When it comes to truly iconic cinematic moments, Steven Spielberg’s 1993 adaptation of Michael Crichton’s sci-fi novel, Jurassic Park, is over-represented.
From the click-clack of velociraptor claws on a kitchen floor to something as fiendishly simple as ripples in a glass of water, Spielberg’s all-time classic was not only genre-defining, it launched a multimedia franchise worth nearly $15 billion.
English actor Rupert Friend was still in primary school when the original movie hit theatres, and admits those tense raptor scenes had him on the edge of his seat.
“Yeah, definitely, I mean, I remember being scared by most of it, but fun scared,” he laughs over a video call with STM.
Three decades later and the 43-year-old is not just watching actors being chased by dinosaurs any more; he’s become one of them, in the seventh instalment of the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic World Rebirth.
This stand-alone sequel is set five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, in a world where dinosaurs that escaped from a theme park operation now live among us, admittedly with limited success outside the warmer equatorial zones.
The film sees Friend play Martin Krebs, a Big Pharma executive who believes dino DNA could hold the key to curing diseases modern medicine had previously deemed incurable.
There’s just one catch — the DNA samples must be taken from the largest living dinosaurs that swim, fly or roam the Earth.
For the dino-nerds keeping score at home, that’s the mosasaurus, a gigantic 10-tonne aquatic predator; the titanosaurus, a sauropod and the largest dinosaur known to science; and quetzalcoatlus, a fearsome pterosaur with a wingspan as long as a bus.
That’s a big job for a pharmaceutical company employee, so Krebs assembles a crack team, including covert operation specialists Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and Duncan Kincaid (two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali), as well as a handsome young palaeontologist played by Wicked star Jonathan Bailey.
With a script penned by original Jurassic Park writer David Koepp, Friend says Rebirth uses CG creatures to examine a very real issue.
“Is it ever noble to pursue profit at the same time as a cure or a relief for people who are suffering?” the actor wonders.
“And there are plenty of debates on both sides, and I feel like one of the things this film does, apart from being an amazing adventure, is ask that question.
“And I think Krebs, my character, comes down quite hard on one side of the debate.”
It’s a debate that literally plays out on screen as Krebs’ team treks to an abandoned Jurassic World research facility, populated by the aforementioned terrible lizards, as well as genetically engineered freaks that were deemed too weird for the theme park.
As if that doesn’t sound tough enough, the mission is complicated further when a shipwrecked civilian family finds itself along for the ride.
It’s the result of an ill-fated family yacht trip through the dino danger zone, which makes one question the parental qualifications of patriarch Reuben, played by Lincoln Lawyer star Manuel Garcia-Rulfo.
“I know it’s terrible. I cannot defend it. I don’t know what the hell Reuben was thinking, honestly,” Garcia-Rulfo jokes with STM.
Garcia-Rulfo believes director Gareth Edwards’ restraint as a filmmaker effectively re-creates the visceral thrills of Spielberg’s original.
Edwards, who previously gave us the excellent Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, helped his actors get into character by making dinosaur noises on set.
“Gareth did the sounds. He had a microphone and he would do sounds, and he was very good,” Garcia-Rulfo reveals.
Every little bit of realism helps on a production like this, where actors are performing on location and sound stages opposite life-threatening dinosaurs that aren’t actually there.
“Bugger all,” Friend says of what the cast got to look at in a dinosaur action scene.
“We began with literally nothing, and then we kind of said, ‘Look, can we maybe have like a little cross of scotch tape on the wall (to represent a dinosaur)’, and that was reluctantly given.
“And then we asked if there was anything we could do that would give us a sense of scale, and there was some sighing and grumbling and then eventually a tennis ball appeared on a stick, and that was the gold prize we got for good behaviour.”
After gaining international attention and earning an Emmy nomination in 2013 for his work on the hit TV series Homeland, Friend has frequently collaborated with indie king Wes Anderson as he has carefully crafted a resume of work.
With fellow Brit Edwards, he enjoys a relationship based on “mutual mockery”, the director jokes.
“Rupert’s got the best sense of humour . . . he’s such a funny guy, he would basically make my life so much fun on set,” Edwards says.
While directing his good mate was fun, Edwards says another cast member was his favourite.
“I would say the T-rex was probably my favourite because, if you were to get it down to a top 10 greatest scenes in cinema, somewhere in that top 10 will be the T-rex attack in the original Jurassic Park,” the director says.
Having seen the first movie just as he started at film school, when CG effects were still in their infancy, Edwards says the experience “changed everything” for him.
“I ended up buying a computer and learning how to do dinosaurs in my bedroom . . . and now here I am, talking about a Jurassic film that I’ve managed to direct somehow. (It) is incredibly surreal,” he says.
The same could be said of his career thus far, which includes directing franchise entries for Star Wars, Jurassic Park and Godzilla.
“Someone tweeted or put a meme together which said, ‘Gareth Edwards doing Godzilla, Star Wars and Jurassic is the kind of greed they warned us about in the Bible’,” he laughs.
Accordingly, Edwards is used to weighty franchise expectations, and realised the way forward for Rebirth was to look backwards at Spielberg’s accomplishment.
That meant shooting on 35mm film, a rarity in the digital age, with the same anamorphic wide-angle lenses used on Jurassic Park.
“The goal was . . . (to imagine) a film from the early 90s that (the studio) forgot they made, which had been sitting on a shelf for 32 years and they’re gonna finally release it,” Edwards explains.
One big difference, of course, is the science fiction of the original is a lot closer to science fact these days.
“It’s all kind of plausible if we buy the conceit, which actually has already been proven and is happening right now, of DNA extraction and de-extinction,” Friend says.
But, just because science may have the power to resurrect extinct animals — the dire wolf is a recent headline-grabbing example — Friend and Garcia-Rulfo aren’t so sure it should.
“It would be spectacular, it would be amazing, but I don’t think it’s a good idea, because we’ve already messed too much with nature; let’s just let it be,” the Mexican actor says.
“It would be a spectacle that none of us would last particularly long enough to see, if there were T-rexes running around,” Friend adds with a smile.
Jurassic World Rebirth is in cinemas now.