A Sandbar Mishap Forced The Lost World: Jurassic Park To Improvise An Ominous Scene

Director Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" is a stone-cold masterpiece — a fantastic adaptation (even if it is vastly different from the book), a stunning achievement in filmmaking, and a revolutionary moment in the history of special effects. Less praised but still fantastic is Spielberg's "The Lost World: Jurassic Park" (which some consider to be the best movie in the franchise). This movie adds to the lore of the series by introducing Isla Sorna and other islands we hear about but never see in the Muertes Archipelago.

Speaking with CinemaBlend, writer David Koepp explained how, during a scene where Jeff Goldblum and the rest of the cast approaches Isla Sorna, their boat stops short of shore. In the final movie, the captain says they don't want to approach the island for rumors of missing boats and dead crewmen. In reality, that was a hard pivot needed when the boat used in the movie literally stopped short. According to Koepp:

"We got stuck on a sandbar in the middle of the river. So, Steven was on an airplane headed to wherever he was gonna shoot next, and I called him and I said, 'We're stuck on a sandbar. I can't land and have them get off the boat.' And he said, 'Just' — it was cracking up, it was coming in and out — and he said, 'Just rewrite it however you can and shoot whatever you can.' So we very quickly, on this boat on the sandbar, rewrote, you know, 'Why have we stopped!?' And I just made up the scene."

"That's all made up at the last second," he continued. "And then the tide came up and the boat floated free and we were fine. But yeah, we had to make up a whole thing. And that's fun because, you know, you're using your wits."

This is far from the only time the "Jurassic" movies have had to pivot due to being victims of nature's wrath. Much like "Jaws," this franchise is full of moments of brilliance created by happenstance and necessity. Case in point: The first "Jurassic Park" movie was filming when Hawaii suffered the worst hurricane in recorded history. The hurricane destroyed sets and ruined a planned scene where Samuel L. Jackson's character, Ray Arnold, runs to the shed before he is killed by raptors. With the sets destroyed, the scene was scrapped. Instead, we got one of the best jump scares in the entire film when all we see is Arnold's torn-off arm, the rest of his body never to be found.

Similarly, rather than a unremarkable boat scene where the characters disembark on shore, "The Lost World" gives us an ominous moment that foreshadows the carnage and horror to come while also introducing an interesting piece of lore to the franchise with Las Cinco Muertes ("Five Deaths" in Spanish), the set of islands that includes Nublar and Sorna. Granted, the concept was abandoned and we never heard of the other islands, but that's par for the course in this franchise; there's a lot of lore that is briefly introduced then mostly abandoned. Heck, for the longest time, the idea of InGen and its bioengineering competitors was never really examined, until "Jurassic World Dominion" finally did something with it. 

Then there's "Camp Cretaceous," the animated series set after "Jurassic World" that greatly expanded the lore of the movies, picking up lost threads and introducing new ones. That show also revisited the concept of additional islands connected to Nublar and Sorna and properly re-introduced Biosyn as an overarching villain.