“’Life finds a way’ is, for me, always the story,” says screenwriter David Koepp about Jurassic World Rebirth. “What’s wonderful about that theme is it can apply quite literally to your plot about the persistence of nature, represented by our dinosaurs, and it can apply to the characters and what they’re going through. They will manage to prevail and survive. Or they don’t! Sometimes life finds a way through death – though hopefully not for the characters you really like.”
When Dinosaurs Dream Again: The Timeless Myth Behind Jurassic Park’s Science
Jurassic World Rebirth was conceived almost immediately after 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion brought the second trilogy to a close and retired the cast of characters of both series, when revered blockbuster screenwriter David Koepp, who wrote the screenplay for the original Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park, got a call from Steven Spielberg. “He said, ‘Hey, do you want to make another one of these?’” Koepp says. The answer, of course, was yes. “Developing stories with Steven is so much fun because he’s so good at it and we have such a great vibe and rapport.”
Spielberg and Koepp commenced the collaboration by riffing on the central theme of the series. Their brainstorming focused on imagining the state of the world following the events of Dominion, which left the entire planet suddenly overrun by dinosaurs running amok. Returning to Michael Crichton’s books for inspiration and leaning into his science-based premises, they decided this new age of human-dinosaur co-existence wouldn’t last long because most of the modern world would be inhospitable, if not toxic, to creatures indigenous to the Mesozoic Era. And so, in Rebirth, dinosaurs are in danger of extinction once more. The only places they continue to thrive are the tropical climes along the equator.
Here, warm-water leviathans like the Mosasaurus troll for food near Ile Saint-Hubert, located 227 miles off the northeastern coast of South America. A lush rain forest of low mountains and mangrove swamps, the island is also dotted with ruins of an ancient civilization and the blight of a more recent endeavor: a secret R&D facility run by InGen, the firm that cloned dinosaurs for the ill-fated theme parks of the first two Jurassic trilogies. Something went catastrophically awry deep in the jungle 18 years ago, and now, Ile Saint-Hubert is a forbidden zone, haunted by the horrendous consequences of reckless hubris.
Having forged a new “lost world” for Rebirth, and a rather lethal one at that, Koepp and Spielberg now needed a credible reason to visit it. They concocted a mission plot about a pharmaceutical giant that tasks a team of covert operations experts (and one sensible scientist) to infiltrate Ile Saint-Hubert and extract DNA from three colossal Cretaceous-period creatures, each the largest of their general type: Quetzalcoatlus (avian), Mosasaurus (aquatic), and Titanosaurus (terrestrial). The reason: to use the genetic material of these (literally) big-hearted animals to manufacture medicines that can cure cardiac disease.
“While doing research, I found that certain dinosaurs, larger ones in particular, did have extraordinarily long lifespans and the reason was they had remarkably low incidences of heart disease,” says Koepp. “That led to the idea that a drug could be synthesized from their DNA, because the greatest killer of humans is heart disease. The nice thing about that premise was that it was true to the core theme, ‘life finds a way.’ Life extension! Everyone can get onboard with that! To me, that seemed a valid reason—combined with the promise of a massive payday for the covert operations team—for smart, competent people to take the risk of going on an adventure into the most dangerous place in the world.”
To create complications for this quest, Koepp and Spielberg spun a subplot about a shipwrecked family, the Delgados, whose plight troubles the goals and consciences of the dino-hunting team. Koepp and Spielberg also devised strange new creatures—creepy misbegotten byproducts of InGen’s ill-fated genetic experimentation—to terrorize the characters. One was inspired by a memorable afternoon of yard work at Koepp’s house. “We had these old columns that were rotting, so we had to replace them,” says Koepp. “I was spraying off one of these things when two clawed hands came crawling out of the column at the top. They were followed by these long arms that just kept coming, followed by the head. It was this huge bat, soaking wet from the water. I thought: ‘I’m putting you in a movie!’”
Spielberg and Koepp also wanted to create action sequences unlike any seen before in a Jurassic film. Spielberg was particularly intrigued by the possibilities suggested by a Mosasaurus roaming the oceans. Koepp swam with it. “I loved the idea that part of the movie could be a seafaring adventure,” says Koepp. “Not only have I never seen that before in a Jurassic film, but it would be a new way for the franchise to capture the raw beauty of the natural world, which I believe all these films should do.”
Koepp and Spielberg found further inspiration in material from Crichton’s novels that had gone unused in the first two Jurassic films, including a suspenseful stretch on a river in which characters come upon a T. rex slumbering in a lagoon, sleeping off a feast of fresh kill. “We always loved that moment in Michael’s Jurassic Park novel,” says Koepp. Back in the early ’90s, when they were making the first Jurassic film, Koepp says, “there was discussion of putting that scene in that movie, but the number of shots that one could do with CG at that time was limited, and for reasons of pacing and budget and time, it was never fully pursued. So, one of the first things Steven and I decided when we started working on Rebirth was to get the scene into this story. Besides, the T. rex is the star of these movies; it had to at least make a cameo. This scene seemed like the perfect amount of T. rex.”
Prior to writing the script for Rebirth in earnest in the fall of 2023, Koepp reviewed the six previous movies and created a list of commandments: the nine rules that all Jurassic films should follow. “I’m afraid they’re now official trade secrets, so the list is now locked up somewhere inside Universal,” Koepp says. Still, he’s willing to share a few of them: Jurassic films should embrace plausible science as much as possible; they must keep continuity with past films; and they should be funny. “Humor is oxygen for movies like these,” Koepp says. “Not in a self-conscious way, but in an utterly believable, character-oriented way. To me there’s nothing funnier in films like these where you have characters trying to stay calm in the face of extreme peril by understating it.”
The first thing Koepp wrote was the Mosasaurus attack at sea, which dominates the first act of the film. “Shooting on water is always very tricky,” Koepp says, with a chuckle. “I remember thinking: “Oh, the poor people who will actually have to do this!’ But I’m just the writer! That’s their problem, not mine!”
A New Epic At Epic Speed
Accepting the challenge of solving the script’s seemingly impossible scenes were veteran Jurassic producers Frank Marshall and Patrick Crowley, who also recently produced Twisters for Universal. First, though, they had to get over the shock that the challenge even existed. “When we finished releasing Dominion in 2022,we had no doubt there would be another Jurassic film, but we had no idea Steven was cooking up a new one or that it would be ready so soon,” Crowley says. “We were focused on wrapping up Twisters when suddenly this script from David Koepp arrives in December of 2023. It really snuck up on us.”
With an accelerated production schedule, Rebirth needed a director with a proven record for big-budget franchise filmmaking. Enter Gareth Edwards, whose résumé made him ideally suited for telling the story of Rebirth and re-energizinga franchise: 2010’s Monsters, an ingeniously designed low budget creature feature; 2014’s Godzilla, which reintroduced the towering atomic kaiju to a new generation of moviegoers; and 2016’s Rogue One, a Star Wars tale with a heist-movie engine. He was also, unbeknownst to Spielberg at the time, perhaps the legendary director’s longest and most devoted student.
Edwards grew up in in England loving and studying Spielberg’s films. At the age of 10, he decided to learn storyboarding and special effects after watching a documentary on the making of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. “Most of my films have been secret attempts to make my own Jurassic Park film, sometimes more obviously than others,” Edwards says.
Edwards also impressed screenwriter David Koepp. “Gareth has a 3-D imagination that can visualize things that are spectacular,” Koepp says. “But what makes him gifted is he can not only visualize them, but also he can figure out how to bring them to reality. That’s the line that separates a director who’s good from one who’s terrific.”
Still, the call to Jurassic adventure arrived at a moment when Edwards’ energy was at an ebb. He was feeling depleted after finishing The Creator, and part of him hoped Koepp’s script would give him a reason to say no. But much like life, good writing finds a way. Edwards was riveted by the Rebirth script,from its thrilling story to its implicit love letter nostalgia for the films of Spielberg. “I wanted to not like it,” Edwards says. “I wanted to be able to say, ‘Thank you very much, but I’m going to take a break.’ But when I got to the end and closed the script, I went, ‘Oh, f—.’ I knew I had to do it.”
Indeed, Edwards could probably write another four-page essay about Koepp’s Rebirth screenplay. “It’s a mission story that becomes a survival story with some great curveballs thrown along the way,” Edwards says. “It elegantly balances and intertwines a story about these adventurers on a quest and an emotional family story. It’s a journey of distinct chapters set in interesting environments, sea, land, and air. Each one is their own short story thrill ride that adds up to one roller-coaster of epic story. At times, it’s like Jaws, at other times, it’s like Indiana Jones, and in between, it delights in the majesty of nature like a David Attenborough film. Truth be told, when I was reading the script, I thought if it presented one opportunity to do anything as cinematic and intense as the T. rex attack in Jurassic Park, I’d probably do it. But David’s script presented multiple opportunities, and I just got excited by the thought of making all of them.”
Besides an accelerated prep, the most intimidating challenge Edwards faced prior to rolling film in June of 2024 was getting over the pinch-me awe of working for Steven Spielberg. “Say you’re a composer who admires Mozart. Well, Mozart lived long ago, so he’s like a mythical person,” Edwards says. “But the great cinematic master of today is still very much with us, and I’ve now sat in rooms with him, and I can tell you, it’s a surreal experience; it’s like learning Santa Claus is real.”
As for his vision for Rebirth, Edwards wanted to use Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park as his tonal touchstone. “Jurassic Park was presented as a family film, but I always thought of it as a horror film in a witness protection program pretending to be a family film,” Edwards says. ”Jurassic Park is perfect pure cinema. You’re never going to get close to beating what Steven did with the original, and I never once thought I could. But I do hope we’ve made a film that’s worthy of it. Jurassic World Rebirth should feel as if Universal went into the vault and found a movie that they’d forgotten they’d made, a sequel to Jurassic Park from the nineties, with the vibe and style of the original.”
From Page To Screen
Jurassic Park Rebirth was shot in Thailand, Malta, the United Kingdom and New York. Principal photography began on June 13, 2024, and wrapped in October.
To craft the world of Rebirth, director Gareth Edwards enlisted production designer James Clyne, who also served as his production designer on The Creator. “Jurassic Park was a seminal movie for me and in film history and I wanted to pay tribute to that as much as possible,” says Clyne. “The aesthetic of Rebirth feels very much like nineties-era Jurassic Park, especially on the island, with the concrete buildings and fences and use of colors like red and yellow. But there were some areas, such as the depiction of technology, where we borrowed from the Jurassic World movies and even pushed the futurism while always remaining as grounded as possible.”
To serve as director of photography, director Gareth Edwards enlisted John Mathieson, a two-time Oscar nominee (Gladiator films, Logan), known for his many collaborations with legendary auteur Ridley Scott. Fresh off lensing Gladiator II, Mathieson brought valuable experience shooting in the horizon tanks at Malta Film Studios, where Scott had staged Gladiator II’s battleship sequences.
Shot with Panavision cameras and anamorphic lenses, just as 1993’s Jurassic Park had been, Rebirth is the first feature that Edwards has made using 35mm film rather than digital. “I wanted that vintage look, the kind of texture that made Jaws and Jurassic Park so special,” says Edwards, who also credits Mathieson for encouraging him to embrace film. “Shooting in the jungle environments, film brings out colors in a way that digital just doesn’t. And when I held that Panavision camera, it felt alive. It vibrated in my hands like an animal.”
The challenge of designing Rebirth’s dinosaurs and bringing them to life on set and screen was a team effort across multiple departments, led by director Gareth Edwards, visual effects supervisor David Vickery andvisual effects producer Carlos Ciudad. The creature effects department was led by CFX creative supervisor John Nolan (Jurassic World Dominion, The Witcher).
Rather than jumping between physical builds and CF creatures during the movie, Edwards’ goal was to keep a consistent aesthetic by sticking to one clear methodology and use VFX to create all the dinosaurs in Rebirth. That approach allowed the team to focus on developing the fully realized digital assets—some of which took nearly a year to complete.
Introduced with a splash in Jurassic World, the Mosasaurus was the Jaws of the Late Cretaceous period, only bigger: a massive, muscular eating machine, and technically, not a dinosaur but a close reptile cousin. The Titanosaurus is one of the biggest sauropods ever seen. This massive herbivore from the Late Cretaceous period, whose name aptly means Titanic lizard, is around 50 feet tall, 70 feet long, weighed more than 30 tons and had legs the size of Redwoods, each measuring about eight feet in circumference. The Quetzalcoatlus is a gigantic pterosaur from the Late Cretaceous period. This massive omnivore is one of the largest known flying animals of all time. It stands 16 feet and seven inches high when on the ground and has a 30-foot wingspan when in flight. It sports a six-feet-long razor-sharp beak and weighs approximately 550 pounds. A fan favorite since their first appearance in Jurassic Park III, the Spinosaurus is a massive, amphibious predator. The Spinosaurus, whose name means “spine lizard,”first lived during the Late Cretaceous period. They are 39 feet long and 13 feet high, with thick, powerful bodies, massive claws, razor-sharp teeth and six-feet-high sail fins. Inspired by Ray Harryhausen’s iconic creature work and staying loyal to the incredible designs created by previous Jurassic teams, the VFX concept artists set out to evolve the T. rex for Rebirth—creating something meaner, recognizable, but distinct. Inspired by Koepp’s creepy close encounter with a giant bat that crawled out of a rotted column on his property, the Mutadon is roughly the size of a raptor, measuring 6-7 feet high, 16 feet long and weighing approximately 550 pounds. Other creatures include two new Velociraptors, The Dilophosaurus is a theropod from the Early Jurassic period, the well armored herbivore packs Ankylosaurus, and the Compsognathus, a small bipedal theropod dinosaur the size of a chicken.
To create the score for Jurassic World Rebirth, director Gareth Edwards turned to a distinguished friend, two-time Oscar® winner Alexandre Desplat (The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Shape of Water), who worked with Edwards on Godzilla. “I feel very fortunate to be doing the music for a movie franchise like this, which entertained me so greatly, as a filmgoer, for decades,” Desplat says. “I dreamed of writing music for movies like this since I was a teenager, and now, here I am,” he adds with a laugh, “part of Jurassic World, almost a teenager.”
