Laura Dern has done a lot of stuff since Jurassic Park, way back in 1993. She has excelled at playing flawed, cracked characters, like Amy Jellicoe on HBO’s Enlightened, or her most recent role as cancer victim Bobbi Strayed opposite Reese Witherspoon in Wild.
While Dern certainly had done great work before Jurassic Park, that film reached a huge audience, attracted much attention, and went on to spawn sequels.
Now that the entire franchise is being reopened again with the upcoming Jurassic World, Dern recently looked back at the beginning in 1993. She told The Washington Post that she was not surprised at all that the dino-dynasty was being reopened.
“It makes sense to be honest, I think Steven Spielberg has thought about it from the beginning and talked about it, and Michael Crichton has talked about it.”
When Jurassic Park opened in 1993, the idea of cloning was still pretty much the stuff of sci-fi. Then came Dolly the Sheep in 1996, and suddenly everyone realized that cloning was the stuff of reality.
“[G]enetic modification and the use of cloning is so huge in science now so it’s far more relevant than before,” Dern says. “Like, by the way, it actually could happen! Yes, we can do that right now! I mean, not exactly, but very likely. It’s a really interesting story to reinvent right now.”
Dern recalls how important the original Jurassic Park was in terms of graphics and realism, blazing a new trail away from the old, hackneyed animatronics and animation that had gone before.
“ I had forgotten what a pioneered film it was — it was so cutting edge and there had been nothing like it,” she said. “And it was the first CGI and it was so radical, it was such a cool thing to be part of. I feel lucky to have been there to see something feel so unique.”
The upcoming Jurassic World has been a long time in the making. It has been caught in “development hell” since 2001. It stars Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Vincent D’Onofrio. It is scheduled for release on June 12, 2015.