked on the script alongside Liana Dognini and had eyes on shooting commencing in the summer of 2003, only for a colossal spanner to end up thrown into the works.
Producer Aimee Peyronnet signed a first-look deal with DreamWorks, Steven Spielberg displayed an interest in backing The Lovely Bones, and by April 2004, Ramsay was long gone with The Lord of the Rings trio Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens attached to bring the story to the screen.
“It was a bummer,” Ramsay admitted to The Guardian of dedicating herself to The Lovely Bones, only for the heavyweight team from Middle-Earth to budge her out of the way. “But I got over it.” She might have taken it in her stride, but there’s every chance her take on the story would have been vastly superior to what audiences ended up getting.
Ramsay’s work has become synonymous with its explorations of grief, death, despair, and the lingering effects of trauma, especially how it affects younger people. With that in mind, she was tailor-made for The Lovely Bones, only for that pesky Jackson to come along and make a movie that nobody really liked.
