Interviews
[Interview] ‘Jurassic World’ Cast On Spielberg’s Iconic Franchise, and Making a Smart Summer Blockbuster!
Twenty-two years ago, Steven Spielberg gave audiences everywhere the ability to travel through time, and witness, first-hand, what a world with dinosaurs could look like to the tiny human at their side. “Part of what was so amazing about Jurassic Park was until that point, we’d only seen bones in a museum, two-dimensional drawings, and a couple of really weird ’50s films where dinosaurs looked like your elbow” Bryce Dallas Howard comments as she dissects the consistent admiration for these majestic extinct creatures throughout the ages. “So, to get to see them come to life, and to co-exist with human beings, it’s a wish fulfillment in a way”. As she reminisces upon her very first Jurassic Park viewing at the young age of twelve, her bright eyes shimmer with childlike excitement. Although legendary director Ron Howard was initially hesitant to allow his young daughter to watch such a mature film, after seeing it himself, he actually insisted. “I remember this clear as day, my dad said, ‘this is cinema history, you have to see this movie in the theaters”. Despite their youth, even child actors Ty Simpkins and Nick Robinson express very positive feelings toward the 1993 picture. “It just transports you to another world” Robinson utters dreamily about the film that still stands tall in people’s hearts, a whopping two whole years older than the young man asked to fill the archaic shoes with some new blood. Even thirteen year-old Ty Simpkins holds affection for Spielberg’s first venture into ancient territory “I just remember watching the ending where the T-rex is roaring and the poster is falling down, just that really awesome scene”.
[Related Post] Review: Jurassic World Is One Big Thrill Ride Through the Theme Park
Now, in 2015, Spielberg has passed over the torch to Safety Not Guaranteed director Colin Trevorrow,who tries his best to put his own stamp on the monster movie franchise that has become, over the years, larger than life. “It was a huge challenge because we care about these movies so much that he made and for me, to be put in the position where I need to not just make a sequel, but make a new film in the context of Jurassic Park, that is inventive and that is moving forward and is not a fan film”. Despite his own adoration for the series, director Trevorrow understands the temptation to merely replicate what has already been done in the 1993 classic; a common trap that many filmmakers fall into when called upon to add on to a popular franchise. “Worst case scenario here is if you’re accused of just making a carbon copy of Jurassic Park” relates Trevorrow, who worries about settling for a copy of one of his favorite films instead of making his own. Despite the daunting task at hand, and the plethora of eager, worthy filmmakers who would revel at the chance to get behind the camera of a historical Spielberg project, the iconic director handpicked Trevorrow after seeing his first and only feature length film. It may seem odd that Spielberg would opt for such an inexperienced filmmaker when there are so many with much lengthier film resumes, but it feels rather self-explanatory for those have seen the Sundance Film Festival favorite, Safety Not Guaranteed. Although it is not as grand in scale as a Spielberg film, it offers the same sense of wonder and nostalgic awe that many Spielberg films have inspired in the past. As for Spielberg’s involvement, he played an intregal part in the brainstorming process and an objective eye in the cutting room, but had little do with the actual filming itself. “We wrote a screenplay based on three key ideas that he had, that the park is open, there’s a raptor trainer, and there’s a dinosaur that gets loose and threatens everyone in the park” Trevorrow reflects on their collaborative process. “Once we had a script and we were ready to go he really stepped away and let me make the film that I was very confident we could make”. The filmmaking process was actually so fluid and casual for Trevorrow that he found that the movie making process for this giant summer blockbuster was just as, if not more laid back than when he worked on Safety, “the studio was just very supportive and they were thrilled to be able to be making a Jurassic Park movie again”. The humble director may push aside all credit and selflessly list Universal as the key proponent for such a relaxed, positive filming experience, but according to star Bryce Dallas Howard, Trevorrow deserves just as much praise: “Something that he brought to this movie was sort of that mindset that’s required when you’re making a micro budget film, which is just a lot of passion, a lot of efficiency and just the ability to accomplish a lot with kind of a small, intimate crew”. Despite the more lavish complimentary craft tables, director Trevorrow never lost his hunger, or his identity, in the luxury and intimidation of such a massive undertaking.
One of the most crucial updates to Isla Nublar was the park itself; a re-vamped, highly stylized version of the park gates that viewers passed through over two decades ago. John Hammond envisioned a world where man and dinosaur could co-exist in the same lifespan; the enormous, mythical reminder of a simpler time when the earth remained untainted, and the young, cynical man who cries out for a reminder of such uncomplicated joy, brought together by questionable, albeit hopeful, forces. Thanks to men like Masrani and Dr. Henry Wu, that dream has become a reality. When child genius Gray (Simpkins) enters the park for the first time, the dazed, euphoric look on his face is one that is shared by every member of the audience reflecting back at him. The mosasaurus splashes audience members as it lays down its massive body upon the water’s surface at an attraction on the other side of the island, triumphantly seizing its prey, a full-sized shark that appears as a lego in comparison, in its teeth-riddled, bloody jaws. On a much dryer section of land, kids roam about in translucent balls powered by motors known as “Gryospheres”, weaving in and out of legs as thick as tree stumps, holding up the Brontosaurus, the gentle giants of the dinosaur kingdom who are much more interested in eating leaves from the tops of trees than hurting any of the tiny humans that race across the lawn below. The dream for a safe haven filled with dinosaurs has become so successful, in fact, that these once extinct reptiles have become commonplace, and the park which once thrived now must seek out ways to bring attendance back up, and ensure the future of Jurassic World.
One of the most appealing aspects of the new and improved park is its basis in reality. Many of the attractions and immersive experiences in the film feel like they could actually happen in this current age. “I didn’t want to create a futuristic unbelievable theme park of the future, we wanted to create a theme park of today” urges director Trevorrow. Of course, this angle is admirable, but how does one actually fathom a dinosaur theme park that is rooted in reality? Trevorrow visited several established, up-and-running amusement parks, like Universal Studios and Disney World, and found inspiration in an unlikely place: the control room. “I was actually surprised at how simple the set ups were” confesses the director noting that despite their grand outer appearance, behind the scenes, they were no more than “three guys with a Pepsi just sitting here watching a thirteen inch monitor”, which influenced an interesting choice for the control room of Jurassic World, when the crew decided to make their control room practical. “All of our video is really playing live when we shot it” points out Trevorrow, who admits that they might have “tricked out” the room for the film, but insists that most of the attractions the film were invented from a logical standpoint.
At the head of the operation is Bryce Dallas Howard, an executive who resides over the park and is responsible for more than twenty thousand lives on a daily basis. According to Howard, her character Claire, “projects this sense of power and authority, but in truth, she’s super disconnected from herself”. Always putting her career before her own more maternal and romantic desires, Claire always chooses businesses over pleasure. “In her quest for profit, she’s disconnected from her own humanity” explains Howard, “and I thought it was so interesting to meet a character like that, and then to have that person….evolve into an individual who redeems themselves, and who is ultimately heroic”. When the brand new, spliced together mega T-rex, called the “Indominus” rex, a name that illustrates its inability to be controlled, breaks out of her cage and starts heading towards thousands of unarmed tourists, Claire is forced to call on the last man she’d ever want to ask for help — ex Navy man turned satirical loner raptor trainer Owen. Owen, played by charming and usually funny Chris Pratt, is a much more serious role for the man who has made a living out of making people laugh. “It was a bit of darkness,” Pratt comments about his character, “Like, this is a guy who’s been through something….the likelihood is, in the years that he’s been working for the park, this isn’t his first set of raptors, and some of his raptors didn’t make it through the training.” Pratt muses that his character Owen feels not only the experience of combat weighing heavy on his shoulders, but the guilt over costing lives in his newfound profession nagging at his insides. “A lot of these animals paid the sacrifice for the work that I’m doing for this company, so you know, that’s pretty serious. There’s not a lot of room for goofing around when you’re playing that guy who’s been chosen to move away from the world and live on the dark side of an island”.
Naive brothers Gray and Zach deal with some sadness as well, as the fate of their parents’ inevitable separation looms over their light-hearted trip like a dark cloud on the horizon; anxiously awaiting its moment to burst and shatter any sense of hope for a happy family. Perhaps it is this sense of dread that unites this motley crew, as Claire enlists Owen’s aid in finding her lost nephews after they take off during the great Indominus rex’s prison break. Upon the hybrid dinosaur’s escape, Claire is filled with panic and surprise, as are all of her coworkers watching helplessly from the control room. It seems that Owen is the only one that might have foreseen this terrifying event coming from afar, if only he had been alerted to the animal’s presence earlier on in the story.”It’s a little bit about our relationship with animals, and how we cage them,” explains director Trevorrow on the commentary of the price of captivity,”When something grows up without a mother, and without siblings, thinking that the crane means food, you know, all the things that Pratt points out, that can lead to a very unhappy and potentially homicidal animals, and eventually, that’s what happens.” With several themes intertwined together in this surprisingly thorough film about a bunch of dinosaurs, such as the consequences of constant instant gratification, and the overstimulation encouraged by technological advancements, and the horrors of playing god, Trevorrow highlighted the two main messages that he deemed the most important: “The thirst for profit is a dehumanizing force” and that “dinosaurs remind us of how small we are”. Although he makes sure to point out that this self-aware blockbuster is not a preachy, anti-corporate media through which he wishes to display all of his lessons about life, Trevorrow does have a film on his hands that stands apart from previous summer hits just because of its deeper, more meaningful commentaries about the world within the celluloid.
Of all the places to find a coven of witches, the attic above a Christian youth camp is probably the last place you’d think to look. But that’s just what we find in Camp, a surrealist nightmare of feminist empowerment from Canadian filmmaker Avalon Fast.
Emily (Zola Grimmer) is still reckoning with her involvement in a horrific tragedy when she accidentally contributes to the death of her best friend, Charlie (Giselle Morison). Unable to move on, the traumatized teen takes a job at a rural summer camp, hoping to forget her own sorrows by looking after at-risk kids. She quickly connects with a counselor named Clara (Alice Wordsworth) and finds comfort in her close-knit group of female friends. But a mysterious whisper from deep in the woods warns that they may be leading her down a darker path.
Fast burst onto the scene in 2022 with Honeycomb, a psychological horror film that follows a burgeoning matriarchy. Known for their focus on “Girl Horror” stories, the talented young filmmaker tackles similar themes in Camp as Emily leaves the modern world behind to embrace a dark vision of self-discovery through magic.
Ahead of the film’s U.S. release on June 26, Bloody Disgusting sat down with Fast to chat about the nebulous nature of good vs. evil and the intoxicating power of female-driven horror.
Bloody Disgusting: What inspired this unique story? Did you go to religious summer camps when you were young?
Avalon Fast: I did. I went to lots of different summer camps, but all of them were primarily Bible camps. The memory I have of camp is kind of strange. I was very homesick as a kid, and I didn’t necessarily enjoy all my time there. I definitely remember meeting some interesting girls at camp and having that presence of religion hovering around the whole experience.
BD: I really love the film’s gorgeous natural setting. Camp is the kind of surrealist nightmare that you don’t just watch. You feel it too. How did you approach creating this world?
AF: Well, a huge part of it was working with my cinematographer Eily Sprungman, who’s a very close friend. We spent years prepping, shot listing, storyboarding, and mood boarding. She’d had a similar experience to mine. We grew up around the same place, and so we understood each other’s visions from the get-go. But there are so many other pieces that came together. The costuming, the art, and the animated sequences were done by Sofiya Iurkevych. One of our producers, Taylor Nodrick, was obsessed with shooting on Super 8 film. I’ve always wanted to as well, so all the memory sequences were shot on Super 8. It was just a lot of people with an understanding and a vision for what this project was. I’m really happy with the way it turned out.
To the extent that you’re comfortable sharing, what’s your relationship to witchcraft, and what does Camp have to say about modern witches?
Well, that’s the question of Camp. It’s not that I don’t resonate with any of these things, but I specifically wanted Camp to be a little bit ambiguous around what witchcraft looks like. Is this witchcraft? Are these girls witches? Emily explicitly asks if that’s what’s happening here, and the answer isn’t yes. The film isn’t going to answer that question for you. My relationship to magic and witchcraft? It’s tough. I feel like there’s so much magic, connection, and spirituality that comes from these friendships, the closeness of these women, and what’s happening around them. A lot of what Camp is trying to say or show is just that magic can come out of friendship.
I loved watching these female friendships develop. And you’re right. No one ever says the word “coven,” but you can feel that connection, and you can see a change in Emily as those relationships grow. I’m also really fascinated with the way Camp plays with the idea of good and evil. At one point, Clara says, “Maybe God drew us to the devil,” which stopped me in my tracks. How do you view witchcraft or the magic these girls are experiencing in regard to good and evil?
That was such a huge part of the script’s construction. The story is really trying to keep a balance between those two things. I like asking people if they think these girls are good or bad, because I feel like a lot of people come out of the film thinking one or the other. They’ll say things like “thank God Emily found her people” or “God, I really wish she’d gone home.” I just don’t think there’s ever an answer. I wanted to explore the idea of going down the wrong path, especially coming out of grief. What makes you a bad person, and does healing mean you’re looking to become a better person? I don’t have an answer, but I do feel like that’s a huge part of what Camp is asking. What is good? What is bad? Why did God bring me to the devil?
Yes, because this is all happening at “God camp” in Emily’s words. So how can both of those things exist at the same time? Along those lines, I’m also fascinated by the voice Emily hears in the woods. Without spoiling too much, what is this voice asking, and what is required in return?
Emily comes to camp with a shout into the void, asking can anyone hear me? Does anyone want to? And it’s answered so clearly by these girls, specifically responding only with love, care, support, and trust. It’s like her prayers were answered. It doesn’t mean that everything is going to be alright, but Emily is looking for peace. She’s looking for a moment where she feels pure good. And I think, even at its surface level, she does get that experience.
Personally, I don’t really think people are good or bad. I think we all exist somewhere in the middle. Camp centers traditionally villainized characters, but that’s where Emily seems to find her peace, however you choose to define it.
I also wanted to show the experience of having decided that you are a bad person, you’ve made mistakes, and you feel cursed. Then when you meet other people who have done things that you would consider worse, you can actually feel good in their presence. You feel like less of a bad person. I think that’s a huge part of the story as well. Emily’s finding her version of other fucked up people, and she feels less fucked up around them. I’ve found that in my own life. It’s a cool thing. I don’t think it’s bad.
I don’t think it’s bad either. It’s finding your home, your people. We meet Emily in the aftermath of unthinkable trauma. Is this a story about mental health and healing?
Witnessing it myself. witnessing other people experience tragedy and then move through grief, you hear a lot of talk about healing or coming out the other side. There’s so much conversation around what that looks like, with self-care and showing up for yourself. I always felt really averse to it. It annoyed me. I think the beginning of the film speaks to that. The therapeutic version of what getting help looks like is obviously very different from what Camp is showing. And again, I don’t have an answer for what you’re supposed to do. But I think that’s another question I was asking: how do you heal? Do you heal at all? Is that the end goal, or are we just trying to get better? It’s something I experienced in my own grief. And the answer, for me, at least now, is just that I’m not looking to get better. So I felt like I hadn’t. I found it hard to find people to have those conversations with. And I think that’s what I ultimately wanted to make a film about.
I love that unanswered question. In my own experience, I’ve had to reframe what healing actually looks like. There’s not really an endpoint. It’s just finding a way to keep going. There’s also an element of sacrifice in this story, particularly regarding another counselor named Jo (Sophie Bawks-Smith). What role does she play in Emily’s journey?
For me, Jo is this human embodiment of Charlie, Emily’s friend. As Jo, she had a life at this camp before meeting Emily, and then was kind of taken over by Charlie’s spirit. I think a lot of people view Emily’s final choice as horrendous and tragic. In a way it is, but for me, if Jo becomes her angel, it’s almost like a self-sacrifice. Jo knows that by sacrificing herself, she’ll be giving Emily power to move forward. In the original script, the girls were supposed to bring out another counselor, JB (Aidan Laudersmith), and burn his body. But I just thought, there’s no way sacrificing this guy could give the girls enough power. There’s just no way, right? Logically, that just didn’t line up for me.
I’m glad you mentioned JB, because he has his own tragic arc. How do men factor into the world of Camp?
The way men factor into my world is so bizarre. I have such little respect for them in my films, which is something I’ve been called on. I think I have to challenge myself in the future to make a movie about a boy because, these boys … It’s not that the men in my films aren’t redeemable, but there’s no depth to these characters. They’re just treated with such disrespect. I don’t know why I do that, actually. That’s something for me to look into. It was the same with Honeycomb. They’re just such peripheral characters. I’ve had people ask about Kayne (Henri Gillespi), the scary guy at the fire, what happens to him? I just think, I don’t know. I don’t care. That’s not the point of the story.
Well, I can say after a lifetime of watching women on the periphery of the story, the course correction feels nice. In a similar vein, I’m in love with your homepage, avalonfast.com. There’s an image of girls on a film set and then a still from Honeycomb in which a blood-covered girl is screaming at the sky. And in the middle, it just says Girl Horror. It’s a really powerful statement that gives me chills. How do you define Girl Horror, and what draws you to these types of stories?
I was obsessed with the term when I started making my movies. It was something I’d come up with to kind of brand myself and describe what I was doing. Then I went through a period where I felt like it was a bit gender exclusive and didn’t interest me as much. But now I’ve come full circle on the term. I think it’s a bit of a commentary on youth and the horror of growing up female. But I think everybody can relate to that experience. I don’t want it to feel like this exclusive thing, that I make movies exclusively for girls, because I don’t think I do. I’m interested in exploring what Girl Horror means. Originally, it was just a title, something I came up with, and now it’s become something that resonates with people. You said it gave you chills. That’s cool for me to hear because there’s obviously some depth there.
Are you working on anything new?
Yes. I am actually making a movie about a boy. That’s the next thing.
That’s exciting! The more I think about feminism, the more I end up coming back to men and boys, because they have a place in the world of Girl Horror too.
Absolutely. It’s all just part of being human.
You must be logged in to post a comment.