Jurassic World Rebirth director Gareth Edwards — the visual effects-oriented filmmaker behind such VFX-heavy films as Monsters, Godzilla, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story — already revealed how iconic sci-fi flicks Star Wars and Alien inspired his star dinosaur, the mutated Distortus rex. Edwards described the deformed dinosaur as a cross between the Rancor, with its tooth-filled maw, and the Xenomorph, with its elongated head, influencing the D-rex’s two most distinctive features (besides its six limbs). But as seminal as director Ridley Scott‘s original 1979 Alien might be, one of Scott’s more recent films proved to be even more influential.
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In the July 2025 issue of SFX Magazine, Edwards revealed that Scott’s “visually stunning” 2005 Crusades epic Kingdom of Heaven influenced the earthy look the filmmaker wanted for his Rebirth of the island-set Jurassic Park franchise.
“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,’” Edwards said of Kingdom of Heaven. “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.”
“Then there’s Steven [Spielberg] as well in the middle of that,” Edwards added of the original Jurassic Park director and series executive producer. “There was this one little overlap where they all intersected, and everyone agreed on Mathieson.”
Mathieson, who earned his first Oscar nomination for 2000’s Gladiator and shot the Scott-directed Hannibal, Robin Hood, and Gladiator II, also has experience with blockbuster fare beyond his collaborations with Scott. The cinematographer worked on films like 2011’s X-Men: First Class and 2022’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
Edwards also recruited VFX vet David Vickery, an Oscar nominee (2011’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2) who served as the visual effects supervisor on 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion. That dinosaur shorthand was essential for Edwards.
“He’s just brilliant and kind of like the world’s best person at dinosaurs,” Edwards said of the ILM creative director and senior VFX supervisor, also credited on Avatar: The Way of Water, Deadpool & Wolverine, and Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. “But he was sort of done with doing dinosaur films. He didn’t want to do another one.”
In wooing Vickery back to Jurassic World, Edwards recalled telling him, “‘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,” Edwards added, with that naturalistic take blending with Mathieson’s cinematography to create the look that harkens back to the Dean Cundey-shot Jurassic Park.
Jurassic World Rebirth stars Scarlet Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and Jonathan Bailey as a covert team sent to an island research facility for the original Jurassic Park to collect the genetic material of dinosaurs that could hold, in their DNA, the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind. The new movie opens only in theaters July 2.
