To Winston, Spielberg gave the job of creating the film’s most memorable dinosaur: the Tyrannosaurus rex. Winston, who passed away in 2008 at the age of 62, was asked to come aboard the film following his work on James Cameron’s Aliens. Of these 15 minutes, nine were created by the Stan Winston Studio in Hollywood. ![]() Of course, from the moment the heavy gates swing open and the words “Welcome to Jurassic Park” are spoken, the movie’s main attraction are the dinosaurs themselves – despite their only taking up 15 minutes of the total running time. In the shooting script, palaeontologist Alan Grant’s story arc – in which the character played by New Zealand actor Sam Neill evolves from disliking children to becoming something of a surrogate father – becomes the heart of the film’s human story. Many of Spielberg’s best films are about fatherhood, populated by lonely children and distant, or altogether absent, patriarchs. He also reconfigured the cardboard characters of Crichton’s novel so that the story resembled what Slovenian philosopher and film theorist Slavoj Žižek aptly describes as a “chamber drama about the trauma of fatherhood”. Spielberg had a series of images he wanted to build the film around – dino-pupils contracting in bright light snorting, prehistoric breath fogging glass windows giant feet squishing mud – and brought in screenwriter David Koepp to help realise this vision. That was fine for a pop-science thriller, but less acceptable when put into the mouths of film characters as exposition in a potential blockbuster. As with many of Crichton’s novels, much of the book’s thrill came from its almost-believable use of scientific theory to explain away what seemed otherwise implausible. In the end, Universal outbid all – their eye firmly on Spielberg – and Michael Crichton set about writing the screenplay.įirst attempts were poorly received. Fox, meanwhile, wanted Joe Dante, less than a decade removed from Gremlins, while Columbia fancied Superman and Lethal Weapon director Richard Donner for the gig. Warner Brothers, for example, had Tim Burton in mind for a potential helmer summoning up ghostly spectres of stop-motion dinosaurs and Johnny Depp as a Velociraptor. The studios – each with their own chosen director handpicked for the job of bringing Crichton’s vision to life – offered a tantalising glimpse of Jurassic Park adaptations that never were. When the film rights for Crichton’s seventeenth novel, Jurassic Park, were put up for sale (a $2 million minimum designed to root out time-wasters) almost every major studio in Hollywood jumped to have a piece of the action. ![]() ![]() As usual, Spielberg’s instincts weren’t wrong.
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