For one harrowing moment during the making of Jurassic World Rebirth, director Gareth Edwards had to tiptoe gently around a giant. That giant was Ste
For one harrowing moment during the making of Jurassic World Rebirth, director Gareth Edwards had to tiptoe gently around a giant. That giant was Steven Spielberg, the executive producer of Rebirth, the sixth sequel to his landmark thriller Jurassic Park, which redefined the summertime blockbuster in 1993 just as significantly as Spielberg’s don’t-go-into-the-water thriller Jaws had done a generation before.
The shadows of both films hovered ominously over Jurassic World Rebirth, especially in a key scene that places Scarlett Johansson’s daring tracker on the bow of a speeding boat as she fires a dart into a swimming leviathan known as a Mosasaurus.
“When I read the script, I had no idea what was going to happen,” Edwards tells Vanity Fair. “You go, ‘Well, hang on. There’s a boat racing to chase a creature underwater that has a giant fin, and they have a rifle, and they’re leaning out on the edge of the boat to try and shoot it…’ I felt a bit like there’s another movie that did this really well.”
Edwards—director of Rogue One, 2014’s Godzilla, and the 2023 sci-fi drama The Creator—said he would have asked for a rewrite had Rebirth been overseen by anyone except Spielberg, and written by anyone besides David Koepp, who also adapted the first Jurassic Park and its 1997 sequel. “I’d be going, ‘Guys, we can’t do this. This is just too sacrilegious,’” he says. Instead, he leaned in, paying homage to Jaws the same way Spielberg had honored classic big-screen pirate adventures in his 1975 shark-attack movie.
Then he learned that while Spielberg loves referencing others, he hates quoting himself. When he and Koepp gave notes after viewing a coarse cut of Jurassic World Rebirth, the director thought things were going well. “And then, the last [note] was, ‘By the way, take out all the nods and references to all the previous Spielberg films and Jurassic Park Easter eggs.’”
Edwards’s spirit sank faster than a Great White who just took a lethal bite of a scuba tank. But he wasn’t quite deterred. “It was one of those things where I disagree, and nod, and write it down, and see what happens over the next few months.”
He says he understood where Spielberg—who declined to comment for this piece—was coming from. “It probably feels like a snake eating its own tail,” Edwards says. “I wouldn’t want to do that if I was them. But—because I’m not them, and I’m a fan, and I love their work, and so does the rest of the world, I feel like [they’re] the only people in the world that have a problem with this.”
So, Edwards resolved to save what he could. And in true Jurassic Park fashion, life found a way.
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