‘Jurassic World: Rebirth’: Inside Shooting the Mosasaur Boat Sequence with Virtually No Water

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In “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” the new kind of dinosaur action set piece is added to the franchise: the water dinosaur. Approximately one-third of the film takes place on the ocean, and the action centers on two boats that encounter a Mosasaur, which first capsizes the unexpected Delgado family sailboat (La Mariposa) before doing battle with Duncan’s (Mahershala Ali) better-equipped military patrol craft, The Essex.

Appearing on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, director Gareth Edwards talked about how his team shot the complicated action sequence.

The SFX Boat Rigs

While the film is grounded in the exterior locations shot in Thailand, the exterior boat sequences with cast were primarily shot in an outdoor water tank at Malta Film Studios, with special effects supervisor Neil Corbould, who Edwards had worked with on “Rogue One” and “The Creator,” building special rigs that could simulate the boats movements.

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“Neil’s a bit of a genius, and he said, ‘Oh, I’ll build a robotic arm, a gimbal basically, and we’ll put the boat on the gimbal and then we’ll submerge the whole thing in water so it can completely capsize, come back up again, and do all this stunt work underwater,” said Edwards of his first conversations about how they would execute the scene. “We were like, ‘Oh wow, OK. I didn’t know you could do that. How many films have done that before?’ And he said, ‘None.’”

As IndieWire wrote about earlier this week, Edwards was only hired three months before production, creating an extremely condensed pre-production schedule for the special effects-heavy blockbuster. Meaning Corbould would have less than two months to design, build, and test the one-of-a-kind rigs to be used halfway around the globe. The Mariposa would sit on a 65-ton, 11-axis underwater motion base that could tilt 180 degrees to simulate capsizing, while a full-size replica (that served as a full scale set) of the larger Essex was painstaking built in the UK and shipped to Malta to be used on a rig that could tilt 45-degrees and rotate to face any direction.

‘Jurassic World: Rebirth’©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection

No Real Water

For both casual movie-goers and experienced Hollywood filmmakers, it can be hard to wrap one’s mind around the fact that a large portion of the “Jurassic World: Rebirth” boat sequences didn’t involve shooting with water. In the film’s press notes, VFX producer Carlos Ciudad estimates that of the approximately 600 shots that take place on the ocean, only 15 percent were shot with any real water. Even when shooting in the specialized water tank at the film studio, the tank itself would often be empty. Edwards, who came up as a self-trained VFX artist to become one of the most innovative directors working wigh VFX, told IndieWire he was shocked when the idea was first broached.

“I was really concerned,” Edwards said on the Toolkit podcast. “What I felt had happened was some of the people that worked on the water in ‘Avatar’ came onto this film afterwards and were like, ‘We want do the best water you’ve ever seen.’ And when you hear someone [say] it like that, you go for it.”

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While digital visual effects have come a long way, water, because of the amorphous way it moves and reflects light, had long been something films avoided simulating. That appears to have changed with the breakthroughs made on James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water,” which visual effects supervisor David Vickery and members of his team had worked on prior to “Rebirth.” Before Edwards boarded the project, knowing the extent of action taking place on the water, Ciudad, Vickery, and the team started capturing real water data to study its movement, color, and interactions with different surfaces so it could be simulated in the hundreds of shots. Edwards admitted he remained skeptical.

“I spent a long time building up to this thinking, ‘If it can get 90 percent there [with digital water], I’m going to grit my teeth and bear it and we’ll probably get away with it,’” said Edwards. “Then what happened is they did these tests and they sent through a montosaur jumping out of the water and splashing into the water again.”

Edwards was impressed, quickly sharing the clip with screenwriter David Koepp, whose response was an underwhelmed, “Cool.”

“And then about a day later I suddenly get this text going, ‘Holy fucking shit. I didn’t realize it was a mosasaur, I thought this was a YouTube clip of a whale.’ He’d just realized the whole thing was CGI, and I thought that was the best compliment,” said Edwards. “I thought I was going to spend the whole of post criticizing water, but it was so perfect. They got it figured out, we never had to talk about it. [Laughed] Instead, you’re picking on things like the shapes of the clouds in the background.”

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To hear Gareth Edwards’ full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast onApple,Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.

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