Jurassic Park - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of Jurassic Park or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to Jurassic Park

[terry]

Phil Tippett recruited a team to supply more than fifty Go-Motion (a more refined version of stop-motion) shots.

[sophie]

Ariana Richards was upset by the fact that an action figure of her character was not produced. (Kenner only made dolls of Grant, Sattler, Muldoon, Nedry, Tim, and eventually Malcolm.)

[tammy]

Steven Spielberg knew as soon as his kids saw the model T. Rex they wouldn't want to go home, which is just the reaction he wanted. Michael Crichton also viewed the model, and was impressed.

[sara]

In the 3-D version, Steven Spielberg claimed adding leaves to the Jeep chase took the excitement from a seven to a nine.

[dustin]

Steven Spielberg considered Richard Dreyfuss, who starred in his Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), for the role of Dr. Alan Grant.

[aaron]

A life-size T. Rex drawing on the wall of Stan Winston's studio helped create the real thing. The T. Rex was so enormous, they had to raise the roof to accommodate the sculpture.

[jamie]

Malcolm's speech to Hammond about the dangers of Jurassic Park are condensed from the novel: "Scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young. You can make progress very fast. There is no discipline lasting many decades. There is no mastery: old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature. There is only a get-rich-quick, make-a-name-for-yourself-fast philosophy. Cheat, lie, falsify, it doesn't matter. Not to you, nor to your colleagues. No one will criticize you. No one has any standards." This may have been edited by the movie to make Malcolm seem less arrogant.

[jesse]

Steven Spielberg received $250 million from this movie's gross and profit participations.

[kenneth]

Although this was one of the first movies to use CGI, it was pioneered (albeit in its infancy) on another Steven Spielberg movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

[eli]

To showcase the movie's sound design, Steven Spielberg invested in the creation of DTS, a company specializing in digital surround sound formats, so it would allow audiences to "really hear the movie the way it was intended to be heard". George Lucas supervised the sound crew while Spielberg was in Poland working on Schindler's List (1993). The work was finished by the end of April. Sound designer Gary Rydstrom considered it a fun process, given the movie had all kinds of noises: animal sounds, rain, gunshots, vehicle crashes, scenes without music, et cetera. Spielberg took the weekends to fly from Poland to Paris, where he would meet Rydstrom to see the sound progress.

[javier]

Steven Spielberg didn't want people to be constantly reminded that what they're seeing is CGI, but real, full-blooded dinosaurs, starting with the Brachiosaur scene, where Spielberg was keen on the dinosaur interacting with the background, and would offer suggestions to the animators on how to make it better. The second scene done in that same vein was the Gallimimus scene, which made use of twenty-five animated individual Gallimimuses. Geometric shapes represented them initially and were choreographed into the scene. Spielberg needed complete freedom to convey the energy of the scene, so he worked with Dennis Muren to shoot it, because he wanted to move the camera and not lock it down everytime a Gallimimus came into frame. The scene was shot gradually with Sam Neill, Joseph Mazzello, and Ariana Richards running through a field by themselves. A grid was placed over the ground as a frame to chart the movement of the camera by computer, using what looked like golf balls whenever an actor or actress looked somewhere. The dinosaurs were added later.

[lonnie]

The original ending had a rib from the T. Rex skeleton skewer one of the Raptors, and the jaw drops and kills the other. But it seemed too phony, and the crew approached Steven Spielberg to come up with a better ending. They all pitched ideas, but Spielberg came up with the finale. He needed the T. Rex to be the star at the end.

[chris]

The Dilophosaurus never walks because it was difficult to get the weight shifting and the movement right. A trench was cut into the floor of the set for the puppeteers, but Steven Spielberg elected to have it just appear instead to make the scene more ominous and surprising. He also wanted more water for the scene coming down the hillside with every fire hydrant going in the studio until they ran out. Michael Lantieri joked every now and then "just splash him with something so he feels there's more water". To this day, Spielberg still feels that scene needed more water. Wayne Knight thought it a miserable scene to shoot; sliding down things, covered in mud, soaking wet, he was three hundred twenty-seven pounds, and he could barely walk, but he loved watching it.

[wesley]

Compositing dinosaurs onto live-action scenes took up to an hour. Rendering them took from two to four hours per frame, but the T. Rex in the rain took up to six hours.

[melinda]

The goat that eventually gets eaten by the Tyrannosaur is shown at times standing and also lying down. Later, a bloody goat leg drops on the windshield of a car, startling the occupants. The goat was filmed standing and responded to verbal cues to lay down. The leg that dropped on the windshield was a fake prop embelished with movie blood.

[willard]

In an interview with IGN, Jeff Goldblum described how his iconic semi-supine pose came to be, he vaguely recalled director Steven Spielberg slyly asking him to unbutton and to rub oil on his chest.

[russell]

Although sickly in the movie, a Triceratops could, in reality, successfully battle a T. Rex.

[norma]

This movie revolutionized dinosaur behavior; whereas in previous movies they were slow moving, they were now fast and athletic. This derived from paleontologist Robert Bakker. Another aspect included was dinosaurs are not cold-blooded, but rely on the Sun to be active. Steven Spielberg wanted his dinosaurs to be fast-moving, warm-blooded predators, for example, if a T. Rex in the rain were cold-blooded, it couldn't do anything, hence the scene in the movie.

[chris]

Laura Dern thought the first scene with the Brachiosaur was very tender. She recalled shooting the scene, where the actors were looking at an X on a piece of paper. Grant loses the power in his legs because Sam Neill thought seeing something so mind boggling would make you faint. When Steven Spielberg first edited the scene, the temp music was the St. Crispin's Day speech from Sir Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989). Phil Tippett thought it perfect and said "you did it, you crazy son of a bitch", not knowing that was a line from the movie.