In adapting Alice Sebold's beloved best-seller The Lovely Bones, Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson was faced with a problem.
How do you film a story about the rape and murder of a teenage girl and not make it so traumatic that it scares away a mainstream audience?
The answer, Jackson says, was to focus on the novel's "curiously comforting" depiction of 14-year-old Susie Salmon's afterlife.
"She holds on to love," he explains, "and by doing that, she escapes the horror of her death".
Jackson makes a cameo in the film, playing with a Super 8 film camera
"If the book hadn't been comforting in that way, I don't think I would ever have thought about doing the movie in a million years."
Indeed, Jackson's film skirts around the murder, using dramatic suggestion and judicious editing to portray the brutal end of Susie's life without lingering on the gory details.
He has been uncharacteristically cantankerous when asked to defend this decision. "I have no interest in filming a murder and rape," the director scolded a journalist from the New Zealand Herald last year.
"I have zero interest in filming it, and zero interest in watching it."
Had the film gone in a different direction, it would have been robbed of its greatest asset - Irish actress Saoirse Ronan, whose captivating portrayal of Susie is at once awkwardly innocent and achingly sad.
"My parents were a little apprehensive about the whole thing," the 15-year-old recalls.
Teenager Saoirse Ronan has received warm reviews for her performance
"If a rape scene was going to be in the film, I wouldn't have been allowed to do something like that."
Guided tour
After meeting with Jackson and reading the script, Ronan's family were reassured, and filming started in Pennsylvania in late 2008.
It was a step into the unknown for the Lord Of The Rings director.
He had intended to shoot the movie, as usual, in his native New Zealand, until Sebold sent him on a tour of the novel's real-world locations, with a map she had dutifully hand-drawn.
"She knew the exact mall on the book, she knew the street where Susie lived. She knew where the sink-hole was," Jackson says.
"There wasn't a real sink-hole there," he clarifies, "but she knew the field she wanted to put it in".
Having toured the town, Jackson says, it would have "just felt wrong" to try to recreate 1970s American suburbia in the Southern hemisphere.
But he did retreat to home turf to dream up Susie's fantastical afterlife - a technicolor dreamscape full of golden cornfields, shimmering stars and sweeping shorelines.
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"I remember one day we took a helicopter into this untouched mountain valley," says Ronan. "It had snow on the peaks and a lake and everything was beautiful."
These scenes were mixed with CGI to create Susie's surroundings in the "in-between" - a sort of metaphysical purgatory; a holding area between death and heaven.
In the US, where the film has already been released, these vistas came in for a drubbing from critics, who pointed out that Sebold's book portrayed a much more mundane afterlife - with Susie stuck, initially at least, in her drab schoolyard surrounded by javelin-throwing students.
Dream imagery
"The needs of the adaptation pointed us in a different direction to what was in the book," Jackson counters.
"And the direction we ended up going with the afterlife was to base it on the subconscious imagery of dream."
Jackson's take is certainly more visually appealing, not to mention cinematic.
It also proves necessary, given that the film eschews the book's complex, multi-threaded story of a family in crisis, to focus in on Susie's attempts to come to terms with death, and aid in the pursuit of her murderer.
Susan Sarandon, who plays Susie's gloriously indiscreet grandmother, believes this is the key to the film's unexpectedly uplifting tone.
"Even though it is a really traumatising situation, I think what people find comforting is this idea that you can't destroy energy.
"Something of Susie is still around, and somehow she can continue to communicate - if not directly, then at least [she] can see the father who passed away, or the baby that was just born."
Sarandon's alcohol-fuelled character provides some essential comic relief
As a parent, Sarandon admits that she spends too much time worrying about her kids. "It doesn't take much to get me panicked," she grimaces.
"The fact that my eldest son is driving a car in LA is a nightmare for me."
But she thinks parents should sit down with their children to watch the 12A-rated Lovely Bones.
"It has a lot of things you could talk about," she suggests. "Not in a cautionary tale, don't-go-down-into-someone's-basement kind of way, but just about life and death and what you think there is in the hereafter."
The Lovely Bones is released in the UK on 19 February.
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