Having already directed Godzilla, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and The Creator, Gareth Edwards is used to fantastical storytelling on an epic scale, as well as handling some of the biggest and best-loved IPs in the history of cinema.
Jurassic World: Rebirth, the seventh installment in the multibillion-dollar Jurassic film franchise, is one of the year’s biggest box office hits both globally and domestically. Taking place five years after Jurassic World: Dominion, Rebirth follows an expedition into a no-go zone to extract DNA from three prehistoric creatures in an attempt to create a groundbreaking medical breakthrough. Rebirth‘s lead cast boasts two-time Oscar nominee Scarlett Johansson, Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali, and Wicked‘s Jonathan Bailey.
Here, Edwards explains to The Credits why he chose to shoot on film, why he loved filming on location in New York, and Jurassic World: Rebirth‘s box office success.
There are no guarantees at the box office these days, even for massive IPs, but this has done really well. How do you feel about that?
I personally feel like I can take zero credit for it because it’s down to the world’s love of dinosaurs and the Jurassic films. I’m relieved we made a film that we’re proud of. It’s out into the world now and belongs to everyone else. It was surreal. You spend a year trying to ignore the fact that it’s going to go out into the world because it’s too much pressure on yourself. We pretended to be working on a passion project, a little movie we all wanted to see. I convinced myself it was this mini film that we were all making from an office in London’s Soho. One day, I went home, and it was 11 pm. I was typing an email or responding to the visual effects guys about something, and I heard the movie playing from next door to where I lived. I was like, ‘How come my neighbors are playing our movie?’ I got worried that it was somehow streaming it to their TV. When I went out into the corridor, I found a trailer on loop on the TV, as it was being shown at a basketball match in America. That was the moment when I went, ‘Oh my God. Everyone is going to see this.’ Relief is probably the easiest word to describe how it feels. Honestly, the Jurassic IP is always going to have this sort of response. It’s very primal to be pulled into an adventure. As mammals, for millions of years, we have been trying to avoid being eaten and killed by bigger creatures. In our modern society, we’ve pushed that nature away and forgotten about it, yet it’s still right there within us. The moment it starts happening in a film like this, it feels so correct, even if it seems absurd as a science fiction premise.
We start the movie in New York. You shot those scenes in the city. How was that?
I wasn’t sure if we were going to be able to, but we kept pushing to film in New York. Suddenly, we were allowed to find this great spot right under the Brooklyn Bridge, and they were willing to close off the roads and everything. What was super interesting was that you inherit a New York crew and cast in a way, so when you go shoot somewhere like that, you have to land running. We shot there for two days, and there was no time to get up to speed. It was amazing how the background artists, all the people on that street walking around, were all actors, but they were so perfect. I couldn’t tell who was a tourist who walked into the shot, and who was a background artist. It is then that you realize, ‘It’s because there have been so many movies and TV shows shot in New York, they’ve done it a billion times.’ They are just so good at looking naturalistic and repeating themselves. It’s a small thing to pick up on, but as a director, I appreciate that. Often, when you’re working with background people, you spend a lot of time trying to make it feel natural, and they’ve got it down without even a conversation. I feel like people aren’t going to real locations enough. I wanted this movie to be shot in real environments, not against a green or blue screen. Thankfully, the studio and producers all supported that.
You also shot in the UK, Thailand, and other places that you have shot in before. All of them have great local crews. Did you find yourself reusing people you’d worked with before?
I made a film called The Creator, which was shot in Thailand, and some of the crew members came back. A lot of them weren’t able to. There’s this TV show called The White Lotus? You might have heard of it. Some of them were busy with that, but we still had an amazing crew. We also shot in Malta, which is where they had shot Gladiator II just before we got there. I knew all the locations we were shooting in Thailand because we had previously shot in similar places or scouted them for The Creator. It’s paradise, with a crew that’s not only friendly but also incredibly hardworking. They’re also fun to be around. They share a similar sarcastic sense of humor to Brits, so you can joke around during takes. I hope that now that I have made two movies in Thailand, I can maybe get an honorary visa or passport, and I can make more films here because it’s a really lovely place to be.
You shot Jurassic World: Rebirth on film. Did the environment create issues?
What my DOP, John Mathieson, kept saying was that you can drop a Panavision camera into the water, grab it, and pull it out, and everything will be fine. You can’t do that with a digital camera, because we’re shooting about a third of the movie on the ocean or in water, which ended up being one of the reasons why film was probably an advantage. I wanted it to have the aesthetic of movies I grew up loving. Even when shooting digitally, I’m trying to capture that Kodak film stock feel. Shooting on Kodak was a dream come true, and it gives us a straight-out-of-the-can look. There was a lot of pressure not to do it. It makes life harder. We were shooting in places where we wouldn’t see what we filmed for four days, so we had to wait to find out if we got it right. Luckily, there were no problems. We didn’t have a single technical issue, and we didn’t have to reshoot anything. I would definitely do it again. If you make a small indie movie with a digital camera and then switch to a film camera, the crew size is going to explode. When you’re making one of these big Hollywood blockbusters and you have a crew this big, you replace the digital camera with a film camera. This was my chance to use film, and I fell in love with it. If I ever do a movie like this again, I’ll definitely shoot it on film.
Many references to the original Jurassic movies, as well as other films like The Goonies and E.T., revolve around colors such as reds, yellows, blues, and greens. Does shooting on film help authenticate that aesthetic?
Absolutely. When people do period films set in the 60s, they often dress all the background artists and use sets with pastel colors that feel very coordinated. You think, ‘Oh, that’s strange that everyone phoned each other before they left for the office that day and checked that they were going to wear the same thing in the middle of the street?’ Then you realize none of that happened. They had just as loud, crazy clothes as we have today, but Kodak changed those colors and made them into a beautiful palette. That’s what those film stocks always did. They remove colors that fight with those other colors or dampen them. It’s really interesting once you get into it. It’s an arms race with digital cameras to get more pixels, more resolution, more reality, but film isn’t trying to be like reality. It’s trying to be better than reality, more dreamy and beautiful, and that’s what storytelling is as well. What happens in real life is very boring, and so you’re trying to do realism meets beauty, and look like you got really lucky that both arrived in your movie. Film does that without anyone doing a thing; it just comes straight out looking like that.
Jurassic World: Rebirth arrives on digital on August 5 2025 and is also currently in theaters.
Featured image: Scarlett Johansson as skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett in JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH, directed by Gareth Edwards.
