When complimented about his new film “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” the soft-spoken filmmaker Gareth Edwards replied, “It’s not a bad karaoke number.”
For a director who has taken on a Star Wars film (“Rogue One”) and the rebooting of an original movie monster (“Godzilla”), the British director has demonstrated a knack for finding his own way into established IP and putting his distinct stamp on a franchise. But that wasn’t the case with “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” as Edwards explained when he was a guest on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast.
“I get asked by people, ‘How did you get your own voice in the film? And I was desperately trying not to,” said Edwards “[Steven] would, I’m sure, hate the idea that I thought of it like this, but you’re sort of doing your best impression of Spielberg. It’s an impossible task, at best.”
In the age of the franchise vs. the auteur, this is not Edwards selling out his personal vision, but rather one of the biggest challenges of his career. Emulating Steven Spielberg, the master who started the “Jurassic Park” franchise, is a fool’s errand, a near-impossible task, and few understand this as fully as Edwards.
Edwards, who turns 50 in two weeks, is hardly the first director of his generation to embrace Spielberg’s influence, having come of age at time when Hollywood cinema was shaped by “Jaws,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “E.T.,” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” or films produced by his Amblin production company, such as “Goonies.” But for Edwards, who has proved himself to be one of the most innovative visual effects directors of his age, Spielberg — and in particular “Jurassic Park” — had an outsized influence on his career and life.
“‘Jurassic Park’ came out this summer I went to film school,” said Edwards. “We arrive at school and cinema’s changed, right? Digital effects have landed. This was clearly going be the future of cinema for quite a while.”
Edwards didn’t waste time trying to catch the wave. He bought a computer and spent months, which soon became years, and then a decade-plus, locked in his room, trying to create CGI dinosaurs, as he taught himself how to do digital visual effects. It culminated with his breakthrough indie, “Monsters,” a film shot with a three-person crew and the most impressive DYI visual effects anyone had seen when it premiered at SXSW in 2010. It would make such a splash that the previously unknown director signed with one of the top directing agents and was attached to “Godzilla” by 2011.
Said Edwards of his first film, “To be honest, there was quite obvious inspiration, or [a] kind of love affair with ‘Jurassic,’ which is essentially a monster movie.”
And Edwards kept coming back to study “Jurassic Park” to draw inspiration from it. Just days before getting the call from Universal about Spielberg and David Koepp’s “Jurassic World: Rebirth” script, he’d done a five-and-half hour session with the 1993 original as part of an exercise/ritual to figure out his next original project, resulting in a four-page document.
“I was in my room at home, just pausing [‘Jurassic Park’], writing something, playing it, pausing it again,” said Edwards. “And my girlfriend [said], ‘What are you doing in there?’ And I was like, ‘I am watching “Jurassic Park” and making notes.’ She just looked at me like ‘You’re fucking crazy, you’ve seen it a million times, why do you need to make notes on it?’”
Spielberg is hardly the only director Edwards has studied, but he is the one that he hasn’t cracked. Edwards makes the analogy of studying a director to studying a magician.
“You can watch their trick and after a few tricks, you go, ‘I think I know how you do that. The coin’s up his sleeve, right?’ And you go, ‘OK, good. I know how to do that now,” said Edwards. “But Steven Spielberg, he’s someone, when you watch the trick over and over, and watch his shot decisions and how he’s moving the camera and how it all flows and connects… You watch the trick three times, and you watch it 10 times, and the thirtieth time, and go, ‘I think he’s actually a magician. I think it’s magic. I don’t know how this is happening.’”
When Edwards got the Koepp script, which he later learned Spielberg was heavily involved in, he was, for a variety of reasons, prepared to say no. Said Edwards of reading the script, “I just kept hitting all these little mini movies — every encounter with each dinosaur felt like a little mini love letter to some Spielberg movie.”
Koepp, who wrote the original film “Jurassic Park,” had made an effort to bring the franchise back to what made it great, creating his own manifesto of the rules of a “Jurassic” film. He and Spielberg even put back into “Rebirth” the waking of a sleeping T-Rex sequence that had to be abandoned (due to VFX limitations) in the original film. In the back of his head, as he learned how invested Spielberg was in the new script and production, Edwards wondered why Spielberg wasn’t directing the film himself.
Edwards isn’t being self-effacing when making the analogy of “Rebirth” being a decent karaoke version of a Spielberg film. It’s actually the closest the humble (especially by action movie director standards) director comes to bragging. He doesn’t hide his goal of trying to emulate the filmmaking style of his hero, which to him was a Sisyphean mission at best.
And for diehard Spielberg fans who think they see nods to the director’s work in the world-building of “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” you’re not wrong. Edwards and production designer James Clyne looked to the ancient ruins of the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” films, or the magical tunnels of “Goonies,” the original lab designs of “Jurassic Park,” the summer-side bar in “Jaws,” and other Spielbergian worlds for inspiration.
“It felt sacrilegious, like it felt like I shouldn’t be doing this,” said Edwards of referencing Spielberg’s films. “If this was another movie, if for some reason either it didn’t have Steven’s involvement, or a different name on the title, I wouldn’t have done it. You know what I mean? It feels too close to home, put in all those movies I grew up loving, but the fact is I kept waiting for him to pull the script away and go, ‘I’m only joking, I’m going to direct this.’”
Edwards is half-joking, but for a busy filmmaker, Spielberg’s attention to the details and hands-on role as executive producer on “Rebirth” did catch him off-guard.
“What’s interesting is, you go to meetings with a top studio exec and you talk about a screenplay that they’ve developed, and they can’t remember the name of the character, or some detail in the movie that they’ve totally misremembered,” said Edwards. “Whereas with Steven, on this, he remembered every little atom. Like, if you slightly implied something that wasn’t the way it was, he would correct you. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, his mind, he’s so sharp.”
Spielberg watched dailies almost every day, which Edwards admitted was paralyzing when he would made the mistake of stopping to think about it. Said Edwards, “And now and again, I’d get a text [from] him that would say something nice about something he saw the day before, and it’d be like mainlining crack cocaine.”
Universal Pictures will release “Jurassic World: Rebirth” in theaters on Wednesday, July 2.
To listen to Gareth Edwards‘ July 2 interview on “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” subscribe to the Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.