Sam Neill explains what was going on with his Jurassic Park accent in cast reunion interview

The original Jurassic Park is, unlike the other bunch of movies that have evolved from its potent dino DNA, very good. In order to help us remember that fact well enough that we’re likely to go see the latest entry to the series, the 1993 original’s Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum have got together to promote Jurassic World Dominion by spending the bulk of a new Vanity Fair interview discussing their first time working together.

Over the course of the conversation, they get into a wide range of Park-related topics, from how Goldblum’s immortal bare-chested pose came about to an explanation for Neill’s quasi-American accent.

“I get a lot of flak to this day,” Neill says about this last point, citing the masses who would compare his accent work to, in his words, “a load of T-rex poo.” While it’s certainly not the worst accent ever committed to film, Neill explains that his performance was harmed by Steven Spielberg changing his mind about how Dr. Alan Grant should talk while filming.

Neill says that Spielberg approached him on the first day of the shoot—“on the day we fried the kid”—and told the actor that he didn’t need to bother delivering his lines in the American accent he’d been working on for the past few weeks. A few days later Spielberg came back and amended his instruction, asking for “somewhere in between” Neill’s American and natural accents. The result is what ended up in the final cut: A non-committal American voice that could maybe just be attributed to Grant bouncing between Northern Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States in his youth.

There are other great bits of trivia throughout the interview for anyone who grew up wearing out a Jurassic Park tape. Dern, at one point, talks about accidentally dragging prop Samuel L. Jackson limbs behind her during one raptor escape scene, the three remember what it was like to pretend to interact with giant CGI dinosaurs, and Goldblum explains how the role of Dr. Ian Malcolm was not only almost written out of the movie before production but that Malcolm lounging around while wounded, bare chest exposed, wasn’t written in the script and “just happened somehow.”

With this interview finished, we now wait with bated breath for another, post-Jurassic World: Dominion sit-down to hear more from the trio about what making that movie was like—and whether the dinosaur its director compared to the Joker was as much of a pain in the ass to work with as other Jokers.

[via Digg]

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