Susan Sarandon Talks About Her 'Lovely Bones'

Production began last month on Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's ultra-popular novel, The Lovely Bones -- just as Ryan Gosling left his role as dad, and Mark Wahlberg jumped in. The film focuses on a young girl who is raped and murdered, and then watches her loved ones and killer from heaven as her family falls apart and they try to find her body. It's pretty dark, but with word finally coming from the set, we're finally getting hints to just how Jackson will present it -- Susan Sarandon recently talked to MTV about her role as Grandma Lynn, and just what sort of adaptation Jackson has been cooking up.

She says: "I play kind of the comic relief. She's [a] drinking, hard shooting, smoking [old lady] cutting across all of the pain, pain, pain. Whenever I possible can blow smoke in someone's face, I'm doing it!" But it seems that this levity is not just present in her role. As she says of the film on a whole: "I haven't figured out the tone of the movie, I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it is. It's going to be a strange jumble of things. But Peter Jackson did Heavenly Creatures. It's like that." So the director is turning to his roots, but that doesn't mean he's completely left the world of special effects. The actress also says his treatment of the heaven sequences "will work better in the film than they did, for me, in the book." Why that is, I don't know, but considering all he did with Lord of the Rings, it must be good.