Daily Dialogue — September 25, 2013
John Hammond: [as they gather around a baby dinosaur hatching from its egg] I’ve been present for the birth of every little creature on this island.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: Surely not the ones that are bred in the wild?
Henry Wu: Actually they can’t breed in the wild. Population control is one of our security precautions. There’s no unauthorized breeding in Jurassic Park.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: How do you know they can’t breed?
Henry Wu: Well, because all the animals in Jurassic Park are female. We’ve engineered them that way.
They take the baby dinosaur out of its egg. A robot arm picks up the shell out of Grant’s hand and puts it back down.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: But again, how do you know they’re all female? Does somebody go out into the park and pull up the dinosaurs’ skirts?
Henry Wu: We control their chromosomes. It’s really not that difficult. All vertebrate embryos are inherently female anyway, they just require an extra hormone given at the right developmental stage to make them male. We simply deny them that.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: John, the kind of control you’re attempting simply is… it’s not possible. If there is 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 and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh… well, there it is.
John Hammond: [sardonically] There it is.
Henry Wu: You’re implying that a group composed entirely of female animals will… breed?
Dr. Ian Malcolm: No, I’m, I’m simply saying that life, uh… finds a way.
— Jurassic Park (1993), screenplay by Michael Crichton and David Koepp, novel by Michael Crichton
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is science, suggested by plinytheelder_t. Today’s suggestion by Aarthi Ramanathan.
Trivia: The film opened on Friday, June 11, 1993, and broke box office records its first weekend, with $47 million. It eventually went on to make more than $900 million worldwide. David Koepp remembers the day it opened: “I was in New York and I walked to the Ziegfeld [Theatre] to see how it was doing. The guy comes out and announces to the big line, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the 7 o’clock show of Jurassic Park is sold out.’ And people go, ‘Oooh.’ And he goes, ‘Also the 10 o’clock show is sold out.’ And they went, ‘Ooooooh.’ ‘And also Saturday night’s 7 and 10 o’clock shows are also sold out.’ And I was like, ‘I’m not an expert, but I think this is very good.’”
Dialogue On Dialogue: Ian Malcolm is my favorite character in the JP series and I love the whole chaos theory angle… in part because that’s the way writing is. We can break a story, work it all out, but then characters come to life and start trampling all over our well-laid plans. That’s the sort of chaos a writer should pray for because then you’ve got something real and alive!