British filmmaker Garth Edwards just can’t get away from the monsters after following his 2010 indie Monsters with the first American Godzilla reboot in 16 years, before venturing into other science fiction realms, including Rogue One: A Star Story. Edwards is now back with the monsters, in this case, the vicious dinosaurs of Jurassic World: Rebirth.
It’s been 32 years since the launch of the original Jurassic Park, and humans have gotten bored of dinosaurs, but they still offer much potential for science, so Scarlett Johansson’s hired gun Zora Bennett is offered a lot of money to fly down to the Equator and retrieve DNA from the largest of dinosaurs for a pharmaceutical company. She’s joined on this trip by Rupert Friend’s Martin Krebs from the company and the dino expert Dr. Henry Loomis, played by Jonathan Bailey from last year’s Wicked. After meeting up with Mahershala Ali’s boat captain Duncan and his crew, the mission gets sidelined when they receive a distress call from Manuel Garcia-Rulfo’s Reuben, who is on a cross-ocean trip with his daughters before they encounter a large aquatic dinosaur.
Cinema Daily US had a chance to sit down with Edwards to talk about his decision to take on Jurassic World Rebirth, how they convinced Johansson to join the movie, and how the movie came together so quickly, all of which you can read about in the interview below.
Q : After making The Creator, a more personal film, what made you decide to jump into the Jurassic World thing? This movie seemed to come together very fast, too.
Gareth Edwards: Yeah, usually from the day that you first get a phone call or whatever it is: “Would you be interested?” or “Let’s have a chat,” to the day the movie comes out is at least two and a half years. This was a year and a quarter, so it was like half the amount of time, which was half the appeal ’cause it was a bit like running a half-marathon rather than a full marathon, ‘cause it’s like it’s just a year, just go for it. Also, there are only two franchises that I would drop everything I’m doing and just go, “Okay, yeah, I’ll do it.” And one of them, I’d already done.
Q : That would be Star Wars, I’d assume?
Edwards: Yeah, yeah, and so, you just sort of checkmated because half of you is going, “Jurassic Park’s a masterpiece. What part of you thinks you could even get close to competing with anything like that? Don’t do it.” But then the other part, half of you is like, “Steven Spielberg’s kind of like giving you this screenplay, which is like this amazing opportunity, this amazing playground for a filmmaker.” I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing… it’s always been my dream to have someone like Steven himself offer you something like this. And then the idea of saying no. So you just checkmated, and you’re like, “I gotta do it, so how do we do the best thing we possibly can?”
Q : I spoke to David Koepp a couple months back, and I asked about him returning to the Jurassic world. His involvement seems more crucial to make Rebirth feel more old school, so did you have a full script, and that helped get you on board?
Edwards: A thousand percent. I’ve approached him on nearly every film, or we’ve at least made the phone call at some point in the life of the movie, and gone, “Is David Koepp available, would he be interested?” And there was a polite, “he’s busy” kind of response. When I got the script, and on Page One, it said, “Written by David Koepp,” I was like, you know, your little barometer of like, am I interested or not? The fact it’s Jurassic and Steven, it’s already like, very high, right? And then it says “David Koepp,” and he goes, whoop, you know? And then you’re like, “Okay, well, let’s just hope it’s good.” I did say to my girlfriend before I disappeared for a few hours to read it, I was like, “Here we go.” And I said, “I really just hope it’s bad, because then we can have a holiday and have a break.” But it got to the end, and it was like, “I gotta do it. It’s like the perfect playground for a filmmaker.”
Q : When I watched the movie, it not only reminded me of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park movies, but it also reminded me of Jaws a little bit, and it had some elements of Indiana Jones. As a director, are you going back to study other films, like when you did Rogue One, did you go back and study other Star Wars films from that era to know what made them work?
Edwards: Yeah, you do, because you’ve studied them to death as a kid, subconsciously, and then I did rewatch all my favorite Spielberg films. What’s really hard about Steven is his vocabulary’s just a genius level, the way he has beats, everything’s unique. You can’t go, “Oh, that’s his style, I’m gonna do that, so I just move the camera like this, and it feels like a Spielberg movie.” It doesn’t; it’s way more sophisticated than that. Also, out of the blue, you can’t create a set of rules, so it’s really intimidating. What I did was I basically digitized Jaws, Close Encounters, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Munich, and I turned them all into shots. I said, “I’m gonna do a little greatest hits of the best shots,” and I put all my favorite shots together, thinking it’d be like 10 minutes, and it was about four hours. I would watch these clips on the journey to work, to try and just subconsciously consume as much Spielberg-iness as I could.
Q : Getting Scarlett on board must have been a huge coup, because she was coming off a huge Marvel franchise, she’s now a mother and a director herself. What did it take to convince her to join this?
Edwards: I didn’t have to convince her at all. What had happened was she’d met with Steven, and tried to hide her enthusiasm, I think, to not look like a fan girl. She was essentially pitching herself to be in the next Jurassic film. We ended up having this meeting with Steven Spielberg and Universal Studios, going through who could be the star of this movie. There EW all these pictures of everyone on this table, just like a cliché in a way, and there were so many conversations about so many people. At the end, I just felt like, we’re never gonna make a decision, we gotta do this really quick. Steven just sat there a little bit, took a sigh, and went, “Well, if I don’t give it to Scarlett, she’s gonna kill me.” I didn’t know what he meant. I was like, “Sorry, what’s this?” and he goes, “Scarlett’s been hounding me about being in Jurassic for the longest time.” I was like, “Scarlett Johansson wants to be in the film, then why are we having a meeting? Let’s just call [her]. Why are we doing this conversation?” The meeting ended right there, and then, someone got on the phone to her agent, and she read the script that weekend, and she was on it.
Q : What about all the film’s different locations? You have a jungle, you have the ocean, so how much of that can be done on location, and how much of it is building stuff on a set somewhere?
Edwards: It’s really important to me to shoot in real locations. My background was visual effects, and you just want that real-world foundation to put the dinosaurs in. So we went to Southeast Asia, and we shot in real jungles, waterfalls, mangrove swamps, everything. The actors were really there. Essentially, when it’s a jungle, and it’s daylight, it’s the real jungle. When it’s the ocean, we’re in the Mediterranean, in North Africa by Malta, and it’s a water tank and the ocean. And then, when it’s nighttime, it’s mainly studio, like in England, in Elstree Studios. So there are three different approaches, really, across the movie.
Q : I feel like making The Creator helped to inform this one, because usually, the visual effects would take a ton of time to make things like realistic, but you took a similar approach with The Creator by adding VFX to stuff you filmed on location. Did that help make the process of making this movie quicker?
Edwards: I think you’d have to. I don’t know if I’m really annoying to the visual effects people, or not, ’cause you understand a little bit what they’re trying to do. Basically, there’s this shorthand, and I feel like a picture’s worth a thousand words, so what I would do when we were in post-production is I would screen-grab frames from the movie, and just very badly, quickly paint over them, and then send that image to the artist, and then it would come back looking great a couple of days later. It was just the fastest way to get through the shots, because when you try to describe in words… it’s realy just like cinema. the best thing about cinema is that the best moments in film, you can’t really put them into words. They just feel right, you know? So it’s like trying to communicate, but with visuals, really, so having that skill set, I think, is probably what helped.
Q : Were you able to use some of the same VFX people from The Creator… and maybe pay them a little bit more this time?
Edwards: I think they got paid all right. Two of the visual effects supervisors from The Creator were also on this movie as visual effects supervisors, so yeah, it was a little bit like getting the band back together, but I’d never worked with David Vickery before, who was our top visual effects guy, and he was super impressive. He’s got a really great eye, and I could just leave problems with him sometimes, and just go, “You deal with that, and you come up with a solution for that. I’m gonna carry on editing.”
Q : The whole process for making this seemed very fast, and I was hearing about screenings of this months ago, which is not something that’s normally the case with a VFX-heavy movie, since normally you’d be working on it right up until release.
Edwards: Yeah, it was super quick. My editor put a quote on the door of the edit suite, I think from Leonard Bernstein, saying, “Art is when you have a plan and not quite enough time.” Every day we walked into the edit suite, going, “Well, we have not quite enough time.” What it meant was, no one could second-guess anything; everyone had to go on their first instincts. The director’s cut, where we played our first version of the film to the studio, if you looked at the schedule, it’s a bit like, we can’t mess around. We’ve got to just kind of lock this and go. And so, they just give you their main notes, and that was the movie. We didn’t need to mess around because the script that David had written was really solid. It was actually really straightforward. It was quite shocking.
Q : You really doubled down on the water, since you have this amazing extended ocean sequence, but then you have water in the T. Rex sequence. I imagine that water is as difficult to work with as fire. Were there water tanks involved with some of these sequences?
Edwards: Anything where there’s a dinosaur in it, obviously, there’s probably digital water. If the actors are in it, that’s real water. So, sometimes it’s a combination. But yeah, we were really nervous about the water, and we thought it would be really hard to do. And some artists at Industrial Light Magic were like, “We wanna do the best water anyone’s ever seen.” And you think, “Good luck with that.”And then a few weeks later, they sent a clip. And it was a mosasaur jumping out of the ocean and splashing. And it was phenomenal and looked perfect. I sent it to David Koepp on a text. And see his reaction, and he just went, “Oh, thanks.” Like, it was a very light, deflating reaction, and then about a day later, I got this like, “Holy shit!I thought it was some clip from a whale or something.” And then he suddenly realized it was actually CGI, and he was blown away. That’s the problem. All those visual effects they started doing, the water’s perfection. I look at the interaction with the creatures, and it looks 100% real. They kinda nailed it, I think.
Q : Did you work with ILM on Rogue One or Godzilla?
Edwards: I worked with them on Rogue One and The Creator, and then this is the third one in a row now.
©Courtesy of Universal Pictures
Q : Do you have any idea what you wanna do next? The nice thing about this movie is that it feels very contained and not trying to start another trilogy. What do you want to do you next? I feel like you’ve earned yourself a couple years off.
Edwards: Yeah, definitely. [both laughing] The thing with the pandemic is it sort of taught me a bad lesson, which is when you make a film, and then you have like two and a half years off, you know, ’cause you can’t make anything, and then you make another film again. And so I’m kinda like, oh yeah, like, we get the two and a half years off now, right? And so I’m just looking, I’m gonna wanna take a break. The problem is the second I take a break, an idea turns up, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” So I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but I’m really looking forward to it. I’m super excited about the future. I think there are some really interesting things around the corner, and we’ll see what happens.
Q : You’re not one of those directors who has to be on set all of the time?
Edwards: No, I hate being on set. I’m the exact opposite. I hate the process of making a film. It’s hard, it’s a marathon. I don’t enjoy it. I’ve got the wrong personality for it. I kinda like to not be surrounded by 400 people watching me think up ideas. I find it the hardest thing in the world, really. ‘
Q : I always cite when Guy Ritchie told me that he would rather be on set shooting something than sitting at home writing on a typewriter or computer. He’s figured out a way so that he literally always has something to film, which isn’t for everyone.
Edwards: No, I think just different personality traits, isn’t it? I’m much happier behind the camera, not to be the center of attention. This is why this is so weird. I’m going through my worst nightmare right now.
Jurassic World: Rebirth opens worldwide on Wednesday, July 2.
Check out more of Edward Douglas’ articles.
You can watch the trailer below: