Gareth Edwards on directing Jurassic World Rebirth: 'We just had to go for broke'
Scarlett Johansson plays Zora Bennett, a covert ops specialist who is hired by a pharmaceutical company to bring a team to a no-go island where dinosaurs still roam. The goal? To get blood and tissue for planned heart drugs that could save millions. Jonathan Bailey is the conscience of the group as paleontologist Dr Henry Loomis; Rupert Friend plays smarmy suit Martin Krebs, and Mahershala Ali is Bennett's old comrade Duncan Kincaid. Sure enough, they should have gone in a bigger boat...
Below, Edwards discusses the challenges and practicalities of making a blockbuster - and getting the chance to fulfil star Johansson's childhood dream.
Harry Guerin: I remember when I talked to you about Godzilla and you said at the time, 'It was the hardest thing I've ever done.' Given that you've since made Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, The Creator, and now Jurassic World Rebirth, did this top them all in terms of difficulty?
Gareth Edwards: It didn't, actually. I would love to sit here and go, 'Yeah, this was the absolute hardest.' It was really hard, but it was, like, an achievable difficulty. Probably the difference between this film and my other ones is that this was the first film that I entered and there was a screenplay that every single person in the room held hands and went, 'We want to do this. Don't touch it.' That made life a lot simpler. So then it was just about me not screwing up, really, and bring all the visual ideas and try and make it the best it could be.
But the fact that you started filming this in June 2024 - that's phenomenal that you got it turned around so quickly.
Yeah, my editor had put a quote on the edit suite, and it was Leonard Bernstein, I think, and it said, 'Art is when you have a plan and not quite enough time.' Our mantra was, like, 'It's good not to have enough time.' And it kind of became true. You have to go with your first instinct. You can't second guess yourself. Nothing can get in the way. No one's allowed put a barrier or hurdle to anything because it will derail the film. And so we just had to go for broke.
Everyone went with their best first idea, including the actors, including everything. And even when we did the director's cut or whatever you want to call that and showed it to the studio, they were like, 'Ok, we've got until this long. You've basically got to finish it. Here's our thoughts. Go.'
Looking back, it was actually a good scenario. There were definitely times... The honest truth: if there was a button that at any point you could just go and press this button and you'd get teleported out of this and there's no consequences, I would've pressed that button about three or four times during making it. And I would have done that on every film I've ever done.
There's always points where you just go, 'I can't do this anymore.' Right? But now I look back, I'm kind of like, 'Oh, I think I might try and build into all my contracts that we have half the time you're supposed to have.' Because it actually... I think it's good.
Was it really as simple as Steven Spielberg saying to you that Scarlett Johansson had always wanted to be in a Jurassic film? Was the casting that simple?
There was this one day, the very, like, first day where everyone at the studio [was there] - the head of Universal and Steven Spielberg (executive producer) and Frank Marshall (producer) and everybody else. We were all there and everyone had all their thoughts on cast and there was all these photos and faces. All 'the usual suspects', everyone you can imagine. And you start to go, 'How are we going to resolve this? We've talked about everybody you could talk about.'
And then Steven just goes, 'Well, if I don't cast Scarlett... If we don't cast Scarlett, she's going to kill me.' And we were like, 'What do you mean?'
He goes, 'Well, Scarlett, I met with her.' And he starts telling his story about how they met and she loves Jurassic and really wants to be in it. I was just listening to this going, 'Hang on, why are we doing this meeting?! That's great! If Scarlett wants to do it, why don't we just offer it to her?' Everyone was just like, 'Yeah!'
It was a really simple solution and we just left that meeting and I was like, 'I hope they call her. I hope that wasn't just, like, a conversation that was happening at the end there.' And then they did. And then I heard she was reading the script. And then the next thing it was all go.
Channelling her inner Ripley.
I think the thing about that movie (Sigourney Weaver in Alien) is that I heard that they wrote that script and it was a guy. Like, it wasn't necessarily a girl. They just wrote characters and then at one point just said, 'We'll make that one female.' Right? They just flipped it. Because it wasn't written as a female [character], it wasn't, like, having all the tropes and what men think women should behave like in a movie. I think it was a really solid bit of great character. And so for this, we didn't have that approach - Zora (Scarlett Johansson's character) was always a woman - but we did remove any sort of love triangle kind of vibe. You win the girl is kind of like the classic thing that happens in these movies. And Scarlett was very keen not to do a film like that as well.
So I feel like it just became about these three people - one happened to be a woman, right? - and this kind of triangle that was more about genuine relationships. That became super interesting. There's a lot of - including the original Jurassic Park and a film with a shark in it - there's a lot of great examples of triangular dynamics. David Koepp, who wrote the screenplay, was a big fan of those. Obviously, he wrote the original Jurassic, but he was a big fan of Jaws and stuff. You can really feel that, I thought, in the script.
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