Gareth Edwards’ new Jurassic World movie, Rebirth, is getting some credit for injecting a little horror back into the concept of dinosaurs run amuck, up to and including occasionally feinting toward treating its characters with a bit of genuine savagery. But it could have gone so much further, had Edwards—and star Mahershala Ali—not been overruled by the studio.
This is per a new Variety interview with Edwards, who talks about the tension of trying to convince audiences who’ve shelled out to see your PG-13 crowd-pleaser that you might actually let a dinosaur eat a child in front of them. “It’s tricky because you want people to think you’re going to do it. You’ve walked into a family adventure movie with lots of families and their kids. So, can they and will they do this?” But while chomping down on the kids (like Audrina Miranda’s Isabella, who gets one eye-catching scene) was probably a non-starter from the jump, another character was genuinely on the chopping block: Heroic paramilitary leader Duncan, played by Ali. Who apparently only had one question about his character when he read the script and came aboard the project: “Can we kill him?”
Edwards was on board, for sure, noting that in the original draft of the script, Duncan was slated to die—and only spared when the film’s casting scored Ali’s Oscar-winning talents. “I joined Team Mahershala and we both pushed to have him killed; the script changed back to him dying.” But although Edwards shot the film’s ending with the intention of giving the character a heroic sacrifice, execs at Universal asked if he wouldn’t, maybe, just possibly mind shooting a version where the character lived. Edwards could read the writing on the wall: “I know how this works; whatever we film will be in the movie, so you’ve got to be careful. I thought, ‘If we can do this, I want it to be the really classy version that I can live with,’ so I started trying to imagine it and to picture some shots. The actors gave this amazing performance for this little section, and I really liked it.” Still, when it was time to send in his director’s cut of the movie, Edwards went with the one where Duncan dies. At which point Universal asked, “Hey, can we see the other way, too?”
Anyway, Edwards admits he got his mind changed on the matter when he watched test screenings of the film, and saw audiences break into “massive applause” when the character’s non-fatal fate was revealed. “Hats off to the studio… I just didn’t want to feel like I was selling out by bringing him back. But if anything, I had to remind myself that there’s this film called E.T. where E.T. died, and then when he came back. So I kept reassuring myself: remember that movie you loved did this, it’s not a cop-out.”
