AJ Michalka, who appears in the Peter Jackson remake of The Lovely Bones, says viewers ought to brace themselves for a beautiful slice of heaven.

“I think it’s going to be stunning,” Michalka said of Jackson’s vision for heaven, a major set-piece in a film whose narrator resides there. “There’s going to be this beautiful gazebo involved, I know that. He’s doing a lot of stuff with blue screen, which if going to be insane, unbelievable. It’s going to be her own little world in heaven.”

And the character occupying it will be Susie Salmon (portrayed by Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan), a 14-year-old who watches her family and friends from the afterlife, observing them as they struggle to cope with her brutal rape and murder.

AJ plays Clarissa in the film, Susie’s best friend. She had nothing but praise for another costar, too: Mark Whalberg.

“He’s incredible,” Michalka said.“We all did our own and after every take he was like, ‘Are you okay? Are you okay?’ He was super cool, super nice. It was great.”

The Lovely Bones is far from a comedy. But Susan Sarandon will be doing whatever she can to make sure the drama has a bit of levity in it.

“I play kind of the comic relief,” Sarandon said of her role as Grandma Lynn in the upcoming production. “She’s [a] drinking, hard shooting, smoking [old lady] cutting across all of the pain, pain, pain. Whenever I possibly can blow smoke in someone’s face I’m doing it!”

It’s a mixture of tones that’s indicative of the overall production, Sarandon told MTV, insisting that fans who only know Jackson for Lord of the Rings and King Kong are going to be “surprised.”

“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,” the actress continued. “But Peter Jackson did Heavenly Creatures. It’s [a lot] like that.”

Don’t worry, though, fantasy fans: Sarandon is most excited about the movie’s special effects.

“I think that probably the heaven sequences will work better in the film than they did, for me, in the book,” she said..

With controversy swirling around his exiting of The Lovely Bones (after one day of shooting), Ryan Gosling has finally spoken out about the supposed rift between himself and Peter Jackson.

“I think, people are making it a far more interesting story than it actually is,” Gosling said. “The age of the character versus my real age was always a concern of mine. Peter and I tried to make it work and ultimately it just didn’t. I think the film is much better off with Mark Walhberg in that role.

Peter Jackson is an incredible filmmaker and I’m here to tell you that he has things up his sleeve that are going to blow peoples’ minds. I’m going to be the first person in line to buy tickets.”

As we reported yesterday, Mark Wahlberg has taken over for Ryan Gosling in the big screen adaption of The Lovely Bones?

But why?

The LA Times reports that Ryan was too fat for the role:

“Peter Jackson was said to be quite surprised that Gosling had showed up to start work on The Lovely Bones looking like he’d donned a fat suit.

According to sources, the 26-year-old Gosling had apparently told the director he was going to gain weight to age himself up to play the part of a grieving father, but Jackson was still expecting some movie star allure — not paunch and a beard.

By Friday, Gosling had left the high-profile production over those pesky “creative differences,” and, by Sunday, he’d been replaced by 36-year-old Mark Wahlberg, who actually could be old enough to father a teenager.”

Beyond that, Page Six reports that Ryan was a diva.

“‘Peter couldn’t stand Ryan,” said a source. Though Variety reported that Gosling had “stepped down” and was replaced by Mark Wahlberg, our source said, ‘Ryan cut his own hair, and was fighting with wardrobe. He was so demanding… Peter booted him two days before filming started.’”

Mark Wahlberg is taking over the role of grieving father in the big screen adaption of the best-selling novel, Lovely Bones.

Peter Jackson wrote the script for this anticipated, which originally starred Ryan Gosling and Rachel Weisz.

But the former left the project after just a day of shooting, enabling Wahlgberg to step in.

Weisz is still on board, though, as is newcomer Saoirse Ronan, who stars as the murdered the girl, looking down on her family from heaven.

Shooting beings today in Pennsylvania.