Twenty-two years ago, Dr John Hammond had a dream a theme park on a remote Pacific island where visitors could experience the thrill and awe of witnessing actual dinosaurs.
A massive power cut which turned the electric fences into insignificant barriers to a Tyrannosaurus Rex meant things went a little awry.
However, watching the fall-out certainly thrilled an impressionable Minnesotan teenager.
“I was 13 when I saw Jurassic Park,” recalls actor Chris Pratt, star of the latest film in the series, Jurassic World.
“It was the first big event movie that I was taken to see and it blew my mind.
“So to be given the opportunity to continue to tell the story of a franchise that was really important to you as a kid is a huge honour.”
Based on a book by Michael Crichton, and starring Sir David Attenborough as the well-meaning Dr Hammond, Jurassic Park was a huge box-office success and spawned two sequels 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park and 2001’s Jurassic Park III.
The new movie is a narrative successor to the 1993 original, taking on the idea of the theme park filled with dinosaurs.
Guardians of the Galaxy star Chris plays Owen Grady in the film, a military veteran who respects the precarious place of humans in the natural order and now works at a behavioural facility on the outskirts of Jurassic World.
When all hell breaks loose, the unflappable adventurer is ideally suited to restore calm.
“Owen is stoic, quick to act and without a single bit of goofiness, which for me is hard,” laughs the 35-year-old.
“My natural instinct is to be a goofball, and it’s something I had to remind myself to be quiet before every take.
“A movie like this is a massive undertaking, it requires thousands of people to come together to bring this to the big screen, so it did feel like a big responsibility and every day was a challenge.
“But even to be an actor for a living is very much a dream for me so to be handed that responsibility was absolutely beyond my wildest dreams.”
It didn’t take long for Chris to appreciate what a thrill that running away from imaginary dinosaurs can be.
“The shoot began on a Second-World-War air base,” he explains.
“Bryce (co-star Bryce Dallas Howard) and I were both in our jungle-worn wardrobe with dirt on our faces, shooting on 65mm, and you could hear the cameras rolling.
“We’re stepping on our marks looking at each other, and we could have been on the set of Casablanca.
“That’s when I discovered how cool movies could be and it felt like a very big deal.”
n Jurassic World is at cinemas from Thursday, June 11.
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