‘The script didn't have Jurassic World on the front': Gareth Edwards on Monsters, Godzilla, Star Wars and reinventing dinosaurs

The Guardian

2 days ago

Like an ancient warhorse hearing the bugle for one last time, readers of a certain age will be snorting and whinnying at the words 'Gareth' and 'Edwards'. They are irresistible madeleines for the legends of Welsh rugby: unfeasible 70s sideburns, neck-high tackles and JPR Williams on the overlap.
These days, though, things are different: Gareth Edwards is also the name of the unassuming, Midlands-born fortysomething film director sitting in front of me, who has quietly acquired a reputation as one of Britain's most accomplished franchise movie-makers. 'I've had it my whole life, to be honest,' he says. 'My dad was a massive rugby fan. My comedy goal is that the Gareth Edwards does something and everybody goes: 'Oh, the film‑maker?' That would be it. I could die happy after that.'
While there is no immediate prospect of this Gareth Edwards finishing off an eight-man move and going over in the corner – any more than there is of Willie John MacBride taking on the next Iron Man movie – you sense that the tide may eventually turn in the younger man's favour. With a Star Wars and a Godzilla movie under his belt, not to mention the Christopher-Nolan-esque sci-fi parable The Creator, Edwards is now perched atop the new Jurassic World movie – the seventh in the series, if you count the three Jurassic Park films – which is slightly ominously subtitled Rebirth.
As gigs go, it doesn't get much bigger. Edwards is stewarding the franchise at a critical moment: even though the last film, Dominion, proved as commercially robust as its predecessors, it took such a critical pasting, not least from the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, that the future of the whole thing was in doubt.
Diplomatically, Edwards says 'they just wanted to press the reset button slightly' – although Rebirth, as its title suggests, does rather more than that. It junks the entire cast and characters of the previous three films, ditches the theme-park-gone-wrong through-line and generally adopts a scorched-earth attitude to what went before. (Devotees of the franchise will be glad to know that the series' basic DNA – involving ferocious dinosaurs and creepy corporate types attempting to exploit them – remains unchanged.) Edwards says a new beginning was very much the plan. 'The honest truth is that, when the script arrived, it didn't have the words Jurassic World on the front. It really felt like a new chapter.'
Even so, anyone who reads the movie-industry trade press will know that Edwards wasn't the first name on the team sheet; what is more, the Hollywood Reporter rather ungallantly described him ungallantly as 'more shooter than auteur'. Edwards, though, brushes this sort of thing aside with aplomb and readily offers an insight into how the Hollywood hiring game works. He says he found out the Jurassic producers were looking for a new director after spotting an article in the very same movie-industry trade press and messaged his agent ('is it worth throwing my hat in to see if they'd be interested?') just as the franchise's producer Frank Marshall was tentatively reaching out to him.
He had a weekend to read the script – 'I basically spent that weekend hoping I would hate it, because I kind of wanted to have a break and not do a big franchise movie' – and then found himself pitching to Marshall, a Hollywood legend who has worked on movies including Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, The Sixth Sense and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. 'I just went through my little list and waited for him to have an allergic reaction. And then, right at the end, he went: 'OK, do you mind repeating everything you just said to me tomorrow to Steven?' And I thought: oh shit, I assume he means Spielberg. Maybe there's three Stevens.
'So the next day I am pitching a Jurassic film to Steven Spielberg, which is very surreal. Halfway through, he asked for a pen and paper and started writing stuff down. And I thought: oh, is this a bad sign or a good sign? Then, at one point, he just stopped and smiled and went: 'That's great.' And I felt like: OK, can we just end my life now? Because it can only go downhill from here.''
It's a great pitch-meeting story, perhaps matched only by the one in which he gets a talking-to from another Hollywood big shot, Thomas Tull, just before the pair went in to Warner Bros to sell Godzilla in the early 2010s. 'I felt like my whole life was hanging on what I said over the next half an hour. As we were walking there, he said: 'Remember, Gareth, you are not auditioning for them, they are auditioning for you. If they don't want you to do this movie, we're going somewhere else.' Whether he meant it or not, it was the best thing he could have said to me.'
Quite how Edwards got here seems to baffle even Edwards himself. He is still awestruck by the fact he is rubbing shoulders with his childhood movie heroes – Spielberg, George Lucas – but is focused and tough enough to channel it into his own creative inspiration: 'They managed to make what I consider to be art and commerciality at the same time. They managed to combine [the two to create] the holy grail. Jaws is a masterpiece and it was the most popular movie ever made when it came out. So that's your benchmark, right? Like, what's the matter with you, Gareth? Why can't you try to do that?'
Edwards cut his teeth in visual effects (he won a TV Bafta in 2006 for a BBC drama-documentary about Hiroshima) and applied those skills to his first feature, Monsters; released in 2010, it still looks amazing, despite being produced on an inconceivably small budget. Having established himself as the Kevin Smith of the creature feature, Edwards experienced a vertiginous ascent after being picked by Tull to oversee Hollywood's latest attempt to take on Godzilla, going from Monsters' $500,000 budget to a $160m blockbuster. 'I felt I was getting crushed as I was doing it. I felt like: I don't know if I'm going to survive this.'
Having scrambled up the learning curve, Edwards can look back with a measure of calm. 'Any movie like that is a machine, and the machine kicks in and you've just got to [do it]. You've got to know the battles you can win and the ones you can't, the ones that are worth dying on a hill for and the ones that won't really matter at the end of the day; they might hurt your pride a little bit, but the audience is not going to notice or care.'
The Godzilla gamble paid off handsomely and the lessons appeared to stand him in good stead: he rolled straight in to another fanboy dream project, a standalone Star Wars film. The experience of making Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was marred by much after-the-event muttering that the scriptwriter Tony Gilroy had been brought in to re-shoot and re-edit much of the film, but Edwards remains unbowed: 'It's the nature of doing a massive film with that much pressure on it – the studio just wouldn't leave anything to chance.' In any case, it is evident that the kerfuffle did not have any long-term effect on his standing.
Edwards clearly has a talent for what Hollywood likes to call 'vision': an ability to orchestrate grand, sweeping visuals into which spectacular digital visual effects are seamlessly integrated. Rather more unusually, he also likes a roving quasi-documentary camera, giving many sequences a combat-movie edge. He also has a predilection for a certain type of scene, which you will notice if you watch all his films in a row: people dying horribly trapped behind a sealed glass door, often with someone they love watching it happen. ('Maybe I got trapped as a kid in one of those automatic doors in Sainsbury's, or something, and my mum left and I couldn't get out.')
That was then; this is now. Like most of Hollywood, Edwards is waiting hopefully on Rebirth's box office performance, as movie theatres cautiously haul themselves away from the Covid disaster and try to beat back the menace of high-end TV. On the surface, at least, he seems sublimely unbothered by it all. 'This movie is kind of what I've been waiting for. I felt that if we get the right cast, then really it's a playground for me to do the things I love doing, you know? So I was like: it's mine to screw up.'
Jurassic World Rebirth is in cinemas in the UK, Ireland and the US from 2 July and in Australia from 3 July