Jurassic World Rebirth Director Gareth Edwards Reveals He Nearly Skipped The Iconic John Williams Theme

Jurassic World Rebirth is the seventh film in the world’s best-known franchise about the return of dinosaurs from extinction. Set five years after the last entry, Jurassic World Dominion, the new film imagines a world inhospitable to dinosaurs, where the surviving creators largely live on secluded tropical islands. The movie stars Scarlett Johansson as Zora Bennett, an operative tasked with retrieving DNA from select dinosaurs to help achieve medical breakthroughs.

Every movie set in the world of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is destined to hit certain familiar beats–a deadly trip to a secluded island, a sense of wonder morphing into visceral terror, and at least one hungry apex predator–but Jurassic World Rebirth boasts a director with a reputation for putting a new spin on what’s seemingly known. Gareth Edwards, who made what many consider Disney’s best Star Wars movie, helmed Jurassic World Rebirth, suggesting audiences will be treated to his standout visual style. But Edwards also confirmed he’d bring back one standout Jurassic Park element in John Williams’ iconic theme.

ScreenRant’s Liam Crowley spoke with Jurassic World Rebirth director Gareth Edwards about his work on the sequel. The director discussed the experience of seeing the movie with an audience, the nine commandments behind writing a (surprisingly scientifically accurate) Jurassic Park movie, and when and how to use John Williams’ unforgettable motif. Later in the interview, Edwards and Crowley also got into spoilers–be sure to check back once Jurassic World Rebirth is released for a more in-depth look at the film.

How John Williams’ Theme Almost Didn’t Make It Into Jurassic World Rebirth

“We Were Asked To Try Versions Without It Anywhere”

Scarlett Johansson squinting on a boat in Jurassic World Rebirth

John Wiliams’ Jurassic Park theme is one of the most beloved pieces by one of the most beloved film composers of all time, and it nearly didn’t make it into Jurassic World Rebirth. Despite the fact that Gareth Edwards said “You’re going to play that card, probably, at some point,” the process of actually getting it in the movie was not as simple as one might imagine. “That was one of the first conversations,” Edwards shared, “Alexandre Desplat, who wrote the score, was like, ‘We’re going to do the theme at some point, right?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah. Where?’”

To try and figure out where Williams’ iconic cue could go, Edwards shared that “we played a game of ‘If it can only be one place, where’s it going to go?’” which is no small decision. “I wanted it at the end credits,” he said, adding, “I was like, ‘It’s got to come at the end credits.’ Then, the problem was, ‘But then you haven’t really used it in the movie.’”

“We were asked to try versions without it anywhere,” Edwards continued, saying, “and I showed that version to some people just as an experiment, praying it didn’t work … and as soon as they saw it, they were like, ‘Yeah, you’re right. Put it back in.’”

I came, really sad, back to Abbey Road, and then they were like, ‘Oh. We were joking. We haven’t recorded it yet, and we were going to do it today.’

Clearly, Edwards really wanted the Williams theme in the movie, which gave his musicians the opportunity to pull one over on him: “I [had] to do a publicity thing whilst we were scoring the movie at Abbey Road. There was a hundred-piece orchestra and I had to go and do this one thing [because] the studio said, ‘You have to do it.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, but please don’t record the John Williams moment whilst I’m away.’ And I was a way, and they [teased] me that they had recorded it so I’d missed it.”

The venue itself made the moment even more special for Edwards. “I got to sit on the steps where all the Beatles had recorded all their albums and everything, there was Alexandre Desplat and a hundred-piece orchestra, there was a guy called Conrad Pope, the orchestrator for the film, who orchestrated the original Jurassic Park, and it just felt like we were [on] sacred ground. The theme began, and it’s one of those things where you want to take a picture or video it, and I was like, ‘Put the phone away. Just suck it up. Just live in this moment. It’s never going to happen again.’”

Even Gareth Edwards Isn’t In On The Nine Commandments Of Jurassic Park

“[David Koepp] Would Just Bring Them Out When He Needed To Win An Argument”

A mososaurus emerging from the water next to a boat in Jurassic World Rebirth

Although Jurassic World Rebirth has a director who is new to the franchise, it boasts original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp, whose other work includes Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man (2002), and Black Bag. The production notes shared by the Jurassic World Rebirth team revealed that Koepp came up with nine commandments of the franchise, which each new entry in the series needs to follow. The trick is, not even Gareth Edwards knew them in full. “He would just bring them out when he needed to win an argument,” he joked. “So, he would be like, ‘Well, [if you look at] commandment number four…’”

A T-Rex Roaring From Jurassic World Rebirth

Jurassic World Rebirth Early Reactions Praise Movie For Recapturing Spielberg Magic & Its Terrifying Dinosaurs

Jurassic World Rebirth early reactions praise the new movie’s Spielberg vibes, mutated dinosaurs, and for making dinosaurs scary again.

“I only heard about two of them,” Edwards continued, “I think one of them was something like–he’s got a more eloquent way of saying it, but it was essentially that the movies are fueled by fun and humor. The more of that you have, the more you can be scary. It’s like you get a horror token every time you crack a joke. And if you watch the original Jurassic Park and sit there with a clicker, there are way more jokes than you give credit [for].”

“There’s a lot of humor in that film,” Edwards added, “but you wouldn’t walk away going, ‘It’s a comedy,’ [or] ‘It’s a horror,’ because they sort of balance each other out. And that’s what we tried to do. We tried to make it fun and funny, but then serious and a bit shocking. There’s always a moment where you’ve got the audience in a certain feeling, and you go, ‘Okay. Now we can do a really funny joke.’ Then, after a bit of humor, you go, ‘Okay. Now we can scare the s*** out of them.’”

Gareth Edwards Reflects On Seeing Jurassic World Rebirth With An Audience

“I Sit In There Thinking, ‘This Is Never Going To Happen Again’”

Jurassic World Rebirth is a movie clearly made for the big screen–after all, that is the closest audiences will get to seeing its dinosaur characters at their actual sizes. The theatrical experience can be so powerful, in fact, that even Gareth Edwards had an emotional experience when watching it with an audience. “You think you’re going to get through a whole movie with silence,” the director shared, “maybe a couple of laughs with some jokes that are in there. But [we were] getting gasps, and there was applause at various comments during the end of set pieces and stuff.”

“I sit in there thinking, ‘This is never going to happen again. I’m not going to be in this situation, where it’s going to be a great crowd that’s so vocal.’ I also got paranoid that the sound designers [for] Dolby Atmos had put all these crowd reactions,” the director laughed. “Afterwards, I was like, ‘The studios should start putting crowd reactions into the sound mix, because people wouldn’t know. They would just think, ‘Oh, they’re clapping. I’m going to clap. They put laughter on TV shows, [so] why not?”

Jurassic World Rebirth hits theaters on July 2.