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The New Warden of Jurassic Park


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Joe Johnston was a visual effects artist on Star Wars. He came up through Industrial Light and Magic which lead to opportunities to direct second unit for Lucas. Johnston made his directorial debut on the effects-heavy kiddie flick, Honey I Shrunk the Kids. He followed that up with the much-less-successful Disney adventure movie, The Rocketeer.

In 2001, Johnston was tapped by Steven Spielberg to take over the Jurassic Park franchise for the third installment. In this profile from the July 2001 issue of Movieline magazine, Johnston discussed how he went visual effects to helming dino-sequels.

When Steven Spielberg decided to forgo directing the third installment of his billion-dollar Jurassic Park franchise, he turned over the keys to his prized vehicle to Joe Johnston, the director of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Jumanji. That these two movies were both special effects-laden box-office hits surely weighed heavily in Spielberg’s consideration, as did the Oscar for Best Visual Effects that Johnston shared with his Industrial Light & Magic compatriots for turning Spielberg’s own Raiders of the Lost Ark into a visual spectacle. But Spielberg had other reasons for favoring Johnston. He’d just watched his fellow director’s small, critically acclaimed gem October Sky, the modest true story of a group of boys in a coal-mining town whose passion for rocket science offers an escape from their own fathers’ life-shortening fate of working the mines. October Sky hadn’t made money, but its precise psychological portrait of fathers and sons showed a directorial hand that could create a needed emotional tug for the new group of characters that would try to avoid becoming dinosaur snacks in Jurassic Park III. The Lost World, the sequel to Jurassic Park, set an opening weekend record with a gross of more than $90 million and took in $600 million worldwide, so an eager initial audience for the third Jurassic Park movie was ensured. But would people care enough about the human element–which involved a returning Sam Neill, a grad student played by Alessandro Nivola and an estranged couple (William H. Macy and Tea Leoni) searching for their young son (Trevor Morgan), who’s apparently missing on Isla Sorna–for this third dino spectacle to rake in megabucks? Spielberg trusted Joe Johnston to make sure they did.

A frustrated scientist wanna-be who gave up the possibility of a career in marine biology only after flunking physics four separate times, Johnston backed his way into a directing career that has let him indulge his love of science vicariously. Back in the ’70s, a chance notice on a college bulletin board led him to become one of George Lucas’s pioneering young visual effects artists at the embryonic Industrial Light & Magic. After years of working on films that would turn out to be some of the most beloved and suc¬cessful in Hollywood history, he went to USC film school and became a director. Fascination with science was at the core of Johnston’s first movie, the big hit Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and the big miss that followed, The Rocketeer, so when he turned the true story of schoolboy rocket scientists into the intimate, low-budget October Sky in 1999, it wasn’t as strange a move for him as it sounded. And though JPIII could be seen as a regression from the more emotionally complex October Sky, the big paycheck it offered Johnston was backed by the bait of a personal adventure in the science of paleontology. He couldn’t resist.

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He should direct more movies.

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