NEW YORK (AP) — If you are going to let dinosaurs run amok, it is good to have some floor guidelines.
That is how screenwriter David Koepp noticed it, anyway, in penning the script for “Jurassic World Rebirth,” which opens in theaters July 2. Koepp wrote the unique “Jurassic Park and its 1997 sequel, “The Lost World. But “Rebirth,” the seventh movie within the franchise, marks his return to the franchise he helped beginning.
And Koepp, the veteran screenwriter of “Carlito’s Way” and “Mission: Impossible,” noticed it as an opportunity to get just a few issues to ensure that a film sequence that had maybe strayed too removed from its foundational character. Impressed by the animator Chuck Jones, Koepp determined to place down a listing of 9 commandments to information “Jurassic World Rebirth” and future installments.
Jones had carried out one thing related for the Roadrunner cartoons. His “commandments” included issues like: the Roadrunner by no means speaks besides to say “meep meep”; the coyote mustn’t ever catch him; gravity is the coyote’s worst enemy; all merchandise come from the ACME Company.
“I always thought those were brilliant as a set of organizing principles,” Koepp says. “Things become easier to write when you have that, when you have a box, when you have rules, when you agree going in: ‘These we will heed by.’ So I wrote my own, nine of them.”
Koepp shared some — although not all of them — in a latest interview.
1. The occasions of the primary six motion pictures can’t be contradicted
“I hate a retcon. I hate when they change a bunch of things: ‘Oh, that didn’t actually happen. It was actually his twin.’ I don’t like other timelines. So I thought: Let’s not pretend any of the last 32 years didn’t happen or happened differently than you thought. But we can say things have changed.”
2. The dinosaurs are animals, not monsters
“On the first movie, anyone working on the movie would get fined for referring to them as monsters. They’re not monsters, they’re animals. Therefore, because they’re animals, their motives can only be because they’re hungry or defending their territory. They don’t attack because they’re scary. They don’t sneak up and roar because they want to scare you.”
3. Humor is oxygen.
“You can’t forget it.”
4. Science have to be actual
“The tone that Steven (Spielberg) found and I helped find in that first movie is really distinctive. I haven’t gotten to work on a movie with that tone since then. So to go back to that sense of high adventure, real science and humor, it was just kind of joyful.”
5. The tone mustn’t ever been ponderous or self-serious
“And then there were a number of other rules that I would define as trade secrets. So I’ll keep them to myself.”
