In case you needed any more proof that John Hammond (Sir Richard Attenborough) bit off way more than he could chew with Jurassic Park, then pay close attention to the background audio during the Chilean sea bass lunch scene.
The little slideshow presentation is accompanied by a narration track in which Hammond talks about future plans to expand the dinosaur operation worldwide.
John Hammond’s Global Plans for Jurassic Park Are in Steven Spielberg’s Movie
Despite the fact that the initial park wasn’t even fully operational yet, InGen’s construction arm had already leased a tract of land in the Azores and an island near Guam for Jurassic Park Europe and Jurassic Park Japan, respectively.
More impressively, he was also in talks with the famously restrictive Chinese government for a Beijing outpost—described as “the first western enterprise to bring its profits home from China.”
Screenwriter David Koepp wrote Hammond’s ambitious business projections, but made it part of an appendices at the end of the script (a technique he still uses to this day).
“You don’t want people reading it to get clogged up,” he explained in 2023’s Jurassic Park: The Official Script Book: Complete with Annotations. “Suddenly, your lovely four-page dialogue scene is now six, and it just feels out of place.”
Unlike his literary counterpart in Michael Crichton’s original novel, the movie Hammond is a lot less ruthless and focused on the bottom line. That’s because director Steven Spielberg saw him as a Walt Disney-esque figure, not a cutthroat businessman.
“Steven wanted a sunnier captain of the Jurassic Park ship; he was clear about that,” said Malia Scotch Marmo, who worked on the screenplay prior to Koepp’s involvement. “I felt Hammond was quite insane, but hid it beautifully through tact and an old-world elegance.”
She continued: “I thought he was insane because he made a park with raptors and T. rexes in it and still he brought his grandchildren to a potentially lethal park before to had a real safety check…He had a childlike delight in what he created, but he also had a Dr. Frankenstein [quality] about him. He played God and he failed.”
Attenborough was born to play the role and makes it look effortless onscreen, but that’s not how he felt before production began.
“I’m not allowed to use the sort of language that I would wish to use to tel you the state of my belly and my mind on the night before we started shooting,” he said in a CNN news report shortly after the film opened in 1993. “I don’t think I slept a wink.”
Another Hammond-related deviation from the Crichton source materials finds the character living to tell the tale rather than being picked apart by Compies, as occurs in the novel.
Attenborough brought this up to an executive, joking that he’d “been robbed of my great death scene.” The executive’s response? “You may have been robbed of a death scene, you may not have been robbed of a sequel.”
And indeed, he did return for an extended cameo in 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
