The one thing scarier than a mutant Tyrannosaurus rex
It’s not the prehistoric monsters that haunt the composer of Jurassic World Rebirth. Talking behind-the-scenes at London’s famous Abbey Road Studios, Alexandre Desplat tells Review what really made him panic.
The leafy London borough of St John’s Wood is not where you might expect to find roaring dinosaurs. Today, though, Abbey Road Studios is playing host to a scoring session for one of the year’s most anticipated movies: Jurassic World Rebirth. Outside, a throng of tourists has reliably gathered to shoot selfies on the crossing featured on The Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover. Inside, this famed studio is more than just a shrine to the Fab Four. The walls pop with images of the musical legends – Aretha Franklin, Judy Garland and dozens more – who’ve recorded there.
Since 1981’s Steven Spielberg-directed adventure Raiders of The Lost Ark, Abbey Road has also been a major hub for recording movie scores. Now it’s the turn of Jurassic to get its claws into the studio’s legacy. A jewel in Universal Studios’ crown, Jurassic is the T-Rex of blockbusters. Beginning with 1993’s Spielberg masterpiece Jurassic Park, based on the Michael Crichton bestseller, the six films to date have grossed a staggering $US6bn. With an all-new cast, Jurassic World Rebirth is the first of a likely new trilogy.
Right now, Studio One – the world’s largest purpose-built recording studio – is heaving, as 105 musicians take their seats for a second day’s activity. Brass, strings, woodwind, percussion sections all tune up, as the film’s composer Alexandre Desplat takes to the podium.
Sporting a black neckerchief, the 63-year-old Frenchman furrows his brow, then conducts with hand movements so precise you’d think he was a surgeon at the operating table. A fearful, dread-inducing sound strikes up, capped by a trombone’s ba-ba-ba-bum.
Desplat is already in the upper echelons of Hollywood’s composers. With 11 Academy Award nominations, he’s twice won the Oscar, for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water. He’s scored for the creme-de-la-creme of Hollywood, including films by David Fincher, Kathryn Bigelow, Greta Gerwig and George Clooney, while building his blockbuster credentials, composing music for The Deathly Hallows, the final two Harry Potter instalments.
That assignment saw Desplat interweave his music with the legendary theme by John Williams. And so it goes with Jurassic World Rebirth. Williams composed the unforgettable theme to Jurassic Park. “You mean all of them,” says Desplat, dryly, when he later arrives for a chat. “For the last 70 years he’s written all the scores in Hollywood!” True enough. Taking the baton from the man who wrote such indelible music for Jaws, Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Superman is a mission (nearly) impossible.
Desplat sighs, a sign that this is exactly what he’s been grappling with these past months. “It’s more the weight of his heritage, which is difficult. When you start, there’s a moment of panic, because you know that you’re taking over, like when I did the two Harry Potters, the last ones, it took me a few weeks to figure out, ‘What am I going to write? How can I get out of that?’ Because, yeah, he’s a bloody genius. It’s hard to come after him.” His eyes narrow. “No more questions about John Williams!”
It’s a feeling shared by Rebirth director Gareth Edwards. The British filmmaker has already proved his mettle on Godzilla (2014), which Desplat scored, and Star Wars spin-off Rogue One (2016). “When we worked on Godzilla together, we talked about things that got us into this business. I know for me, it was obviously Steven Spielberg. I know for Alexandre it was John Williams. And so we both had this very big shadow hanging over us for this movie and felt the pressure to even come close to their amazing achievements before.”
Wearing a T-shirt with the legend “Skywalker Ranch” – the post-production facility owned by another hero, Star Wars creator George Lucas – Edwards, 49, was coming off the back of 2023 sci-fi The Creator when he was offered the job. He was desperate for a break, but knew he couldn’t turn this down. “Steven’s the reason I knew there was such a job as a film director.” He recalls storyboarding a short film in class when he was caught by a teacher. “And that was from watching behind the scenes [footage] of Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”
While Spielberg directed Jurassic Park and its 1997 sequel The Lost World – the only two films based on Crichton novels – he has remained the godfather of the franchise, overseeing every entry. On this, he recruited David Koepp, the screenwriter of the original two movies, to script this new beginning. They spent months batting ideas around. “You’re having meetings where you start sentences with, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if…?’” says Koepp, 62. “And Steven’s fantastic at that. To have his full attention, as we did on this movie, is a blessing. And he’s very keyed into this. He gets these stories. He loves these stories.”
Set five years after the last film, 2022’s Colin Trevorrow-directed Jurassic World Dominion, Koepp and Spielberg wanted to go back to the tone of the original movie. Like that, it’s also another island-set adventure, as a covert operative named Zara (Scarlett Johansson) journeys to an abandoned research facility in the Atlantic Ocean, alongside a scientist (Wicked’s Jonathan Bailey) and others. The mission is to retrieve samples of three of the world’s biggest dinosaurs in a quest to cure heart disease, although it doesn’t take a student of the franchise to know chaos will soon reign.
The first thing Koepp did was go back to the Crichton books to re-imbibe the spirit of the author. He even plundered a sequence from the original novel in which the T-rex, on the banks of a river, pursues its prey while they’re on a raft. A fan favourite scene, it was destined for the first movie but dropped due to the complications and expense of filming it – back when CG-rendered dinosaurs were in their infancy. Now, finally, it’s being integrated. “I felt like that alone is worth the ticket price,” says Edwards. “I would queue up just to see that scene, let alone be allowed to direct it.”
Jurassic World Rebirth won’t have the July box office all to itself; James Gunn’s Superman reboot opens a week later. But the Jurassic films are evergreens for one reason alone: dinosaurs. “They’re these great mythical creatures,” reasons Koepp. “Although they’re not mythical.”
Edwards concurs, aware of what the audience expects: “If the T-Rex didn’t turn up in a Jurassic film, you’d probably be camping outside, asking for your money back.”
At least this time, there’s a twist: among the main antagonists of Rebirth is a deformed dinosaur – the Distortus rex, a mutant Tyrannosaurus rex with six limbs.
Even by modern Hollywood standards, the speed of this production has been remarkable. Edwards was only announced as director in February 2024 and filming – primarily in Thailand – was finished by September, an insanely short timeline for a movie of this scale. “You basically haven’t got time to second guess yourself,” he says. “You’ve just got to go with your gut on everything.” At his London edit suite, a quote from musical maestro Leonard Bernstein is taped to the door: To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time. “We’ve certainly got the second bit,” says Edwards.
Desplat only saw a rough cut of the film at Christmas and hasn’t stopped since. “It’s been hell. It’s been difficult,” he says “But there’s always a deadline. An iceberg coming to you, and this iceberg will not stop. (The studio won’t say) ‘Oh, it’s okay, we’ll release the movie later, because you don’t have enough time’.” For the past month, he’s been sleeping four hours a night. “That’s the only way to finish.” For sustenance, he drinks herbal teas. “Tea is part of my everyday discipline. Japanese sunshine in the morning. Taiwanese Gao Shan Cha after lunch, and Japanese Genmaicha in the afternoon,” he says.
“It helps a lot, and it’s not as brutal as coffee.”
Thankfully, Desplat is not facing this ordeal alone. Esteemed orchestrator Conrad Pope – “a legend”, says Edwards – walks past. “Just happy to be on my third Jurassic,” he shrugs. Downstairs, in the control room, is Desplat’s producer and wife, violinist Dominique Lemmonier – better known by her nickname “Solrey”, a pun on the musical notes. Overseeing a huge control deck, Solrey is Desplat’s ears throughout. “She’s been playing with an orchestra since she was 14 as a professional,” Desplat says. “She adds musical sensitivity and technique that I can’t even hear when I’m conducting.”
In front of Solrey is a bank of monitors showing a scene being scored. It’s classic Jurassic, riddled with tension. An overhead shot shows a giant Mosasaur, the aquatic beast previously seen in 2015’s Jurassic World, speed underneath an upturned boat hull. There are immediate vibes of a certain other Spielberg ocean-going classic – something Koepp raised when they were kicking around ideas. “He said, ‘Yeah, it can’t be Jaws!’” the writer says. “It’s the problem, though, writing for Steven as he’s created so many iconic moments in so many different kinds of films that you really do catch yourself unconsciously repeating something.”
Repetition is something a composer must guard against too, especially in a film like Rebirth filled with multiple scenes of high drama and shrieking tension. “There’s many of these sequences where there’s danger, chase, being killed, not killed, escape, chased again by huge beasts,” Desplat says, just as a scene flashes past on a monitor of Johansson and Bailey in a clifftop temple, being attacked by a winged Quetzalcoatlus. “In musicals, there is a saying … there’s no plateau. It’s always one plateau, another plateau, until the final of the musical, because you can’t go down in energy – and it’s the same in this kind of film.”
Desplat isn’t the first to follow John Williams in the Jurassic franchise; Don Davis scored Jurassic Park III and Michael Giacchino worked on the music for the Jurassic World trilogy. But he and Edwards knew that it couldn’t be ignored. “I’d say Alexandre himself would be the first to say that he’s quite different to John,” says Edwards. “There are strategic moments where we want to bring in that original theme that you can’t stop singing in the shower but we really cherry pick those moments when they happen.” The director even suggests there’s a “sprinkling” of Bernard Hermann, the composer behind so many masterful Alfred Hitchcock scores.
Watching Desplat at work, it’s easy to be swept along by his precision, as he tells the brass section to truncate their shortest notes – an infinitesimal difference that will sharpen the score no doubt. From flutes to French horns, he loves to utilise every instrument in the room. “As John Williams would say, having such a huge machine, huge orchestra, you can do so many things,” he says.
“You can have the clarinet playing loud. You can have no clarinet. You can have the strings all in unison. There’s so many ways of using an orchestra, which is fabulous. It’s a tool that’s endless in possibilities.”
Does Desplat have a grasp on what makes a good score? Or is it so instinctual, so ingrained, he simply couldn’t articulate it? “What makes a good score?” he replies, eyebrows arching. “It’s always this balance that I try to make between function and fiction. Function, which means being efficient and being – in this kind of genre film – able to mark what is important, the emotions, the fear, the chase, all the dangers, the moments of intimacy. That’s function. And then there’s the fiction, which is how much you can invent and how much imagination you can bring to that function.”
Whether their collective imaginations will return for second and third instalments remains to be seen. Universal Studios will surely encourage it, and Koepp admits that he and Spielberg have discussed it, even casually. “We’ve thought about it but I can’t say we know what’s next,” he says. Edwards and Desplat, meanwhile, can’t even think beyond the next few weeks. “I think (Avatar director) James Cameron said it best when he said you should never ask a woman if she wants another child when she’s crowning and about to give birth!” says Edwards. “We’re in the maternity ward right now.”
Jurassic World Rebirth is in cinemas July 3.
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