Deep Dives: Movies in the Spotlight - Jurrasic Park
Welcome back to another edition of Deep Dives: Movies in the Spotlight! This time we are going to take a detailed look at the making of Steven Spielberg's 1993 masterpiece Jurassic Park. Let's start with a quick recap.
An Adventure 65 Million Years in the Making (more like a decade actually)
While Jurassic Park is certainly an adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel, its development was actually a bit more convoluted than that. The idea for Jurassic Park actually started as a screenplay that Crichton was developing in the early 1980s. The original premise centered around a grad student who manages to secretly clone a pterosaur in his lab. However, Crichton wasn't satisfied with his drafts and wound up shelving the idea for several years. Reflecting on this time Crichton recalls:
It was a very different story. It was about the person who did the cloning, operating alone and in secret. It just wasn’t satisfactory. The real conclusion for me was that what you really wanted in a story like this was to have a sort of natural environment in which people and dinosaurs could be together. You wanted the thing that never happened in history: people in the forest and swamps at the same time as dinosaurs. Once that notion began to dictate how the story would proceed, then everything else fell into place.
Towards the end of the 1980s, Crichton revisited the script and began crafting it as a novel instead. Even still, Crichton struggled with aspects of how to tell the story. In interviews he recalled that when he finished the first draft he sent copies to the group of people that he always trusts to read his manuscripts. Unfortunately, the responses were not glowing. In Crichton's own words "I got angry reactions such as, “Why would you write a book like this?” But when I asked them to explain exactly why they hated it, they couldn’t put their finger on anything in particular. They just hated it, that’s all. Hated every bit of it."
After the initial feedback, he would go on to write two more drafts which resulted in the same critical responses from his advisors. Luckily this time he received a light-bulb moment from their feedback. In the first few drafts Crichton had constructed the novel to be told from the POV of Hammond's grandchildren. After one of his advisors mentioned being irritated by the kids POV, Crichton altered the story to revolve around the various adults; namely Ian Malcolm. The pivot seemed to work and the group of advisors loved the new draft.
Finally, in May of 1990, Crichton submitted his manuscript to publisher Alfred A. Knopf and the novel was officially published later that year. However, even before the book had made its way into stores, it caught the attention of one of Crichton's friends and collaborators - Steven Spielberg. The pair had actually met decades before when Crichton had sold the rights to his novel Andromeda Strain to Universal Pictures. At that same moment in time, Spielberg had just signed a contract with Universal to direct their television shows. They initially spent time developing the idea for a medical show based on Crichton's time as a med student (this would much later become the show ER), but ultimately that project would not move forward. The two stayed in touch over the years and in 1989, while revisiting their medical show idea, they began discussing Jurassic Park.
Despite their fortuitous conversation, the pairs collaboration was not set in stone. Crichton's agency at the time was already in the process of shopping the rights to the novel to various studios - each of which that had their own idea of who would direct the film. Luckily, Universal and Spielberg won out and the film development began.
Crafting the Screenplay
During the negotiations for the rights to the novel, Crichton was brought in to write the initial drafts of the script. This can be a fairly standard practice, but unlike some writers who only have experience writing their novels, Crichton had already made a career of doing both novels and screenplays. When remembering the initial steps of development Crichton recalls
I didn’t have it in my mind to do the script, but Steven said, `We really need somebody to pare this thing down into some kind of manageable shape so we know what to build and it has to happen fast.’ I said, “I do have the advantage of having tried many versions of this, so I know what works; I’ll whack it down. Then when you want to do your character polishes, get somebody else.
During the process, Crichton submitted several draft to Spielberg and the two worked together to decide exactly how they wanted to craft the film version. One of their challenges that was already mentioned was trimming down the novel into a digestible form for cinema audiences. In describing his approach Crichton remarks:
It’s a fairly long book, and the script can only have somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the content. So what you’re really trying to do is make a sort of short story that reproduces the quality of the novel and has all the big scenes retained and has the logical flow that appears in the much longer and more extended argument.
In addition to truncating the length of the novel, Crichton felt that there were other elements that needed to change for the film adaptation. More specifically, he felt that the violence of the novel needed to be toned down.
The explicitness of the violence serves a different purpose [in the book]. You don’t have certain advantages a movie has, so in a way the violence is a way to say, `These are real dinosaurs, and take them seriously... In the movie, if they look wonderful, then you take them seriously; you don’t have to see them tear people open.
Once Crichton was satisfied with the initial drafts of the screenplay, two more writers would come in and help polish the script. First, Malia Scotch Marmo, who was already working with Spielberg on Hook, was brought in. For her draft, Marmo mostly discarded Crichton's screenplay and started from scratch using the novel and consultations with Spielberg and Crichton help sculpt it. In her version, she felt the characters needed to be built out more. Some notable changes included things like removing Ian Malcolm and transposing most of his characteristics into Alan Grant instead. Also, in the conclusion of her version, Hammond would choose to stay behind on the island while the rest of the cast escapes on the helicopter - a departure from Crichton's version which actually had the character get killed by velociraptors. However, after about five months of working on the script, Spielberg was dissatisfied with the final draft and decided to move on to another writer.
The second writer to get a crack at the script was David Koepp who was coming off Death Becomes Her for Universal. Similar to Marmo, Spielburg allowed Koepp to start from scratch because Koepp didn't want to be influenced by the other writers' work. Nevertheless, Koepp also ended up cutting out Ian Malcolm and using Grant to channel those characteristics instead. It was also during this process that certain ideas started to take form. In particular, the scientific exposition of the novel was condensed into the short video segment that appears in the final movie - an idea that came from Spielberg and executed by Koepp. As the draft started to finally take its final shape, Spielberg had one last script change he wanted to make after watching Jeff Goldblum audition - bring back Ian Malcolm. Final polishes would continue until right before principal photography, but the team was finally ready to start shooting.
The Cast
For Dr. Ellie Sattler, Spielberg was able to secure his first choice; Laura Dern. Dern was a fast rising star, but her work had almost exclusively been in independent films at that point. Maybe more interestingly, after her casting in Jurassic Park she returned back to independent roles - this despite a wealth of casting offers to be in bigger budget movies like JP. For her part, Dern recalls getting the call from Spielberg while talking with Nicholas Cage on the set of Wild at Heart:
Nic, they want to put me on the phone with Steven Spielberg, but they want to talk to me about a dinosaur movie…” And he was like, “You are doing a dinosaur movie! No one can ever say no to a dinosaur movie!” I was like, “Really?” And he’s like, “Are you kidding? It’s a dream of my life to do a movie with dinosaurs!” [Laughs] So he was such an influence on me. Then I talked to Steven and he goes, “I know that you’re doing your independent films, but I need you to be chased by dinosaurs, in awe of dinosaurs, and have the adventure of a lifetime. Will you do this with me?” And I was like, “Sure."
Ellie's counterpart in the film, Dr. Alan Grant, was floated to a few big name stars during the casting process. In particular, consideration was given to a few past and future Spielberg collaborators such as Harrison Ford, Richard Dreyfuss, William Hurt, and Kurt Russel. Ultimately, the role went to Sam Neill who, despite not having quite as high of a profile as the others, was a very established and credentialed actor at the time.
Per Spielberg's insistence, the character of Ian Malcolm was placed back into the script after he became enamored with Jeff Goldblum during auditions. However, Goldblum was not the only actor that was considered. A range of actors were considered including Johnny Depp and Michael J. Fox, but the closest to getting cast was actually Jim Carrey. In the end, Goldblum was undeniably the perfect fit for the role, but reports suggest that Carrey was a very close second place.
For the two child stars, Lex and Tim, Spielberg would ultimately land on Ariana Richard and Joseph Mazzello. Ariana won the part because her audition included the need to demonstrate a bone chilling scream. While watching audition tapes, Ariana's scream allegedly woke Spielberg's wife up from a dead sleep - a feat that Spielberg felt was undeniable. As for Mazzello, his casting was actually the result of auditions for an entirely different movie. After auditioning for a role in the movie Hook, Mazzello was deemed talented, but too young for the role. Mazzello recalls that after that process Spielberg helped eased the blow:
I was just too young for the role. And because of that, Steven came up to me and said, “Don’t worry about it, Joey. I’m going to get you in a movie this summer.” Not only a nice promise to get, but to have it be one of the biggest box-office smashes of all time? That’s a pretty good trade.
As for the eccentric mogul John Hammond, Spielberg actually originally offered the role to Sean Connery who he had just finished working with on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. For one reason or another, Connery turned it down and the casting team shifted to Richard Attenborough (not the documentary guy - that's his brother David). While modern audiences may not be overly familiar with him, Attenborough was extremely credentialed as an actor, director and producer and has served as the president to several organizations including the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and also the world famous Chelsea football team.
Production and Principal Photography
With the cast in place, the film would begin principal photography in August of 1992. However, well before that date - a full 25 months prior in fact - the various design teams had begun crafting the sets and designs for the film.
One of the most obvious hurdles to overcome was deciding how to bring the dinosaurs to life and which dinosaurs to use. Crichton's novel included the use of 15 different dinosaur species. For budgetary reasons, utilizing all 15 was impractical and the design teams whittled it down to about seven instead; brachiosaurus, dilophosaurus; galliminus, parasaurolophus; triceratops, velociraptor and tyrannosaurus.
With the specific dinosaurs chosen, the teams had to decide how they wanted to bring them to life. Multiple techniques were considered, but Spielberg ultimately decided the best path forward would be to utilize a mix of animatronics and CGI. As one might assume, the most daunting challenge was going to be the T. rex. To bring it to fruition, Spielberg hired Stan Winston Studios who had recently done major work for James Cameron's Aliens which featured a giant animatronic for the Queen Xenomorph.
In order to fully bring the T. rex to life, Spielberg also enlisted the help of renowned VFX studio Industrial Light and Magic. Despite ILM's legendary status within the industry, 1993 was a time where CGI was still in its infancy. In fact, the initial plan to animate the dinosaurs was going to be a classic one: stop-motion. However, after initial testing, Spielberg was unhappy with the results. Luckily, Animation Director Phil Tippet and the various ILM teams developed a way to take the principals of stop-motion and blend it with motion encoders to recreate the movements digitally. That digital information, could then be fed into their CG models with the end result looking far more realistic. If this sounds familiar, this technology was basically a blueprint that all modern day motion capture and animation comes from.
Now, the T. rex is obviously not the only dinosaurs to show up in Jurassic Park, but the combined use of puppetry and CGI was the same framework for all of the rest of the park's inhabitants. So with the technology in place, the next task for the production teams was creating the park itself. For internal scenes, the filmmakers elected to utilize Universal's sound stages which allowed for easier use of the animatronics and some freedom with filming scenes such as the iconic kitchen scene. For external shots, the teams actually began building what would be Jurassic Park over a two year period on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. These outdoor sets are featured in several of the films most noteworthy scenes and include the T. rex paddock, the Raptor pen, the famous gates of the park, the electrical bunker, and, of course, the iconic visitor center.
As for the sound stage portions, the filming was actually staying ahead of schedule. Nevertheless, the crews encountered a few different unexpected roadblocks. For instance, in order to create the scene where Alan pulls Tim out of a jeep suspended in a tree, the production team had to create a 50 ft artificial tree which they had to create out of steel. The scene also required that the jeep be dropped multiple times. On top of the engineering feat of it, Spielberg was dissatisfied with the height, asserting that it needed to be 3 times as tall. The solution ended up being fairly simple - they used three different sides of the same tree in order to represent a much taller structure. That same tree would go on to be used as the hiding place Alan and the children use to get some much needed rest after escaping the T. rex.
That same scene also created a bit of a plot hole for the film. When watching the scenes, writer David Koepp realized that the cliff that the T. rex pushes the jeep over appeared to be in the same relative spot that T. rex emerges from just minutes before. Upon bringing this up with Spielberg, Koepp recalls:
I asked Steven, 'Don't you think people are going to notice that suddenly there's this cliff?' And he looked at me like I was from another planet and pointed at the great big robot of the T. rex and said, 'There's a T. rex! They're not gonna notice anything else but that"
Speaking of the T. rex, the initial scenes of the dinosaur escaping its enclosure also had some unexpected difficulties. Stan Winston's incredible animatronic not only looked frightening on set for all of the crew members, it expectantly started to move on its own. The reason - the rain storm that was included in the scene was causing the electronics to malfunction. The latex skin was absorbing too much of the water and the crew ended up having to dry the giant structure with towels and blow dryers in between takes.
Despite the difficulties along the way, principal photography would end in November of 1992 - a surprising 12 days ahead of schedule and came in under budget. Spielberg would attribute this success to the tireless efforts of the crew as well as the extensive use of storyboarding early in the pre-production process.
Bring it All Together
With principal photography concluded, Spielberg moved into the editing room to begin his work with acclaimed editor Michael Kahn. At this point, Kahn and Spielberg had already been long time collaborators having first met on Close Encounters of the Third Kind and then went on to work together again on 1941, all three Indiana Jones movies, The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun and Hook. In fact, the trust that they had built up over the years allowed Spielberg to leave most of the editing to Kahn and a bulk of the post-production duties to producer Kathleen. Kennedy. Spielberg than divided his time to long-distance work on Jurassic Park, while also simultaneously filming Schindler's List (imagine creating two of the greatest films ever made at the same time - unreal).
In addition to finishing the final cut of the film, Spielberg wanted to ensure that the films sound design was as good as possible. The first challenge involved working with sound designer Gary Rydstrom for crafting the sound effects for the film - a task that Spielberg brought in long time friend George Lucas to help supervise. Spielberg even went as far as helping fund a new multichannel audio technology company called DTS (Digital Theater Systems) in order to ensure the movie received the most state of the art sound it could. For his part, Rydstrom was hard at work trying to create sounds for animals that no one had ever actually heard before. He started with simple recordings of various animal noises, and then used homegrown sounds to tweak them. For the T. rex, Rydstrom famously combined the noises of a baby elephant, tiger, alligator, and just a hint of Rydstrom's own Jack Russell terrier named Buster. And the key to turning all of that into an iconic roar - slowing it down.
One of the fun things in sound design is to take a sound and slow it down: It becomes much bigger,” he continued. “That was inspired by Ben Burtt, the great sound designer from the Star Wars movies and a mentor of mine: He did the Rancor beast in Return of the Jedi by slowing a chihuahua sound down. It’s one of the secrets of sound design that if you slow something down, something small, it brings out elements of the sound that you could probably never get if you recorded something big.
As for the rest of the park inhabitants, some of it has some fairly surprising origins. For instance, while the stampeding herd of gallimimus mostly came from horses stampeding, the twist is that unique squeal sound that you can hear is from one of the female horses that was in heat. The serene sound of brachiosaurus singing to each other during the tree scene came from a slowed down donkey. The light-hearted moment of them sneezing on Lex is a mix of a whale using its blowhole and a fire hydrant. The triceratops sound is mostly derived from cattle, while the dilophosaurus that kills Dennis comes from a hooting swan. And then of course my favorite unexpected anecdote: that bone chilling bark of velociraptors talking - it's a tortoise having sex.
With the sound effects in place, there was one last sound the movie needed - a score. And yet again, Spielberg turned to a trusted collaborator, John Williams. While studying the film, Williams quickly determined that the underlying feeling he needed to convey:
I wanted to do something different for Steven. With Close Encounters, I needed to write pieces that would convey a sense of "awe" and fascination, especially for the last half hour of the film. The music that would be needed here, especially when the group first arrives on the island and see the dinosaurs, would require something rather similar. So instead of going for a sense of fascination, I created a theme for the park itself, which could be used in several different places, and when orchestrated differently, could convey the beauty of what they were seeing at first. So when the passengers in the jeep pass by the group of dinosaurs for the first time, this is the theme I used.
With post-production nearing its end, Universal led the charge toward release with a massive $65 million dollar marketing campaign that included deals with over 100 companies and thousands of products. Their gambit paid off.
Release
On June 9th, 1993, Jurassic Park made its initial premiere, followed by a full release in 2,404 theaters that weekend. By Monday, Jurassic Park had begun an unstoppable record-shattering run that included the highest gross for an opening weekend, a record setting first week run of $81.7 million, and then held that pace as the number one film for three weeks straight. Internationally the release fared even better, toppling records in dozens of different countries. All told the film would go on to gross $914 million dollars during its initial run, making it the highest grossing film ever at the time.
Critically, the film was also a huge success. In particular, there was obvious praise for the massive achievements of the special effects teams and its incredible entertainment value. Nevertheless, not all of the reviews were glowing. Most detractors seemed to focus on the shortcomings of the script - namely a lack of character building and overuse of science mumbo jumbo.
Despite some of the critical nitpicking, cinema fans seem to have gotten the final say. Jurassic Park is widely heralded as one of the greatest blockbusters of all time and is still beloved over 30 years later. Its revolutionary use of CGI helped change the way that movies get made and still manages to hold up to this day. Its financial success (possibly a bad legacy) changed the way studios invested in big budget blockbusters - all hoping to chase the nearly billion dollars that Jurassic Park earned. And, maybe most importantly, Jurassic Park helped inspire a new wave of creators by showing them new limits of what is possible on screen.
I'll end with this - another bit of Jurassic Park's legacy that I find interesting is the fact that none of its many sequels have ever been able to recapture the magic of the first film. In fact, apart from Jurassic World (which was a soft reboot that closely mirrors the first film), each film has been a critical failure. I can't say exactly why this is the case for every single film, but I think that the original Jurassic Park represents a very special cinematic moment. Audiences were, as intended, in complete awe of how the film manages to bring dinosaurs to life - and did so with a great sense of realism. I also think there was something special in its simplicity. Every other Jurassic Park was doomed to try to do it bigger and better. More dinosaurs, more CGI, more marketing, more movie stars. None of it worked. And maybe there was bad writing, or bad acting, or bad whatever. But I think it's even simpler; you can't force movie magic. Sometimes it just happens when all the right stars align with all the right people working on the same movie. It's just something singular.
Thanks for reading the newest installment of Deep Dives. If you still want to know more about Jurassic Park you can check out the links that I used below.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130420074556/http://cinefantastiqueonline.com/1993/08/jurassic-park-michael-crichton-on-adapting-his-novel-to-the-screen/
https://www.michaelcrichton.com/works/jurassic-park/
https://web.archive.org/web/20240620000306/https://sffgazette.com/sci_fi/creating-jurassic-park-a-classic-interview-with-author-michael-crichton-a1296#gs.mzc5m7
https://www.ilm.com/creating-dinosaurs-jurassic-park/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8JgN_srwCc
https://screenrant.com/jurassic-park-movie-dinosaurs-create-cgi-effects-explained/
https://laurenpolizzi.com/jurassic-park-1
https://web.archive.org/web/19970401110926/http://www.lost-world.com/Lost_World02/Jurassic_Park.Site/Jurassic_Park.html
https://www.vulture.com/2013/04/how-the-dino-sounds-in-jurassic-park-were-made.html
Comments
Post a Comment