‘They’re not dinosaur movies’: Sam Neill on Jurassic Park’s lasting appeal

“That’s a curiosity, isn’t it?” the acclaimed actor says to me about the durability of Jurassic Park† “We didn’t make a serious art film. We weren’t making The piano.

“It’s popular entertainment. But it’s curious — mind-boggling, in fact — that some things that are pop aren’t disposable. Some of the most memorable, popular music was created to be effectively disposable. But you can’t kill it. It goes on and on. And there’s something left Jurassic Park. I think it was kind of a milestone in cinema because it showed that you could use these huge animatronics in tandem with this brand new CGI thing. You could create worlds, only our imagination would limit it. And what better way to demonstrate that than to bring back creatures that lived 60 million years ago?”

The dinosaurs were real (sort of)

Neill touches on a theory I’ve always had about why watch again Jurassic Park remains so worth it. It was released in 1993 and predates the CGI-heavy action movies of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Those movies now look dated because the visual effects are so retro. But with Jurassic Park Spielberg and his team relied on using real robots to bring the dinosaurs to life. Because they largely shun CGI, the film actually looks more modern in many sequences than films that came years later.

“I think that’s absolutely right. The T. rex is a real one, you have to believe it when there are poor kids trapped in the car and breathing something over the clear sky roof,” Neill says of one of the more terrifying scenes from the film.

“Everything was a bit recognizable, you have the kids next to the dinosaurs. It always seemed like a tangible experience.”

The first movie had a perfect tempo

But according to Neill, it’s not just animatronics. It’s also the pace and sense of discovery that made Jurassic Park so compelling.

“I always think it’s the dark that makes the light. It’s the silence that makes the bang loud. Nothing happens in that first one for about 45 minutes. And then it’s all over. There’s something about Jeff [Goldblum] and I’m in that car, and there’s a glass of water that starts to vibrate. That gives everything a feeling of being terrifying.”

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Jurassic Park isn’t really about dinosaurs, it’s about humans

The relationship between Dr. Grant from Neill, Dr Ellie Satler from Dern and Dr Ian Malcolm from Goldblum, as well as the supporting cast, helped the Jurassic Park to be more than just an action movie with some robot wizardry. According to Neill, those relationships are really what the film is about.

“People call them dinosaur movies,” he says of the franchise. “They’re not really dinosaur movies. They’re people movies, and dinosaurs appear and wreak havoc, but it’s really about the people in the movies. The bad guys and the strong women and all that.”

Of course there are also dinosaurs. And in lordship there are also real ones (animatronic).

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“We had it full of dinosaurs, we had these fantastic dinosaurs, more complex than even the original ones,” Neill describes excitedly. “And we’re not in a green screen world, we’re in a real three-dimensional world with three-dimensional dinosaurs. And it’s much, much easier to work with something three-dimensional than with someone roaring with a tennis ball on a stick. .”

In an age when so much cinema consists of tennis balls on sticks roaring at other tennis balls on sticks, it was refreshing to hear my own reasons for loving Jurassic Park – the intimacy with both dinosaurs and humans – were the result of conscious decisions by those involved. And it’s very exciting to see the willingness to recreate the magic.

Jurassic World Dominion is now in cinemas. Read our review here†