We’re excited to drop our new interview with the cinematographer of Jurassic Park 3, Shelly Johnson! I was lucky enough to speak with Shelly not too long ago about his time working on Jurassic Park 3, along with many other features he has shot.
Shelly was first brought onto the third Jurassic Park movie by Steven Spielberg himself, who had seen Shelly’s work on the Dreamworks Television series, The Others.
“I got a call from Larry Franco who’s the producer of Jurassic and said, Hey, you know, we were just in Steven’s office, and he showed us some footage from the show and said that we need to talk to you about doing Jurassic. And so why don’t you come down and you’ll get to meet Joe Johnston, and you guys can discuss it. He said, unfortunately, we can’t show you the script, but it’s Jurassic 3 and you get the idea.”
The collaboration with Joe Johnston led to a long and varied career, shooting films such as Captain America: The First Avenger, The Expendables 2, The Wolfman, and the upcoming Bill & Ted Face The Music and Greyhound.
Shelly went into detail about the role he plays in crafting a movie, and the complex lighting setups he used on Jurassic Park 3:
“My plan was to have this very kind of indirect light, filtered through the fog and as they got deeper in the canyon and got a little darker until it got to the bottom when there’s no sun at all. Maybe a little bit of that in the cliffs up there, but they would be in indirect light. Our largest set piece was a set of cliffs on the river at the bottom of the canyon that was all at Falls Lake, which is a permanent Lake on the Universal backlot, kind of a pathway up the hill there, and they’ve got a permanent green screen structure on one side of it.”
Along with sharing the technicalities of a shoot this large, we discussed the infamous and slightly troubled production the movie had, which stemmed from the original shooting script being thrown out weeks before filming was set to begin.
There was never an ending written while they were shooting, but an ending sequence had been planned at one point in time which would have involved a rescue helicopter getting attacked by a Pteranodon – something Spielberg had been wanting to see with a passion. The scene ultimately ended up in Jurassic World, along with the motorcycle Raptor chase.
“At one point, I’m not sure if it was written or not, there was a big discussion and some illustrations of a Pteranodon attacking a helicopter, like a big helicopter, a black Hawk. And when they fly away at the end of it they were going to attack and pick their way through the windshield, kind of like they did with the little helicopter in part four.
We were kind of waiting for it because as they fly out, that’s where it was. The last thing was this attack and they had to get out of it. And it ended up getting cut because of the expense, everything, you’re at the end of the movie now. And that was the sequence we had least worked out, where everything else we had sets for and had worked it out and it just didn’t seem like it was going to be viable.”
We talked about some of the concept posters for Jurassic Park 3, that were seen on the Jurassic Park 3 DVD release, showing titles such as Extinction or Breakout, with one even showing a human fetus in the logo in exchange for the T. rex.
After Jurassic Park 3’s release, many ideas for the fourth Jurassic were thrown around and as we know Joe Johnston was attached to direct the movie for quite some time.
Shelly discussed some of the things he had heard about the fourth movie from Joe and the similarities between the concepts he had heard and what ended up in Jurassic World.
Jack: “Joe Johnson was attached to direct Jurassic Park 4 for quite some time after Jurassic Park 3 was released. After you and he had built that sort of solid working relationship on the third, were you automatically on that with him or did you discuss Jurassic Park 4 with him?”
Shelly: “We did discuss it, yes, I’m not sure I would have automatically been, nothing’s automatic with him. I sort of have to earn my way onto every project, but it was definitely in the discussion. He played so much of that close to the vest, I don’t think there was much he could talk about.
But he told me what was out there, he told me that there was a story of creating an army of Raptors as kind of this invincible army, which you kind of see in part four. You see Chris Pratt out there training the raptors and you see the military contractors realizing the profit potential
I know that four went through a whole slew of iterations, and I think that the finished version, what they ended up shooting was very different than the film that Joe was considering making way back then.”
Shelly also shared with me how he would have liked a new Jurassic to look, if he were shooting it.
Jack: “After your work on Jurassic Park 3 and the prospect of, of lighting and shooting another, had you had time to think about what direction you would have liked to take it in? Obviously, it depends on what Joe wants and what the script was like, but had you had an idea about the way you wanted it to kind of look or what you wanted to explore?”
Shelly: “Yes, if I could do it again, I think that the moodier stuff in that movie is where it starts to kind of hit a tone that makes the Island feel a lot more mysterious, less of a tropical paradise and much more of a mysterious and scary place. And I would have liked to have kind of gone for that tone, even with the Kirby story and that little nod to comedy that Alexander Payne put in there. You know, I think it’s still work in a very, a very more threatening environment. So, I would have loved for it to have gotten a little darker.”
An even moodier Jurassic Park is music to my ears, and it’s great to hear that from the cinematographer himself. Jurassic Park 3 has some of the most beautiful and well-shot sequences in the franchise, specifically the atmosphere that Shelly created in the aviary. It would have been great to see how far he could have pushed that in Jurassic Park 4.
Shelly was also kind enough to answer some fan questions submitted to us, including: ‘what attacked the boat in the opening sequence?’, ‘how late into production did the Spinosaurus replace the Baryonyx?’, ‘were the Velociraptors going to attack the Spinosaurus at any point?’
The interview is available to listen both on our YouTube and as an episode of Podcast which streams through iTunes, Google Podcasts, Podbean and other feeds.
I’d like to thank Shelly for taking the time to speak with me and for sharing such fantastic and detailed behind the scenes stories of his time working on the franchise!
Be sure to give Shelly a follow on Instagram and head to his website for some detailed breakdowns of his lighting setups.
Happy Jurassic June!
