The director who tried to steal ‘Jurassic Park’ away from Steven Spielberg: “He beat me to it by a few hours”
When Steven Spielberg was making Jurassic Park, his mind was split in two: Not between T-Rex and Velociraptors, or Deinonychus and Utahraptor, but between his dinosaur world and Schindler’s List.
Though Spielberg saw the potential in Jurassic Park before many others, and even required the film rights to Michael Crichton’s novel for $1.5million long before it was even published in 1990, it wasn’t his dream job. Perhaps it was too similar to the suspense fest that was Jaws, but Spielberg’s eye wandered elsewhere and landed on Schindler’s List.
Spielberg somehow managed to film both films in a single year, as MCA/Universal President Sid Sheinberg only gave the Holocaust film the go-ahead provided that the director agreed to make his dinosaur picture first. Spielberg may have been spinning two completely different shapes, but both came out as masterpieces: From the obtuse angles and the gripping humanity, Spielberg’s handprints are pressed all over the movie.
In theory, this would annoy nobody more than Titanic director James Cameron, who had his eye on the story right from the very initial sale. “I tried to buy the book rights, and he beat me to it by a few hours,” Cameron admitted sheepishly to the Titanic Museum in Belfast.
However, the magic of the movie quickly swept away any grievances Cameron had toward losing out on the genius idea: “When I saw the film, I realised that I was not the right person to make the film: He was. Because he made a dinosaur movie for kids, and mine would have been aliens with dinosaurs, and that wouldn’t have been fair.”
Cameron went on, “Dinosaurs are for eight-year-olds. We can all enjoy it, too, but kids get dinosaurs, and they should not have been excluded for that. His sensibility was right for that film, I’d have gone further, nastier, much nastier.”
Spielberg was never going to get too “nasty” with the movie, certainly because he’d have to hone all of his more violent, evil thematics for the film he was set to make later in the year.
On set, it remained playful, too: During filming, the icon once took on the role of the dinosaur, as actors were having trouble reacting at the same time to an invisible, soundless beast. Spielberg thwarted the problem spontaneously by picking up a megaphone and roaring loudly through it as, elsewhere, one of his crew shouted “Action!”.
It turns out that Cameron and Spielberg would be forefathers to two beloved sci-fi franchises that are often comparable to one another at the global box office. While Cameron’s three Avatar movies (including the 2009 original, The Way of Water, and Fire and Ash) have cumulatively grossed over $6.7billion worldwide, with the first movie retaining its crown as the highest-grossing film of all time, the dinosaur realm is not far behind with a cumulative global haul of around $6.9b for, admittedly, seven movies.
Despite this, Spielberg has won significantly more awards than Cameron (not that we’re counting)… From our eyes, each director ended up with exactly the right projects. Thank God they’re still going today.
