“I feel like a ’70s chick now,” quipped 15-year-old Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan, adding she loves the era’s music, a typical teen’s enthusiasm for the newly discovered in her voice.

The young Irish actress (her name is pronounced “Sur-shah,” but friends call her “Sursh”) with the arresting ice-blue eyes, immersed herself in the sounds of the mid-’70s for her role as 14-year-old murder victim Susie Salmon in The Lovely Bones.

The movie opens Friday.

The film, directed by The Lord of the Rings franchise helmer Peter Jackson, is set in 1973 Pennsylvania. It’s based on Alice Sebold’s 2002 bestseller about a girl who watches her family, and the neighbour who killed her, from the afterlife.

“Fleetwood Mac is one of my favourite bands,” Ronan said passionately as she curled up on a Yorkville hotel room couch with her co-star Rose McIver to talk about The Lovely Bones.

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New Zealand native McIver, 21, plays her younger sister, Lindsey, who ages from 11 to 19 in the film.

Both actresses embraced the unfamiliar world of polyester pants and David Bowie for the movie, which has a soundtrack by English composer Brian Eno, who made his mark in the ’70s with Roxy Music.

“I’m fascinated with the music – not the fashion, but the style where it started off from. It was a very interesting era, when things started to become bold,” said Ronan, her Irish lilt coming as a surprise after hearing her mastery of a middle-America accent onscreen.

Ronan pointed out that teens today tend to have common ways of expressing themselves, thanks to globalization and the pervasive reach of popular TV shows.

That wasn’t the case in the 1970s, “and because I’m not like that anyway, I felt it was very easy to go there. I feel like I’m not like one of those (modern) kids.”

The Lovely Bones was shot two years ago, when Ronan was an unknown 13-year-old actress. All that changed in 2008 when she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Briony Tallis in Atonement.

Both Ronan and McIver needed to do some homework to play typical American teens.

“I had the luxury of spending a few days at an American high school,” said McIver. “Just seeing the cafeteria, and we went to a homecoming game and saw American football being played, and all these things that were completely foreign to me.”

“We don’t have those kind of high schools back home,” added Ronan.

McIver also relied on her own diaries, kept through her school years, to help get her in touch with different stages of Lindsey’s life. Physical alterations, like pigtails and braces, helped her look younger, along with medical tape that was used to flatten her womanly curves.

“Poor thing, I felt so bad for her,” Ronan said.

“Especially during the running scenes,” added McIver with a laugh, mock-gasping.

Susie, of course, doesn’t age over the eight years that spans her family’s grief and desperate attempts to find her killer and her remains.

Jackson has crafted an elaborate series of settings for the almost-heaven place Susie inhabits, where the scenery shifts from meadows and woods to fanciful places that challenge the imagination.

Shooting those scenes demanded much from Ronan. She was often acting in front of a bare blue screen – digital effects and scenery were added later – and had to rely solely on Jackson’s descriptions to help her imagine her surroundings.

“We would play music every single day. It was very important and reflected the mood of the scene and it helped more than anything else,” said Ronan, adding the playlist varied among ’70s hits and albums, and classical.

“Pete would talk to me in between takes and he would describe what was going on and I would react to it,” Ronan added.

So what did she think when she saw the final version of The Lovely Bones, when her moving to music and Jackson’s direction meshed with his vision?

“Oh, I was completely blown away,” said Ronan. “The in between was very, very beautiful.”

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