Designing Set Pieces 'Jurassic World Rebirth', Production Designer, James Clyne

0:00Jawad MirThere was a conversation between Scarlett Johansson's character and Mahershala Ali's, and they're just kind of talking about their personal life and their family.

0:08James ClyneYeah. Yeah.

0:08Jawad MirAnd that whole setup, and then the lighting that was hitting Mahershala on the face, because you could see it was shifting because the boat was rocking.

0:16James ClyneI'm glad you mentioned that, 'cause, 'cause you're right. A ton of work went into that just having that light going back and forth. Yeah, there are a lot of Easter eggs in the movie, one of which I think we did put a Back to the Future nod, on one of the magazine covers. We had to grow grass in Thailand for the Titanosaurus sequence. So all that kind of, chest-high, shoulder-high grass we actually grew five weeks prior to the shoot. Gareth doesn't want a s… kind of slow, meandering little river. We came up with this crazy idea, s… what if we shot it, all the in-camera stuff, at this facility outside of London where they actually did the London Olympics?

1:11Jawad MirWelcome back, everyone, to another episode of Kingdom of Dreams Podcast: The Making of Stories. I'm your host, Jawad Miah. Today I'm very excited to have production designer James Clyne, who I had the pleasure of speaking last year for Gareth Edwards, the Creator. Today he is here to talk about another Gareth Edwards film. Yes, you guessed it right, Jurassic World: Rebirth. Lovely conversation. He talked about a lot of details that went in making different sets, the convenience store, the raft sequence, the boat sequence, and a whole bunch of other stuff. So without further ado, here is my conversation with production designer James Clyne for Gareth Edwards' Jurassic World: Rebirth. So were you already committed on this project, like, a… right after Creator was done? Because this film went into production really quickly. Like, last year around this time I think it was probably announced, and then they, you know, they started production late fall, winter, and rolled it out very quickly. So tell me when you got involved

2:07James ClyneYeah

2:07Jawad Mir... And then we'll take it from there.

2:10James ClyneYeah. So, I was working on another production, and I got a call from Gareth, probably two or three days after he was signed, or at least, two or three days after it was announced and made public that he was doing the next Jurassic. He's just called me up and he's like, "Hey, do you wanna do a Jurassic Park movie with me, James?" it was a hard time saying no, but, I did not say no, and I just jumped into it. And, you know, where, the studio had a date set, a release date already set, which was the Fourth of July holiday weekend, which is, I believe a really big weekend for movies and moviegoers. So, locking into that, we only had X amount of time to prep. In fact, we had, I believe, about 12 weeks of prep, and for a movie this size it was kind of unheard of.

3:16James ClyneAnd Gareth's known for making, you know, smaller movies, or at least smaller budgeted movies that have big spectacle, and I think The Creator was one of those movies where it had big spectacle, but we did it for a lot cheaper and a lot quicker. And I think the studio was excited about that possibility. So yeah, we just jumped in headfirst. I went down to LA. This was probably early, February of 2024. And then we had some offices at Universal, and we, yeah, we just jumped right into it, building the world as quickly as we could. We, most movies have these things called war rooms, where we put up all the imagery, as quickly as we can and start to create a visual narrative of the movie from beginning to end. And Gareth and I, and, with our kind of small team, just built out the movie, visually speaking, fairly quickly.

4:24James ClyneI think what the advantage was for myself and Gareth was that we had worked together prior, and we kinda had a little bit of a shorthand together. So there wasn't, there wasn't the typical kind of back and forth and kind of, "Well, what if we tried this?" or, "What if we try that?" We just kinda just jumped right into it. And fair… and Gareth, fortunately, he has a very unique perspective visually. You know, this being a Steven Spielberg pr… production, I think he really wanted to embrace the Steven Spielberg films…

5:03James Clyne... Of the '80s and '90s.

5:05Jawad MirWhich he did.

5:06James ClyneWhich he did. And once we kinda hooked onto that idea, we were just kinda off to the races.

5:15Jawad MirThat's incredible. So you said, you know, it was 12 weeks prep time. To, obviously every production is different. 12 weeks meaning three months. Most films, to my knowledge, especially of that size, you know, sometimes it's, like, six months or more in terms of…

5:30James ClyneYeah

5:30Jawad Mir... Prep time. Is that right wi… right assessment?

5:34James ClyneYeah, that's right, Jawad. I think it's, it's typically six months. Sometimes prep can be a year, depending on…

5:44Jawad MirYeah

5:44James Clyne... The type of production and the amount of work that has to go into the depth of world building. And when we had a big, you know, movie to kind of build upon what does the island look like? What do these boats look like? What do, What is this facility in the third act? And on top of that, what did the dinosaurs look like? So, it was, in a way it was kind of a blessing in disguise because we didn't have the time to second-guess ourselves. We just went on instinct most of the time.

6:23James ClyneAnd just went with…

6:23Jawad MirWhich, yeah

6:24James Clyne... The first or second or maybe the third iteration. But we really just, went on instinct and trusting the story and the narrative, and trusting where Gareth wanted to take it. So, there are times where I do think, even as a visual person, I tend to get, a little, I wouldn't say bored, but, a little anxious to get moving on when things are just kind of slowly turning and turning over. I like to kinda just jump in and get into it, and, there'll be times, you know, when we're shooting or leading up to the shoot where we can do little tweaks and changes, and that certainly…

7:08Jawad MirOf course

7:09James Clyne... Happened. But, on this movie I think the blessing was we just jumped in and just went for it.

7:17Jawad MirSuper. So creating different worlds, right? The boat sequence, the island, the facility at the end. What, out of all those things in the film, what was the most fun part, sequence that you had the most fun, and why? And what was the most difficult and why? Whichever you wanna take up first.

7:38James ClyneYeah. Maybe, the answer is there, i… it's bo… there was one thing that was kinda both in that it was the most difficult and the most fun, which was, which was the Essex, which is the boat, that Kincaid, commands. And that boat came in many incarnations in that it was a, it was a purchased patrol boat, like a 1985 75-foot long patrol boat, that we then stripped out completely. Gareth wanted to give it kind of an upgrade. So we stripped it down and we built all these new pieces to attach on top of that boat, and then gave it a new paint job, and then indu… designed the f… the int… redesigned the interior 'cause the interior was not camera friendly. It was too small. And it obviously had to service all these story beats. But we basically, from purchasing that boat, we built a whole new design.

8:45James ClyneWe knew we had to, we wanted it out at sea, real shots of it out in real water, getting camera boats and helicopters out there to shoot it. But also SFX team built, a full gimbal boat that was able to rock back and forth, and we built that piece as well and shipped it out to Malta. And Malta has this, amazing facility for, tank work, so they shot Gladiator 2 out there. They've shot a lot of movies out there, and the advantage is you put your object, your, in this case, the boat, in this tank and then you shoot across it and you can see a whole ocean, the way they've built these tanks and arranged them.

9:31Jawad MirNice.

9:32James ClyneWhole horizon. So, we com… we kind of built it twice, and then we built it a third time. We built an interior that went on a massive gimbal back in the UK, at Elstree. And that serviced all the interior work. So there were kind of, like, three incarnations of one set. One thing that really helped us was, you know, there were a lot of pages on this boat. Initially there were, like, 45 script pages on this boat, so it was a good third of the movie. And if we knew if we can crack that, then, it would help us in the long run in terms of all the other sets and locations we had to do. If we can kinda grab that one piece, we knew we can kinda push that aside and concentrate on the other two thirds of it. So that was the most fun. I don't know a lot about boats, but I feel like I got a crash course in…...

10:34James ClyneUnderstanding my difference between, you know, what's, what side starboard is and, that was just a, you know, real education. I didn't know what the difference between port and starboard was. So, it was a fun education understanding the basics, of sailing. 'cause we also had a sailboat, which we called, oh gosh, I'm completely blanking. The, oh, I can get it to you. It's in my head. What happens is I work on another film and all the stuff from the previous film dumps out in service of the new film so I can add new information. But our sailboat

11:20Jawad MirIt's called, La Mariposa. Is that what it's called?

11:22James ClyneLa Mariposa. Thank you.

11:24Jawad MirYeah.

11:24James ClyneThank…

11:24Jawad MirI just had to Google it.

11:27James ClyneMariposa. So that was another boat that was a, just a wonderful challenge 'cause we picked a boat. We had a choice of, like, five or six sailboats. We chose one, actually purchased it in Malta, and then we stripped it down, repainted it. And then we built a second piece. SFX then came in again and built a second piece that was on a big, we called it a rotisserie, where it could rotate, 180 degrees so the mast would go completely upside down, and that was done in a deep tank in Malta. There were two massive tanks that we had, and that was in the deep tank. So a lot of what you see in the movie… It's not a visual effect. It's all in camera, which was super important to Gareth and the whole team was to get as much of it as we could in camera.

12:23Jawad MirThat's lovely. And, you know, talking about the boat, there was so much action on the boat, like, which was great, you know? Full of suspense. But to me, the scene that stood out the most, is, there was a conversation between Scarlett Johansson's character and Mahershala Ali's, and they're just kinda talking about their personal life and their family.

12:41James ClyneYeah. Yeah.

12:42Jawad MirAnd that whole setup and then the lighting that was hitting Mahershala on the face, because you could see it was shifting because the boat was rocking…

12:50James ClyneYeah

12:50Jawad Mir... I… like, that spoke volumes to me, the amount of detail, amount of work that went into creating everything of course, but that stood out the most for me, aside from all the fun and action stuff.

13:01James ClyneI'm glad you mentioned that 'cause, 'cause you're right. A ton of work went into that just having that light going back and forth. I mean, typically, obviously, if you're on a stage, you just get, you get the, you know, the lighting to come in the way you want it and you just shoot it the way it was. But we knew we kinda wanted that early on, so we had to build everything into that to make it happen, which was a big interior set piece that was, you know, 40 feet on a f… well, no, it was on a, it was on about a 18-foot gimbal. Felt like 40 feet. And that whole gimbal would be able to rock back and forth. And then because Gareth wanted that lighting, we had to design ports, little portholes on the ceiling of the ship. And that was... You know, we had to think about all that stuff, like, in advance. And then John Mathieson, the DP, came in and set up his lights in a whole rig on top of the set, to just create that simple little detail of light going across an actor's face.

14:10James ClyneSo, yeah. Thanks for noticing that. It's a fun little, it was a fun little thing to do. Of course, the actors got a little seasick the first day.

14:21Jawad MirI bet.

14:22James ClyneBecause that thing rocked back... You know, you could, you could have it really rock back and forth. And one of the only ways you can understand, the eye can understand that it's rocking back and forth is, well, one, the lighting, and two, any object that is a bit loose. So we built all these cables to hang off the ceiling, these loose cables, and it's really the only thing that you can tell that, other than the lighting, that the o… that the whole set is rocking back and forth.

14:53Jawad MirYeah, no, it was, it was fabulously done. And even the visual effects throughout the film, you know... Then I saw a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff, like how the sailboat upside down sequence was done. It… a… and I just couldn't believe that how authentic and the visual effects real they were. And a lot of credit that goes to, obviously, the effects team, but Gareth being Gareth, who made his very first film, Monsters, pretty much on his own.

15:17Jawad MirYou know, from directing to visual effects. He brought that, and I think that's one of the reasons he was hired, along with his storytelling abilities. Because he has this a… ability to mix the visual effects world with the real world seamlessly.

15:30James ClyneFor sure. And he… that's already baked into his mindset when he's making these movies. He's already understanding where it's all gonna go…

15:40Jawad MirYeah

15:40James Clyne... At a very early stage. So that's super helpful in terms of, you know, understanding what visual effects need to be done and what is gonna remain in camera or be on a set or, you know, out in the real world. He has a real command of understanding what needs to be what, and I think it just helps everybody when you have a director that's so decisive in that respect.

16:08Jawad MirYeah. Amazing. I'm gonna get to the convenience store sequence in a bit because that required, obviously, a lot of work and planning. But the raft sequence, which was in the original book and which was supposed to be in the original film but it didn't end up being so, and I'm glad it didn't because back then, water and visual effects, you know, probably wouldn't have been possible. Maybe that's why they didn't do it. What wa… even though it was a very simple sequence, your role in that, was there anything that you can sort of talk about that and speak about what that was like?

16:43James ClyneWell, that was a tricky one too because, you know, most of our shooting happened in Thailand. Certainly all the jungle stuff was all in Thailand, in the Krabi area of Thailand. And pretty late in the game in terms of prep, we realized, "Oh my God. There's no rapids in Thailand." Rapids don't exist in Thailand. Doesn't really exist much in the South P… South Pacific. And we were like, "Well, what are we gonna do? We don't, we don't have rapids." Gareth wants this feel. He doesn't want a s… kinda slow, meandering little river. He wants something that has a lot of power t… to it and action to it. And, we actually proposed, to do it... Because we were in London, we came up with this crazy idea, it was one of our out of the box thinking ideas, where what if we shot it, all the in-camera stuff, at this facility outside of London where they actually did the London Olympics.

17:52James ClyneThey actually had, white water rafting Olympics at this place called Lee Valley outside of London. So in all of places, we chose this concrete, run of... And they could pump water, a tremendous amount of water, they could pump through these canals and mimic, white wa… wa… white water rafting. So… it was gonna be, we knew it was gonna be a huge visual effect to capture all the water, but then replace everything in foreground and background and everywhere. But we all kinda just, took a leap of faith there. And it worked. Like, what you see in the final shots are the real water with re… real actors. There's some rocks that we built. Art department built some rocks, and the two rocks that they kind of go through, that the dinos… that the T-Rex tries to get through, our art department.

18:54James ClyneBut everything else is visual effects. There was just no other way to doing it other than going to another country and shooting, rapids in another country. So that was, like, a huge challenge for VFX, for our department, and everybody involved to kinda get it right. But hopefully in the end, you realize that place is just... You don't realize that place is just a completely fictitious world, and it doesn't exist other than, you know, what ILM was able to produce and what we were able to give in this UK location.

19:39Jawad MirNice. You know, I wonder sometimes, y… you've seen Star Trek, obviously, Next Generation.

19:44James ClyneYeah. Yeah.

19:44Jawad MirRight? And…

19:45James ClyneI'm, I'm more of a Wrathicon guy, but I do know, some Star Trek Generations, sure.

19:51Jawad MirSo, you know, if you look at the world of visual effects from Star Wars age to then leap of, the visual effects of Jurassic Park One, and, you know, then there was LED, now there's LED screens, there's all these different things, you know, gimbals. I alwa… I had this conversation with somebody, this company called Plates Pro. He's the founder. He did all those screens and plating and all that stuff. And I wonder, and I think it will happen, but I wonder when it will happen. The whole idea of holodeck from Star Trek, where you…

20:24James ClyneRight

20:24Jawad Mir... Create all these worlds, I wonder how far we are from that. Because nobody would've imagined 60 years ago what we are able to do now.

20:34James ClyneSure. Yeah. I mean, we're getting close to it, certainly with the volume, the LED volumes. We've gotten pretty close to it. I think even the volumes have their limitations in terms of you're, you can only build a space as big as the footprint of the actual volume, meaning you can't do two football fields inside that volume and have people running two football fields. You can only have them run from one end to the other, which is about 100 feet. So there are limitations to that. But I think with technology, with new tools, obviously AI…... Tools coming online, I think there are gonna be some worlds where, you know, we can, we can create something where you just simply st… you simply step into that volume and it just, you know?

21:28Jawad MirSimulation, right? So.

21:30James ClyneYeah. But ultimately, I do think there is a, there's a bit of a fatigue, like a CGI fatigue, and you hear it from, like, you know, online people of like, you know, movies that are just all CG or too much CG. They're, they're turned off by it. They like knowing that a m… that a movie, you know, whether it's like, you know, Top Gun or F1 or, you know, even our movie, that it's shot on real locations and shot with real actors…

22:07Jawad MirYeah

22:07James Clyne... In real places. I think ultimately, filmmaking is about creating stories that allow you to escape into somewhere else, and I think real places on Earth allow you to, you know, your brain to understand that a little bit more than just something created from nothing.

22:25Jawad MirI couldn't agree with you more. I mean, you look at, you talked about fatigue. I even think there's AI fatigue now, you know, with all the videos that pop up on your feed. Like, you know, they look cool and f… you know, fun, but okay, now you know it's fake. And another thing is the actors who work with the green screen. I was just watch… reading a quote from Tom Holland, who's working on Christopher Nolan's, The Odyssey, which comes out next year. And he s…

22:45James ClyneYeah, right

22:46Jawad Mir... And he literally said, "It was refreshing to be on a physical location with real people than being working in front of green screen," with all the superhero movies that he's done, right?

22:56James ClyneRight.

22:56Jawad MirAnd if you look at the sequence where the characters in Jurassic Park see the dinosaurs for the first time, and that landscape. I mean, the dinosaurs, in my opinion, don't make that scene the way it is. It's that landscape, that depth.

23:12Jawad MirAnd in that depth, the dinosaurs are there. And it's…

23:15James ClyneYeah

23:15Jawad Mir... You're, you're absolutely right. Locations and real things are something that people appreciate way more than pe… than studios think that they do.

23:26James ClyneYeah. I, and you can, you can see that from, you know, in terms of, you know, whether a movie is successful or not. I think a lot of times it, that is based on, you know, how it shot or where it shot. You know, Oppenheimer made a billion dollars, and it's, it's all shot in locations and small sets. And, I think, I think there is definitely some fatigue, and I feel it too, where some movies just rely too much on CGI. And I think, it's like looking at your phone too long, and you start to get a little, like, exhausted from it. And I, there's some, there's, there's, there's no replacing, you know, a beautiful image of a real horizon with real sky…

24:20Jawad MirYeah

24:20James Clyne... And an actor sitting in that real world sweating and, emoting in that real world. There's just no replacement of it.

24:28Jawad MirYeah. And I've learned that from Steven Spielberg, people like Gareth Edwards. You know, even the production that I'm working on, everybody's like, "Why don't you just build a set in Toronto?" no, I wanna go to Poland, and I wanna go to Jordan.

24:42James ClyneRight.

24:42Jawad MirYou know, yes, it's gonna cost money, but that feel and that tangibility of the location that you can see, you can feel it on the screen, that's what au… immerses audience into the characters.

24:54James ClyneYep. Yep, agreed.

24:56Jawad MirThe final sequence, the gas station convenience store, that must have been a lot challenging 'cause of the way the way the dino… the spaces in the dinosaur moved in, the hiding fridge, the gas station. I mean, there were so many references to The Lost World, the original Jurassic Park.

25:18James ClyneYeah.

25:18Jawad MirI even s… I even, maybe I was looking into it too much, I even felt there was a little bit of T2 when, the dinosaur comes from the ceiling.

25:27James ClyneFrom the ceiling. Yeah.

25:28Jawad MirIt was that T-1000 from the elevator kind of comes down.

25:32James ClyneYeah.

25:32Jawad MirBut t… talk to me about that. What was that? Because that must have been really challenging, I think. There was a lot of moving parts.

25:39James ClyneA lot of moving parts, and we built that, the interior of the convenience store and the exterior all on the back lot at Sky Studios, Elstree. And, it was meant to be a bit of a... I wanted to give Gareth a bit of a playground. There was a lotta groups running to the left or to the right or into the, convenience store or underneath a truck. And we had to give the impression that this place was much bigger than what we were actually gonna build. So it kinda was like a, if you can imagine like a big cube, and it had four sides, and each side represented a different part of the facility. So one side was the facade of the convenience store. Another side was the geothermal area. Another side was the entrance into the lab. But it was all one block of a set. And we built all kinds of models to kind of show what this idea would be, and we'd have to, you know, obviously we'd all have to be in agreement of how to work this and how to shoot it.

26:41James ClyneAnd Frank Marshall himself was very much a part of how to make all these complicated pieces work together from a story standpoint. So very challenging, super stressful, but I think we came up with something that ultimately was really satisfying. And you can tell s… there's, there's a lot of, JP1, Easter eggs in terms of just the design of the architecture. So you might see like a, like an angled slab of concrete, almost like a bunker look to some of it, and that definitely played into some of the, you know, some of the buildings you saw in Jurassic Park where they were running into, their lab or running into, you know, a different location. You'd see these kind of like angled slabs of concrete. So we definitely played off of that. The convenience store itself was completely stocked with real items.

27:45James ClyneL… and because of the UK, a lot of their like candies and, like snack food is very different than it is…

27:55Jawad MirYeah

27:55James Clyne... In Canada or America. So we had to ship in a lot of stuff from North America to make it look like it was more like an American-run facility and not some other, y… you know, not British-run. So we shipped in a lot of like Doritos and all kinds of different foods. It was really fun. I felt, I got a little homesick when I would walk in there because…... All these snacks that I had missed. And then we filled, we flooded that s… that set, so it had to be waterproof and run water down this drain. So that was a complexity. But it was fun. It was, it was obviously hearkening back to the kitchen sequence with the velociraptors…

28:43Jawad MirYeah

28:43James Clyne... In JP1, but with a kind of a Gareth Edwards twist to it.

28:48Jawad MirYou mentioned magazines and products. I read somewhere online, I don't know if this is even true, and I've only seen it once, so I, excuse me. I wanna go see it again, and I wanna see if that's true, but you can just tell me right now. There's a lot of speculation that those magazines in the background that are out of focus…

29:06James Clynehuh

29:06Jawad Mir... There were some Back to the Future, like all the Spielberg stuff, magazines that were kind of in the distant back. Is that accurate?

29:13James ClyneThere definitely are some Easter eggs. We, yeah, there are a lotta Easter eggs in the movie, one of which I think we did put a Back to the Future nod, on one of the magazine covers.

29:25Jawad MirOkay.

29:26James ClyneYou know, all of that has to be run through clearance, so we can't…

29:29Jawad MirOf course

29:30James Clyne... Put any other magazine we wanted. We had to either create it, or we had to get something cleared. So we just created a lot. My supervising art director, his partner is a, is like a backyard, astronomer and does these amazing photographs of nebulas and planets. We put that on a magazine cover as like a science cover. But, lotta little Easter eggs here and there. But yeah, I think, from what I remember, at least Back to the Future was on one of those. There's a pinball machine in the convenience store that was very, dinosaurs kind of attacking or dinosaurs in this kind of, landscape. I think, I forget the name of it, but it's called like Muldoon's

30:26James Clyne... Adventure or something. So there's certainly little Easter eggs everywhere we could, we can put 'em

30:34Jawad MirSweet. Love it, love it. Any set stories, funny stories that you remembered with any of the actors, the crew, or you witnessed, or you were part of, that you're able to discuss or talk about?

30:47James ClyneYeah, I mean, there was weird surreal things that just happened constantly. You know, we built a bit of a temple piece, in a national park in Thailand. It's, it's kind of where they get the sample from the temple, and they're down in this kind of little pond area, which existed in this real national park. But, we had to build, we had to build this little facade piece where they run out of this little temple section. But we couldn't close the set, meaning we had to let people go travel literally through our set to go to these waterfalls behind them. So I don't think people understood that they were actually walking through a temple being built for a Jurassic World movie.

31:39Jawad MirOf course they didn't.

31:40James ClyneBut we couldn't... We had to leave it there. We had to leave, like, an opening, an archway to allow literally tourists to just walk through. They must have been quite confused of why there was some, you know, a built bit of temple right in this location. But, that was, that was a fun one. Of all things, we had to build gr… we had to grow grass in Thailand for the Titanosaurus sequence. So all that kind of, chest-high, shoulder-high grass, we actually grew five weeks prior to the shoot. And that was one of the most stressful things. It kept me up at night a lot because the grass kept dying. There was like a, there was like a heat wave that went through Thailand, and it killed all the grass. So we had to bring in a horticulturist from the UK to regrow the grass, and we had to put in sprinkler systems to make sure the grass would grow.

32:41James ClyneIt's like all those th… there's like these little things that you never think are gonna be a problem become a, become a problem, and shooting outdoors, in the elements can always be a problem. Like, we call it, like, the film gods, you know, whether a set is kind of... You know, there's torrential rains, and a set is just kind of flooded out, or, you never get the right sunlight 'cause it's, it's raining or it's too bright out. So those are kind of the crazy little challenges nobody thinks about by shooting in a real place, is you just never know what kind of weather is gonna be thrown at you.

33:23Jawad MirYeah. And, you know, i… it's, it's kind of like a curse, but at the same time not a curse, that people don't understand how much time, money, hard work that goes into any film, whether the film turns out to be amazing or absolutely terrible.

33:42Jawad MirBut there's just so much stuff. Like, it's just, like, even, you know, you're talking about the grass story. These little things, if people start getting educated, and I think the audience is more educated now than they were 20, 30 years ago, thanks to YouTube and making of featurettes. But it's just such a big thing for people to understand that it's a lot of lot of work, you know, that goes into planning. It's like almost, it's like making a building, like, you know, constructing a building from start to end.

34:09James ClyneYeah.

34:09Jawad MirThe only difference is people see a building going up. They don't see a movie getting made. That's the only difference.

34:15James ClyneYeah. They get to walk through that beautiful building at the end, and…

34:19Jawad MirYeah

34:19James Clyne... You know? But they don't under… yeah, what they don't understand is there's a lot of people that are behind it making it happen, spending long hours to making sure that, you know, it goes successfully. And it's, it's ultimately, at the end of the day, it's an art form, you know? It is, it is engineering and it's, it's a lot of technical work. But ultimately, it's an art form, and you're trying to tell the story that's never been told before in a new way and create all this, like, new stuff. But then you have to create it practically, and it has to work e… every time. Not only does it have to work once, but as you know, it has to work, like, 10 times 'cause there's 10 takes to do it…

35:05Jawad MirYeah

35:05James Clyne... Exactly the same way. So, it's a huge process. It's very complicated, and everybody has to be on their A-game to make sure that it's successful on the day.

35:19Jawad MirYeah. No, that's true. Is it… We all learn something from ev… every day that we do any kind of work, you know, whether it's your just the time you spend with your family or work. Working on Jurassic World: Rebirth, what was one thing that you learned about yourself? I know it's a very big question, but I just… I'm always curious because we always learn stuff, and it's a hard one to answer, I'm sure.

35:43James ClyneOh, that is a good question. Might have to think about that. I mean… you know, it is a, it's an artistic endeavor ultimately, but really what you learn about yourself working on these movies is, you have to be like a real teammate. You have to be part of… You have to be, like a leader in your team, but you also have to be somebody that can listen in your team. You have to really just be… You have to be willing to put your ego aside sometimes and just work for the betterment of the production. You know, I could spend all day going, "No, I think it should be this, and it should be that," and really grind against, you know, the different… HODs of, you know, camera or stunts. But it really i… it requires everybody to kinda come together on the same page.

36:46James ClyneAnd if you're not, if you're not part of that team, then you're not gonna... It's not gonna be successful. You'll fail. So you have to lean on the people that are supporting you, and then you have to be willing to work with those above you to make it all, to make it all work. I didn't do much sports as a kid. I was more of, like, an art nerd. But I was in a couple... I did swimming and water polo, and what that, what that... The takeaway from that was, like, l… learning how to be part of a team. And then, and if you can't be a team player, you're, you're just not gonna, you're not gonna succeed, so.

37:31Jawad MirYeah.

37:32James ClyneYeah.

37:33Jawad MirDoes... And sorry if I'm asking a little too much. We're all human beings. We all have our flaws. Even all this experience that you've had over the years, you know, worked on such amazing productions, do you still find yourself for a moment or for a minute or for an hour or for a day, the ego kinda kicks in and then you try to snap back out of it?

37:53James ClyneYeah, I mean, it's,.. It's an amazing thing to be able to be a part of. I don't know if it's, like, wish fulfillment, but I've always been... Since I saw Empire Strikes Back in the theater when I was eight years old, I've always wondered how those things can be made and who makes 'em. And I didn't have any idea. I, you know, grew up in Oregon and then California. Even though I was in California, I was so separate from Hollywood. I only learned about how things were made back in the day, you know, they would put on a Laserdisc or a VHS, you know, some little making of Aliens or something.

38:37James ClyneYou get a little bit of window into what it takes to make those movies. But yeah, I... It's not lost on me that, the luck that I've had, the... But also the, you know, the fact that I've put in a lot of work to get here, to make this happen. And I, and I know I'm talented, but, talent only takes you so far. I think you just... You wanna be in the right place at the right time. You wanna find the right people to work with, like Gareth Edwards. I just feel so lucky to be able to work with somebody like that who s… kind of sees eye to eye the same kind of vision. So, no, I... There are moments where I'm like, "Oh, my God, what am I doing here? This is crazy that we're working on a Steven Spielberg production." But at the same time, you just push that all aside because you have, you know, A, B, C, all the way to Z of things to do that day and tasks to make happen.

39:45James ClyneAnd that's kind of what's in the forefront of your brain at the moment, not, "Oh, my God, look at me. I get to, I get to, you know, trudge through waist-high water in Thailand looking for locations for Scarlett Johansson to walk by." Like, if you think about that too much, you'll just get lost into the mix in your head. But, yeah. Yeah, it... And then the moment it finishes, it's all like a weird dream. It's all some strange…

40:14Jawad MirYeah

40:15James Clyne... Happen. You can't believe it happened. But, it's a very hard thing to explain.

40:21Jawad MirWould you do another Jurassic film, as we sort of wrap it up, if you, the offer came on the table?

40:26James ClyneI think so. I love the franchise. The first movie just is just perfection. The books are great. I'm a big Michael Crichton fan. And then ultimately I love dinosaurs. I was a kid who used to go to the li… you know, my mother used to take me to the library and, I would just go right to, like, the paleontology section and just check out dinosaur books. And I loved drawing dinosaur books and... Or drawing dinosaurs from those books and, some of my earliest memories of drawing was drawing dinosaurs. So to be a part of this franchise, to be involved in, you know, on this level, yeah, I think I would have a hard time saying no.

41:19Jawad MirI'm glad you said that. And I... As much as I don't wanna see another Jurassic film, the truth is there will be one. And…... And because I just don't want it, this experience to be ruined. And if there is one, I would love Gareth to do it

41:33James ClyneMe too

41:33Jawad Mir... Because he's, he definitely, he's definitely up there for me. You know, he's in a similar age group as you and I, but I still admire his work and his humbleness. He's a very humble individual.

41:45James ClyneYeah, he's, he's just ultimately, such a, an amazing fan of filmmaking in general, and just wants to, wants to make movies that excite him and then ultimately excite an audience.

42:02Jawad Mir100%. Well, awesome. Thank you so much, James. I really appreciate your time, man.

42:07James ClyneAll right. All right, Fuad.

42:08Jawad MirFor fitting me in on your Sunday.

42:10James ClyneYeah, of course. Sorry I was a little bit late, but, all the luck to you. Let's stay, let's stay in touch.