65’s directors want to break Jurassic Park’s ‘monopoly on dinosaurs’

You’d think that after more than 130 years of movies, audiences would have seen it all and filmmakers would be out of ideas. But no, on March 10, writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, best known for their work, arrived A quiet place, Adam Driver plunges into the Cretaceous Period to battle dinosaurs with futuristic military technology and avoid a mass extinction event on the horizon. Movies!

Produced by Sam Raimi, 65 was a childhood dream for Beck and Woods, and it shows. The movie promises a lot — dinos, meteors, laser guns, and a few sci-fi surprises, too — and as the duo tell Polygon, the whole project started on the playground. The Hollywood multihyphenates have known each other since they were 11 years old, and they desperately wanted one Dinosaur creature function almost as long.

“Dinosaurs are such magical, bizarre creatures, and when you’re a young kid… it’s beyond comprehension!” says Bos. “How did these giant creatures walk the Earth, the same Earth we walk on today? And I think we’ve always wondered since that age, like… Do Spielberg and Universal [Pictures] have a monopoly on dinosaurs? Or is there a way to do one in a way we haven’t seen before?”

“We love the idea of ​​ticking clock movies, where catastrophic danger lurks around every corner,” adds Beck, referring to the 1994 Keanu Reeves movie. Speed, which escalates the action every five minutes, acting as a core influence on 65.

Over the years, Beck and Woods landed on a premise that they hoped would give them the same vibe. Instead of finding reasons to bring dinosaurs into humanity’s present, the team cracked a plot that would pit a human against dinosaurs on their home turf of Earth 65 million years ago. (How they set up that showdown is a mystery, but that’s something the film should reveal.) Still, Woods says the clever twist the story enabled didn’t make the task any less daunting, either for the writer-directors or the editors. studios.

It’s impossible to escape Jurassic Park‘s shadow. It’s one of the greatest movies of all time and one of the best performances of visual effects creatures in movie history. I think all we were trying to accomplish here was to cut through the debilitating fear that apparently all of Hollywood has had since then Jurassic Park came up: that you can only have one dinosaur franchise.”

But thanks to technological advancements in the art of chompy dino baddies, 65 was more feasible a swing for a studio than ever. And it didn’t hurt that Beck and Woods eventually found famed horror director Sam Raimi in their corner. According to the filmmakers, Raimi hosted large table readings of the screenplay and encouraged free-flowing ideas, and leading up to production hired concept artists to help design creatures and other sci-fi gear.

“Sam is such a great mentor to all the filmmakers he works with,” says Beck. “He’s made the best independent movies of all time, arguably if you’re an Evil Dead fan, and some of the best studio movies of all time, the Spider-Man movies. He’s done it all, and to us he was a mentor, guiding us from the independent world to the studio world.

Beck and Woods’ first priority was probably music to Raimi’s ears: they “just wanted to make dinosaurs scary again.”

“We felt like that threat was lost,” says Beck. He compares Driver’s situation in the film to being lost in the African outback. “We wanted the inherent thrill of traversing a landscape that can feel utterly serene and isolated at times, and suddenly change in the blink of an eye if you encounter the wrong group of dinosaurs.”

Image: Sony Pictures

The film stars Driver Mills, a working-class dad type, who ends up protecting a young girl, played by 15-year-old Ariana Greenblatt (previously seen as the youth version of Gamora in Avengers: Infinite War.) Greenblatt says Beck and Woods underscored the threat to the actors with unusually intense stunt work, much of which was shot on location in the Louisiana swamps.

“The stunts were beautiful spontaneouslyGreenblatt says with a laugh. Her most difficult moment on set involved a scene where her character is dragged through the sand by a reptile. “That was a last minute. And I thought, ‘OK, let’s just do it.’ […] We tried it a few times and it just looked too good. I was like, ‘This has got to look a lot more painful and rough.’ So they took off the safety harness and just started towing me full out!

Figuring out which dinosaurs should drag their stars through the mud took a mix of historical record and dramatic liberty. The result: realistically rendered critters whose bone structure has been vetted by paleontologists, but still maximized on terror.

“We had a Venn diagram, where one circle was all about science,” says Woods, “And then in the other Venn diagram circle, we had Ridley Scott’s Alien, one of the scariest movies ever made. And so we just wanted to combine interesting science with something that is frightening.”

For all intents and purposes, no dinosaurs or humans were hurt in the making 65. But will the public go for a dinosaur romp (stump?) that isn’t emblazoned with the Jurassic Park logo? Woods believes so.

“Why aren’t there as many dinosaur movies as superhero movies every year?” he asks. “WHO not do you like dinosaurs?

65 will be in cinemas from March 10.