Latest news with #JPRWilliams
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The script didn't have Jurassic World on the front': Gareth Edwards on Monsters, Godzilla, Star Wars and reinventing dinosaurs
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
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The script didn't have Jurassic World on the front': Gareth Edwards on Monsters, Godzilla, Star Wars and reinventing dinosaurs
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 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, 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
Daily Mail
21-06-2025
- Sport
- Daily Mail
THE MOUSE WHO ROARED! McLauchlan shone from Tarbolton to Dunedin... and back again
There was an added sense of poignancy that news of Ian 'Mighty Mouse' McLauchlan's sad passing should arrive just as the latest batch of British and Irish Lions were jetting off on this summer's adventure to Australia. McLauchlan, who died on Friday aged 83, was considered one of the toughest and feistiest players to ever pull on a Scotland jersey, something he did 43 times between 1969 and 1979. It was his performances for the Lions, however, that elevated the Ayrshire-born prop's reputation and brought him to wider recognition, something he did with distinction over two tours of duty. The first came in 1971 when a group that included Welsh great JPR Williams and Irish icon Willie John McBride won two games out of four and drew the final one to secure what remains the Lions' only series victory in New Zealand. McLauchlan played a pivotal role in the first Test in Dunedin, charging down an attempted All Blacks clearance to score the only try of the game. Perhaps surprisingly for a player who scored frequently in the club game, it also turned out to be the only Test try of his career. McLauchlan was back in the fold three years later when the touring party, now captained by McBride, won 21 of the 22 matches they played in South Africa and drew the last one to earn the nickname 'The Invincibles'. It was a physically bruising, often violent tour but the Lions proved too strong for their Springbok hosts as they clinched the Test series by three matches to one. McLauchlan was again pivotal, playing in every Test match just as he had done in New Zealand, making him one of just five players to be ever-present across the two victorious series. International rugby had come late to the man from the Ayrshire village of Tarbolton, not a renowned stronghold for the sport. When he made his Scotland debut a month short of his 27th birthday in an 8-3 Five Nations loss to England at Twickenham in March 1969, he became the first former pupil of Ayr Academy and ex-Jordanhill College student to be capped for his country. 'Much of that day is a haze but I remember sitting in the changing room at 2.50pm,' he wrote in his autobiography, Mighty Mouse. ''Open the doors', I thought. 'Let me get out there and at them'. I had waited all my life for that moment.' McLauchlan wasn't big for a loosehead at under 15 stone and just 5ft8 tall but what he lacked in physical stature he made up for with tenacity and determination, in the scrum especially where he would regularly give his tighthead opponent a difficult afternoon. His club performances for Jordanhill and West of Scotland brought him belatedly to the attention of the Scotland selectors — six years after his first trial — starting a decade-long period of international recognition where he'd go on to establish himself in the team before becoming captain in 1973. He would lead his country 19 times, an achievement that stood as a record until it was later surpassed by David Sole. On one of those occasions, another Calcutta Cup clash with the Auld Enemy, he captained the team despite having broken a bone in his leg against Ireland just a fortnight earlier. Although he came from a corner of the country where football, racing pigeons and whippets were the favoured pastimes, McLauchlan would become a rugby obsessive. 'I was hooked straight away,' he admitted. 'I loved the physicality, the brutality and the camaraderie of it. Before long, the game had become the be-all and end-all of my life. 'I never wanted to give up. I played every minute I could play. I used to go down to Wales mid-week and play. I'd go to Ireland at the weekends and play on the Sunday. At that time Scottish Rugby had a ban on Sunday rugby but it didn't seem to matter too much in Ireland. It was quite good. You'd play in Glasgow and get the six o'clock plane to Dublin and come back on the Sunday night.' The 1970s were not a hugely memorable period for Scottish rugby overall, with the unlikely five-way tie in 1973 the only championship Scotland celebrated throughout the decade. The feeling was, though, that it could have been even worse had McLauchlan not done his best to lift the level through both word and deed until his international retirement in 1979, again with another Test match against the All Blacks, this time at Murrayfield. He worked as a PE teacher at Broughton High School in Edinburgh, launched his own marketing firm and even had a brief spell in journalism but rugby remained in the blood, making it little surprise that he would continue to contribute to the sport later in life. He served as president of Scottish Rugby from 2010 to 2012 and remained on the board until 2019. 'I've always been involved in rugby in one way or another,' he said at the time. 'I suppose it kind of appealed to my sense of humour, the thought of being on the board. 'It's like everything else. I just wanted to do something to help rugby. It's a plain, simple fact: if you don't do anything, you don't get much from it — but if you try to do something you get a great deal of self-satisfaction and reward comes from effort.' McLauchlan would fill other rugby roles, too, chairing the British and Irish Lions Trust, becoming a director of European Professional Club Rugby, chair of the Murrayfield Injured Players Foundation and a director of the Hearts & Balls rugby charity. In 2013 he was inducted into Scottish Rugby's Hall of Fame and four years later received an OBE for services to rugby. Later in life he moved from the Corstorphine area of Edinburgh to settle on Islay where his wife Eileen, who died in 2023, hailed from. News of McLauchlan's sad passing prompted tributes from all across the rugby world, including from former team-mate — and another Lions and Scotland legend — Andy Irvine. 'He was some character and some player,' said Irvine. 'He was smaller than most props he came up against but I never saw anyone get the better of him. He was so tough, almost indestructible. What a fantastic career he had for Scotland and the Lions. It's very, very sad.' The sad news broke just as Lions head coach Andy Farrell and his players were boarding the plane to Australia ahead of their Test series against the Wallabies. They paid tribute to one of their own: 'Our thoughts are with the friends and family of former Scotland captain and Lions great Ian McLauchlan.'
BBC News
10-04-2025
- Sport
- BBC News
Wales rugby: Iconic 1973 JPR Williams rugby shirt sells for £27k
A rugby jersey worn by the late Wales legend JPR Williams in what is considered one of the sport's greatest ever games has been auctioned off for £27, jersey was worn in the Barbarians' 1973 match against the All Blacks, in which Williams was instrumental in this famous 23-11 Wales and Lions full-back, died in January 2024 aged 74, was an icon of Wales' dominance of the 1970s, winning three Five Nations Grand Rogers Jones and Co described him as "a revolutionary player who changed the way full backs played the beautiful game". The jersey was worn by Williams in the 1973 fixture - during which Sir Gareth Edwards scored one of the most memorable tries in formed part of a collection of items sold at an auction on Thursday. It was a "white glove sale", meaning all of the items were successfully sold, and auctioneer Ben Rogers Jones said it was "a special honour and privilege" to coordinate."JPR Williams was one of my heroes, as he was to so many others," he said."There was interest from across the rugby playing nations and we are delighted to have achieved some fantastic prices." Mr Rogers Jones added that, while Edwards' try was well-documented, "it is sometimes overlooked that JPR scored the crucial try to clinch the match for the Baa-baas", making the jersey "an important item of sporting memorabilia"."We were so pleased that, at the auction, JPR's performance that day wasn't overlooked as the price soared to £27,500 with a bidder on the phone in London winning the top prize," he collection sold to a global audience, with buyers in Australia, Switzerland and France, as well as Wales and across the UK.
