Movie fans around the world should know the name Stan Winston. This four-time Academy Award winner has the power to make fantasy become reality thanks to his help in revolutionizing the use of makeup effects and live-action robotics for television and feature films. His work has been seen in numerous motion pictures, ranging from “Roots” to most recently A.I., and his success in Hollywood led him to open his own studio in 1983 and leave his dreams of becoming an actor at the door.
Although Winston’s work has been seen in various films for over three decades, Winston may be best known for bringing the dinosaurs back from extinction with “Jurassic Park” and “The Lost World.” As though bringing back the stegosaurus, triceratops, brachiosaurus and tyrannosaurus wasn’t hard enough, Winston recently discovered that these dinosaurs were only the stepping stones to something much bigger– Jurassic Park 3. With two new dinosaur stars (the flying pteranodon and the spinosaurus) and a classic enemy getting a face-lift or two (the velociraptor), Winston soon discovered that the dinosaurs of “Jurassic Park” and “The Lost World” were a thing of the past. This time around, the dinosaurs had to be bigger, faster, scarier and more realistic.
When I caught up with Winston on a Universal soundstage just weeks before Jurassic Park 3‘s theatrical release, Winston was eager to discuss just how these creatures were brought back from the dead with “Jurassic Park” and how technology let them evolve for JP3. As I listened to him talk and got a chance to look at the spinosaurus up close, I saw first-hand how the magic of Hollywood can allow someone to play God for a day and bring back to life something that has been gone for thousands of years.
Read the interview in part two of JP3’S EVOLVING DINOS: AN INTERVIEW WITH STAN WINSTON>>>
