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‘It does feel like a dinosaur that would exist': ‘Jurassic World: Rebirth' director Gareth Edwards on creating those menacing new monsters
Gareth Edwards was definitely the right director for Jurassic World: Rebirth. After Godzilla, the Star Wars prequel Rogue One, and his innovative little AI sci-fi adventure, Creator, he was ready to play in executive producer Steven Spielberg's legendary dinosaur playground. Plus, David Koepp's first Jurassic script in nearly 30 years inspired him to pretend that he was making a 'lost' franchise film from the '90s. To get into the retro vibe, Edwards even made his Kodak 35mm debut, shot by cinematographer John Mathieson (the Gladiator franchise) in all its anamorphic glory.
'It just felt like the perfect playground for me, and Steven is my hero,' Edwards told Gold Derby. 'And being in the same room with him never gets old. He had really good advice. I think my favorite note is: 'Being a film director is like being a chef. But when you make a meal for the cinema, you need to have the audience leave hungry. If they leave full, then you failed.' You should keep them on the edge of their seat and leave a lot to the imagination. And so that was my approach.'
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But, of course, it's the new dinos that animated Edwards the most. He collaborated again with Industrial Light & Magic (led by VFX supervisor David Vickery), pushing them to be wildly unconventional. This resulted in some weird designs and animated improvements. But it was a holistic approach on a very tight schedule. This included physical builds of dinosaur parts, puppeteering, and mo-capped performers on set, in addition to the imaginative CG creatures.
The three primary dinos — part of a DNA experiment to cure cardiac disease — consist of the reptilian Mosasaurus (an eating machine that made its first appearance in Jurassic World), the elephant- and giraffe-like Titanosaurus herbivores, and the winged Quetzalcoatlus, the fierce pterosaur, which is one of the largest flying animals in history.
'The tone of the screenplay was a little bit different, it was more fun,' added Edwards. 'David had done such a great job of segmenting the film into these different genres. This was his love letter to the early works of Steven, and each little section felt like a little mini-movie of its own."
The first segment is the Jaws-inspired sequence involving the Mosasaurus attacking a family in a boat. ILM redesigned the 100-foot/40,000-pound creatures (modeled after a tiger shark but with the speed of a killer whale). They improved the skin and musculature and gave them a greenish/gray color and leopard-like pattern.
Still, Edwards was uncomfortable at first reading this tribute to Jaws in the script. Under normal circumstances, he would have scrapped it. But since Spielberg sanctioned it, he fully embraced it. 'It's like Paul McCartney giving you license to redo 'Hey Jude,'' he said. 'You could blend in all of these nods.'
By contrast, the sequence with the Titanosaurus on the forbidden island of Ile Saint-Hubert was a very deliberate attempt at recreating a BBC wildlife epic. These alluring creatures are 50-feet tall, 70-feet long, and weigh more than 30 tons with legs the size of Redwoods. But they are depicted as very affectionate. In fact, Edwards encouraged actor Jonathan Bailey, who plays the paleontologist, to touch the Titanosaurus puppet one day on set, which ended up in the film with the CG dino.
'I felt like this section could transform into a beautiful moment of awe and majesty,' Edwards said. 'But I really wanted to draw out the reveal with some really tall grass. But there is no tall grass in Thailand, so we had to grow it ourselves. But it was too short, so we kept going and came back in a few weeks. And what they did was call the world's leading horticulturist, and they flew over and irrigated the entire field. And essentially in a month, it grew to the height of your shoulders, and we were worried it was going to get too high.'
The sequence with the Quetzalcoatlus protecting her baby eggs on a cliff edge became a thrilling nod to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The creature stands more than 16-feet high, with a 30-foot wingspan, and weighs 550 pounds. ILM, though, took a lot of creative license because there isn't much in the way of fossil records. However, they gave it a 6-foot-long razor-sharp beak and added some furry fluff.
'I just really struggled with how to do that set piece at all,' Edwards said. 'It felt like it could get quite clumsy and difficult. I've seen these temples on the edge of mountain tops, and if we could just justify that, maybe there was an ancient culture here. It might give us more of a playground and roller coaster ride. And David was really into that.'
There were also two menacing mutations to play with: the Mutadon, which was a cross between a raptor and a pterosaur, with massive, paper-thin wings and translucent skin that reveals portions of its skeleton underneath, and the horrific Distortus rex, a T. rex with a misshapen head, bloated legs, and two additional arms, which was Edwards' favorite.
'The Mutadon was a real struggle and it took hundreds of designs but nothing looked right,' the director said. 'But you look at it now, it does feel like a dinosaur that would exist. It's a very simple idea as a flying dinosaur.'
But the Distortus rex, which was also very difficult, became an overly complicated design on purpose. He was the product of a T. rex gone very bad after throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the mix.
'I could see what he was in my peripheral vision, like I was doing an artist rendering for a police report,' added Edwards. 'There's a bit of Rancor from Star Wars and H.R. Giger from Alien, and also Chris Cunningham's 'Rubber Johnny' in there. But the animators were struggling, and they asked if there was an actor in a film that I could reference, and I said John Hurt from David Lynch's The Elephant Man. Because that's probably the character that it's most similar to, in that people are afraid of it because they don't understand it. And it's probably struggling health-wise, so it was good. I love it when there's gray in a film, especially when it comes to a monster or a creature. It's not as simple as, just kill the thing. There's something sad about it because it didn't ask to look like this.'
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