Steven Spielberg doesn’t love ‘Jurassic Park’: “It’s not even in the top five”
To an entire generation of cinephiles, finding out that Steven Spielberg doesn’t love Jurassic Park is like finding out Santa Claus hates Christmas. It just sounds wrong.
Jurassic Park is an era-defining blockbuster that instilled a love of cinema in millions of kids all over the world, and kick-started an obsession with fossilised artefacts and the serious friend/enemy-making query of ‘what’s your favourite dinosaur?’.
It’s a revolutionary piece of filmmaking that pioneered technologies Hollywood has been endlessly iterating on ever since. Oh, and lest we forget, it’s a rewatchable, relentlessly exciting thrill-ride that puts most tentpole movies made in the three decades since its release to shame.
All this is to say, Jurassic Park has a strong argument for being one of the greatest motion pictures ever made, and discovering that its creator doesn’t have any particular fondness for it is pretty devastating. Spielberg let this heartbreaking revelation slip during an interview with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls scribe Peter Biskind in 1997, when he was asked why he decided to make a sequel to Jurassic Park, but not his other beloved childhood classic, ET the Extra-Terrestrial. In essence, he admitted that he loved ET on a deeply personal level, but Jurassic Park was little more than a paycheque gig.
“ET was a very personal film for me,” Spielberg revealed, surprising no one who has any knowledge of the background of that heartwarming story of the universe’s friendliest alien. He added, “It was a movie that I absolutely cherished in my heart. I know it has become a much-abused icon, but at the time, it was my first personal film, the opposite of Jaws.”
This is why, when the studio wanted to turn it into a money-making brand by immediately greenlighting a sequel, Spielberg resisted with all his might. He couldn’t sanction the idea of making a second movie that may “blemish its memory” because he knew he simply wasn’t capable of making a sequel better than its predecessor. “I didn’t want to mess with something that I thought was almost a perfect little movie,” he flatly concluded.
More than a decade later, when money-grubbing execs began buzzing in his ear about making another Jurassic Park, he was much more open to the idea, not because he saw great potential in expanding the story or longed to return to any of the characters. Instead, he just recognised that the world fucking loved Jurassic Park so much that it would make little kids everywhere cry their eyes out if he didn’t make a sequel.
“There was such an outpouring of demand from the public, thousands and thousands of letters,” Spielberg admitted, “And so, after all those years of denying them the sequel to ET, I couldn’t face the same nine-year-old, now saying…’Why are you not making the sequel to Jurassic Park?’”
Basically, the director was only able to make 1997’s The Lost World because it wasn’t so close to his heart that he’d need to fall on his sword if the sequel didn’t turn out as strong as the first film. To Spielberg, ET was his masterpiece, while Jurassic Park was just one of many “good movies” that he’d made in his career. Stunningly, he claimed, “It’s not even in the top five”.
While that statement is enough to make most Jurassic Park fans’ heads explode, it’s actually even more astounding when you consider he said it in ‘97, when he only had 15 feature films under his belt. Admittedly, that 15 included bona fide masterworks like Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Schindler’s List, the kinds of movies that usually only come along once in even the greatest directors’ careers.
Still, to not include his dino delight in the top five, even at that point, sounds insane to me, and it begs the question: where would Spielberg rank it now, having directed another 18 movies in the past three decades? Perhaps that doesn’t bear thinking about.
