TV & Beyond on 2025-07-03 12:00:00
Now, as a big dinosaur nerd, I do have to ask you about the dinosaurs.
Yeah.
Whose idea was it to redesign the Spinosaurus into something more scientifically accurate, compared to the movie monster version we saw in “Jurassic Park III”?
I was worried that I’d steered it towards a movie monster version, and that it used to be really accurate. It’s like, imagine we are dinosaurs, the world is full of dinosaurs, we are dinosaurs, and they make a movie about some humans. And someone goes, “Hey, we’re going to have some Asian guy in this scene,” and you go, “But be more specific,” right? And they go, “Oh no, but it’s just an Asian.” It’s like, you can have a Spinosaurus, and then you can have a totally different-looking one. This idea that there’s only one type of dinosaur is crazy.
Basically, I saw it as, “Okay, in the last movie, if that was Clint Eastwood, now we’re going to have Marlon Brando.” So it was more, “Okay, let’s just get that Spinosaurus and start to push and pull shapes and proportions and try to make more of a character out of it.” I don’t know, I can’t really explain, but I look at two images just like in nature, and you personally can go, “That’s more attractive” or “I find more interesting than that,” and sometimes you can’t articulate why, you just go, “That one. I prefer that one.” Then you take that one, that’s the new one, and you mess around with it and you make two children and you say, “That one.” And you take that one, you mess around with it, and it’s basically like nature. You’re trying to evolve an idea and it’s very much probably what happens in nature. So yeah, I did a bit of that with the dinosaurs as well, even though some of them have been established. Otherwise, you don’t really have your fingerprint on it. It felt like it’s one of the first things you do, is grab all the toys and you want to make them your own, kind of thing.
In “Jurassic Park” tradition, going back all the way to the original, it’s always been a mix of cutting-edge visual effects and practical effects. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it feels like “Rebirth” leans more towards the VFX side of things rather than puppets, animatronics, that sort of thing. What went into that decision for you?
Yeah, I mean, my background was computer graphics, visual effects. The thing you learn the hard way, I guess, on some of these movies, is you go to a lot of trouble doing something practical and sometimes you end up replacing it in the computer. And it can be really worth it, because it was a great reference. It gave the actor something to react to on set, and it can all be great. But we had a year and a quarter, and so it felt like we didn’t have time to do pre-viz, all that animation that people do of the stunt sequences and set pieces. It also felt like animatronics — like big, cool, crazy animatronics — were not going to happen in time. And it all would’ve been a lot of resources and time and we could probably not have got through this one with just puppets and stuff.
What we did do is, we ended up asking them to do what we called proxy puppets. Essentially, they create shapes and silhouettes that were full-scale, whatever the creature was, and then they could come into a room and puppeteers would come in and they play their animal, and that way we can compose the shot. They don’t look like dinosaurs, you know what I mean? But they’re enough to make the actors react to something, and they look scary. We had these Mutadon puppets and the whole scene cut together and worked perfectly with just the puppets in, because the guys who were operating them, like, I don’t know what makes you want to do that for a living [laughs], but they could tap into something pretty dark. Yeah, it was all mainly just proxy objects, stuff that could push doors open and things like that, but not actually — then it gets replaced with the real photoreal dinosaurs.
