LIFE FINDS ANOTHER WAY

DIRECTOR GARETH EDWARDS WORKS WITH HIS HERO, STEVEN SPIELBERG, TO REINVIGORATE THE JURASSIC WORLD FRANCHISE FOR A NEW GENERATION

-  TARA BENNETT

WHEN SFX LAST SPOKE WITH director Gareth Edwards in autumn 2023, he was decompressing from locking The Creator and was contemplating what his movie-making future might look like in the wake of its release. Extremely satisfied with how he was able to marry the “pros of a small independent film and the pros of a big blockbuster” on that film, Edwards said he was planning to only chase that model going forward.

And then Team Spielberg came calling with Jurassic World Rebirth.

Edwards tells SFX that he unintentionally started manifesting his next gig during New Year's Eve of 2023, when he spontaneously collected his girlfriend to usher in 2024 at Universal Studios Hollywood, a local haunt when he's working in Los Angeles. “I spent New Year's Eve on the Jurassic World ride,” Edwards says, smiling. “I took a picture, and I sent it to Colin Trevorrow, who's a friend of mine, saying, ‘This is me, New Year's Eve, like rock and roll.’ Little did I know it was gonna herald in this year where I was gonna get to direct one.”

Edwards swears he was planning on taking a rest. In fact by early 2024, he says he was in the midst of an exercise that he considers to be downtime fun, which is dissecting his favourite films on paper, distilling them into beats or short phrases, all in service of “trying to crack the code of what makes a good film”.

He'd just done that for Jurassic Park, and the next day the trades announced that Universal Pictures was still looking for a director for the next instalment of their Jurassic World franchise. Because he'd just spent the previous day working on that document, Edwards says, his girlfriend texted him the intel while he was on a phone call to his editor Jabez Olssen.