Original subtitles

In an ancient time...

...where dinosaurs roamed...

...awkwardly,

and special effects looked, well, pretty good.

You just can't make nine tons of hydraulics run.

A team of moviemaking titans...

Spielberg was immediately excited about it.

...worked out how to open a door to a prehistoric future...

And it looked really good.

...that's now the opposite of extinct.

This technology in ten years is gonna be awesome.

That ancient time was...

The early 1990s, of course. And that movie...

Jurassic Park.

But Jurassic Park made waves far bigger than these tiny ones.

It's vodka.

Completely upended the way movies were made to this day.

It makes me feel extinct.

But creating this billion-dollar movie...

This is going to be amazing.

...was far from a walk in the...

He broke his drawing arm.

In fact, this years-long quest...

It's an idea he had had since 1981.

...would take bravery...

Everyone was afraid.

It was termed as being impossible. No.

...ingenuity...

How're you gonna do this? We didn't know how we'd do this.

...bad weather...

Stephen said, "Get the camera. We're gonna shoot."

...and bad boys.

I was suspended three times from ILM.

I still include it on my resume.

It's time to lace up your boots...

These boots were made for kicking dinosaurs.

...arm yourselves...

...and...

Hold onto your butts. ...crunch some numbers.

It's a simple equation. Steven Spielberg... plus dinosaurs.

Bit of a no-brainer.

These are The Movies That Made Us.

Just around the bay from San Francisco lies the city of San Rafael,

built around a historic Spanish mission.

But in the early 1990s, this town was home to another historic mission,

a secret mission, one that would require the utmost discretion

from its operatives, so as not to blow their cover.

Well, maybe those operatives were less secret agent

and more disruptors.

And this guy right here, he disrupted a lot,

as in, the entire future of cinema.

But first, we probably need to start talking about dinosaurs,

because let's be honest, everyone loves talking about dinosaurs.

There's something essential about these sort of quasi-mythical creatures.

And if pop culture has proven anything...

Not the Mama!

...it's that...

People love dinosaurs.

Oh, well, hi, there. Well, most dinosaurs, anyway.

Having long since gone out with a bang, the mysterious allure

of these small-armed, big-legged behemoths only lives large in our imaginations.

However, what if science could cast dinosaurs in nature's ultimate sequel

and once again, real dinosaurs could walk the Earth?

Like in a kind of... Jurassic Park.

Yes, a Jurassic Park.

Jurassic Park, a cautionary tale of what happens when man plays God.

Spoiler, it's nothing good. But in this case, that man...

Kids! ...is a cuddly entrepreneur...

Spared no expense.

...who, after genetically engineering real dinosaurs,

does what anyone would do. What's that?

Build a theme park on an island in the middle of nowhere...

We're gonna make a fortune with this place.

...flies in two paleontologists for an endorsement...

Why would they care what we think? ...along with an observant chaos theorist...

That is one big pile of shit.

...oh and his grandkids, for the desserts.

But when a storm strikes, the dinos get loose...

...damage cars,

and toilets, leaving these guys...

After careful consideration, I've decided not to endorse your park.

...to flee for their lives. So have I.

The end.

But the beginning of this story takes place eons ago

in the prehistoric era scientists refer to as...

...the early 1980s,

when the scientific developments of a brave, new world

began flustering novelist and screenwriter Michael Crichton.

Crichton was actually quite bothered

by what he saw as the commercialization of genetic engineering.

He saw that it could go very badly.

Having written The Andromeda Strain

and the original Westworld...

It all broke down! The machines went crazy!

...stories of science going badly for humanity

were kind of Crichton's thing.

He'd written a screenplay about a genetically engineered dinosaur

and then kind of wasn't that happy with the screenplay, so he put it aside.

But the idea kept coming back to him, and so he picked it up again in 1989.

But picking things up for Crichton wasn't so easy.

He did have his hands full with lots of other projects.

Crichton had written a screenplay called Emergency Room.

Which he was developing with Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment.

And while the idea flatlined on the way to the big screen,

some years later, they'd be able to revive it...

...for the small one.

Emergency Room, the screenplay, actually became the TV show ER.

So Spielberg focused on breathing life

into Crichton's next project, whatever it may be.

Spielberg happened to ask him... What are you doing in the world of books?

He said, "I'm writing this thing about dinosaurs and DNA."

And Spielberg said, "I'm a dinosaur nut. I would love to read that."

And so, this self-avowed nut

cracked into Crichton's prehistoric page-turner.

Spielberg was immediately excited about it

and said, "This is gonna be a very hot property in Hollywood."

And inevitably, a studio stampede ensued

as every major in town rushed after the book's rights

before it even hit shelves.

But for Crichton, there was only one man he trusted not to "rex" it.

He felt like Spielberg had the clout and the experience,

that he had the best shot at getting it made.

Crichton's novel in the hands of the mighty Spielberg?

Well, it's enough to leave mouths agape and minds blown.

That's disgusting. That's why he wanted him to do it.

Him and everyone else, including Universal, who was so confident

in Steven's magical touch that they hired two writers...

Oh, there's one!

...to turn this soon-to-be book-inspired movie back into a book...

The Making of Jurassic Park.

...granting Jody exclusive access to, well, there wasn't much to access yet.

When we first came on, the only people on the film were basically Spielberg

and the producers and the art department.

My name is Rick Carter. I was a production designer on Jurassic Park.

So Rick gave a bell to art director John Bell.

I designed a lot of the things that were destroyed in the movie.

Before all those destructive frivolities,

they had one massive T. rex-sized question.

What's aJurassic Park? Oh, bigger than that.

We didn't know how we were gonna do the dinosaurs.

So, how do you make a prehistoric beast

that no human has ever seen?

The dinosaurs had to look realistic. That's the whole bent of the movie.

You can't come in with Barney. Certainly not. Instead...

Spielberg really wanted to have robotics for most of the dinosaurs.

Which was a very tall order. Yes, and nothing to sneeze at either.

He thought it might be possible because he'd seen the King Kong attraction

at Universal Studios theme park.

It moves with wonderful smoothness.

You can see muscle tone under the fur, and I was very impressed with that.

He thought, well, if they can do that,

maybe they're at a point where they can do mechanical dinosaurs that would work.

Which would take a lot of work, which is why

Spielberg handed the job to Stan Winston and his team,

the legends behind some of the most iconic creatures in movie history.

He had seen what we did with Aliens and he felt like

we could do a big, organic creature.

Actually, more like seven big, organic creatures that could eat,

run, pounce, and excrete various things.

The question was broached. Well, how are you gonna do this?

Yes, Stan Winston, how indeed?

Stan famously said, "I don't know, but I will."

Well, we'll see about that. I don't think so.

While the idea of a nine-ton hydraulic dinosaur

is impressively ambitious, the fact remains...

You just can't make nine tons of hydraulics run.

That, of course, was just my wishful thinking.

At the limits of what animatronics could achieve,

Spielberg was forced to reassess his strategy.

These animatronic pieces are only suitable for more limited shots.

Like close-ups? Yeah.

And so, for the wide shots... For wide shots, they'd use stop-motion.

For that, they would use Phil Tippett, the industry's foremost...

Model-maker, stop-motion animator.

...and not only did... Sculptor.

...not only... Visual effects supervisor.

Sorry. After... Go on. Director, producer.

You finished? Good. That's pretty much it.

And not only did this multi-hyphenate model manipulator

have a hand in many of the '80s most memorable stop-motion sequences,

he also just happened to be a lifelong dinophile.

I was mesmerized by them.

Mesmerized and eventually motivated

to make these Jurassic Park animatics.

It's making the movie before the movie is made,

just to get some sense of the timing of the shots, the choreography.

While Phil's stop-motion animatics were obviously very good,

for many at the time, stop-motion itself was a bit of a non-starter.

Stop-motion is jerky 'cause it's at the time of frame. There's no motion blur.

Motion blur? Motion blur.

Motion blur. Yeah.

Let's clear that up. When something moves quickly,

like the arm of an actor, the motion is captured on film,

and it looks a little blurry.

When you do stop-motion, each frame is clean.

And as an audience, you may not say,

"There's no motion blur in that." You may just say, "Oh, that looks phony."

Phil wasn't phoning it in. No.

He'd long been blurring the lines between good stop-motion

and bad stop-motion.

But it wasn't 100%. It was still jerky.

Well into preproduction, Spielberg was tired of being jerked around

and was probably on the verge

of becoming rude.

No. No, not that rude. That's very inappropriate.

My name is Steve Williams, known in the films as Steve "Spaz" Williams.

In the films, there's no one quite like Steve "Spaz" Williams.

I was just an engineer and animator figuring this crap out.

Steve and his partner Mark Dippé worked

for George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic,

the visual effects house hired to digitally add motion blur

to Phil Tippett's stop-motion animations.

Its legs are here, then they're there, then they're there,

and then we added the blur, and it actually looked really good.

But these computing compadres weren't quite satisfied

with just blurring motion, even though the motion they blurred...

It looked really good.

What they really wanted was to go full John Hammond...

Creation is an act of sheer will.

...and use science to create a monster. Well, computer science, anyway.

Mark and I say, "Why don't we just build the creatures in computer graphics?"

Computer graphics can do things that stop-motion can't do

that will allow the story to be told better.

But hang on. This was 1991.

Computer graphics technology wasn't ready to make that leap.

Or was it? No.

No. Well, at least that's what most people thought.

No, to me, means yes, right? And I was told no all the time.

Nobody really believed yet, or let's say everyone was afraid.

Here's an opportunity to actually build a living, breathing creature,

but it was termed as being "impossible."

And I especially knew I was right when they said it was impossible.

Steve and Mark had grown quite accustomed to creating the impossible

out of thin air, or another element for that matter.

In The Abyss, it was a tube of water that was a living force.

But they really turned heads a few years later

with this far less benevolent blob.

So, they felt pretty confident they could create a dinosaur.

Mark had the same attitude I did. Anything visually was possible.

And Muren did not have that attitude. He fought with me all the time.

That would be Dennis Muren,

visual effects supervisor, AKA Steve and Mark's boss.

And he was quick to burst their bubble.

He told me to my face,

"You do not bother trying to build a T. rex."

"Phil Tippett's doing it. You know, you're committing suicide."

Yeah, you don't wanna mess with Phil.

And so, Steve heeded his boss's advice and backed off.

You backed off, yeah, Steve? Yeah.

Good. With that settled, Stan Winston and his team,

the ones doing the big animatronics dinosaurs,

were facing their own potential suicide.

The big hydraulic T. rex was a huge, huge undertaking.

In fact, it was so huge... We had to raise the roof in Stan's shop

to actually make it fit in there. It took nine artists,

sixteen weeks of sculpting, and three tons of clay.

That was just one dinosaur's worth!

T. rex, velociraptor, The Spitter, a dying triceratops...

Those all came from the Stan Winston studio.

With dinosaurs hatching left and right,

it was now time for John Bell to ask his question.

What's a Jurassic Park?

Production designer Rick Carter said...

"Just give me your take on it." So, John Bell did.

He was such a good designer of how you would want it to be

if you were a kid, colorful and attractive, and yet,

something that a real dinosaur could trash.

And when it came to designing the main gate...

I start thinking about the main entrance to Disneyland.

Yes, of course! The happiest place on Earth.

Steven goes, "Wait a minute! Wait, wait wait."

"I really like that gate from King Kong, 1933."

What's on the other side of that wall?

He goes, "I want something tall like this."

I put some flame elements on there, I put the Jurassic logo on the top of it,

and he goes, "Yeah, that's it! K, take it to construction. We're gonna build it."

What have they got in there? King Kong?

Meanwhile, back at ILM, after the tongue lashing

from his boss Dennis Muren,

Steve Williams had retired back to his workstation, tail between his legs.

I started building the bones of a T. rex secretly.

Oh, did you? Fuck it.

We got in a lot of trouble in here.

I was suspended three times from ILM for my shenanigans.

I still include it on my resume.

So this overqualified merchant of shenanigans got to work

tackling a technical feat never before undertaken

in the history of cinema.

I started building the bones flat, orthogonally.

Right. Right? Once you build them orthogonally,

it is a three-dimensional set of data.

Okay. Then...

Look, he knows what he's talking about.

However, unlike the then-beardless dinophile, Phil Tippett...

Yeah. I'm a big fan.

I was not a fan of dinosaurs. I was a fan of engines.

And there was no manual for prehistoric body mechanics.

I didn't know how a T. rex walked, and so it took me about four, five months

to animate just that initial walk cycle.

That would be this walk cycle.

Ladies and gentlemen, introducing the first-ever digital dinosaur.

Behold, Computer-saurus Rex.

For now, it's just the bones. But the idea was, "Look what we can do!"

But now, deep into preproduction,

Phil and his team were well past the bones stage.

We had set up a crew, we had hired people,

you know, we had, moving people in from different parts of the country.

We're really gonna be having a chance to advance the craft of stop-motion.

With overwhelming enthusiasm,

clearly the stop-motion dinosaurs were neither starting nor stopping.

Throwing this into the mix would surely screw things up.

We're not trying to make things get all screwed up.

Yeah.

We wanna show people we can do this,

even if we just a little part, we don't mind.

It became clear that the best way to make their case

was to let Computer-saurus Rex speak for itself.

So, Steve chose his target and cooked up a plan

that would make any prehistoric predator proud.

Clever girl.

I ambushed them.

No one knew this was gonna happen. I just did it,

because I knew I wasn't gonna be allowed to show it.

The plan? Ambush Jurassic Park producer Kathleen Kennedy

during a routine screening at ILM.

What we did is there's a viewing room and we were gonna show Kathy

something else. I think it was a motion blur test.

I had the monitor positioned to the door.

There's a walk cycle of the T. rex playing on it.

Kathleen Kennedy and the entourage walk in. Dennis Muren is with them.

The first thing they saw was the monitor. "What was that?"

That's how I got 'em, and Kathleen Kennedy says, "What is that?"

Dennis says, "That's something the guys have been working on." He went with it.

She just looks at it, and everyone looks around, and she pats me on the back

and she goes, "You have a very bright future."

Verbatim.

Computer-saurus Rex was a hit.

But for Dennis Muren, it felt more like a hit job on his authority.

Dennis was not very happy when I did that. He was silent.

You know, I knew I was committing, in his words, "political suicide,"

but I did it anyways. I didn't care. I knew I was right.

You should still apologize. Sorry.

What a character. Now speaking of characters,

it was now time to start casting the human characters.

And on this front...

Steven knew exactly who he wanted to play each part.

It was just a matter of availability and making it work.

And of course, if they actually wanted to do it, right?

No. Who's gonna say no to the Maestro?

We'll see. No.

Okay. How about when Spielberg said he wanted Sir Richard Attenborough?

I introduced myself on the phone, he said, "My name is Dicky."

I said, "I'm calling about a film Steven Spielberg is going to do

called Jurassic Park." "I'm in!"

All right, Maestro. One-nil.

Okay, who's the jerk? For the role of Ellie Sattler...

It's an illusion. Spielberg wanted Laura Dern.

"I'm in!"

For the other leading lady, Steven loudly demanded...

Someone who could scream.

Ariana Richards screamed bloody murder for, like, three minutes.

Spielberg heard that and said, "I haven't heard screams like that

since Fay Wray was undone by King Kong."

For everyone's favorite mathematician...

We're sorry...

Chaotician. Chaotician.

Chaotician, all right. For him, Spielberg wanted Jeff Goldblum.

You know, he had that nerdy, really smart quality

but was also able to deliver...

An essence of raw animal magnetism?

The humor.

Yes, the humor. Think they'll have that on the tour?

And with that, there was just one more phone call to make.

Is that my phone dinging? No, that's your phone dinging.

Not my phone, mate. Definitely yours.

Sure? Pretty sure.

My agent called me and said, "Steven Spielberg would like to meet you

about a film he's doing. It's got dinosaurs in it."

Weighing up his options...

Well, Steven Spielberg plus dinosaurs.

Bit of a no-brainer.

For this New Zealander, possibly a no-go.

He wanted an American accent for it,

and I don't particularly like doing American accents.

But really, in any accent... Are you gonna say no to a Spielberg film?

No.

I don't think so. I just...

And it's got dinosaurs.

Well, it will have.

Because up until now, they were still mucking about with dinosaur bones.

People were really starting to wonder... What's the T. rex gonna look like?

Amblin gave us the seed money

to secretly build the skin version of the T. rex.

And so, after about four, five months, we had something.

I built all the data, then I had the first walking, fully-fleshed T. rex.

So once again... What's the T. rex gonna look like?

It looked real. It looked great.

So Dennis went down with a film to Universal.

That was shown with Lucas and Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall.

It's about a five, four-second shot.

The test comes up.

The walking Rex in a field, comes walking,

camera right to left.

Everybody freaks out. Everyone freaks out.

Stan Winston runs out of the theater, starts making frantic phone calls.

Things go crazy. Steven just explodes. You know, he can't contain himself.

It's so exciting to him because it just changes everything.

You did it. You crazy son of a bitch, you did it.

Lucas is alleged to have cried. Alleged. I wasn't there. I wasn't invited.

Even though it was my Rex. Don't make this awkward.

And everything changed.

Wiping away the tears, Spielberg could see the light.

I actually said, "Well, that's the future. That's the way it's gonna be from now on."

It was so exciting, that we just decided to roll with it.

And Steven said, "That's it. We're gonna use that."

W ith every thunderous,

computer-generated stomp, the fate of stop-motion animation

was one step closer...

...to irrelevancy, and for Phil Tippett more than anyone.

That's when everything changed.

It was very emotional for me. I was really sick.

He went away, I think, for, it was ten days.

I don't think anybody heard from him for ten days.

I got pneumonia and had to stay in bed.

And being told you and your work will no longer be needed

by none other than the Maestro himself...

That's the way it's gonna be from now on.

...hit Phil hardest of all.

He asked me then, you know, "How does that make you feel?"

So, what are you thinking?

And I said, "You know, it's just... It makes me feel extinct."

He goes, "That's a great line. I'm putting that in the movie."

We're out of a job.

Don't you mean "extinct"?

It was a huge deal. I mean, Phil was our... our dinosaur guy,

and now his way of creating the dinosaurs had become extinct.

I hate computers.

He really thought, "Man, these computer nerds, fucking...

They can't do art with a mouse."

I-I couldn't see past my own ego.

But don't worry. Just like the dinosaurs, Phil would be back.

And then Dennis, he started working out a way that he could be the one

to influence how the dinosaurs moved in the digital realm.

So while Phil contemplated evolution as opposed to extinction,

production contemplated location, and not just any location.

An island, off the coast of Costa Rica.

So of course... They considered Costa Rica.

But then they asked the obvious question.

Why not Hawaii? Yeah! Why not Hawaii?

It had very comfortable hotels,

wonderful weather. Most of the time.

We were the epitome of Hawaiian tourists.

Except that we also were gonna have the fun of making a dinosaur movie.

Fortunately, Hawaii was quite good for that, too,

'cause it was chock-full of exotic filming locations

where they could build the set.

We had to get the visitors' center, the raptor pen, the jungle sequences.

And when they finished... Actually, we would not finish sets.

Not finish sets?

Because of time and budget. And let's be honest, luaus.

But relax. It's Hawaii!

Rick and Steven decided we're gonna make the visitor center incomplete.

We spared no expense. We'll have all this scaffolding.

That wasn't part of the script, but it was a way to save significant money.

Don't get cheap, Dodgson.

And with a sufficient amount of money shaved off the bottom line,

Jurassic Park's principal photography was ready to commence in August of 1992.

And action!

Day one is always a very nerve-racking day.

Especially for American-accented

New Zealander, Sam Neill.

Steven comes up to me halfway through that day one and said,

"You know, Sam, that American accent that you're doing..."

I guess that means the power's off.

"Why don't we forget it? Just do your own voice."

I said, "Steven, that's great. I will. That's terrific. Thank you."

So here's Sam Neill...

...faking being electrocuted in a real New Zealand accent.

That's not funny.

Then on day three, he came to me and said, "That voice you're using?"

I said, "Yeah, my voice. Yeah." He said, "Can we sort of go halfway?"

I said, "Oh, okay."

So I've had 30 years of people going,

"Sam Neill's American accent isn't very good."

So with Dr. Grant finding his voice,

it was also time for him to find his first dinosaur.

The first dinosaur we really saw was the triceratops.

It was Steven's first day to see it. Of course, that's a big deal.

To Steven, it was incredibly important that all the dinosaurs look real.

He was in luck.

'Cause Stan Winston and his team were really good at that.

To give it life, Stan Winston dug a pit

so that the puppeteers could go underneath.

You go round the back of this creature, and there are several nerds, you know,

doing controlly, puppetty things inside.

Push on poles for breathing, and the eye would blink.

It was amazingly effective. You didn't wanna, like, get too close.

And it was about then they realized...

Holy shit! This is going to be amazing.

Shooting the Triceratops first lined up pretty well with the story, too.

Everybody stay here.

It's the first close-up of a dinosaur any of our characters get to meet.

That thing was breathing and living. When you touched it, you thought,

"This is a real creature."

And for these actors, they could ask for no better motivation.

Because the Triceratops was so real,

it lent that reality to the actors.

It's something that the actors can touch and feel and react to,

because acting is reacting.

And this Triceratops wasn't just the first dinosaur

they'd see in Hawaii,

it was also the last.

Because the rest of the Hawaiian dinos, well, they'd be popped in later,

leaving the cast a little lacking motivation.

You had to react to nothing at all.

So Steven asked them to do more than they would have done normally.

If they couldn't look to the dinosaurs,

at least they could look to their director.

That looks great.

We said to Steven, "Listen, if... if someone could make a noise?"

"It's not really doing it for us." So Steven said, "Yeah, sure."

[screeching, squawking}

Cut.

Steven Spielberg going...

You sit up straight for that stuff.

And apparently, you also stand up,

stumble, and shake.

Steven's very good with added action. Just take the hat off.

Be amazed and put it back on.

There are several of them throughout the film.

You don't take your glasses off to see something better. It's ridiculous.

But from a performance point of view, it kind of makes sense.

Those are Spielberg moments.

So while the actors spent their time reacting to imaginary dinosaurs,

the animators back at ILM were busy imagining how those dinosaurs would act.

It was one thing to build a creature, but my problem was to try and make it run.

When it came to natural movement of creatures,

Phil Tippett could run rings around anyone.

Phil was the creature leader, and under his guidance,

we actually had movement classes.

That was kind of like getting to know your body,

feeling free to move in a certain way.

We filmed it. The idea was to project it in the screening room

so we see ourselves trying to be dinosaurs,

to learn about what it is we're misunderstanding.

So we're out there, all being Gallimimus, we're jumping over the log, acting afraid.

Our art director, TyRuben Ellingson, slipped while trying to jump over the log

and fell and broke his drawing arm.

He had major surgery and wasn't able to draw for the rest of the movie.

With enhanced knowledge of how to jump over pipes,

the team retreated to the safety of their computers

ready to face their next obstacle...

The tricky part was getting the composition to work

as if the herd is surrounding your action.

There was one way to make it easier,

but they'd need to get Spielberg onboard.

Up to that point, Steven was under the impression

that for effects, he had to keep the camera still.

Dennis said it would actually be good if the camera's moving

so we won't see the feet hit the ground so specifically.

Steven just went crazy. He thought,

"You're telling me I not just get to move the camera, I should?"

That was like hearing all of his dreams come true in one sentence.

Blowing Spielberg's mind again and racing towards the end of the shoot,

production's time in Hawaii was soon to be just a collection of fond memories.

Staying in a nice hotel. Everyone's getting on real well,

and then a hurricane comes in and destroys everything.

As the Hawaiian sun... Sorry, did you say hurricane?

We have a very major hurricane threatening Hawaii.

We were all leaving the next day to go back to LA.

But 3:45 in the morning, my phone rang.

I never liked using the word "problem."

This, in fact, was a problem.

Everything will go downhill from now on.

I do remember going out to the beach with Laura and Jeff.

It looked like the end of the world was approaching.

And Laura turned to me and she said, "Sam, do you think we might die today?"

And I said, "You know what, Laura? We might just die today."

There wasn't time to contemplate their own mortality

because the hurricane was fast approaching.

We had to get everybody undercover. We unloaded our prop truck.

We had a line of guys to the truck, into where we were putting provisions.

Who's there throwing boxes but Jeff Goldblum.

Fairly alarmed here.

Jeff Goldblum is the man of the hour.

As Goldblum brought order to the chaos...

That's chaos theory.

...Spielberg added to it.

All of a sudden, Steven said to Dean, "Get the camera."

"Get everything. We're gonna go shoot."

Steven said, "Well, it would be great to have storm footage."

Because in the story, the approaching hurricane is significant.

So while most of the crew were fortifying their hotel...

I went out to the beach with Steven, and we were shooting

these tremendous waves as the storm would get more, more.

The storm sequence you see is the actual hurricane.

They all came back and said it was quite something out there.

We should go in. It's gonna start going crazy.

But they had no idea just how crazy it would get.

The winds were fierce, up to 150 miles an hour.

It was really, really scary.

But at the end of it, it was devastation. No power, no water.

It was like a giant lawn mower had come through

and completely denuded the landscape.

With supplies dangerously low...

The bottles of water had been rationed out.

...and not to mention, half a movie left to shoot,

was it possible that Mother Nature had met her match?

Kathleen Kennedy, she's a force of nature. I mean, she's quite scarily powerful.

Kathy Kennedy couldn't get the film crew off the island

because martial law had been declared.

Plotting their escape, this veteran of movie mega-hits,

including this one, raced to save the movie.

Purely by happenstance, Kathleen Kennedy ran into the guy

that had been the pilot on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

That guy was Fred Sorensen, who was now flying for Hawaiian Airlines.

Come on! Show a little backbone, will ya?

And he was taking in supplies to Kauai.

So Fred and Kathleen brought the supplies, picked up the crew...

I will attempt to coordinate some transportation

for everybody to get to the commercial air terminal.

And she got them all back to LA in time to shoot the rest of the film

on the Universal backlot, where they shot scenes like...

The kitchen scenewith the raptors.

Oh, look. There's John in a raptor suit.

I'm in this kind of downhill skiing kind of position.

And despite John's clearly powerful hindquarters,

well, he couldn't do that.

That was up to the team at ILM.

But as for Steve and Mark...

Everyone's waiting with bated breath. Is the T. rex gonna work?

Come on! These guys knew what they were doing. Of course it was!

I was having a hard time getting the run to work.

It was do or die for Mark and Steve.

I was terrified. I'd really shot my mouth off and said I could build a Rex.

Now they felt the heat of other people shooting their mouths off.

"Oh yeah, that foot's gotta move quicker? How about this?"

"That doesn't look right." The run wasn't working.

I'd go, "How about that?" Not working.

Kept going back and forth, getting hammered on.

Please!

Phil's like, "Those computer guys, man, I told you."

Hate this hacker crap!

So I took all the animation curves and expanded them out about 10%.

And bingo! Spielberg said, "You know something?"

Hold on to your butts.

"I think this works."

Down!

And that was it. Once we got a T. rex shot finaled, to me it was kind of like butter.

For Steve, it was a different meal all together.

How did I celebrate? You know, chips and gravy.

So with the digital T. rex up and running,

it was now time for Stan Winston's animatronic T. rex to show its teeth.

He's got a giant, full-size T. rex on a flight simulator chassis.

It was hydraulically controlled by a telemetry device so that when you moved it

in real time, it did it to the big one.

And ironically, much like the real-life prehistoric predator...

T. rex himself was dangerous. Whenever he went on, they had an alarm.

You didn't get underneath him, get near the mechanics.

He weighed like a ton or something. Eight tons or something?

All right.

When that head was whipping and moving, it felt like a school bus driving by.

Time for this school bus to make its first stop.

It's working beautifully. Everybody is more than impressed, I must say.

Well, just slow down before you shower on the praise.

That scene takes place in a rainstorm.

They were going to have the rain fall either in front of or behind the T. rex.

Everyone knew it wasn't supposed to get wet.

Keep the T. rex dry. Makes sense.

But when you actually start shooting, that all goes out the window.

Surely, a little rain is no match for the king of the dinos.

What's the skin made out of? Foam latex.

What's foam latex like?

It's a giant sponge. Yeah.

Well, we all know what sponges do when put in water.

He got soggy.

Now it weighs... Like a ton or something?

No! A lot more.

God knows how much more it was. Well, God and Dean Cundey.

Probably three or four times heavier. So much heavier.

And this poor little, wet, cold T. rex got the shivers.

It started shaking and shuddering, doing exactly what you didn't want it to.

One more time! All right!

It slowed the progress down, and Steven doesn't like to be slowed.

Can we please stop this? I wanna dry him down.

This soggy T. rex caused problems off the set as well.

All of a sudden, the T. rex got fat.

So we had to, essentially, fatten up our digital T. rex

to match the Stan Winston practical at that time.

Because the T. rex attack scene was really a tag team.

If you're seeing it from head to toe, it's CG.

If you're punching in close up, then it was the giant puppet version.

So this is pretty groundbreaking stuff.

Well, ground at ILM was being broken, too. And fast.

The shots are getting final and starting to look really good.

People are flipping out. The word is out. We really hit our stride, literally.

And Steven was so enamored with the CG T. rex.

Look how it eats. He said, "This is the hero of the movie."

That's when something became obvious.

The audience would've been left with a bad taste in their mouth

if they didn't get to see the Rex one more time.

That's right! The original ending was T. rex-less.

So Spielberg decides, literally, to rewrite an end sequence.

Knowing he could do things he couldn't before.

Now, you don't have to control yourself.

You can have dinosaurs getting flung off and jumping back on.

You can just go nuts. So, well, they did go nuts.

The raptor's on this side of his head. Get him around this way.

Dean Cundey got really tricky with the camera. A lot of swish pans

onto where the character is and to where the actors were.

Knocking out shots on set, the team at ILM

attacked the new ending as well.

The raptor's coming in, and as he's about to pounce,

the Rex grabs him in frame, the music crescendos.

The camera lifts up, and Sam Neill gives the thankful,

"Thank you so much for saving my life" look.

And then the other raptor joins the party, and it's the crescendo of the music.

The other guys run off, and the T. rex smashes one.

Finally, he's gonna roar like he's king of the world at that time.

Right? And then the banner falls. Perfect ending. Ish.

Cut! Great!

On November 30, 1992, production wrapped on Jurassic Park,

and Spielberg's editor, Michael Kahn, already had a head start.

He and Michael Kahn had been getting together regularly

to edit as they go along.

But many of the shots were still missing dinosaurs.

And remember, those are quite important. There's a whole list of CG shots.

And as ILM worked on finishing that list,

Spielberg worked on a list of his own.

Almost as soon as Jurassic Park ended, Steven Spielberg had to go to Europe

to start shooting Schindler's List.

But with shots still being completed on Jurassic Park,

Steven had to work around the clock.

He'd work on Schindler's List during the day and Jurassic Park at night.

He'd look at something on a screen, and in the corner would be the ILM guys,

all being done by satellite and very expensive.

We'd sit in our little room, and there's Steven Spielberg.

We'd play the creature footage live...

Steven would tell them, "That's great, we got it."

Or he'd note it as a CBB, "Could Be Better."

We were kind of lucky dealing with Spielberg.

It was the first time anybody had ever seen this stuff.

Like, "Hey, it looks cool." Yeah, no kidding. Final.

A process that continued right to the last minute.

Spielberg did that the entire shoot.

We finished filming Schindler's List last day of May,

and Jurassic Park was released on, I think it was June 11th of '93.

Well, three years after preproduction began

and 65 million years after dinosaurs walked the Earth,

Jurassic Park debuted worldwide.

Dinosaurs are coming back to life today in the new movie Jurassic Park.

From the looks of it, you'll be lucky to get in to see it.

Movie-goers, bookworms, beach chair enthusiasts,

they all lined up to witness history, something Universal was banking on,

having spent more on the marketing campaign than the movie itself.

Other studios in town are so sure of monster-sized crowds for Jurassic Park

that they will not open any of their pictures against it.

The trailer was great. It was all abuzz.

And when, for the first time in history,

audiences saw their first CGI dinosaurs...

They freaked.

The audience was so into it.

You hear people gasping.

I'm jumping even though I know!

Clapping. The audience went crazy.

The thrills never stopped. It was amazing.

I was pretty blown away. It worked.

The dinosaurs worked. They still work!

On its opening weekend, Jurassic Park set a box office record,

raking in over 50 million dollars, and it didn't stop there.

Week after week, fans flooded the theaters.

Even the critics liked it, and they don't like anything.

The special effects dinosaurs are truly thrilling.

Thumbs up for me. Thumbs up, too.

Even paleontologists. One claw up.

It seemed that everyone loved Jurassic Park, except Christine.

Christine doesn't want to see it because they didn't give Barney a role.

Come off it, Christine!

By the end of its run, Jurassic Park surpassed E.T.

to become the highest-grossing film ever, earning...

Almost a billion dollars around the world.

Jurassic Park earned a lot more than money.

Those digital dinosaurs won award after award.

The envelope, please?

Including the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

Thanks, ILM, thanks, Tippett Studio, and thanks, Steven Spielberg...

But really, it's no surprise.

None of this works without a decent story,

and here we have a really good story with a really good director.

The performances... Don't move!

The dinosaurs. All of them add up on each other.

And when you do movies well, they become bigger than life.

And they're bigger than life to generation after generation after generation.

A sentiment that continues with the Jurassic Park sequels,

which had some pretty big boots to fill. And speaking of boots...

I found those boots in my cupboard.

I thought, "These boots were not just made for walking."

"These boots were made for kicking dinosaurs."

But Jurassic Park is more than just a good movie.

It really did disrupt everything,

a disruption that happened right here, the former home of ILM.

And for Steve Williams,

a walk down memory lane is a glimpse into film history.

Because the magic contained within the hallowed halls...

Still smells in here.

Yes. Steve, we're trying to make this magical, mate.

The gal in there had rabbits. Beyond the aromatic history...

Bathrooms. I spent time there. Mm-hmm.

The silent halls of this former home of ILM echo today...

I played the bagpipes here.

Let's just see where the CGI was invented.

This room might not look like much,

but every single frame in Terminator 2 was done in this room. All righty.

This is where I started building The Abyss.

Of the many unique rooms in this building...

Coffee.

...one is particularly rich with memories.

Thirty-two years ago this month, I came down those steps into this room.

Welcome to the disgusting pit.

Steve Williams was 26 when he was offered a job here

in the computer graphics department of George Lucas's ILM.

There was crap everywhere, stacks of Styrofoam and empty beer cans.

I'm surprised there's still Cheez Whiz and stuff between the pipes. Yeah.

I think that's the only thing left.

Yeah.

So, I used to blast Beethoven and Bach in here.

There was just something very strange about having Beethoven blasting.

It would go right through my head and into my hands,

against the keyboard and right into the Rex.

It's one of those weird things where you're part of the machine.

I know it sounds all zen, but that's what happened.

Before Jurassic Park,

the possibility of a photorealistic dinosaur

being created on a computer,

well, it was about as likely as using a real T. rex.

So many people doubted that computers could do something

that felt organically alive and that was the big breakthrough.

We were definitely discouraged. There was a lot of doubt

about what we were doing, right?

But, um, we didn't care. We just thought it was inevitable.

And for Steve and Mark

and everyone who worked on this groundbreaking movie,

well, they really were a part of something that completely changed filmmaking.

After Jurassic Park, digital filmmaking is just filmmaking.

And to be part of that, it's almost indescribable.

Jurassic Park's enduring legacy can still be clearly seen today.

But seeing this history come to life for the first time,

well, it was kind of unforgettable.

I think of the scene where Ellie and Alan first see the brachiosaur.

It's the first dinosaur we see in the movie.

It's a dinosaur!

Basically, what Ellie and Alan are thinking in that scene is,

"Oh, my God, look what science has done."

And as an audience member, I was sitting there thinking,

"Oh, my God. Look what science has done."

Well, science and, you know, a mad scientist.

I was lucky enough to produce things here, isolated from the world,

that, little did I know, would make it all over the world

and change the way we look at films.

This was my seat right here.

This theater is where we projected every single one of the shots

that we knew was gonna change the entire film industry. In this theater.

Assigning himself an impossible task...

You can't do that. That's impossible.

...Steve did what Steve had to do.

If I failed, I'd be the one who failed, no one else. That was it.

And I was shooting my mouth off that I could do it, you know.

And it was just a lot of pain, you know?

The divorces and problems and all this stuff

to make sure that the specular highlight on a fingernail of a creature

looks proper on your monitor.

No one knows the pain you go through to do that.

Yeah. This place used to be alive, man.

But it was great, man. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Anyone hungry? You know, I'm interested in cheap beer and cigars.