Jurassic Park | Return to Jurassic Park: Dawn of a New Era | Bonus Feature

0:08 [Music] oh two more guys with guns coming in they'll start crawling away toward me one two three get it get it in all the way

0:58 oh that's great that's great for you that's a cut right there great fabulous okay great it was very important to me to be a kid directing jurassic park because i like most kids one of my first longest words was triceratops stegosaurus my dad would always take me to see the dinosaurs uh in in philadelphia the franklin institute of technology there was a it was a natural history museum there with big dinosaur bones and so i made that movie really as a youngster remembering how much fun it was to imagine with such yearning that someday wouldn't it be great to run into a dinosaur and meet up with one without being eaten

1:44 by it and i just remember making the movie with that philosophy for everybody that had ever wondered and been fascinated with that whole era of the dinosaur i want to make a movie for all those dinosaur lovers dr grant my dear dr that welcome to jurassic park the most advanced amusement park in the entire world what do they got in there king kong we've made living biological attractions so astounding that they'll capture the imagination of the entire [Music] planet how'd you do this i'll show you [Music]

2:37 very good push push very good jurassic park wasn't a monster movie it was a movie about animals long ago gone extinct that through the miracle of science and technology are brought into the 20th century and that's what michael crichton had conceived in this amazing book he wrote and all of a sudden the second i read his book i realized that we weren't dealing with monsters and this was not going to be a genre of horror science fiction fantasy or back to the famous monsters of filmland magazine culture but instead this was a really credible look at house dinosaurs might

3:22 someday be brought back right alongside modern mankind and that really fascinated me and immediately set my own template for not making this a monster movie [Music] one of the things that the book deals with and the film too and one of the sort of shaping concepts is that this kind of research is tremendously expensive and the question arises who will pay for it and at the moment for better or worse there isn't any pressing need to recreate a dinosaur and in trying to think about how that might happen or who would pay for it the only thing that i could think of was that it would come from a desire for entertainment we can charge anything we want 2 000 a day 10 000 a day and people will pay it this

4:09 park was not built to cater only for the super rich everyone in the world has the right to enjoy these animals michael crichton had come up with this spectacular notion that if you created a theme park where the dna could recreate dinosaurs and you would have a place to keep them in an environment where people could feel safe just like with other wild animals of the jungle you could go and actually see a dinosaur dilophosaurus it felt real it felt extraordinary and it had tremendous dramatic potential there's no doubt our attractions will drive kids out of their minds

4:54 well i was planning to make the movie you know as much as possible with full-size animatronic dinosaurs and the only person on the face of the planet that could pull that off was stan winston he had an amazing shop he had great artisans and he had great technologists working with him we're all dinosaur fans everyone who does the type of work we do is a dinosaur fan so we said we'll do some drawings just to see if our concept and our feeling is in sync with what stephen's looking for in this film i was working for stan winston who i had a very long career with and stan had to start designing dinosaurs and mark crash mccreary was

5:41 essential in that and i was fortunate to have a hand in you know coming up with color schemes and things like that the drawings i had done initially were more about action and kind of this is the idea we want to ultimately to walk away with is that wow these things were real animals that that could think and move and we went through a lot of iterations just drawing wise the ground floor of the process was to come up with the look of each dinosaur and to weave in information now that was coming out about the dinosaurs to try to make these as accurate as possible and look at the half moon shaped bones on the wrist it's not one of these guys learn how to fly

6:27 well the first person we went to was jack horner not just to achieve an authenticity but we wanted a credible resource that could back up several theories that we were sort of expounding and one was that dinosaurs eventually evolved into birds and even the word raptor means bird of prey and that's something that jack horner believes in and could defend if necessary and jack horner became our credibility then we started working on maquettes and we had done a little small 1 16 scale tyrannosaurus rex maquette then we did a fifth scale maquette that had all of the details on it you know so steven could really see what it was going to be and then we

7:15 projected that up large [Music] you like it i love it it's coming along with nightmares the first time i saw the t-rex was this dan winston's shop my kids would say where does the poopoo come from daddy i had a chance to actually operate it myself which was a thrill where the movements were so smooth and so authentic you know when it would snap its head around it didn't it didn't have a recoil the head would go as fast you could imagine and would come to a complete stop and look right at you his eyes would stereo focus right on you that was absolutely frightening to watch and he also kept it moving even when it was still it was breathing it had muscles flicking and he kept every animal alive [Music]

8:01 we were building all of the dinosaurs all the animatronic ones kind of in parallel because there was so much work to be done we actually had a baby triceratops going which never made it to that movie that scene got cut out plus there's the famous scene in the movie where the big foot comes down into the mud so that was going to become a separate animatronic piece the spitter the velociraptors the brachiosaur or the t-rex stan could give them utterly authentic movements far beyond where we were technologically in 1973-74 with jaws but how we wouldn't get the dinosaurs to run how we were going to get them to even be in the movie and wide shots was always

8:46 going to be the old-fashioned way through stop-motion animation the same way that willis o'brien made made king kong just taking that little armature on a small maquette and just moving it just a millimeter at a time and phil tippett was hired by me to do that because he was the best in the business the first call i got was from kathy kennedy at home and i just finished working on this big stop-motion project it was absolutely beating kathy calls up and goes she's all like perky goes hey phil we got this really cool thing we're going to do with dinosaurs it's really going to be a lot of fun and we're like yeah really okay fine and we all started to plan it out as the conventional stop motion go motion rod up at high speed with a little bit of computer graphics and then one day i got

9:32 a call from dennis muiron at ilm who already had the job of doing jurassic park with phil tevit and dennis said that he thought that he could pull off a full-size dinosaur that would be authentic to the eye and so he started doing tests and the first test he did was a whole herd of gallimimus just the skeletal structure of the gallimimus running through a still photograph of hawaii it was several angles of this and it was so authentic and smooth i actually said well that's the future that's the way it's going to be from now on a couple of the guys steve williams mark depay were trying to get even closer and do a t-rex and see how that would work out and it looked really successful then we decided okay let's go ahead and do a real shot and stephen fang meyer lit it

10:20 steve animated it and we got a shot that just knocked everybody out and was beyond what you could do with stop motion or anything else a videotape came from ilm and we saw this image of what they had done and were just wow everything changed and this technology really kind of you know changed my movie forever and i think in that sense changed the world forever it was april 20th 1992 i mean we call it black monday because we got the word that production was going digital at that point in time it's like emotional big emotional moments like you know when your dog dies you know you just you know your dog is going to die but when your dog dies you know it's like it's really hard because it did seem like everything that i had built up until that time was

11:06 like we're not going to do that anymore you know it's like suddenly you know here we are we're extinct you know we're the dinosaurs and of course that irony wasn't lost on any of us we're out of a job don't you mean extinct because all the computer graphic guys were doing things like i had no idea what they were doing you know and it was just like a monitor and a mouse and it was like jesus i'm a firm believer in whatever is the best technique to achieve a shot for the film is how it should be done if it needs to be cgi it should be but if you can get it live in camera then why not because some of the best acting comes from reacting you know it encouraged us to even work harder and you know make everything that much more convincing in a realistic on

11:52 stage puppet sense the reason that steven still wanted obviously phil involved was because he realized that his crew had information and experience that was just as important as just the toolbox it changed so what was developed was the did or dinosaur input device which was a traditional stop-motion armature with motion encoders which would translate anything we animated into a computer model so it bridged the gap of stop-motion animation into the digital age it was exhilarating when we realized that there was a new way to do this and that we're going to be able to create a lifelike looking dinosaur on a level that we never before imagined and that we were on to a whole new way

12:38 of looking at jurassic park so you two um dig up dig up dinosaurs well try to i bring scientists you bring a rock star if you make a humorless movie about dinosaurs coming back to life in 1993 nobody's gonna care about your movie i think establishing characters like laura dern and and sam and jeff it lent a whole sense of credibility to the storytelling because you really believed that they were scientists why did i go too fast i go too fast i did a flyby give me that big glass of water we're going to conduct an experiment

13:24 those characters when they're postulating better have a little wit and david kept gave it all the wit gave jeff goldblum his lecherous crush on the played by laura dern and with sam neil being right in the middle watching this guy hitting on his girl where jeff doesn't even know that it's his girl i mean that was all david keps uh uh kind of invention camera we had to pretend to be scared and and steven spielberg so that was kind of

14:12 more funny than anything [Music] and the the acting part was not laughing very nice it's not easy the three of us are in the jeep and we start to glance and as we glanced in the tree and i'm supposed to look up at its neck there is a there was a giant paper x on it you know like a sharpie sharpie to x on a piece of white paper and i just remember looking up like okay and that's the dinosaur you crazy son of a you did and we did close-ups and i remember he'd never rehearse ready jeff okay there there you are you're seeing the dinosaur

14:57 oh my gosh just keep keep keep rolling that looks great you're looking at it you can't believe what you're seeing is is it real it's it now strikes you funny you don't even know why you know and he's he's just talking me through it and i'm kind of acting i enjoyed that uh a lot you know the first sort of few days of filming you really had to get your bearings because it was all so new for us i mean just to be in sync with what we were looking at and what it would feel like and look like we had no idea what we were going to see oh can we go see it can we relax in front of your time this afternoon my dear t-rex welcome to jurassic park the actors certainly did their jobs and they believed who they were and that's

15:42 all an audience needs is to believe the characters are believing in themselves and that's what the actors did so well we've been in pre-production for 50 million years on this movie jurassic park by golly he just hung out with us he bonded with us he he played games with us a lot on the set and in between playing games he would throw in a question about her upcoming scene and he worked with us so seamlessly that we would do anything for him in the performance on the scene so you really admire him to you he's like a movie star because of your interest in paleontology this is this is everybody else's equivalent of a tom cruiser or you know or a uh you know kevin costner or sam neil i think that he just had a lot of respect for kids

16:28 and had a lot of respect for their talent you know and their intuition i always felt so much freedom with him i always felt like i was a part of the collaborative process you know that it wasn't just he was telling me what to do or he was talking down to me it was always what do you think and what do you think we should do for this scene and he trusted my ideas and he let me do that and then my teacher tells me about this other book [Music] and he said slammed on his face he slid good good good good and it was that kind of relationship where i felt like a part of the gang rather than like an outsider looking in that i think brings out such great performances in children grandpa kids and i'm a big fan of richard attenborough's i knew dickie before i cast him in jurassic park and liked him a lot and just saw him as john hammond let's get

17:14 the camera right in here see if we can get richard right in here yes sir an actor and a director he knows to move that much farther to that side you know it was interesting to watch hammond's character suddenly realizing that he might have gone mad he doesn't utter those words but he's certainly feeling what have i done and only richard attenborough i think could have pulled that off with such dignity and also with such tragedy hold on to your butts sam jackson was in it you know before he became a big star you could tell sam was going to get eaten by a dinosaur because he had him smoking actually earlier on when he's working how many lines of code are there

18:00 about two mean and the guy that smokes always gets eaten that's a wonderful about dinosaur films mr arnold because it takes place ostensibly on an island we were thinking about shooting in costa rica but stephen was a little concerned about the the infrastructure that is how whether we'd have roads and and whether we could get equipment there and and other kinds of facilities that we would need so we opted for a place where he had worked before the island of kauai in hawaii and that became the exterior jungles during the day

18:46 welcome to jurassic park jurassic park was a tour of attraction it was about that so each step that you got involved with was about constructing the actual journey as ride or amusement entertainment rick carter designed the movie and the job that he was faced with was creating a theme park built in costa rica so the theme park had to kind of echo the local cultural design sensibilities of what we might adapt in an environment like that working with rick carter was great because he was so generous with giving me

19:32 so many areas to get involved with you know again from the storyboarding to props and vehicles and sets and all that there's the scene where nedry goes out into the jungle at night and we had to get something for him to put the dna in it just said in the scripts just said a shaving can so i went over a laurel canyon the long's drugs down there and i went through the different aisles and i found a barbasol can of shaving cream at the time i liked the name and i liked how it graphically it stood off from the shelf from the others and so just as a as a whim this became the can that nedra used there's enough cooling inside for 36 hours no memphis

20:18 so you can see take the top off and then and the guys just go down the shop did a cool mechanism for it i think that's the compsognathus right there very cool i think the first time we saw one of stan's dinosaurs we were filming at kauai it's a scene where we wander out and there's a sick triceratops which is breathing and you could go right up to it and its skin was all wrinkly and real it was extraordinary that was one of the cases where there was a dinosaur there full size laying down and the guy the seven or eight people who were operating it were unseen kind of hidden from the actor's

21:05 immediate view and one person was working the blinking eyes and the tongue and the breathing body and when we first came upon this thing wow it looked real it was kind of a defining moment for us because this was the first dinosaur to really be put on film and it was the first dinosaur to interact with all the actors and you know we were very confident in what we were doing but at the same time there's a pressure you know it's your baby you're unveiling this to everyone [Music] you show up and you're just kind of taking taking it back a second because it's so lifelike it's so real you feel the energy from it and you kind of don't want to even get

21:50 too close but uh when you like kind of get more comfortable all you want to do is put your hands on it and just like touch it and see like is this real like how is this even the texture you know the feeling of it i just remember being blown away you're right there's no trace of lilac berries i think stephen gets a kick out of that my dream was to work with steven spielberg and so for 20 years now at any restaurant i've ever been in there's a child under 10 that comes up to me and says are you the lady who stuck her hand in the dinosaur poopy that's like that is the question i get most commonly in my career thanks what are our symptoms well imbalance disorientation labored

22:36 breathing when i did my scene with the triceratops i also had the great privilege of working as an actor alongside jerry mullen who is in that scene with me and because he's one of the crew having started in other capacities before producing he knew how to run a set and we could have never shot in the difficulties and the limitations of kauai we could have never done it without jerry and then about three weeks in hurricane aniki came in we turned up for work one morning and we were told we're not going to work today because there's a hurricane coming actually it seems to be heading straight for us the hurricane hit dead on

23:24 landfall was our hotel and it was a category five hurricane sustained winds of 165 miles an hour with gusts to 185 and the hurricane lasted for nine hours i'll never forget when the eye of the storm passed directly over the hotel we got out looked up it was beautiful blue sky above and just a wall of white clouds surrounding the hotel slowly moving about like this i'd never seen anything like it before was a special effect we were confined to the ballroom of the hotel we were staying in apart from the fact that was slightly exciting a lot of it was rather boring and then that night we camped out and figured out where we were going to stay as all the lights were off

24:11 i remember steven spielberg he had the flashlight he was going i'll show you how lighting you change changes the story horror story love story horror story love story and then we woke up the next morning when the sun came up seeing the devastation it was amazing it was interesting to see that all the skills that go in to creating the community that makes a movie ended up creating the community that ended up really helping everybody after an event like that and it really changes a dynamic on a movie when you've survived something together and i have never felt prouder as a member of a crew that i was privileged to work with than on the day of the hurricane richard attenborough slept through the whole thing i you know

24:56 i have to commend him when the hurricane passed i said dickie you slept through the whole hurricane he said oh dear boy darling i survived the blitz so this was nothing compared to the blitz i love this guy you