“If there’s one thing the history of evolution has taught us, it’s that life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories. It crashes through barriers… I’m simply saying that life, uh…finds a way.”

For the 45th anniversary of the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF) the organizers have designated the annual Al Milgrom tribute award to be given to legendary Hollywood cinematographer Dean Cundey. As a part of his time at the festival, he agreed to host a screening of his work on Steven Spielberg’s 1993 masterpiece “Jurassic Park.” It is a film so iconic in pop culture that introducing it feels almost redundant, but if you somehow haven’t seen “Jurassic Park” or if you’ve seen it 100 times over, allow me to enlighten you with some things you may not have known about it.

The plot follows several disparate people brought together by the enigmatic financier John Hammond (played by Oscar winning director Richard Attenborough) to provide expert testimonials for his new experimental theme park. They include paleontologists Dr. Alan Grant (played by Sam Neill) and Ellie Sattler (played by Oscar winner Laura Dern), mathematician Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum), and Hammond’s two grandchildren named Lex (played by Ariana Richards) and Tim (played by Joseph Mazzello). But after an unfortunate case of corporate sabotage and bad weather, they find themselves fighting for their lives and trying to survive the park’s main attractions, dinosaurs brought back from extinction by the miracle of science.

Interestingly, although there were several instances of practical effects in the movie, there were only 57 shots in the entire film that utilized CGI. Possibly drawing from his experiences filming “Jaws” in 1975, Spielberg learned that you don’t always need to show the creature on screen for you to feel its presence in the film, so many of the times that dinosaurs are on screen they are practical puppets. It was only for the shots that were impossible to do practically that this CGI was used sparingly and to such a great effect that the Oscar winning special effects still hold up over 33 years later.

Cundey wanted to highlight two scenes of note in the screening that he felt were particularly memorable from his time working on the movie as its cinematographer. And the first was the shot immediately before Dr. Grant is introduced in Montana.

“That was an extreme challenge because of the technicalities of the long pull in [to the piece of amber when they are in the mine], but Steven wanted a very specific storytelling shot. So we accommodated that, and it took time to rehearse it and block it and do all of that. But we ended up with one shot that worked, and it was in the movie, beautiful,” Cundey said.

He also discussed the iconic shot of the rippling cup of water in the RV, and how that came to be.

“[The Shot of the cup] was in the storyboard, it telegraphs for us and for the characters there’s something happening.
And it was a case of ‘how do you get those concentric ripples?’ And we tried tapping the glass, we did all of that stuff, but it didn’t work. And then, one day, the special effects guy had a glass of liquid–I don’t know if it was pure distilled water or maybe, something else…–and they put it on his guitar and accidentally plucked the string and the concentric ripples occurred. That was a case of them taking the cup of ‘liquid,’ putting it on the dashboard of the vehicle, running a guitar string all the way down to the floor, and then going [pluck]… That’s G flat right? So, it was one of those things that could have been complex, computer or visual effects or something, but it turned out to be just a very simple answer,” Cundey said.

Finally, when asked about if here were any small details in the film that the audience should look out for, he responded rather dryly:

“My credit,” said Cundey, to uproarious laughter from the audience.

They took it to heart, and the reaction to his name every time it showed up in the end credits was nothing short of deafening. The sound even surpassed the reaction to Jeff Goldblum’s impeccable shirtless physique. Not even the name of legendary composer John Williams mustered a reaction, which I found hilarious.

So the next time you want to watch or rewatch “Jurassic Park,” try to keep an eye out for how it was made and see how this miracle of a film 65 million years in the making turned out to be so great. My final rating for “Jurassic Park” is an iconic 10/10.