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Joe Johnston has had a long career in special effects movies, from working
in visual effects on the original Star Wars trilogy, to miscellaneous
crew positions on Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Always,
and finally directing his own movies Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,
The Rocketeer and Jumanji. Through his friendship with Steven
Spielberg, Johnston had actually asked to direct Jurassic Park II,
but when Spielberg decided to do it himself, he promised Johnston the
third, if a part three were to be made.
 Jurassic
Park III opens July 18th with Johnston at the helm. Sam Neil returns
as Dr. Alan Grant, tricked into joining a rescue mission for a lost child
on Isla Sorna, but that story only evolved while the crew was filming.
Johnston discussed the script issues and other aspects of the research
and production of Jurassic Park III.
How would you have done The Lost World differently if you
had directed it? Well, I offered to do Lost World. Actually,
no. I offered to do the sequel to Jurassic Park before it was called
Lost World, even before the book was even written because I liked
the first one. I actually liked the second one. I think that if the second
film had been done by anyone other than Steven Spielberg it would have
been much more well-received. I think Steven has a pressure on him that
no one else in this business has. There is so much expected of him and
so much that he has to live up to, all self-inflicted of course.
So, what would you have done differently? I was never attached
to the project anyway. I don't know. Impossible question to answer.
Were Spielberg or Crichton involved in this? Michael Crichton
was not involved. Steven was involved in the script writing phase and
he was always there if I wanted to ask him something.
What does it mean to be involved in script writing when there was
no finished script? Well, there were two other versions of this story
that were written. There were two other complete versions of Jurassic
Park III that we wrote and storyboarded and scheduled and then threw
away. Five weeks before we started shooting this movie, we threw the script
out and started over. We started writing in '99 actually. Craig Rosenberg
wrote a script in June of '99 that was about five or six teenagers who
get marooned on the island. It was just discouraging, even though it was
not a badly written script. It was actually good for what it was but I
don't think anybody wanted to see that movie. And there was another one
that was actually storyboarded and scheduled and budgeted and we scouted
locations for it and even started to build sets for some of it.
What was that second idea? It was sort of a similar idea although
it didn't involve a rescue. It involved a family with a kid and Grant
and Billy crash landing accidentally on the island. It had as a parallel
story a whole Costa Rican mainland thing where dinosaurs were getting
onto the mainland and killing people and they didn't know who, what or
why it was doing it. It turned out to be pteranodons. It was a completely
different story but Steven was involved in sort of helping to conceive
all the different stories. Then when David Koepp came up with the last
idea for the rescue mission, Steven embraced it as completely as everyone
else did and we all said almost at the same time, "Yeah, we have to start
over. We have to throw out what we've got because this is a better idea."
 Did
the old scripts have the same action sequences? Yeah, there were variations
on those because what we had to do at that point was we were so far down
the road as far as schedule and budget the storyboards that we had to
adapt those sequences to the new idea. There was an aviary sequence that
was much, much longer, unnecessarily long I think, and we had to adapt
that to the new story. There was a lab sequence that was more complicated
where they actually went into the lab, spent the night and made that a
base of operations, and raptors were getting in and sneaking into the
lab. It was sort of the same idea, just more elaborate and more unnecessarily
complicated. So, we tried to take those ideas and adapt them.
At what point did you have the final script? We never did have
a final script. We did not have a final script until after we wrapped
the movie. We shot pages that eventually went into the final script but
we didn't have a document. The joke on the set was it was going to be
the wrap gift, everybody got a script. We had a script for the day we
were shooting and maybe the next day and sometimes a week ahead of time,
but we never had a story that had a beginning, middle and end while we
were making the film. We had to go back to Hawaii to shoot the ending
because when we were there the first time, we didn't know what the ending
was going to be.
Was the film always intended to be 90 minutes? No, but I think
the movie is the length that it needs to be. It was never a lot longer.
It was maybe six or seven minutes longer in the longest rough cut. I don't
think movies should be any specific required length. I mean, if it was
under 70 minutes I'd think it was too short but 90 minutes, 94 minutes
I think with credits, is a comfortable time to sit in one of those chairs
and the whole story evolves and I don't think we're missing anything.
(Photos provided by Universal Pictures)
Next page >Blair
Witch, new dinosaurs and Barney > Page 1,
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