Now, as a big dinosaur bust, I have to ask you questions about dinosaurs.

Yeah.

Whose idea was to rethink the spinosaurus in something more scientifically precise, compared to The version of the film Monster that we saw in “Jurassic Park III”?

I was worried that I had directed her to a film monster version, and that used be really precise. It’s like, imagine that we are dinosaurs, the world is full of dinosaurs, that we are dinosaurs and they make a film on certain humans. And someone says: “Hey, we are going to have an Asian guy in this scene”, and you go “, but be more precise,” right? And they say, “Oh no, but it’s just an Asian.” It’s like, you can have a spinosaurus, and then you can have a completely different. This idea that there is only one type of dinosaur is crazy.

Basically, I saw him as: “Okay, in the last film, if it was Clint Eastwood, now we are going to have Marlon Brando.” So, it was more, “okay, let’s just take this spinosaurus and start pushing and shooting forms and proportions and try to make more character.” I don’t know, I can’t really explain, but I look at two images as in nature, and you can personally go, “it’s more attractive” or “I find it more interesting than that”, and sometimes you cannot explain why, you are just going “, this one. I prefer that one.” Then you take this one, it’s the new one, and you are wrong and you have two children and you say: “This one.” And you take this one, you play with it, and it is essentially like nature. You try to evolve an idea and that’s probably what is happening in nature. So yes, I also did a little of that with the dinosaurs, even if some of them were established. Otherwise, you don’t really have your fingerprint on it. It was as if it was one of the first things you do, it’s taking all the toys and you want to make your own, a kind of thing.

In the “Jurassic Park” tradition, going back to the original, this has always been a mixture of advanced visual effects and practical effects. Correct me if I am wrong, but I have the impression that the “renaissance” is more leaning towards the VFX side of things rather than on puppets, animatronics, this kind of thing. What has entered this decision for you?

Yeah, I mean, my experience was infographic, visual effects. The thing you learn to the hard, I suppose, on some of these films is that you are going in a lot of trouble doing something practical and sometimes you end up replacing it on the computer. And it can really be worth it, because it was a great reference. It gave the actor something to react on the set, and everything can be great. But we had a year and a quarter, and therefore it was as if we did not have time to do before, all this animation that people make of waterfall sequences and sets. It was also like an animatronic – like great crazy and crazy animatronics – was not going to happen in time. And everything would have been a lot of resources and time and we could probably not have spent this one with just puppets and things.

What we did is that we ended up asking them to do what we called proxy puppets. Essentially, they create shapes and silhouettes that were on a large scale, whatever the creature, then they could enter a room and the puppeteers entered and they played their animal, and in this way, we can compose the photo. They don’t look like dinosaurs, do you know what I mean? But they are enough for the actors to react to something, and they seem frightening. We had these Mutadon puppets and the whole scene cut and worked perfectly with the puppets, because the guys who exploited them, like, I don’t know what makes you want to do this to live [laughs]But they could draw from something quite dark. Yes, all of this was mainly just proxy objects, things that could push open doors and things like that, but not actually – so it is replaced by real photoeurm dinosaurs.