‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ | Anatomy of a Scene

“Hi, My name is Gareth Edwards and I am the director of “Jurassic World Rebirth.” So right now we’re with a family who have kind of been shipwrecked on this island with our team of experts. and essentially trying to get across the island to get rescued, which involves potentially going down river on this raft. Unfortunately, there is a curveball of a giant sleeping T-Rex. What you’ll see as she drags the raft, there’s a close up and it says on it, basically “inflate on land.” And this was something we added in the edit because we did a test screening and the audience was just like, why would you inflate it in front of a T-Rex? And so I just thought, well, why don’t — if we just put some instructions on it that say have to inflate this on the land, if you drag it through the water, it will sink. And so I thought, there’s this great opportunity because the raft inflates. You get this David Copperfield moment where from the camera perspective, it can completely hide the T-Rex. And then when the raft is put down, you realize it’s missing. And I never knew this when we were filming, but basically found out that this was a sequence they had initially tried to put in the original “Jurassic Park” screenplay, and then at some point, Steven Spielberg decided to take it out. And then when him and David Koepp got together to write this script, one of the first things on the agenda was like, we’ve got to get that raft scene back into a movie. And so I was blissfully unaware of this when we shot this sequence, thank God, probably, because I think if I’d seen Steven’s storyboards, I think the pressure would have been like, immense. What you’re looking at is two main locations. One is in Thailand, and it’s really actually a lake. We use it as a river, but it’s this big lake within a quarry. And then once the rafting begins proper, it becomes this location in the U.K. called Lee Valley, which was essentially built for the London Olympics in 2012. And then my favorite image in this sequence is Audrina, the little girl, looking from the back of the raft and seeing the T-Rex make eye contact with her and start to head towards them as she screams at her dad to paddle. And it feels like there’s a reason you have a family in a film like this, and I think it’s because most people seeing these films are part of a family and you relate to them a lot more maybe than the experts. And seeing a sequence like this through the eyes of a child is way more intense. In London, in the rapid section, it’s freezing cold, and the actors, they were very tolerant, but we had to do take after take after take, as you can imagine and slowly through the day I could see the look in their eyes. They wanted to kill me and I would come up and give notes wearing this big, furry, warm winter coat and gloves and they would be like just convulsing and shaking with hate in their eyes for having to do another take.