Online out-scares dinosaurs?
FILM TRAILER TRASHED: Jurassic World star Howard faces down monster outrage
One morning in April, Bryce Dallas Howard got an anxious email on her phone. It was from director Colin Trevorrow, with whom she’d been shooting Jurassic World a few months earlier.
“I wanted to check in with you and make sure you’re OK,” he had written.
Overnight, Universal had released a teaser clip in which Howard’s character, Claire Dearing, the coolly capable operations manager of the film’s ill-fated theme park, verbally spars with the park’s scruffy dinosaur wrangler Owen Grady, played by Chris Pratt.
She’s terse and task-focused while he haplessly attempts to flirt.
But unexpectedly, Joss Whedon, the director of Marvel’s Avengers films took exception online, trashing the clip as “Seventies-era sexist,” adding: “She’s a stiff, he’s a lifeforce — really? Still?”
Trevarrow, 38, was distraught. After all, he insisted that Jurassic be restructured around a high-ranking female executive at the park — who, Howard says, is “incredibly accomplished, but also flawed and myopic, and who reconnects with her humanity” when disaster strikes.
And during production, Howard, 34, felt Claire was a worthy successor to Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and the others. But sometimes on studio blockbusters, strange things can happen in the editing.
Had she been demoted to mere love interest?
“Part of me wanted to scream, ‘No, no, please don’t misunderstand!’ ” she says. “Joss Whedon is a hero of mine, and what he’s done for women in film and television, particularly when it comes to writing female roles that would typically go to a man, is awesome.
“But the tricky thing with movies is, you release these little bits without the larger context. And that scene only shows my character at the beginning of her journey.”
The last line of Trevorrow’s email on that April morning reassured her that their film had stayed the course. “Don’t worry,” it read. “You’re still the hero.”
Indeed she is. Arriving in the swirling dust cloud of Mad Max: Fury Road, Jurassic World gives this summer’s blockbuster season its second alpha heroine. Claire Dearing may not be as radical a character as Mad Max’s Imperator Furiosa.
But the story of Jurassic World is her personal journey — from the stone-cold careerist who begins the movie looking for corporate sponsorship for the park’s latest tourist attraction, the genetically soupedup Indominus Rex, to the woman clutching a burning flare in the dark of the jungle, humbled but defiant, and facing these terrifying creatures.
Spoiler alert! Things go wrong in Jurassic World, and the dinosaurs break loose and eat people.
She remembers watching the original Jurassic Park at 12 years old and feeling “shell shocked” by its effects — unusual, given she’s the daughter of Oscar-winning director Ron Howard and spent much of her childhood on sets.
Howard has nothing but praise for the “very centred, humble” Trevorrow. And while most of her experiences on various blockbusters have been positive, a few have not.
For instance, on the set of Terminator Salvation, Christian Bale launched a tirade at director of photography Shane Hurlbut that was recorded and later leaked on the Internet. And she’s been caught in on-set crossfire in other films.
Might her generosity toward directors have something to do with being raised by one?
Her father, she says, has always been her mentor: For as long as she can remember, he showed her that work could be a playground and fantasy a viable career. “It’s thanks to him I’m sitting here today,” she beams. And it’s clear she could never have ended up anywhere else.
Jurassic World opens Friday.