Gareth Edwards Confirms Star Wars Connection in Jurassic World Rebirth

In an interview with Collider, Gareth Edwards and Frank Marshall, the director and producer of Jurassic World Rebirth respectively, confirmed that they ‘borrowed‘ some of the Rancor’s likeness for the Distortus Rex (aka D-Rex); just don’t tell Marshall’s wife Kathleen Kennedy!

I’ll stick with the D-Rex a little more here. Can you tell us what it’s made up of? I know the base of it is the T-Rex genome, but what else do you envision being in it?

EDWARDS: I thought it was really an opportunity for Frank to have a cameo in the film, so we scanned Frank’s face. The scanner wasn’t working properly, and… No, I’m joking. Basically, you took everything in a melting pot. It’s really hard to come up with a monster idea. We put in a little bit of the Rancor from Star Wars. Don’t tell people who work on Star Wars.

MARSHALL: Don’t tell Kathy [Kennedy].

EDWARDS: Then we put in a little bit of H.R. Geiger’s alien for good measure. There was a little bit of, obviously, the T-Rex. Then, if you imagine we were all dinosaurs for a second, and someone made a movie about humans, they would go, “Oh, it’s a human.” That’s the end of the conversation. You’d be like, “Well, which human? What kind? Like, Clint Eastwood? What is it?” So, basically, the animators go, “Well, who would it be if it was a character?” I ended up saying, “Okay, maybe go rewatch David Lynch’s The Elephant Man.” It’s the idea of something that’s a little bit suffering, didn’t want to be in this situation, and I like that. It’s in there, certainly, hopefully, but there’s this little bit of empathy you have for it. You wanted to feel slightly sorry for it.

Apparently, it’s the sound designer’s mother-in-law’s dog that struggles to breathe. That’s what I heard. There’s another sad story if you want it. His cat got attacked by another cat and crushed its windpipe. The cat recovered and was perfectly happy and recovered, but breathes in a very strange way, and he recorded his cat, who’s now passed away — I’m sorry — and used the audio for Aquilops. So, the little sniffles and the [snorts] is his cat that had a crushing windpipe.

MARSHALL: The sound designers are very strange people.

Read the interview in full here, and see Jurassic World Rebirth in cinemas now.