Steven, did you feel like Jurassic Park was going to revolutionise the film business?
When we made Jurassic Park , we didn’t intend to revolutionize anything. I was going to make this film by the old standards of go-motion animation, claymation one frame at a time. I was hoping Jurassic Park would succeed on a story level more than anything, until one day, Dennis Muren told me something he was working on up at ILM called computer animation. There are only about 58 digital dinosaur shots in the first movie. Everything else was covered by actual full scale replicas of fully mechanical dinosaurs made by Stan Winston. I think if there’s a benchmark, it’s between the greatest mechanical animals ever created and the first digital characters rendered.
Steven, how did you decide that you were ready for another Jurassic film?
The deciding factor was Colin (Trevorrow, the director) himself. I had seen Safety Not Guaranteed and it was the last 45 seconds of the film and the leap of faith Colin took with the audience that showed me he was the right person to direct the next Jurassic film. That combined with the fact that he was completely enthusiastic, both as a filmmaker and as a fan, and who also had a story to tell. He came in with an actual story that worked even before there was a screenplay.
How did you come about casting Chris Pratt for the role of Owen?
I thought Chris Pratt had the chops for this film and Colin and I both believed in him. When Guardians of the Galaxy came out, it reconfirmed it for us. Chris is a wonderful actor. He has a strong screen presence, a tremendous sense of humour and he’s a team player. He has a big career ahead of him.
How did you get the actors excited without having the animatronics on set that Steven had in the previous films?
It’s become an art form of actors reacting to something that’s not there and convincing us that it is there. It’s an internal process that an actor goes through and even I have experienced throughout my career. For Close Encounters , there was nothing to see and for five months, the actors literally reacted to numbers that I would call out on a bull horn. They’d have to move their eyes from number one to number thirty-one and yet, have to hold the moment. They’d have to convince all of us that they were seeing something that was provoking a sense of wonder in them. The same idea also worked for Jurassic World with the actors.
How exciting was it to reinvent the raptors?
It took a lot of effort to establish how intelligent the raptors were in the first film. This is shown when the raptor learns how to open the door when the kids are hiding in the kitchen. Jack Horner and other palaeontologists have also figured out, based on the fossil record, that the raptors were one of the most intelligent of all the animals. That intelligence is a bonus for Jurassic World because it plays into the plot in a very important and significant way.
How fun for you is it to watch the effects that ILM has done and the technology as an audience member?
I watched the film as an audience and not as a colleague or an executive producer. I was captivated by what Colin and his team created. What’s wonderful about this picture is it goes down an original road and is a breathtaking adventure. The film also touches upon the really interesting territory of morality, which was always Michael Crichton’s dream. He took a very moral interest in his own story, posing the question, “If we can invent something, should we?” This was a big theme of the first film and that really echoes throughout Jurassic World .
