The Lost World: Jurassic Park isn’t quite as good as the original, but it’s still got plenty of wonderfully Spielbergian moments, as this screenshot-by-screenshot fact-filled viewer’s guide proves…
Steven Spielberg: Director's Collection Blu-ray box set available to order now.
6.52 Hammond's nephew, Peter Ludlow, is played by Arliss Howard, who also appeared in another 1997 Steven Spielberg production, Amistad.
8.29 “Thank God for site B.” The author of Jurassic Park didn’t have plans to write a sequel, despite the massive public outcry for more dino-mayhem. He was eventually persuaded to do so when Steven Spielberg himself asked for a follow-up.
9.36 “You bred them lysine deficient. Shouldn’t they have kicked after seven days without supplemental enzymes?” “But, by God, they’re flourishing! That’s one of a thousand questions I want the team to answer.” Well, that explains that, then.
11.31 In case you didn’t spot it, there’s that all-important amber-topped walking stick, still getting some love.
12.00 “So you went from capitalist to naturalist in just four years…” David Attenborough, Richard’s brother, is a naturalist. Bet you didn’t know that. Oh, you did? Right you are.
15.09 The Lost World’s screenwriter, David Koepp, chose Vince Vaughn’s character name because he liked a Warren Zevon song called ‘Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner’, which features both a Roland and a Van Owen{
15.49 Vanessa Lee Chester plays Kelly Curtis. Coincidentally, she had a tiny part in The West Wing later on in 2006, which of course Richard Schiff starred in.
17.05 “I got cut from the team.” Kelly’s gymnastic superpowers have now been foreshadowed. Deal with it.
18.55 Your five deaths, close up. The name comes from a Indian myth about a brave warrior facing a different execution on each of the five islands: burning, drowning, crushing, hanging and beheading.
19.07 This barge shot and the few that follow it are some of the few scenes – other than the opening one – that were shot in Hawaii. As you’ll see, much of the rest was done on set, on the lot, or in northern California.
0.19 This was the first movie to use this new late-‘90s, early-‘00s Universal ident. The most recent one looks like this{
1.03 Actually Hawaii. Sorry about that. New Zealand was considered at one point, but eventually dismissed for cost reasons.
3.03 This young girl, Cathy Bowman, is played by Camilla Belle, who grew up to play one of the lead roles in 10,000 BC 11 years later.
3.36 Mrs. Bowman, with her high-pitched voice and natty hat, is played by Cyndi Strittmatter, who you may have recently seen as Maurine Dunne in Gone Girl.
3.48 Mr. Bowman, with his Financial Times down for a moment, is played by David Sachs, who you may know as sorcerer Ethan Rayne in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, or, if you’re a real Sachs fan, as the very green insectoid bad guy Roth'h'ar Sarris in Galaxy Quest.
4.07 This may be the best yawn-based gag in the history of cinema. Take note.
4.34 Yes, that’s a young Eli Roth – The Bear Jew himself – doing a bit of extra work as a man reading something on a subway train. Here’s Roth himself tweeting about it.
4.56 This cheeky chappie is played by an actor called Ross Partridge, but he’s worth pointing out because his character is called “Curious Man” in the credits. Okay, maybe he’s not.
5.34 The butler here is played by Ian Abercrombie, who’s used to playing butlers, as seen in his work on Desperate Housewives (where he plays a butler). He’s probably best known as Mr. Pitt, Elaine’s boss in Seinfeld, who is not a butler, however.
5.54 All of Hammond’s house was shot in Mayfield Senior School in Pasadena, California, a Catholic all-girls independent school. These scenes were shot during term-time.
6.16 Look, it’s Ariana Richards as Alexis "Lex" Murphy, Hammond's granddaughter, and Joseph Mazzello as Timothy "Tim" Murphy, Hammond's grandson! Since the Jurassic Park films, Richards has become a professional artist, while Mazzello continues to act, most notably playing Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz in The Social Network.
20.55 All of these vehicles were specially made by Mercedes-Benz for the production. No, you cannot buy the trailer yourself.
21.17 We’re now no longer in Hawaii, but in a redwood forest close to Eureka, California. There are no redwoods in or near Costa Rica, but everyone’s hoping you don’t notice that sort of thing.
22.02 One of the few dinosaurs not seen in the original Jurassic Park, stegosauri were specifically included in the sequel after Steven Spielberg got so many letters from fans begging him to sneak them in somehow. This is that somehow.
22.54 Spielberg first met with Julianne Moore three years previously, not with The Lost World in mind, but just because he admired her work, first properly noticing her after seeing her in The Fugitive.
25.00 Video cameras have come a long way, baby.
25.33 This puppet baby steggie was called Claire, which is a fine name for a fine beast.
26.33 You can see on the side of the gun that this is a “Lindstradt” – a fictional Swedish arms company that has its origins in the original novels. Again, you can’t buy one.
28.06 Here, Dr. Sarah Harding explains her theory that T-Rexes are not inherently aggressive, just protective. This mimics the argument made by the film series’ resident dinosaur expert, John Horner, and goes against the argument by Horner’s paleontological rival, Robert Bakker, who says they are predators. The character of Dr. Burke, seen later in the film played by Thomas F. Duffy, is based on Robert Bakker, and genuinely looks a lot like him.
29.06 If you ever expected the phone to work, you are a damn fool.
33.06 The first time we meet Pete Postlethwaite’s philosopher hunter Roland Tembo. There was a scene shot where the audience was meant to meet Tembo earlier, but it was removed in favour of introducing him here on the fly. In the deleted scene, Harvey Jason’s Ajay Sidhu is seen trying to persuade Tembo to join the trip. It ends with Tembo punching someone else in the face.
34.04 There were meant to be pteranodons in this film as part of the ending, but they were cut when the new final act was devised. This shot would have been a foreshadowing of their arrival.
34.20 The dinos being herded and grabbed here come in four categories – give yourself an Empire point if can spot at least one of the following: Parasaurolophus, Pachycephalosaurus, Gallimimus, Triceratops.
34.90 Here’s Dr. Burke. Take a look at this picture of his real-life counterpart, Robert Bakker, to play a game of spot the difference.
34.51 All these lassoos are CGI too, because otherwise… otherwise it would have been impossible.
35.26 This vehicle was known as “The Snagger” because it snags things. Mainly dinosaurs.
36.13 The two groups were referred to as “The Hunters” and “The Gatherers”. You can guess which name goes with which group.
38.15 Tembo’s gun here is a double-barreled rifle chambered in .600 Nitro Express made by B. Searcy & Co., of Boron, California. There were two made, and Spielberg kept one.
40.39 This was all built on set and looks absolutely amazing.
48.59 All of the high hide scenes were shot in studio with a blue screen background, because of the length of the dialogue required up there.
52.06 The T-Rexes in the original film weighed 9000 lbs. In this one, they weighed nine tonnes.
52.28 The T-Rexes were so heavy that they stayed exactly where they were initially set up on set, and the rest of the production moved around them. The same goes for George Clooney, incidentally.
55.36 This shot was done with the magic of blue screen and Universal Studio’s parking department allowing production to use the side of their multi-story car park to dangle off a prop half of the trailer. The actual mega-trailer they had made weighed in at 12 tonnes.
56.12 All of the cracks here magically appear with a very simple trick. The production designers broke some sheets of glass into some pretty / scary shapes, then shot them on camera, flat. With that already done, they just “animated” the reveals of the cracks from the initial centre outwards, with sound effects doing the rest.
57.18 With days and days of artificial rain hurling down on them, so much time spent hanging from a rope and a lot of stunt work required, all three leads here confessed afterwards that they pretty much hated doing all of this. Then there’s poor Richard Schiff, who gets drenched, then dies.
1.03.17 Spielberg called this moment the “Make a wish” shot, because he’s one sick puppy.
1.04.13 Again, imagine the rain-fuelled misery.
1.08.02 “That chap, I can’t remember his name…” That would be Reinhold Messner, the first man to climb Everest without oxygen, and the first man to ascend all 14 "eight-thousanders" (peaks over 8,000 metres above sea level).
1.10.20 This is Carter, Dieter’s (Peter Stormare) only friend. He’s played by Thomas Rosales Jr., who if you didn’t know already, is a legend in his field. As a stunt man, he’s had small speaking roles or notable injuries/deaths in the likes of RoboCop 2, The Crow, Tremors 2: Aftershocks, Universal Soldier, Predator 2, L.A. Confidential, Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment, U.S. Marshals, Deep Impact, The Running Man, The Hunter, Beverly Hills Cop III, Speed and NCIS. Respect him.
1.12.39 Though many shots in this sequence were CGI-ed, particularly when the “compies” – as they were known, short for Compsognathuses – are moving in a flock formation, this is all Stan Winston Studio puppetry magic.
1.17.47 Of course there had to be a callback to the ripples in the cup of water. This time, it’s bigger.
1.18.37 At this point, no-one else is awake. Know this: T-Rexes can be stealthy too.
1.22.00 Stan Winston and his team were petrified that the mechanical workings of the T-Rex puppets wouldn’t be able to handle the water being poured over them in the waterfall sequence. This is why this entire scene was the very last shot with the puppets, just in case they broke down disastrously (which, thankfully, they didn’t).
1.22.18 This is a milk snake, which is not dangerous in the slightest. It looks just like the very venomous coral snake, mind, which explains Dr. Burke’s mistake.
1.22.29 The story goes that in-house paleontologist Jack Horner asked for the Robert Bakker substitute Dr. Burke to eaten by the T-Rex. Bakker was pleased, saying, "I told you Rex was a predator!"
1.22.32 This portable waterfall actually looked like a shower rail with holes in it. Some of the holes were rigged up with fake blood so that at the push of a button, there’s red on everyone.
1.23.21 This field of tall elephant grass was grown by production guru Michael Lantieri and his team specifically for this scene, with seeds sown the year beforehand. The eight acres were required so that they could be divided into quarters, and shots could be done more than once, as after the grass was flattened, it couldn’t come back up.
1.23.37 Spielberg called this the “Torpedo Shot” and said that if they couldn’t make it work, they would scrap the whole raptors-in-the-grass sequence. The trick was done by compositing an image of the grass flattened with an image of the grass upright, and digitally erasing one on top of the other, with CGI raptors added in later.
1.25.31 Originally, this research centre was actually part of a much bigger village, complete with its own Denny’s – the theory being, there’s nowhere on this earth where commercialism won’t rear its ugly head – to fit in a long raptor chase finale but this was scrapped half-way through production in favour of the San Diego ending.
1.26.10 Vince Vaughn first appeared on Spielberg’s radar after the producers of his break-out movie, Swingers, requested used of the Jaws theme and Spielberg decided to watch the film before approval.
1.29.56 Bear in mind that to make this shot work, Goldblum had to grab a door, pull it off its hinges, then slam it into his head. With several takes required, and rehearsal on top of that, Goldblum had very bruised noggin by the end of proceedings.
1.32.39 This is actually a male stunt double doing the super gymnastics.
1.34.07 In case you weren’t counting, Julianne Moore’s character, Sarah Harding, has landed flat on her back four times – in a row.
1.34.52 The very final sequence in the original script had two flapping, screeching, highly aggressive pterandons attacking the helicopter.
1.40.06 This boat sequence was all done with miniatures.
1.41.11 Quick question: who or what killed all the men on the boat?
1.42.43 “NO FRUITS, VEGETABLES OR ANIMALS BEYOND THIS POINT”. Yep, this is a joke, joke fans. You see, the T-Rex is an animal… oh, forget it.
1.43.05 This shot, like the suburban streets later, was genuinely taken in San Diego.
1.44.27 If you look closely, you can see that as the T-Rex walks past that basketball hoop, he makes a dribbling motion with one of his arms.
1.45.08 This kid’s name is Benjamin, and he was played by Colton James, who has since had small roles in the likes of TV’s Supernatural and bigger ones in the likes of TV’s 7th Heaven.
1.45.29 It’s this image, of a T-Rex drinking from a swimming pool, that Spielberg liked so much, he wanted to do the new ending.
1.46.14 Spielberg doesn’t play by Roland Emmerich’s the-dog-never-dies rules: here, Fido gets it.
1.46.21 Benjamin’s mum is played by Katy Boyer, who later crops up in another Spielberg production, Minority Report.
1.46.21 This stadium is another glorious bit of miniature work from the production team, as is the tiny, tiny car.
1.48.16 Burger King gets a big plug here on the side of this bus. With all the tie-in deals involved with the film, a lot of shops on this street had their lights turned off, or were covered up.
1.48.21 Look, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s King Lear is on videocassette! And so is Robin Williams’ latest, Jack And The Beanstalks! Take that, Hook, and, um, Francis Ford Coppola’s Jack, you silly movies, you.
1.48.24 And in the bottom right, there’s a poster for Tom Hanks’ new movie, Tsunami Sunrise, where he plays some sort of surfer dude.
1.48.33 This in-your-face Godzilla riff sees one Japanese business man say in his native tongue: "I left Japan to get away from this!”
1.48.46 This is David Koepp, the movie’s screenwriter, about to get deaded. His character is called “Unlucky Bastard” in the credits.
1.50.04 To maintain man-to-dino eyelines throughout the film, contraptions known on set as “Monster sticks” were used: cardboard cut-outs of the dinosaur in question’s head, on a stick, being carried about by a crewmember. There’s no doubt Julianne Moore is looking at one now.
1.53.05 The new T-Rex puppets had the ability to pick up stuntmen and not hurt them, so there was no way the Big Bad wasn’t going to get a chomp-and-drop.
1.56.52 Finally, a pteranodon! Perhaps they’ll have a bigger role in Jurassic Park III…