Steven Spielberg Tried to Nix the Spielberg Homages in ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’

For one harrowing moment during the making of Jurassic World Rebirth, director Gareth Edwards had to tiptoe gently around a giant. That giant was Steven Spielberg, the executive producer of Rebirth, the sixth sequel to his landmark thriller Jurassic Park, which redefined the summertime blockbuster in 1993 just as significantly as Spielberg’s don’t-go-into-the-water thriller Jaws had done a generation before.

The shadows of both films hovered ominously over Jurassic World Rebirth, especially in a key scene that places Scarlett Johansson’s daring tracker on the bow of a speeding boat as she fires a dart into a swimming leviathan known as a Mosasaurus.

“When I read the script, I had no idea what was going to happen,” Edwards tells Vanity Fair. “You go, ‘Well, hang on. There’s a boat racing to chase a creature underwater that has a giant fin, and they have a rifle, and they’re leaning out on the edge of the boat to try and shoot it…’ I felt a bit like there’s another movie that did this really well.”

Edwards—director of Rogue One, 2014’s Godzilla, and the 2023 sci-fi drama The Creator—said he would have asked for a rewrite had Rebirth been overseen by anyone except Spielberg, and written by anyone besides David Koepp, who also adapted the first Jurassic Park and its 1997 sequel. “I’d be going, ‘Guys, we can’t do this. This is just too sacrilegious,’” he says. Instead, he leaned in, paying homage to Jaws the same way Spielberg had honored classic big-screen pirate adventures in his 1975 shark-attack movie.

Then he learned that while Spielberg loves referencing others, he hates quoting himself. When he and Koepp gave notes after viewing a rough cut of Jurassic World Rebirth, the director thought things were going well. “And then, the last [note] was, ‘By the way, take out all the nods and references to all the previous Spielberg films and Jurassic Park Easter eggs.’”

Edwards’s spirit sank faster than a Great White who just took a lethal bite of a scuba tank. But he wasn’t quite deterred. “It was one of those things where I disagree, and nod, and write it down, and see what happens over the next few months.”

He says he understood where Spielberg—who declined to comment for this piece—was coming from. “It probably feels like a snake eating its own tail,” Edwards says. “I wouldn’t want to do that if I was them. But—because I’m not them, and I’m a fan, and I love their work, and so does the rest of the world, I feel like [they’re] the only people in the world that have a problem with this.”

So, Edwards resolved to save what he could. And in true Jurassic Park fashion, life found a way.

Edwards began by following orders. The film’s next cut removed as many callbacks and shout-outs as possible, including an introductory sequence that mimicked the first scene in Jurassic Park, when a trio of thrashing velociraptors are delivered to their pen deep in the island jungle.

“The opening of the movie used to start with these primates watching, the trees are moving, and there are some monsters there,” Edwards says. “It turns out, it’s a giant digger destroying the rainforest. They’re building the laboratory in the middle of the jungle, and then the prologue begins.” Instead, Rebirth begins with the lab already in operation, and an accident involving its various mutants and monstrosities that leads to its eventual abandonment.

Edwards also lost the return of Mr. DNA, the animated double helix who gives exposition in the original film. “We mocked it up really crudely in an early cut. And yeah, I got slapped on the wrist for that,” he says. So he turned his own exposition into “a Disney, kind of retro-documentary thing.”

He hoped other homages were subtle enough to slip by Spielberg—a risky gamble, given Spielberg’s hawkish attention to detail. Yet something similar had already happened during the making of Ready Player One. Though Spielberg didn’t want to reference his own past, beyond the inclusion of the time-traveling DeLorean from Back to the Future—a film he helped produce—Ready Player One’s crew worked in a few other nods to the director’s career, like a copy of the book that inspired Schindler’s List that slipped onto a shelf in one scene. But a diner named after the villainous brothers in The Goonies was scrapped as soon as Spielberg spotted it.

The nostalgia-fest of Ready Player One meant some things from his own past inevitably got in. “I think a lot of the digital artists were trying to get some of their favorite ’80s cultural references in there, you know?” Spielberg said in 2018. “And having seen every shot 30 times as we go through all the different steps from pre-viz to animatic to final, I started noticing little things. They snuck a Gremlin in.”

Edwards took a similar stealth approach. Some of his Easter eggs are so well hidden that no one could possibly detect them except him. “You know Quint, Robert Shaw’s character from Jaws? You know the pedal that he puts his feet on as he’s trying to wind in the shark?” Edwards says. “There’s an exact replica of that pedal in the bar at the beginning of the film, where [Mahershala Ali] is gambling.”

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Jurassic World Rebirth also features two sequences so steeped in Spielbergia that the homages were impossible to overlook. One involved a raid on the nest of a Quetzalcoatlus, the fighter-jet-sized flying pterosaur, which was originally scripted to take place on a natural cliff. Edwards decided to change that to a cave that had been carved into an ancient temple, giving it Indiana Jones vibes.

“I couldn’t figure out how to do a cool set piece on the edge of a cliff because I just felt like there’s not much real estate. If the [dinosaur] comes back, I don’t know what you could do to hide,” Edwards says. “I thought, Well, maybe we could get away with a cave or carving in the edge of the wall, like there was an old civilization that used to live here. Once you are in Central America, that means it has to be an Inca civilization. Then once you start doing Inca iconography, you suddenly go, ‘Hang on a minute. This is Raiders of the Lost Ark.’”

Frank Marshall, who produced both Rebirth and Raiders, was the first to call it out during filming. “[He] walked onto set and said something like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is certainly familiar,’” Edwards says. “I didn’t know if this was good or a bad thing, but I just looked at all the faces of the crew, and they were beaming. I kept waiting for someone to tell me, ‘No, don’t do that.’”

Eventually, Spielberg and co. allowed it, perhaps in part because Edwards had a key ally: “One of David Koepp’s favorite films is Raiders of the Lost Ark. So he was never going to fight me about that.”

Then there was the Jaws-like Mosasaurus sequence, which somehow kept recalling Spielberg’s shark movie despite efforts to differentiate the two. Before composer Alexandre Desplat’s original music was finished, Edwards and his editors experimented with various temp soundtracks to add intensity.

“It’s about 30 minutes of ocean section in our movie,” Edwards says. “We had ominous, scary, foreboding music for about half an hour, and after about 10 minutes of that, it gets a bit relentless. So I remember thinking, Is there another tone we can go for here? I tried to find some tracks where it was just more, like, pirate fun.”

The same thing happened when Spielberg was editing the open-water shark-chase scene in Jaws. Initially, he used grim temp music pulled from Robert Altman’s 1972 thriller Images, composed by John Williams. When Williams saw what Spielberg had in mind, the maestro pitched Spielberg a different idea: an upbeat, buccaneer-like jaunt.

Fifty years later, Edwards and Desplat found themselves going the same route. “I also did that a little bit with Mexican mariachi-type music at one point, which reminded [Spielberg] of the scene where Dodgson goes to find Dennis Nedry and gives him the shaving cream hiding device,” Edwards says. Rather than directly call back to Jurassic Park, Spielberg was more okay with the Jaws similarities.

Later in production, Edwards and Desplat commiserated about the position in which they’d put themselves. “On day one, both of us compared who’s got the hardest job here. He’s like, ‘Well, I’ve got to compete with John Williams.’ And I was like, ‘So what? I’ve got Steven Spielberg!’”

In the end, much of what Edwards wanted to keep got through, and he emerged sympathetic to Spielberg’s hesitance. “I think we got the right balance in the end. And I think it’s just humbleness on his part,” Edwards says.

After all, Spielberg himself is fond of quoting his own favorite filmmakers. “It feels like it’s my version of an homage to John Ford—except this time John Ford asked me to make the film,” Edwards says. “So it’s maybe just a bit more awkward.”