Trivia / Heavenly Creatures

• Billing Displacement: Sarah Pierse and Diana Kent are billed before the then-unknown Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey, who are undoubtedly the protagonists. And even then, Kate Winslet is billed first when Pauline is the narrator and POV character.
• Colbert Bump: The film launched heavy interest in what became of the two girls, and resulted in the very quick discovery that Juliet was none other than mystery writer Anne Perry.
• Dawson Casting: While both leads were teenage actresses, they were still older than their characters. Kate Winslet was eighteen playing thirteen and Melanie Lynskey was seventeen playing fourteen.
• Fake Brit:
  • Sort of. Honorah Parker was born in Birmingham and moved to New Zealand later. Sarah Peirse is wholly from New Zealand.
  • Nana Parker likewise was British, but her actress Lou Dobson was a local New Zealander.
• Friendship on the Set: Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet did become good friends and lived together for a while, though they lost touch after the latter's Hollywood career took off.
• In Memoriam: Producer Jim Booth passed away shortly after the production was complete. The film is dedicated to his memory.
• Method Acting: Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet were so strongly into their roles that they would interact with each other as their characters off screen.
• My Nayme Is: Honorah Parker spelled her own name with a final H, but due to a misspelling in the initial police reports, the local papers referred to her as "Honora" during the murder trial. The error was repeated in subsequent media, including the credits for Heavenly Creatures.
• Referenced by...: The Simpsons episode "Lisa the Drama Queen" was inspired by this story, with Lisa befriending a young girl named Juliet Hobbes. Together, the two girls invent the fantasy world of Equalia. Unlike Pauline, though, Lisa eventually decides she'd rather live in the real world.
• Separated-at-Birth Casting: Melanie Lynskey was cast based on her uncanny resemblance to the real Pauline Parker. Most of the other cast members were likewise chosen for their resemblance to the real life figures.
• Star-Making Role:
  • For Kate Winslet. And while Melanie Lynskey didn't exactly become an A-lister, she was launched towards her more memorable roles such as Ever After, Coyote Ugly and Two and a Half Men.
  • A behind-the-scenes example for its director and co-writer, Peter Jackson, as this was his first major studio project.
• Unbuilt Casting Type: Kate Winslet would become known for English Rose or Proper Lady roles after this in Sense and Sensibility and Titanic (1997). In her first film, she plays a girl with the appearance and background of an English Rose, but it soon becomes clear she's deranged and takes part in a brutal murder.
• Peter Jackson admitted the gorgeous Fourth World hallucination sequence was an excuse for him to play with new CGI technology. Pauline's real diary explains their experience of the Fourth World more as a special way of seeing beautiful things in reality. While they at first thought "only ten people" have this ability via a "special part of the brain", she wrote later of discovering more "saints," artists and creators who seemed to express a sense of the Fourth World.

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