Jurassic World: Rebirth director Gareth Edwards reveals surprise Ridley Scott movie inspiration

Jurassic World: Rebirth director Gareth Edwards reveals surprise Ridley Scott movie inspiration
The 50-year-old filmmaker is helming the next era in the Jurassic era
Jurassic World: Rebirth
(Image: Photo by)
Jurassic World: Rebirth was inspired by Sir Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, director Gareth Edwards has revealed.
The 50-year-old filmmaker is helming the next era in the Jurassic era, and has now spilled Scott's "visually stunning" 2005 epic Kingdom of Heaven was a big influence in making Jurassic World: Rebirth.
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In the July 2025 issue of SFX Magazine, Edwards said of Kingdom of Heaven: "John Mathieson was the director of photography and the more and more I looked at it, the more I was like, 'This is perfection. There's not a bad frame in this movie.'
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"I've always had this love for his work. When you start a film like this, you have a group of names you'd like to work with, and the studio have a group of names they would trust."
The Rogue One: A Star Wars Story filmmaker added it was important to him to bring in VFX veteran David Vickery - who served as the visual effects supervisor on 2018's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and 2022's Jurassic World: Dominion - to help capture the right visual style for Jurassic World: Rebirth.
Edwards explained: "He's just brilliant and kind of like the world's best person at dinosaurs. But he was sort of done with doing dinosaur films. He didn't want to do another one."
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Recalling how he persuaded Vickery to board Jurassic World: Rebirth, the filmmaker told the VFX supervisor: "'I don't want this to feel animated. I don't want it to feel like we've anthropomorphized these creatures.'
"I would love it if we could build a massive catalogue of natural history and essentially, every single shot in this movie is based on a piece of existing footage of a real animal really doing whatever it is that's happening."
Jurassic World: Rebirth - which stars Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey and Mahershala Ali - follows a team of covert operatives who race to stop a rogue biotech group unleashing weaponised dinosaurs across the globe.
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As prehistoric chaos spreads, the group must confront a dark secret tied to the original Jurassic legacy.
Edwards previously said he wanted to revitalise the Jurassic Park franchise's "horror" elements with Jurassic World: Rebirth - which hits cinemas on 2 July 2025.
He explained to Vanity Fair: "Jurassic Park [the original 1993 movie] is a horror film in the witness protection program. Most people don't think of it like that.
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"We all went to see it as kids. But I was scared s*******, to be honest, when I was at the cinema watching the T. rex attack.
"It's one of the most well-directed scenes in cinema history, so the bar's really high to come on board and try and do this."
The Creator director added: "There's something very primal that's buried deep inside everybody. As mammals, we evolved [with] this fear of the bigger animal that's going to come one day and maybe kill us or our family.
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"The second we see it happening onscreen, you're like, 'I knew it ... We had it too good for too long.'"

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