Dr. Grant here. I had the pleasure of speaking with director Ryan Bellgardt about THE JURASSIC GAMES which just hit VOD platforms on June 12th (My review here: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/80176 ). We spoke a lot about production, the challenges of making a low budget film, and some of the advantages of being a small multi-hat wearing production. For those that want to just write off this film because its a low budget affair with CG dinosaurs, just make sure you check out the film. Bellgardt and company are giving it their all, listening to feedback, and trying to get better with each and every film. So without further stalling, here’s my discussion with Ryan Bellgardt.
Ryan Bellgardt: This is for Ain’t It Cool right? I’ve got to say that I’ve probably followed AICN since very close to the beginning and I was a big fan, and still am of the site. It’s where I got all of my movie news and reviews for years and years. I felt like there was only like four websites online and that was one of them.
Dr. Grant: I haven’t been writing for AICN for that long but I’ve also read the site for like 20 years it seems, so I’m in the same boat.
RB: We had our first two movies reviewed through there which was kind of thrilling for me and honestly, when ARMY OF FRANKENSTEINS ( http://www.aintitcool.com/node/66196#9 ) was reviewed on there it was just a few days later that Shout Factory reached out to us to ask about distribution, so I kind of think that they saw it and I’d like to think that AICN helped propel us into getting a little bit more attention which got us the distribution deal which is pretty cool. I have no proof of that, it’s just what I think.
DG: So tell me about how THE JURASSIC GAMES came together?
RB: We were kind of talking about doing a dinosaur convict movie and our sales agent was wanting one to present to buyers and he presented the idea to me and I was trying to wrap that idea around my head and try to think of something that would be interesting for me to write a script around it. I thought the idea of the dinosaurs being real dinosaurs like cloned Jurassic Park style dinosaurs on an island somewhere. I was having a hard time consolidating that in my mind, like why would that exist. And then it came to me, maybe it should be a RUNNING MAN-style TV show. Like a futuristic dystopian tv show and the reason that these criminals are running from these dinosaurs is because that’s what the public would want. They’d want to see guys being ripped apart by dinosaurs and it kind all of sudden fell into place and made a lot more sense to me because I was asked to be doing the same thing, coming up with a reason why dinosaurs would want to eat people, because it’s what the buyers were wanting to see. So it sort of, in a weird meta way, moved itself from my experience writing and making this kind of movie into- I transplanted that onto the tv show in the story itself and it helped make it fun because you have contestants asking questions like “why are there dinosaurs here?” and the other guy says “well, because they tested better than robots”.
DG: Yeah, I was going to bring that up. I thought that was a good line. It seems like going the realistic route with the dinosaurs; you’d have a lot of backstories you’d have to explain.
RB: Right right. That’s really key. Part of the things that people have said about our movies before was like, pacing issues and things like that and I listen to stuff like and I want THE JURASSIC GAMES to be just action-packed and moving really, really fast and part of having a story like that is having things in the story that don’t need to be explained. And that’s why having the virtual reality dinosaurs there or even having certain characters in the movie that is- for example, I wanted to put brothers in there because I wanted to have two characters that would have an alliance but it would be an easy alliance to understand why they would. I didn’t have to go into a long backstory to describe why they have an alliance you know. They’re just brothers so they obviously have an alliance. So I think there are things like that I did in the script that were just kind of like, I want this movie to move fast.
DG: yeah, obviously it moves fast. I mean within two and half minutes you’re right there in the games, right in it. And correct me if I’m wrong, there really wasn’t an explanation about how long the games had been going on or what prompted them to get started. It’s just another one of those unexplained things that just there and you kind of move on from that.
RB: Right, you sort of get the idea as the story goes along that yeah ok, this has been going on for a few years but yeah, I didn’t think it was necessary to explain why it was going on or what the state of the world is that caused this to go on. I think it’s more about getting the people that watch the movie to think something like “Could this really happen in a few years? And what side of the issue would I be on?” And that’s just a little bit more of the thought-provoking stuff I was trying to explore a little bit when coming up with the story because to me, don’t get me wrong, I love dinosaurs eating people, that’s great, but I wanted to add a little bit more dimension to it and a little bit more reasons like “could this really happen?” That’s what made it fun and interesting to write.
DG: From more of technical standpoint, how much pre-production was there going into this film.
RB: Well, there was a lot. Finding all those locations and doing our research and development on the dinosaurs, it took awhile to get the main star dinosaurs in place. We had the id models created and rigs created and then we did a lot of testing with rendering and lighting to make sure we could get those things looking as good as we could. So there was a lot of that and in big action sequences like the big T-Rex fight or the Raptor Maze, we tried to storyboard those out a little bit but at the end of the day, it really became more just like - point the camera at the desert and we’ll add the dinosaurs in later. We did that because we were working on a bit of a time crunch to get it done. There was a lot of stuff in post that we did that we probably should have done in pre-production but I was able to visualize that T-Rex fight and figure out, working backwards. We shot all the plates and all the footage first and all the actors and then we came in and then we drew storyboards over a lot of the plates and then our animators started animating the dinosaurs and we sort of tweaked the edit at that point so we worked a little bit backwards on it but I like to think that I probably wouldn’t have come up with a T-Rex fight like that if I had drawn it all out in storyboards beforehand, so I’m happy with the way it works, it’s a little backwards but yeah, at the end, everybody went above and beyond and produced something that turned out pretty cool.
Doing GREMLIN was great because we learned what our limitations were and what we could and couldn’t get away with when we were filming for visual effects, and we still had lots of challenges. Some of the hardest things to do in this movie were the in-studio shots when they’re in the futuristic control room and there are all these futuristic screens and holographic maps and things like that. There are about 120 shots of that in the movie, where the camera is sweeping all around those things and those screens had to be in there. Those were a nightmare for us and were just so hard to put in there.
DG: I liked that maze sequence. I thought the characters working the maze with their fingers in order to free themselves from their chains even had a slight TRON look to it.
RB: Yeah, exactly! And overall with the scope of the story, I like the idea of having these puzzles they have to solve or challenges they have to do and then you add dinosaurs on top of it. I liked keeping the idea of those challenges very simple but then you throw in a T-Rex chasing them while they’re trying to do it or a Raptor or something and then all of sudden it becomes hopefully it comes across in the movie that their stress level is much higher and it’s much more exciting. I like that. The maze sequence was one of my favorites. The cool story about the guy who does the Kung fu scene which is one of my favorites scenes in the movie. It was definitely one of our favorite scenes to do but it wasn’t written like that in the script. It was just written where he was stuck in his chain and the Raptors came in and ate him. He the actor’s name is Tiger Sheu and he came to me and said, “man I’m reading that part in the script and I just want you to know, I can actually do chain style martial arts, it’s my specialty”, and I was like really? And he goes, “yeah”’ and he took the chain prop and started whipping it around, getting it really close to all of our faces and we were all terrified of it. He’s doing these Bruce Lee moves with the chains and so again right there we are like we’ve got to write that in so we totally changed that sequence to where he gets free from the chains they’re connected to his hands, yes to fight these three raptors in a kung fu sequence that he and I worked together to choreograph The sequence and later we added the dinos to react to what he did and that’s one of my favorite moments in the movie. I mean when he roundhouse kicks that raptor in the face, we’re all like, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do that in a movie before. That’s always a very fun feeling when you think you’ve accomplished something like that.
DG: Right, I was wondering how much tinkering did happen on set and how long was principal photography?
RB: well we shot it in March of last year it was about 26 days or so in March maybe bleeding over with some re-shoots in April. There was definitely some tinkering going on. You know there’s that saying, “there’s the movie that’s written, the one that’s shot and the one that’s edited and I would say that’s exactly true in this case. You get on set and you realize there’s certain dialogue doesn’t work where certain scenes could be improved or better with actors input and stuff like that. I’m way into that and I love working with actors that can bring stuff to it and stuff to their character.
DG: Was there a lot of footage left on the cutting room floor?
RB: (laughs) not really man, not really. From the very beginning, I wanted to write really tight. I didn’t want anyone to say, “Well, THE JURASSIC GAMES was really slow”. I didn’t want that, so I wrote The script really really tight and one of my biggest fears as a filmmaker is when we’re doing our rough edit, And I’m always afraid the film is going to be like 70 minutes when it’s supposed to be 90. So we got our first edit down [and] it was something like 84 minutes and we were just like, “Wow we can’t trim anything out,” you know because we can’t go too much shorter than this, so if anything we had to find ways to stretch it out to make it a little bit longer, to get it up to a little bit closer to that 90 minutes running time target we were trying to get to. So it was a situation where I wrote the script to be very tight and lean, so even the deleted scenes that we have on the DVD release, there’s a few of them but they’re not really deleted scenes, They’re almost like different versions of a scene, ones where we filmed it and thought ah we need to go do it better. For a fight scene for example that was a little lackluster or underwhelming, you’ll see the original version of that fight scene which is kind of lame compared to what we were able to get for the final version. The final version, we were like “we’ve got to make this fight scene longer so that we can add another minute to the movie. Like, there’s this slow-motion scene toward the end— it’s funny because the police come and raid the studio at the end and the original cut of the movie, that all happens in like, 10 seconds, 15 seconds (laughing). It just happens so fast, it was kind of like Benny Hill music was supposed to be playing or something. They were just falling and falling and I was just like “Well, what we just stretch this out and made it slow motion and added about a minute to the movie, and we added some emotional music on it and it makes it seems like we meant to do that from the beginning.
You know, when you get a lot of people that are working really hard on something and they believe in it, you’re going to get a lot of happy accidents and I think THE JURASSIC GAMES had a lot of those. I mean, you get a lot of people with the common goal of trying to make something the best they can— I believe that it is better than the sum of its parts because of the passion that everyone put into it. You know, it’s a very low budget movie and I’m not trying to say that it’s the next greatest thing or anything like that, but it’s something that I’m proud of and one thing I don’t really like is when someone tries to accuse us of trying to make a bad movie or trying to make a B movie. I say no no, I’m not trying to make a bad movie, I’m trying to make the best movie I can with the resources I have.
DG: When I saw it, I didn’t know a lot going into it and then right away, you get the sense that this is not camp and that this is not camp and I think that carried on throughout. There’s also not a lot of humor in it which I felt was intentional. So where was that line for you of adding a little humor here and there but not straying into that camp category?
RB: It was never my intention to make scary movie 4 or something like that with this. I think when some people see the title, [they] might be expecting, oh this is a parody and it’s not. It’s me saying “How can I take the title of THE JURASSIC GAMES and make it into a story that actually has people thinking, Oh I can see why you would use that title of THE JURASSIC GAMES because like I said earlier, they’re trying to get people’s attention. I think there’s an appropriate amount of humor and action, and I wanted there to be drama and suspense and moments of tension. I think that’s what I was going for there and not something that was just a parody or mockery of other big franchises. No, I was trying to tell a story that was interesting.
DG: Well, I think you definitely accomplished that.
RB: Thanks man!
RB: Yeah, so based on the success of the previous films, we’ve been fortunate to now be hired by a company called Ace Entertainment to produce this movie [about a pet dinosaur] which is a kid’s kind of family movie. It’s not really what we’ve done in the past so I’m excited to do it. We get to animate a bunch of shots with a CG dinosaur in it and what’s cool about it is, and it’s a new challenge for us, is that this character is a character and he has— the dinosaur can emote a lot more and he’s friends with the kid. He has a lot more emotions. I mean everything we’ve done before has been a vicious killing creature so this is a chance for us to things that a cute so that’s really fun and it’s just a lot different tonally. It’s a kids movie. It’s something I think you could see easily on Nickelodeon or Disney or something so I’m excited about that. I think it will have a nice reach and I like the challenge of doing something we haven’t done before but then I’m also excited because we’re actually done with principle on that and in post now with it. I’m excited to move into other projects we have coming up, other kids movies coming up, potentially a dragon movie coming up which will be back to more of an action kind of thing. So, lots of stuff coming up and I think what you touched on earlier is the reason because we’ve sort of developed this way of doing visual effects to a quality that is a level that, while it might not be ILM, it’s acceptable to the people we’re selling our movies to and so they’re saying to us “Hey, you guys can make these movies for us on time and on budget so here’s a bunch of them that we want you to make”. So that’s what we’re working in right now so I’m really excited about that. There’s a lot of stuff coming up that’s pretty cool.
DG: That’s awesome, and you’re mainly shooting these out in Oklahoma right?
RB: Yeah, we like to take advantage of the film rebate program here, also too, all those locations in Jurassic Games were all shot in Oklahoma. It’s a pretty diverse landscape here that you wouldn’t imagine so we like to take advantage of that. Also, local talent and crews are great, you know there’s really no reason not to because we're able to do things pretty affordably here. The people here are great. It’s crazy, you can call up the police station and they’ll let you use their cars and stuff like that. It’s pretty cool.
DG: So even that desert scene in Jurassic Games was shot right there in Oklahoma?
RB: Yeah, it’s crazy, it’s called Little Sahara. It’s a place that looks like Tatooine in a complete 360 with these 70-foot sand dunes and they’re just unbelievable.
DG: It looks great.
RB: It was really fun to shoot there except for, the problem is on low budget production you can’t afford to shut the park down. You've got people in dune buggies that are coming constantly, sitting on top of those hills and just watching so we had to run up to the hill and be like “Sorry, can you guys please move?”, and we had to do that about once every hour. Stuff like that that people don’t think about on small budget production. You know, if we were AMERICAN GODS or something out there, they’d just rent the whole thing out. They shut it all down but we don’t get that luxury.
DG: “You’re driving right through my T-Rex right now!”
RB: Exactly! You get people constantly coming up to us “Were you guys making a movie?” Yeah, were...(laughing)
DG: Well I want to really thank you for taking the time to talk with us today.
RB: Man, I’m thrilled, like I said, when I saw Ain’t It Cool News come across the email, I was like woohoo. Thanks for taking the time to interview me, and good luck with the writing gig there.
DG: Thanks!
I had fun speaking with Ryan and as a father of two young girls that love dinosaurs, I’m curious to see how his family-oriented dino film takes shape. Meanwhile, The Jurassic Games is out on VOD now.
-Dr. Grant
