Here’s another shoot Saoirse did in Japan.

Saoirse attended The Lovely Bones Dublin Premiere last night. I only found three images so far, hope more will surface. EDIT: More images added. We now have 8 HQs and 35 MQs in the gallery!

BAFTA-nominated actress Saoirse Ronan finally arrived in Dublin last night for the premiere of Peter Jackson’s film ‘The Lovely Bones’ and said it was the one she was most looking forward to.

After spending the last few weeks at first nights of the film in Sydney, Wellington, Los Angeles and London, the 15-year-old star found herself outside Dublin’s Savoy theatre having her name shouted by photographers.

“I’ve been all over the world with this film but the Irish premiere was the one I was most looking forward too. It’s really important because this is my home, where my family and friends live. To be here and share a film which I care about so much is really wonderful,” Ronan told the Irish Independent.

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Wearing a vintage black moschino dress despite the winter chill, the actress, already nominated for an Oscar for the 2007 film ‘Atonement’, said she considered as “hype” speculation that she could be up for another Oscar when the list of nominees are announced next month.

“It may happen, it may not, at the moment it’s only hype. I really don’t know what way it’s going to go,” she said.

While on her recent Bafta nomination she said: “I was delighted to be nominated, and very happy for Stanley (her co-star in the film Stanley Tucci). I thought he might well get the nod, but it was a genuine lovely surprise to hear I had got one too.”

Organisers of last night’s premiere had hoped that co-stars Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon, along with Rachel Weisz, who plays her mother in the film, would attend the Irish night but it wasn’t possible.

Source

There’s a video of the premiere, screencaps already been added to the gallery.

Video Link:
01.27.10 : “The Lovely Bones” Dublin Premiere

Torontosun.com released an interview with two new shoots of Saoirse and Rose.

There’s nothing like a road trip to cement a new friendship.

So it was with the Oscar-nominated teen Saoirse Ronan and New Zealand actress Rose McIver, 22, who visited Toronto last week on the latest whistle-stop of their tour to promote The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s book about a murdered 14-year-old who looks upon the aftermath of her life from a place called “the in-between.”

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The two play sisters — albeit ones separated by death. Ronan is Susie Salmon, the protagonist, who watches as her “kid sister” Lindsey (McIver) ages from 11 to 19, experiencing first kisses and other milestones denied to her by Mr. Harvey, the psychotic child-killer next door (Stanley Tucci).

In real life, McIver and Ronan became inseparable friends, who touch and play with each other’s hair almost by habit. This despite the fact that they share few scenes in this vail of tears.

“It was funny that I got along so well with Rosie, considering we didn’t do that much together,” says Ronan, who burst onto the scene with a best-supporting actress Oscar nomination for Atonement.” After location filming in Pennsylvania, “she came and visited us on the set in New Zealand and we used to hang out a lot.

“Travelling around like this together is a lot of fun.”

“Although,” McIver adds, “on a visit like this, there’s not much time to do much more than what we’re doing now.”

“But we’re on to L.A. next,” Ronan says excitedly. “And I’m sure we’ll go to (the trendy shopping district) The Grove or something. The last time we were there somebody recognized us and took pictures. It was really weird.”

Ronan admits her life changed radically after the Oscars. “It does open doors, it was incredible and unexpected. But things are even more busy now after The Lovely Bones, even more so than during the Oscars. I have a movie I’m about to start (reportedly the movie Hanna, in which she plays an East European teen trained as an assassin), but I can’t talk about it because it’s not completely signed, sealed and delivered.”

And with an array of choices, she says The Lovely Bones was still a no-brainer. “One of the best directors in the world, the script was incredible. And the idea of my character being in the in-between and not on Earth was very appealing. I was by myself a lot of the time. I like working that way.

“As an actor, I found it easier when I was in the in-between than when I was on Earth. Part of acting is separation and escaping yourself.”

McIver, who just finished shooting Predicament with Flight Of The Conchords’ Jemaine Clement, still hedges her bets on acting (she’s majoring in linguistics and psychology).

Not so Ronan, who looks far enough down the road to say she’d like to write and direct some day. She is wistful about McIver’s school experiences though.

“I have to be tutored. There’s only about three schools where I live (in Ireland’s County Carlow), and the attention I was getting at one of them wasn’t the right kind,” she says. “I don’t really want to go into it, but they didn’t make it easy for me.”

In the meantime, The Lovely Bones is in the middle of its own awards-season circus, and Jackson’s changes have irked some fans of the book.

“I read Twilight,” Ronan says, “and everything in the movie wasn’t exactly the way I’d imagined it. But I accepted it because it was the film version.”

Source

Also, a photoshoot that Saoirse did in Japan has just surfaced.

Here are the screencaps of Saoirse’s GMTV interview.

Video Link:
01.25.10 : GMTV

50+ outtakes from Saoirse’s last year USA Today shoot are now available for your viewing in the gallery.

Star Movies VIP Access posted an interview with Saoirse about The Love Bones.

Video Link:
01.25.10 : VIP Access

Official website of The Lovely Bones are fully opened. A new clip and more photos have surfaced.

I found two never seen photoshoots. Also, Guardian.co.uk posted an interview with Saoirse.

Saoirse Ronan turned 15 last April and runs on a different clock from the rest of us. She says she’s glad she didn’t start acting young, because it might have screwed her up and burnt her out. It’s not as if she began acting at, say, three or something. She waited ­until she was eight, which was more sensible, because when you reach “our age” (she includes me in this) you at least know what you’re doing, and in any case, things didn’t start getting weird until a few years ago, with the Oscar nomination. “So I’m glad I’m only really starting now,” she says firmly. “Because it means I can be seen as an actor as opposed to a child ­actor.” With that, she wriggles forward on the couch and begins eating her spaghetti bolognese lunch.

Ronan has a roiling Irish accent, gangly adolescent limbs and long, shampoo-ad hair that falls across her face. From time to time, mid-mouthful, she will refer to friends – Susan, Keira, ­Vanessa – and it takes a moment to realise that she means Sarandon, Knightley and Redgrave, all of whom she has worked with and grown close to. She was knee-high to a grasshopper when she landed a role in an Irish soap (The Clinic), and this led to her breakthrough performance as ­meddling Briony Tallis in Atonement, which in turn carried her to within touching distance of an Academy Award. Away from the cameras, she likes to sit around, watch the telly, maybe eat a bag of crisps. There is a river at the bottom of her ­garden where she swims in ­summer, and a family dog, ­Sassie, with which she plays all the time. ­Sometimes she hangs out with her mates; sometimes she plays basketball. “You know,” she says, “normal things.”

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In her latest film, as luck would have it, she plays a girl similarly torn between the real world and a gaudy paradise. The Lovely Bones is based on the 2002 bestseller by Alice Sebold and spot­lights 14-year-old Susie Salmon, a kid in 1970s Pennsylvania who is killed by the local pervert, then looks down on her family from limbo. “Susie’s in the In-Between,” explains her soulful little brother, and what an In-Between it is. The film is directed by Peter ­Jackson, of Lord Of The Rings fame, who goes to town on the blue-screen effects and frames Susie’s afterlife as a schoolgirl fantasy, flushed and florid; a land of blooming rose ­petals and sunflower fields; cascading waterfalls and ­giant turntables that you ride like a carousel. For good measure, Jackson also crops up for a Hitchcockian cameo as a hirsute customer in the local camera store. “I think Pete wants to be an actor,” Ronan says. “He wants to be famous!” But she’s only teasing.

Ronan was so good in Atonement, arguably the best thing in it, because she gave us the sort of child rarely seen in films. Her Briony Tallis was neither a bad seed nor a clamouring cutey-pie. Instead, she was pensive, watchful and complicated; wise beyond her years, though crucially not quite wise enough to read the nuances of adult sexuality. Some viewers found her unsympathetic, which annoyed the actor, who insists she is an innocent who waded out of her depth. “People say Briony’s a bitch, and she’s not. She’s not vindictive or spiteful. It’s just that she doesn’t express her ­emotions; she just sits and observes everything, whereas Susie is much more out there. She’s more your typical teenager, running about in the world, disgusted when she sees her parents kissing.” On balance, Ronan is probably more like Susie than Briony. “It wouldn’t be healthy if I were like Briony.”

Ronan’s background proves quite the mish-mash. I’ve read that she was born in New York to an actor father who carried her, as a babe in arms, to the set of The Devil’s Own, where she met Brad Pitt. The bald biography makes her sound like a dyed-in-the-wool showbiz brat. But in conver­sation there is something rough-edged about her; an unschooled, irrepressible quality that doesn’t go with the script. Besides, she was born in the Bronx, not the Upper East Side, and moved to County Carlow when she was three. Inevitably, her memories of those early years are sketchy. “Unimportant things. I remember my dad’s friend showing me a little spider in a box that shook its legs, and me getting scared. That, and going to Toys R Us. My mam used to drive me to this huge Toys R Us store outside town. Not to buy anything, but just as an outing, to look at things.” She has no memory of meeting Brad Pitt.

Ronan explains that her parents, Paul and ­Monica, had moved to New York because things were bad at home in Ireland. He worked in ­construction and then as a barman, she as a nanny. I tell her this all sounds like some 19th-century novel about immigrants coming to ­America. “I know!” she says, and maps out the opening lines. “He was a barman and she was a nanny! And times were tough!”

Anyway, she continues, what happened was that her dad was tending bar when he met an old Irish actor called Chris O’Neill (“He’s not here any more”) who convinced him to audition for some stage roles, and one thing led to another until the bar’s owner said, “You’ve got to decide. Do you want to be a barman or do you want the acting shit?” Paul Ronan replied, “The acting shit.”

“I don’t come from a family that has money,” she says. “Maybe that’s why this stuff doesn’t bother me. They had to struggle for a long time, and then this happened and things are ­better.” She gestures vaguely at the hotel room, but I think she is referring to the broader picture; the “acting shit”. The TV gigs, movie roles and Oscar nomination that brought her to Hollywood, even though she knew she wasn’t going to win. She was just too young; it wasn’t her time.

From the outside, Ronan’s life looks to me ­almost as ­unreal as Susie Salmon’s afterlife. But, she insists, it doesn’t feel that way to her. Of course it has its oddball aspects. She is not keen on press conferences and premieres, especially the first one in Venice, for Atonement, when ­everyone was screaming for Knightley and she feared they might get lynched. Neither is she ­especially ­comfortable being recognised in the street, which happens a lot in Ireland. “I find that hard to deal with, though I don’t have it as bad as the Twilight people or the Harry Potter kids. But it is weird, ­especially after doing a film like this one. If I ­notice that a guy is looking at me – a man – I think, ‘Is this a really weird guy staring at me, or does he just recognise me from a film?’ ”

Until recently she attended Kilkenny College, a Protestant boarding school in the south-east of Ireland. Now she is home-schooled. “The reason was teachers giving me a hard time. Teachers and students.” She pulls a face. “Some of the students were, you know, mean. But I only stayed a while. It wasn’t really working out. You know, the school is a good school and the people who go there are good people. But when your schoolmates ­recognise you before they’ve met you, and the teachers do, too, it can make things very awkward and ­difficult.” She shrugs it off. “It’s a shame.”

I suspect she’ll be OK, if only because she is too likable not to find a world that suits her. In any case, she is not prepared to give up on formal ­education yet. Her mum left school at 15 (“Trouble with the nuns”) and her dad didn’t last much longer. Their daughter, by contrast, has plans to study film at NYU. “­College is different from school. Isn’t it?” I assure her that it is, or at least it was for me. “That’s right. People are there because they want to be, and you can choose what you want to study. So it’s very different.”

In the meantime, there are busy months ahead. Ronan recently ­completed work on The Way Back, a war drama by Peter Weir, and is due to shoot a new movie in the spring that she would love to tell me about but can’t, even though she is clearly itching to, because it isn’t finalised. On top of that, there’s the long round of promotion for The Lovely Bones, which will take her to Tokyo and then America; a necessary part of the Oscar campaign. Ideally, of course, she’d like a bit more time at home, to watch TV, read her book (The Diary Of Anne Frank) or hang with friends. Plus, Sassie is getting to be an old dog – he’s pushing 12 – and time is precious.

Our own time, it transpires, is almost up. I ­confess I have a silly question to end on and she groans because she thinks she knows what it is. “Do you have a boyfriend?” she flutes in a coy ­falsetto. “Do you have a boyfriend? Ah God, don’t ask me that. It’s so annoying when people ask me that.”

No, that wasn’t it. Never ask a 15-year-old whether they have a boyfriend or girlfriend; it’s mortifying for all concerned. Instead, my dumb question is about the pronunciation of her name, Saoirse, and all the garbled variations she must have heard. Oh right, she says, a little deflated. Well, she has been called Cerise and Sor-cha, and Seraki, too. “You actually say it ­’Sairsha’,” she adds helpfully. “But you can also say it ­Sersha, or Seersha – both are OK.” She rolls her eyes heaven­ward. “But, yeah, it happens all the time. They even spelled it wrong on the Golden Globes poster for ­Atonement. On the Golden Globes poster they got it wrong! ­Sarise Ronan, they called me.” Next time, I think, they’ll get it right.

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Another interview with Saoirse and Rose talk about the filming of The Lovely Bones. Screencaps will be up soon.

Video Link:
01.22.10 : Nick Maslow Interview