‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ Alan Grant callout explained by Jonathan Bailey, team

This article contains minor spoilers from Jurassic World Rebirth.

While on a mission to extract dinosaur DNA from the three largest prehistoric creatures of land, sea, and sky, the de facto paleontologist of Jurassic World Rebirth, Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), casually mentions that he studied under Dr. Alan Grant, played in three films by actor Sam Neill.

The idea came from screenwriter David Koepp, who also co-wrote the original Jurassic Park with author Michael Crichton. “It’s actually the only reference to anybody from another Jurassic film,” director Gareth Edwards explains to Entertainment Weekly. “Then the only thing that we did for fun, I designed a little patch that went on his bag that was the Snakewater Canyon.”

The fictional Snakewater Canyon in Montana is the paleontology dig site from the opening Jurassic Park scene, when moviegoers first met Neill’s Alan and Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler on screen. “It was as if it was a national park badge of that dig site, as if [Henry] had worked there as a kid.”

Costume designer Sammy Sheldon Differ then noticed a triangular piece of metal on Alan’s belt in that first movie. “It’s a digging sort of spade. You just open it, and it’s for scratching away at the dirt and stuff. We had that on Jonathan’s belt. We liked the idea that Alan Grant had given it to him as a gift when he retired, or whatever the canon would be.”

So let’s get one question out of the way…Since Bailey’s Henry Loomis worked at Snakewater Canyon and claims (in another piece of movie dialogue) that he’s been on digs since he was 12, is he the now-adult version of that little kid from Jurassic Park whom Alan freaked out on at that dig site with a raptor claw? The answer is no, but Edwards agrees, “That’s a really good idea.”

“There was also speculation that we might have been the older versions of the two kids in the first film. Obviously, we’re not,” Bailey comments in a separate conversation with costars Scarlett Johansson (Zora Bennett) and Mahershala Ali (Duncan Kincaid). “It’s safe to say I don’t think Henry is that kid.”

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Koerr further expands on the decision not to have more than one direct connection between the new set of characters in Jurassic World Rebirth and any legacy characters. “That was always a consideration,” he says. “Steven [Spielberg] abhors self-reference, tries very, very hard not to do it in his own movies. I find it difficult to not, in some ways, quote a Spielberg movie because that was what I grew up with, and his movies are hugely influential.”

Koerr confirms, “We did take a few things out from the original movies. I think Gareth felt less encumbered by our desire to not quote ourselves. So he felt freer making references, and that was fine. But we tried not to. It’s a fine line. There’s a few you want to acknowledge, first of all, that you exist in a world that those movies exist in. You don’t ever want anything that smacks of self-congratulatory or self-love or anything like that.”