Jurassic World Rebirth filmmaker Gareth Edwards has revealed the advice he received from Jurassic Park director Steven Spielberg.
Spielberg, whose films also include Jaws and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time.
He directed the blockbuster 1993 adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel about an ill-fated dinosaur theme park as well as 1997 sequel The Lost World, and continues to produce the long-running franchise.
Edwards made his name with the 2010 indie film Monsters before going on to helm 2014’s Godzilla and 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
Speaking to SyFy, he described the process of waiting for notes from Spielberg as “nerve wracking”.
Asked whether the film legend had offered any specific advice, Edwards recalled: “He said, ‘Making a film for the cinema, it’s like being a chef and making a meal. The only difference is that when you’re a chef for the cinema, the audience has to leave hungry. If they leave full, you’ve kind of failed.’”
Edwards said that although the words of wisdom at first felt counterintuitive, he realized they made sense.
“It was an interesting thing, because it goes against your instincts,” he said.
“You’re trying to please the audience and make them happy. And the audience — especially in a test screening — they’ll tell you what they want to be happier. But it’s not about that. It’s about creating anticipation and surprise and, in a weird way, having them leave and want to go back and watch it again.
“Obviously, that’s where you have the big success like he has. And so I really took that to heart. It was super interesting. And it’s that piece of advice where, the second you hear it, you go, ‘Oh, of course!’ Retrospectively, it’s obvious. But I’d never really thought about it like that. And so yeah, that was super useful.”
Jurassic World Rebirth has been praised by critics. In a four-star review, The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey wrote that the film succeeds by returning to what made Spielberg’s original film so successful.
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“Jurassic Park is, at its heart, merely a different brand of slasher film, where the killer has been previously extinct for 65 million years,” observed Loughrey.
“And slasher sequels have a tendency to just restock the fridge of victims and carry on as usual. Rebirth pretty much does just that. It’s exactly where we should be – back to basics, with a boat full of broad but fun archetypes sailing up to a dinosaur-infested island, and then systematically being chomped on.”
