The Big Picture - Do You Love Scary Dinosaurs? J.A. Bayona’s 'Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom' Has Scary Dinosaurs | The Big Picture (Ep. 72)

Episode Date: June 22, 2018

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey chats with filmmaker J.A. Bayona about his new film, 'Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,' and what it’s like creating a terrifying new dinosaur and diving into a major franchise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

And I put myself in the position of kids and the way kids perceive dinosaurs. And for them, they're very simple. So I thought about teeth, eyes. And when the interrupter is in the dark, you only see the teeth and the eyes. And that feels very simple and very iconic. I'm Sean Fennessy, editor-in-chief of The Ringer. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show with some of the most interesting filmmakers in the world. Let's cut to the quick.

We still love dinosaurs. Did you know that 2015's Jurassic World is the fifth highest grossing movie in the history of the world? The appeal of dinosaurs is forever. Naturally, we were going to get a sequel. Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom is the follow-up to Colin Trevorrow's revival of the series and the fifth installment in the franchise that Steven Spielberg launched way back in 1993. Today's guest, the Spanish filmmaker J.A. Bayona, takes the reins on Fallen World. Bayona makes spooky movies like The Orphanage and When a Monster Calls, and so his dinosaur epic is a little like a haunted house movie. I talked with Bayona about the endless appeal of the Jurassic movies, creating yet another

terrifying new dinosaur, and what it's like to dive into the franchise game. Here's J.A. Bayona. Very happy to be joined today by J.A. Bayona. J.A., thanks for coming in. Of course. J.A., I read a story that you were offered Jurassic World originally by Frank Marshall and you weren't able to do it is that true?

well yeah I was offered by Frank but at the time they didn't have a script and we had to get

into production in six months so for me it was like a way of getting into the Hollywood world in a way that I didn't feel

very comfortable. Is that something that you had been hoping for and plotting for for a while? Yeah, I've been doing movies in Europe. And I wanted to try what was to do a movie in Hollywood, like a big Hollywood movie. I really wanted to try one of these films that I used to watch when I was a kid and I love. And normally I watch them all and I enjoy them. So I really want to try one. But Frank offered me the script, not offered me the project.

There was no script. We had to get into production in six months. It was pretty tight to me. And I told Frank and I told Steven, like, there was nothing else that I was more interested in working with them. But I thought I wasn't the right guy to work like that. At the end, they delayed the project. They hired Colin, and they delayed the production.

But anyway, I think it was okay. It was right, and when Jurassic World opened, they offered me the sequel, and at that moment I was free, so it was great. Interesting. So what was great. Interesting. So what happens there? Are you able to say, I would really like to do the sequel, so keep me in mind? And I have some ideas for things that we could do here.

No, they knew how much I love what they do. And they also really like my movies. So I said, listen, I really want to work with you one day, but I think this is not the right timing. And they understood and they really appreciated that I was so honest about it. And the moment came with the sequel for Jurassic World. And I thought that it was a very exciting project to be involved with. And I did it.

How does that work? Do you have to go in and provide sort of your pitch, your approach to the kinds of stories do you want to tell? Or are you sort of locked into this franchise machine that has certain demands? Well, it's a very different project from the movies I've done before. It's massive. It's very big. It has all these fans all over the world. The expectation is overwhelming, you know?

And in that sense, what you do is you put yourself at the service of the legacy, at the service of the Jurassic story. I felt that I was surrounded by the right people. It was Colin who wrote and who directed the first movie and who wrote this one. It was Stephen, it was Frank. So in that sense, it's like these kind of movies are like filmmakers' collaboration.

It's like a team effort between people who's been in charge of the other movies and yourself. Does the legacy scare you at all? Is there anything intimidating about that? It's not scary. I think it's challenging to find an angle, but somehow Colin told me a story that somehow was taking the dinosaurs out

of the island and making it more like a global problem now. And I felt that was very interesting somehow how now the whole dinosaur situation takes place all over the world and the whole world is talking about it after three years of the disaster. Everyone is talking about it. And I thought that was very interesting. And also the way the story finishes, opening the gate to a place we've never seen before, I thought was very exciting. There is something uniquely in sync with your films too, though, here. There's almost like a haunted house quality to a lot of the story. You know, it just felt very much like it was coming from your mind and from your vision

specifically. Is that something you and Colin are able to work on together and say, how can we make this more like a J.A. Bayona movie? Well, if you think about Jurassic and in general Steven Spielberg movies, there's an aspect of fun and entertainment. And at the same time, he talks about important subject matters. He really talks about something. And you can tell that in Jurassic, not only from the movies, but also from the original book, that you can tell that Michael Crichton is making a big adventure,

but at the same time, he's talking about interesting subject matters. So you have two levels in that sense. You work the fun, the set pieces, the moments of suspense, the moments of action. At the same time you try to say something. That second half for me was very exciting because having the chance of creating moments of suspense inside a gothic mansion with dinosaurs, it felt like a lot of fun to me. It felt like that was the kind of thing that I wanted to see from a dinosaur movie.

But at the same time, we're telling a story. We're telling a story that it's not about dinosaurs anymore. It's about us in a very straightforward way. And I thought that was also very interesting. How do you design those sequences? Because there's a few that are really clever and that we haven't seen before in a movie like this. So what goes into making a sequence?

We've seen the one in the trailer in particular where Chris Pratt's character has to leap through without being bitten by a dinosaur while in a sort of a tractor trailer. What goes into making those sequences? Well, first of all is to decide what is the emotion that you want to communicate with the scene. There's, for example, one scene that you can see

the characters inside a gyrosphere that sinks into the ocean. And for me, that moment was a moment of anguish and claustrophobia. So from that moment on, you decide what is the camera going to do in order to communicate that claustrophobia. And it felt that the right thing to do was to tell the story of that scene, to tell the scene in only one take. It was very challenging technically because we had to shot the whole shot in three shots that we had to merge. With three different cameras? No, no. It was like three shots, three takes, and we merged.

They all have to fit together. Exactly. We merged so you don't see the cut in between the shots so it's a long shot made of three shorts you know interesting

so what is Stephen's role in these movies are you talking to him at length what advice does he give you before you embark on something like this he's supervising the whole thing from above

he takes care of everything he's all the time there to talk about the big decisions so when when we when we talk about the cast you suggest the actors and he will he will give you your opinion but he will never was pushing he was always giving a lot of freedom to to us um and at the same time i was looking for his. So from time to time during the pre-production, I had conversations with him where I show him the shots and the set pieces, the animatics that we designed for the scenes. And he will give me his opinion.

Interesting. So do you guys watch films before this and say, these are some reference points that I want to talk about? These are some things that are resonant in my points that I want to talk about these are some things that are you know resonant in my mind that I want to communicate in this movie yeah I saw again all the Jurassic movies

of course and then I saw again Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and then you know for example one of the things

that I watched again were Buster Keaton movies. Because when you think about the kind of comedy that Spielberg does in Jurassic or Indiana Jones, you can tell that there's the influence of the old classics. It's very visual. Yeah, it's very visual. And I wanted to be also invested in that kind of world. So I remember that as a weird reference. I watched that.

I watched, again, also the original King Kong, for example. Interesting. I love that movie. It's just that to sort of measure scope when something is so big against something that is so small. You try to be in the same world. For example, there's a moment that we introduce a character, a new dinosaur.

And it reminds me the way we present that dinosaur. It has this kind of like King Kong element. Definitely. What goes into making a new dinosaur? That's kind of a strange idea to be trying to invent. Yeah, it's very exciting. It's very exciting. Colin came with this idea of creating the Indoraptor,

which is a combination of the Indominus Rex and Velociraptor. And it was interesting, you know. Normally, you want the dinosaurs. In this kind of movie, you want the dinosaurs. You want the biggest dinosaur, and you have the T-Rex. But you cannot make the T-Rex the start of the show. You need to move forward. And they created the Indominus Rex in the previous one.

And in this case, we had a smaller dinosaur. You need to find elements and details and kind of like a personality for the dinosaurs that makes him as scary as the Indominus, not being that ominous physically. So it was very interesting. The way I approached the dinosaur, of course, was combining the Indominus with the Velociraptor.

So physically it's like a blend of these two dinosaurs. But at the same time it's very interesting how it's very iconic. I tried to do a dinosaur that was very iconic. So it's basically like a black shape where you can very easily see the eyes and the teeth. And I put myself in the position of kids and the way kids perceive dinosaurs. And for them, they're very simple.

So I thought about teeth, eyes, the long arms that are kind of like human arms. So it was like a way of making it very simple, very effective. I really like that you have the interrupter most of the time in the dark. And when the interrupter is in the dark, you only see the teeth and the eyes. And that feels very simple and very iconic. What keeps drawing you back to stories about things that scare us and terrify us and creatures? What is it about that that makes your work go?

Well, I mean, we all love to be scared by dinosaurs. When I think about the first Jurassic Park, my favorite scenes were the moments of tension when you see the T-Rex for the first time or when you have the kids being chased by velociraptors in the kitchen. And I saw that when I was a kid, when I was a teenager. But I remember watching movies of horror when I was a kid and when I was a teenager. But I remember watching movies of horror when I was a kid and the impression that they create on me

are probably the reason why I became a filmmaker. So I really like to go that. And I also, I really like the idea of the monster, you know. It's a very interesting idea in movies and in literature. This idea that the monster is go there, comes to your life to somehow fix it. I mean, for me, the monster is go there, comes to your life to somehow fix it. I mean, for me, the monster is the solution.

I did a movie called A Monster Call where you have a monster that is there to help the kid in order to process the death of his mother. His mother is dying. And in this movie, again, if you think about the T-Rex, the T-Rex is the result of the things that we did wrong in the past. It's the result of the red lines that we crossed. And in that sense, the dinosaur that is like a dream for us becomes a nightmare. And I really like that idea that somehow at the end,

the monster is more the person who creates the monster than the monster itself. That's fascinating. Is it really challenging to be working with this much green screen and this much computer generated animation? Not much green screen. That was one of them. For me, it was a very glad surprise that we didn't shoot with... Jurassic Universe is grounded in reality. You take a look at the books from Michael Crichton,

the ideas of creating dinosaurs were taken from real scientific theories. So in that sense, the story needs to feel like it's happening in our world. It's not like you're doing a superhero movie and you need to set up scenes that take place in a different planet. You know, this is our world. And in that sense, we shot in real locations. We shot in real sound stages. And we shot a lot with animatronics, you know, with real dinosaurs on set. That's interesting.

What was that experience like? Had you worked with animatronics in that way before? I did. In a monster course, I had to replicate this giant tree monster. And we did the monster, we did monster with CGI and animatronics. And the most tricky thing with CGI is the interaction of the actors with the character, you know, that you are doing with CGI. So I knew that all the moments that the actors were touching the dinosaurs, I wanted to have something real. And also for the actors, it's very helpful to have something real in front of them.

So we push for as many animatronics as we could. The truth is that Colin, the way he wrote the story, there was a lot of space for that because there are a lot of scenes where the dinosaurs are sleeping or tranquilized and those situations are perfect in order

to use animatronics because they don't deal with big movements that sometimes are very complicated to to use animatronics because they don't deal with big movements that sometimes are very complicated to recreate with animatronics. That's really interesting. So now that you've made a big Hollywood movie, what is your feeling about, what were your preconceptions and what was different from what you actually ended up getting? I feel very fortunate because in this big Hollywood movie,

there is only one voice, which is Steven Spielberg. And Steven Spielberg supports the director, supports the filmmakers. He was there supporting all the time. Not only me, but Colin and Frank Marshall, who's a producer and who's another director. And there's no better producer than another director because he knows what you're going through. So in that sense, I didn't need to deal with lots of notes from the studio, you know, that kind of stuff. Basically, when I had a problem, I go to Steven and I talk to him

and I always feel his support. Do you feel spoiled by this experience then if you try to make another film of this scope? No, no, no. And I want to do it again for sure. No, I don't feel spoiled. I think every movie is a learning experience. I mean, of course, when you do a movie like this one, there are commitments because it's so massive, so big, and everyone has so many expectations that you basically try to adapt yourself to the story, to what people is looking for in this kind of movie.

And it felt good. It felt good. I definitely would do it again. Do you feel a desire to do something that is an original story now that you can explore and not be bound by some of that legacy that we talked about? I think, you know, I love to see blockbusters, and I go to see all of them. But I think I also like to see original movies. I'm so glad that, for example, Stephen shot last year Ready Player One and The Post. You know, that's the kind of cinema I like to, I want to do.

You know, I like to do big fantasy movies, original movies like Ready Player One. And at the same time, it's a movie that talks about the world we live in. And at the same time, you can do smaller movies that are very meaningful and that are designed to create an impact on the audience and make them thought about the moment we live in. How do you figure out what to do next now? You know, I was developing projects before Jurassic, so I'm keeping that work. I'm doing that work.

So I still don't know what's going to be next. I probably would like to go back to Europe and do a movie there. I was going to ask you, would you see yourself going back to Spain to do a film? Yeah, yeah. Because I feel, I mean, I live there. I feel very comfortable, you know. It's like,

we're talking about Steven and he goes from Ready Player One to The Post, you know. For me, that's more or less the same way, but if I do The Post instead of doing it

in a studio, probably it would be easier to me to finance myself and do it in Europe. Right. Some people know about your association with Guillermo del Toro

over the years. Do you also, like, show him this film and talk to him? Obviously, he has a great creature mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, Guillermo, he's over the years. Do you also show him this film and talk to him? Obviously, he has a great creature mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, Guillermo has been a friend, a mentor from my very first movie.

He's always there. When I need him, I call him and we talk about it. Everything that I'm going through, he's been there before. So it's always great to have the chance of talking to him and have his advice. Could you see yourself doing another Jurassic film? Sure. Yeah?

Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I really enjoy working with all the people involved in Jurassic, and I really enjoy working with these actors, with Chris and Bryce. It was a great experience. I don't know where the Jurassic universe is heading to. Right now Colin is making the third movie, and I think it's very exciting, I don't know where the Jurassic universe is heading to right now Colin is making

the third movie and I think it's very exciting the fact that he's coming back to do the third episode and finish the trilogy

that he started but I don't know what's going to be next but I mean I would consider why not you opened the doors for him

very effectively at the end of your film thank you that was the goal you know. Jay, I end every episode by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing that they've seen. So you say you see everything.

What is the last great thing that you have seen? Like a movie? Yeah. I saw two days ago, I saw Hereditary. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we had Ari Aster, the filmmaker, on here a couple weeks ago. Yeah, what did you think about Hereditary?

Very interesting. I really enjoyed that. Very, very... It's one of those movies that are kind of like or the filmmaker on here a couple weeks ago. Yeah, what did you think about her? Very interesting. I really enjoyed that. It's one of those movies that are kind of like fascinating and uncomfortable at the same time. It's a movie that, it reminds me, you know, a lot of the cinema of David Lynch. Very much. In a very good way.

Because it felt very personal at the same time. Yeah, even some of the mood has a little bit of the orphanage in it, now that I think about it. I'm not sure if I totally put that together, but there's something kind of quiet and lurking about that. I thought it was a very interesting exercise in terms of the POV. From the very first shot, when you see that window, and also a window is always a very meaningful image,

you know, and that window turns into this kind of dollhouse and the movie takes place from that shot. You know that what you're watching is definitely a very special vision on a story. Very cool. Jay, thank you very much for doing this. Thank you so much. Thanks again for listening to today's show.

If you want more Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, please check out TheRinger.com where we've got a bevy of folks writing about it, including Claire McNeer, Miles Suri, and the homie Shea Serrano. And tune in next week. We'll have another episode with Stefano Solima. He's the director of Sicario Day of the Soldado.

So tune in.