‘Fear was part of the pleasure’: How Steven Spielberg mined his dark side to make Jurassic Park
What happens when dinosaurs and humans, two species separated by 65 million years of evolution, are suddenly thrown together? The answer, judging by Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), is two-pronged: the humans rake in over $6bn at the box office over the next three decades and the long-gone dinosaurs enjoy a new lease of life.
“I have no embarrassment in saying that with Jurassic I was really just trying to make a good sequel to Jaws – on land. It’s shameless. I can tell you that now,” Spielberg struck a surprisingly self-deprecating note when reflecting on his film’s astounding success a year after its release. In some ways, Jurassic Park, which launched one of the most successful franchises in movie history, is the quintessential Spielberg movie. It both pulls together his pet obsessions and reveals the director in all his many contradictions. Famously, it is also the film Spielberg was editing in the evenings when he was on location in Poland shooting his other very acclaimed, though tonally very different Holocaust drama Schindler’s List (1993).
Jurassic Park, which is returning to the big screen next month to mark its 30th anniversary, is an action-adventure romp. It’s a matinée movie made with the same relentless energy and wit as Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) – and yet it has some searing observations to make about human greed and hubris. It even boasts its own Oppenheimer moment. The obnoxious computer genius Dr Nedry (Wayne Knight) keeps a photo of the “father of the atom bomb” on his desk. Spielberg makes sure that viewers get a good look at the notorious scientist moments before Nedry unleashes the Jurassic monsters on the world.
