Adam Driver’s 65 hopes to break Jurassic Park’s ‘monopoly on dinosaurs’

You’d think after 130-plus years of motion pictures, audiences would have seen it all, and that filmmakers might be out of ideas. Scott Beck and Bryan Woods were the writer-directors who took over on March 10. They are best known for their work in A Quiet PlaceAdam Driver is now in the Cretaceous Period. He will fight the dinosaurs using futuristic military technology and avoid a mass-extinction. Movies!

Sam Raimi created this film. 65Beck and Woods had a dream of this movie as a child, and they are achieving it. The movie makes a big promise — dinos, meteors, laser guns, and a few sci-fi surprises, too — and as the duo tells Polygon, the whole project started at the playground. The Hollywood multihyphenates have known each other since they were 11 years old, and they’ve been dying to make a DinosauriaCreatures feature almost as long.

“Dinosaurs are such magical, bizarre creatures, and when you’re a young kid… it’s incomprehensible!” Woods says. “How did these giant creatures walk the Earth, the same Earth that we walk today? And I think ever since that age, we’ve always wondered, like… Do Spielberg and Universal [Pictures]Do you have the right to claim the exclusive rights to dinosaurs? Or is there a way to do one in a way that we haven’t seen before?”

“We love the idea of ticking-clock films, where catastrophic danger lurks around every corner,” Beck adds, citing 1994’s Keanu Reeves movie Speed, As a key influence, this escalates the action each five minutes. 65.

Photo: Patti Perret/Sony Pictures

Beck and Woods found a common premise over time. Instead of finding reasons to bring dinosaurs into humankind’s present, the team cracked a plot that would pit a man against dinosaurs on their home turf of Earth, 65 million years ago. (How they set up that confrontation is far-out, but that’s for the movie to reveal.) Still, Woods says the clever twist that enabled the story didn’t make the task any less daunting, either for the writer-directors or for the studios.

“It’s impossible to escape Jurassic Park’s shadow. It’s one of the best movies of all time, and one of the best executions of visual effects creatures in cinema history. It was a way to get past the fearful feeling that Hollywood is afflicted with since its inception. Jurassic Park came out: that you can only have one dinosaur franchise.”

Thanks to technological advances in the art and science of bad dinos, 65A swing was possible for any studio. And it didn’t hurt that Beck and Woods eventually found famed horror director Sam Raimi in their corner. According to filmmakers, Raimi held large table readings of the screenplay, encouraged creativity, and hired concept artists in preparation for production to design creature and other sci-fi accessories.

“Sam is such a great mentor to all filmmakers that he works with,” Beck says. “He’s done the best independent films of all time, arguably, if you’re an Evil Dead fan, and some of the best studio movies of all time, the Spider-Man films. He’s done it all, and for us, he was a mentor that walked us from the independent world into the studio world.”

Beck and Woods’ number one priority was likely music to Raimi’s ears: They “just wanted to make dinosaurs scary again.”

“We felt like that threat has been lost,” Beck says. He likens Driver’s situation in the movie to being lost in the African outback. “We wanted the inherent suspense of traversing a landscape that at times might feel totally serene and isolated, and all of the sudden could change on a dime if you run into the wrong pack of dinosaurs.”

Image: Sony Pictures

Driver portrays Mills, a blue collar dad who ends up helping a 15-year old Ariana Greenblatt, previously known as Gamora’s childhood version. Avengers: Infinity War.) Greenblatt states that Beck and Woods underlined actors’ danger with unusually intense stuntwork, most of which was shot in Louisiana swamps.

“The stunts were pretty spontane,” Greenblatt says, laughing. The scene in which her character was being pulled through the sand and manipulated by a reptile was her most challenging moment. “That was a very last-minute one. And I was like, ‘OK, let’s just do it.’ […]It looked so good that we tried it several times. I was like, ‘This needs to look way more painful and way more rough.’ So they took the safety rig off and they just started dragging me fully!”

The historical record mixed with dramatic license was used to figure out which dinosaurs were going to drag their stars through mud. It resulted in realistically rendered dinosaurs whose bones were vetted and analyzed by paleontologists. However, they still possessed enough terror to be terrifying.

“We had a Venn diagram, where one circle was all about science,” Woods says, “And then in the other Venn diagram circle, we had Ridley Scott’s AlienOne of the most terrifying movies to ever be made. And so we just wanted to kind of combine interesting science and also something that’s frightening.”

According to all reports, there were no injuries to dinosaurs or humans during the creation of 65. However, will the audience go to a dinosaur romp? that isn’t adorned with the Jurassic Park logo? Woods thinks they will.

“Why aren’t there as many dinosaur movies every year as superhero movies?” he asks. “Who doesn’t love dinosaurs?”

65 Opening in Theaters March 10