Tea Leoni Talks 'Jurassic Park III'

[Sunday, April 15th, 2001]

Universal Studios' Horror Online spoke with Tea Leoni, star of 'Jurassic Park III' about her experiences while filming the third installment.

According to the site, Leoni agreed to do Jurassic without seeing a script first, instead basing her decision to join the cast on director Joe Johnston’s enthusiasm—and her own enthusiasm for working with Johnston and stars Sam O’Neill and William Macy. "Joe just said, 'Listen, you're a mom who's lost her 12 year old son, on an island with dinosaurs. What do you think?' And I thought, 'cool,'" she remembers.

She goes on to say, "For the most part, we were face to face with some of the most terrifying puppets," reveals Leoni. "I mean, these guys make Chucky look like child’s play. And that made the acting easy, because when you have a - whatever it is - 6 ton, 1700 horsepower, 30-foot high creature coming at you along a track at 18 MPH, you find the fear. You find the fear quite easily, actually."

Leoni reveals that the dinosaur puppets seemed to have their own personality, and also looked very real. "No one has ever seen a moving dinosaur, but I would credit Stan Winston and his team with vivid and real imagination because you can look into each creature, even in the same species, [and see] a different personality. It wasn't like this one's green, or this one's taller or this one has horns--there were different shapes to the faces, and some seem to have more smiles."

Leoni believes that, as with its predecessor 8 years ago, Jurassic Park 3's story and characters will reel viewers in—and that's the key to making an effects-heavy genre film great. "We’ve got a great kid in this film - Trevor Morgan," she says. "Bill Macy and I are playing a recently divorced couple who has lost their child. Half of that is funny and the other half isn't--how we are going to do this, coming from being divorced and whatever that brings to the table and how we’ll have to come together in order to get our son back [and all of that]."

Leoni was really impressed by the multi-stage operation going staged on the Universal backlot. "At one point, we probably had at least five stages going. I've rarely worked on a film that had more than half a stage going--so five stages is a lot of space and set ends," she marvels at the memory. "One of the sets, the largest, is where they had really recreated the jungle, to such an extent with the lights above the trees and water and a mist being fed in that we sort of developed our own eco system, where in areas of the set it would rain."

The full immersion into this alternate reality was a treat for Leoni. "As an actor, there are usually only three walls. Oftentimes, even when you’re filming a movie, they removed a wall where your camera is located," she explains. "Here, everything was inside of these four walls and you never saw a wall from the set. It was just this dense forest; it felt like a quarter of a mile from one corner to the other."

The experience of working on Jurassic Park 3 is one that will stay with Leoni always—distinguished not by any one particular scene, but rather by discreet moments scattered throughout the shoot. "There are memorable days to me," she says. "Working under water with large claws pawing at me--I felt like this must be [what it's like] to be a fish in a barrel. Being picked out of a plane by a large angry dinosaur, that stands out. And there were a few days that stood out as being very silly, where I was just, if I clocked it for about 9 to 9, all I did was run and scream. At the end of the day I'd just start laughing. I think I laughed after every scene that I screamed in because it starts to be very funny and what I enjoyed most was watching the playback of us running though fields screaming and ducking imaginary tails and swipes of paws because that's what they are called. That’s funny, that's very funny to watch on the playback. It would be different now that they put the big guys in, though--it won’t be so funny."

'Jurrassic Park III' open in cinemas nationwide on July 18, 2001. Thanks to 'Kim' for the alert!