Steven Spielberg (83 page)

Officially, the final production cost was reported at about $60 million, but
Forbes
magazine later estimated that the film’s actual negative cost (including $20 million for interest and overhead) totaled $95 million. Principal photography began on the Hawaiian island of Kauai on August 24, 1992, and was completed in Hollywood on November 30, twelve days
ahead
of the original eighty-two-day shooting schedule. Even Hurricane Iniki, which struck Kauai on September 11, the last scheduled day of the three-week location shoot, barely caused a bump in the production. Spielberg and company, who rode out the storm in the ballroom of the Westin Kauai Hotel, resumed filming on the Universal lot four days later. The day of the hurricane was the thirteenth birthday of actress Ariana Richards. She recalled that “the storm knocked part of the roof in, but nobody was hurt. Steven Spielberg kept all of us kids entertained by telling ghost stories, so it actually turned out to be a pretty good birthday.”

T
HE
sense of wonder that is part of Spielberg’s
raison
d’être
elevates his
Jurassic
Park
to an imaginative level far beyond Crichton’s cold-blooded speculations on paleo-DNA cloning. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould criticized the movie for trying to pass off a dinosaur revivification premise that amounts to “heaping impossibility upon impossibility.” But the achievement of Spielberg and his special-effects wizards in conjuring up believable images of long-extinct creatures is genuinely “spectacular,” Gould wrote. “Intellectuals too often either pay no attention to such technical wizardry or, even worse, actually disdain special effects with such dismissive epithets as ‘merely mechanical.’ I find such small-minded parochialism outrageous. Nothing can be more complex than a living organism, with all the fractal geometry of its form and behavior…. The use of technology to render accurate and believable animals therefore becomes one of the greatest all-time challenges to human ingenuity.”

With its extensive employment of computer-generated imagery (CGI),
Jurassic
Park
rendered obsolescent the traditional stop-motion miniature techniques developed by such special-effects masters as Ray Harryhausen and the original
King
Kong’
s
Willis O’Brien, as well as eclipsing the advanced
go-motion techniques perfected by George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic. An early example of CGI could be glimpsed in one of Spielberg’s own productions,
Young
Sherlock
Holmes
(1985), for which ILM and Pixar (then the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm) conjured up a computer-animated knight springing into action from a stained-glass window. But when preproduction on
Jurassic
Park
began in June 1990, Spielberg did not realize how far he could push CGI techniques to make his dinosaur movie “the most realistic of them all…. I thought it was possible that
someday
they might be able to create three-dimensional, live-action characters through computer graphics. But I didn’t think it would happen this soon.”

Hoping the art of building mechanical monsters had progressed substantially since
Jaws,
Spielberg first thought of hiring Bob Gurr, designer of the King Kong attraction for the Universal theme parks, to build full-sized, ambulatory robotic dinosaurs. But it soon became apparent that the capabilities of Gurr’s creatures were far too limited. Spielberg turned to creature designer Stan Winston, who began building large animatronic dinosaurs operated with mechanized support structures, not unlike Bob Mattey’s sharks for
Jaws,
but far more technically advanced. Spielberg planned to augment Winston’s creatures with go-motion miniatures designed by Phil Tippett and a limited amount of computer animation by ILM. When effects supervisor Dennis Muren told Spielberg his animators could create full-sized dinosaurs with computer graphics, Spielberg replied, “Prove it.”

“And,” marveled Spielberg, “he went out and proved it…. I’ll never forget the time that Dennis brought the first test down. I’d never seen movements this smooth outside of looking at
National
Geographic
documentaries. But I didn’t dare call [Tippett] at that time and say, ‘Hey, Phil, we’d like to replace what you were going to do on this film—creating a hundred shots with the best go-motion ever done in history—with CGI.’ I didn’t have the heart to do it then, because I wasn’t fully convinced until I saw a [CGI test of a] fleshed dinosaur, outside in the worst sunlight.

“When I saw that, and Phil saw that with me for the first time, there we were watching our future unfolding on the TV screen, so authentic I couldn’t believe my eyes. It blew my mind again. I turned to Phil, and Phil looked at me, and
Phil
said, ‘I think I’m extinct.’ I actually used Phil’s line in the movie, gave it to Malcolm [Jeff Goldblum] to say to Grant.” (When they arrive at Jurassic Park and Grant says, “We’re out of a job,” Malcolm replies, “Don’t you mean extinct?”) Tippett remained on the film as what Spielberg called “the director of the CGI dinosaurs.”
§
They filled only six and a half minutes of screen time, but, as Spielberg put it, the
Tyrannosaurus
rex
became “our star,” dwarfing the human performers in more ways than one. The sequence of the
Tyrannosaurus
rex
attack on the children, a mixture of CGI and
animatronics, so impressed Spielberg that he changed the ending (originally planned as a smaller-scale battle between two velociraptors) to bring back his star in an all-CGI climax.

To handle his new tools, Spielberg had to take a crash course in computer technology, his father’s profession. He had resisted entering his father’s field, and that ambivalence was reflected in the movie itself. “I hate computers” is Dr. Grant’s first line, and the villain is the park’s corrupt director of computer technology, Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight), whose brief shutdown of the overloaded system has catastrophic consequences. As Richard Corliss observed in
Time,
“no film could be more personal to [Spielberg] than this one…. a movie whose subject is its process, a movie about all the complexities of fabricating entertainment in the microchip age. It’s a movie in love with technology (as Spielberg is), yet afraid of being carried away by it (as he is).”

W
HEN
Crichton and Spielberg first met to discuss the adaptation, Crichton assumed they would start by talking about the technical challenges involved in creating dinosaurs. But Spielberg said, ‘‘Let’s talk about the characters.”

“And then,” recalled Crichton, “as I scribbled hastily, he went through every character in the story, outlining their physical appearances, their motivations, their hopes and fears, their quirks and foibles. Ideas about dialogue, gestures, and costuming tumbled out. Speaking very rapidly, he went on like this for an hour.

“At last he turned to the dinosaurs, but again, he spoke of them as characters. The strength and limitations of the tyrannosaur. The quick menace of the velociraptors. The sick triceratops. Already, he had a list of telling visual touches: snorting breath fogging a glass window; a foot squishing in mud; muscles moving under skin; a pupil constricting in bright light. He was thinking about how to convey weight, speed, menace, intention. He talked about a
Tyrannosaurus
sprinting sixty miles an hour, chasing a car.

“Finally I could stand it no longer. ‘Steven,’ I said, ‘how are you going to
do
this?’

“He shrugged, and made a little dismissing gesture with his hand. Not important. Not what we need to talk about. (Of course, it was also true he didn’t then have an answer.)

“I said, ‘But these effects—’

“‘Effects,’ he said, ‘are only as good as the audience’s feeling for the characters.’”

O
NE
of the most revealing differences between the novel and the film is Spielberg’s transformation of Hammond into a far more sympathetic figure. The director admitted that he could not help identifying with Hammond’s
blinkered obsession with showmanship.
¶
Spielberg underscored his affinities with the character by casting another movie director (Richard Attenborough) as the Scottish impresario.

Spielberg also admitted that he shares the character’s “dark side,” an all-encompassing passion for his work, sometimes at the expense of family responsibilities. Another in the long line of irresponsible father (or grandfather) figures in Spielberg’s films, Hammond is so thrilled to be able to breed dinosaurs that he doesn’t stop to weigh the consequences. He even exposes his own grandchildren to mortal danger by using them as guinea pigs for his tourist park. But Hammond’s essentially kindly nature in the film—as seen in his almost maternal coaxing of a baby dinosaur from its shell—makes his conduct seem more misguided than villainous. He has no conscious wish to put the children in danger, or any thought of what might happen to them until it is
too late to do anything but rely on Grant to save them.

“The power of the film’s coupling of children and death arises almost solely from Spielberg’s obsessive invocation of it,” Henry Sheehan observed in
Sight
and
Sound.
“… The two most terrifying scenes in the film revolve specifically around the children’s near death at the hands first of a
Tyranno
saurus
rex
and then of the velociraptors. But these encounters also serve to play out the child-murder fantasies of Dr. Grant.” Grant’s first scene in the film shows him sadistically teasing a young boy with a murderous fantasy about velociraptors ripping him apart. When Tim and Lex greet the celebrated paleontologist with hero-worship, Grant’s response is to glower at them and wish they would disappear. He almost gets his wish. “When the
Tyrannosaurus
rex
attacks the kids in their stalled car, [Grant] sits still in his own vehicle for what seems endless moments, watching in horror as his (barely) suppressed murder fantasy is played out in front of him,” noted Sheehan. “When he finally does leap to the rescue of the kids, he has only partially compensated for his evil wish. The film can’t end until he undergoes the exact same scenario, the velociraptor attack, that he outlined at the film’s beginning…. Given the startling effrontery of building a film around such an unspeakable wish, the complaints over
Jurassic
Park’s
lack of ‘story’ and ‘character’ sound a little off the point.”

Spielberg’s decision to change Hammond’s motivation from heartless greed to a childlike love of spectacle helps account for why the character, as critic Peter Wollen observed, “escapes unscathed, presumably because he is too close, in some respects, to Spielberg himself.” The children’s ordeal as they flee from rampaging dinosaurs, and Grant’s gradual acceptance of his adult responsibilities as their fatherly protector, resolve what Sheehan called Spielberg’s “continuing obsession with fathers treading the line between life-giver and life-destroyer.” In the final scene, with his arms around the sleeping children in a helicopter escaping the park, Grant exchanges a silent
acknowledgment with Dr. Ellie Sattler that he finally has become comfortable with his fatherly feelings.

Spielberg’s depiction of the dinosaurs, like his depiction of the Great White Shark in
Jaws,
contains equal parts of fascination and fear. The director’s ambivalence sharpens the suspense by encouraging the audience to admire and even identify with the dinosaurs (as Grant does), while also experiencing the terror of their human prey. The resulting complexity of tone produces the kind of unsettling “attraction/repulsion” ambivalence familiar from Hitchcock films. Spielberg’s lifelong fascination with dinosaurs may stem from the same underlying anxieties as his obsession with irresponsible parents. Crichton theorizes that “children liked dinosaurs because these giant creatures personified the uncontrollable force of looming authority. They were symbolic parents. Fascinating and frightening, like parents. And kids loved them, as they loved their parents.”

It’s fair to criticize Spielberg for failing to make the people in
Jurassic
Park
as three-dimensional as the dinosaurs. While Australian actor Sam Neill fills the role of the brooding Grant in competent but uninspired fashion, Laura Dern is an annoyance as Dr. Sattler, her open-mouthed gaping and general ditziness undercutting her credibility as a paleobotanist. Spielberg’s anxiety about finishing ahead of schedule may have undermined his customary care with performances, allowing the cast (including Jeff Goldblum’s hipster mathematician, Ian Malcolm) to get away with too many affectless, mumbling line readings. Spielberg preferred to spend his budget on special effects rather than on his cast.
||
But the director’s more intense creative rapport with Attenborough and the two children also suggests that the characters played by Neill and Dern simply failed to engage his full emotional involvement.

“Jurassic
Park
packs the thrills of a great entertainment, but it doesn’t resonate like a great movie,” wrote Julie Salamon of
The
Wall
Street
Journal,
who complained that “while the dinosaurs feel real, the humans seem fake.” With few exceptions, such as Henry Sheehan, reviewers tended to be indifferent or actively hostile to the director’s preoccupation with the fatherhood theme. David Ansen of
Newsweek
dismissed it by writing that Grant’s “aversion to children [is] predictably reversed when he must save Hammond’s two movie-brattish grandchildren from becoming the dinosaurs’ hors d’oeuvre.” Georgia Brown of
The
Village
Voice
wrote that
Jurassic
Park
is “too terrifying for tender psyches. Amazingly, it really roughs up its two picture book–perfect child protagonists. After
Hook’s
nauseating tribe of Lost Boys, many will appreciate this new coldness.”