The Lovely Bones movie adapation is a grade-A example of this(leaving out rape in movies) working. Peter Jackson says it really well.
“The key event in Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones is the rape and murder of 14-year-old Susie Salmon, but in adapting the book to film, director Peter Jackson had several reasons for toning down the violent incident that sets the story in motion.
In the movie, we do not see any rape, and the murder is mostly implied. “There are artistic and there are moral reasons and there are practical reasons,” Jackson said in a press conference over the weekend in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Among other things, depicting the violence would immediately get the film an R rating. “We wanted to make a film that teenagers could watch,” Jackson said. “[Co-writer and producer] Fran [Walsh] and I have a daughter who’s very similar to Susie’s age. We wanted Katie to be able to see this film. There are a lot of positive aspects of this film, and it’s not something that I think I wanted to shield our daughter from. So it was important for us to not go into an R-rated territory at all.”
Then there are the moral reasons for omitting the graphic crime. “It would frankly make it a film that I wouldn’t want to watch,” Jackson said. “I mean, I would have no interest in seeing that depicted on film, and I would not want to see the film. Every movie that I make is a film that I want to see. It’s very important. I make movies that I know I would enjoy seeing in the cinema, and that would not be one of them.– But to do anything that depicted violence towards especially a young person in a way that was serious, to me, I would have no interest in filming it at all. It would be repulsive.”
Stanley Tucci, who plays the murderer, said it was a hard enough role to actually play and they didnt even shoot that horrible scene in the book.
In a separate interview, Peter Jackson talks about how disgusted even story-boarding the rape scene went and failed to make it in the film. Some of the crew walked out of the room. The cast and crew also didnt want to subject the two main actors, Saoirse Ronan (who plays 14 year-old Susie) and Stanley Tucci (who plays Mr. Harvey, a serial killer of little girls), to the scene. They didn’t want Saoirse to experience that scene and it obviously affected Stanley as well.
Reading a rape scene is really so much more different compared to people having to write it out, act it out, and really SEE it. I think the people involved in this movie did what I wish everyone did when handling this subject in just a graphic medium. And I would 100% recommend this book and movie. Both are equally powerful and it’s hard to describe.
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