When it came to signing on for the film adaptation of Alice Sebold’s dark, difficult but ultimately uplifting best-seller The Lovely Bones, both of the movie’s young stars agreed that their decision was based on one man: Peter Jackson.

Calling him a “great guy” first and an “amazing director” second, both Oscar nominated lead actress Saoirse (pronouned Seer-shah) Ronan, who plays murdered teen Susie Salmon, and New Zealand’s Rose McIver, who plays Susie’s younger sister Lindsey, were keen to work with the celebrated director and found him to be one of a kind.

“He’s one of my favourite directors to work with. He’s so different to anyone that I’ve worked with before,” offered Ronan while in Toronto to promote the film. “We don’t do that much rehearsal before we shoot a scene; we just kind of go in and do it. It’s very fresh and he’s very open to ideas, although he has a very strong vision – him and [co-screenwriters and producers] Fran [Walsh] and Philippa [Boyens]– have a very strong vision of what they want, which is great because you feel an awful lot safer, but he’s still open to ideas.”

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“People have asked me if he’s an ‘actor’s director’ but he’s not really a departmental director, he’s a director, which is brilliant,” said McIver, seated next to her co-star. “I mean, he’s aware of all those bases that need to be covered when you’re making a film, so he knows everything about the technical side. I mean, he shoots all of the stuff himself. But he’s very good with actors as well and doesn’t limit himself to being one kind of director, which is refreshing.”

And it’s due to his versatile talent and renowned eye for special effects that Jackson is able to deftly weave in and out of the Salmon family’s suburban ‘70s-era home to the other-worldly CGI creation that is Susie’s “in-between” world.

After her untimely death at the hands of a neighbourhood sociopath, played by an unrecognizable Stanley Tucci, Susie enters a trippy type of purgatory filled with images both fanciful and frightening from within her teenaged imagination. From there, she’s able to watch her family come to terms with her death and help her tormented, grieving father (Mark Wahlberg) seek out her killer.

Ronan and McIver both enjoy a believable intimacy with and affection for their on-screen folks, including Rachel Weisz as the mother who deals with the tragedy in her own complex way, and readily related to being part of respective tight-knit families.

But trust, and vulnerability, came into play in a big way for the young thesps during the uber-tense scenes involving Tucci’s savage Mr. Harvey, whom they said could not be farther from the actor’s family man persona.

“I remember the cornfield scene, which was the first scene we did together, we didn’t really know each other before that,” shared Ronan. “And in between takes, I’d go up and give him a hug – that’s the kind of relationship we had. And then the cameras would start to roll and he was thinking about killing m[y character]. That’s how good an actor he is. He just makes you feel very comfortable and I feel like it’s okay to go there.”

‘There’ turns out to be some rather ugly places for young Susie, who, according to Ronan, was a character that required a certain amount of strength and time to firmly grasp, since she chose to read Sebold’s novel after filming.

“For me, to discover who Susie was, I had to go on this journey. It wasn’t one of those characters, I don’t know why, that I completely got straight away. I think the reason was because she was so normal, because she was a very normal teenage girl and that’s what’s very heartbreaking about this story.”

“And I did go pretty deep. Eventually, Susie sort of became a part of me and it was very natural to go to that place every day, even if it was a really emotional scene, which I had to do quite a lot, or a happy scene. I got to experience lots of different emotions and Pete was always involved.”

McIver concurred, crediting Jackson, and his regular contributors Walsh and Boyens, for making both herself and Ronan feel protected and supported during production of a film that deals with disturbing, weighty and mature matters.

“With Peter and Fran and Phil – the filmmakers – it was so important to have a safe environment. With this subject matter, you can’t really venture in there and you can’t commit to it unless you feel really secure. I mean, you want to be able to go into it and leave. And they made us feel like that was totally feasible,” she said.

Filming in Pennsylvania and New Zealand, where Ronan said she’d love to move if she wasn’t already settled in Ireland, on a rather long shoot with a group that functioned more like a surrogate family than colleagues was a remarkable undertaking for the 16-year-old, and she confessed, changed her.

“It was a very special experience. I don’t think I can pinpoint exactly how I’ve grown, except that I’ve grown as an actor, I’ve grown as a person. For a long time afterwards, you sort of go into a state of depression. It’s a family. We were all so close. To leave all of that, after all that time, was a very difficult thing to do.”

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