Who doesn’t love or need a little revenge fantasy to get us through this life? We can’t do much about it when we read on the news some toddler’s been sold for prostitution and shoved in a trunk to die, or a young girl was snatched from a street corner and held prisoner to a man who raped her repeatedly for many years. We just have to read about it after the fact. 2009, though, presents revenge fantasy as raw food. First, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds toys with the possibility of gathering the worst Nazis into a theater and watching them burn, and now Peter Jackson …
If you haven’t read the book this counts as a spoiler.
…says he indulged the agony of one of the main characters in The Lovely Bones after a test audience said they felt dissatisfied in how he met his demise. He also says this about his well-deserved Oscar win for ROTK:
“I do feel I don’t need to prove anything anymore. But winning and even being nominated for an Oscar is still an enormous privilege and big thrill,” he said.
“The great thing about having won is that you do feel, no matter what happens in your career now, you’ve always got that Oscar and it’s a nice thing to wake up to in the morning and go to the office and see them sitting there on the shelf.”
As far as the spoiler goes, I’m guessing this news was floated because there were murmurs of Jackson returning to the editing room – and whenever people hear that (despite how many great films have gone through the same process) they assume the worse. Jackson told the Guardian, “We got a lot of people telling us that they were disappointed with this death scene, as they wanted to see [the character] in agony and suffer a lot more,” said Jackson. “We had to create a whole suffering death scene just to give people the satisfaction they needed.”
