As Spielberg revealed at a 30th anniversary screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, he originally offered the role to the Indiana Jones star Harrison Ford.
"Do you know who I offered Jurassic Park to? This guy [gesturing to Ford]. Alan Grant I first offered to this guy."
CAGE CONVINCED DERN
Laura Dern, who played Dr Ellie Sattler, wasn't convinced that a dinosaur movie was right for her career. But that all changed after chatting to Nicolas Cage who she'd recently finished making a film with.
"I said to him, 'Nic, they want to put me on the phone with Steven Spielberg, but they want to talk to me about a dinosaur movie …'" Dern recalled to Entertainment Weekly.
"And he was like, 'You are doing a dinosaur movie! No one can ever say no to a dinosaur movie!' I was like, 'Really?' And he's like, 'Are you kidding? It's a dream of my life to do a movie with dinosaurs!' So he was such an influence on me."
WHO ALMOST PLAYED DR IAN MALCOLM
The casting director, Janet Hirshenson, said she immediately thought Jeff Goldblum would be perfect for the role of Dr Ian Malcolm after reading Michael Crichton's novel. But she told EW they taped "several other people" for the part, including one of the funniest men on the planet.
"Jim Carrey had come in and he was terrific, too, but I think pretty quickly we all loved the idea of Jeff," Hirshenson said.
Goldblum wasn't just brilliant in the movie, but also suggested a few changes to the script which ended up in the finished film.
The actor recently told FOX 32 that it was his idea for Dr Ian Malcolm to lure the T-Rex away from the kids with the flare in that memorable scene.
"I kind of tweaked my part and said, 'Hey, instead of just running away like the lawyer does, in fear, abject fear, can I do something kind of brave and heroic?'" Goldblum said.
"I break it open and I said, 'Let me break open that thing'. I said, 'I'm going to distract this thing while you save those kids!' It was [my idea]. Steven Spielberg is a genius and it was his idea finally to include this stupid idea of mine."
THE T-REX
The hydraulically powered T-Rex was just as scary on set as it was on the big screen.
It was 10 metres long and five metres tall and worked perfectly up until they started filming the scene where it attacks in the rain.
"The T-Rex went into the heebie-jeebies sometimes," producer Kathleen Kennedy recalled to EW.
"[It] scared the crap out of us. We'd be, like, eating lunch, and all of a sudden a T-Rex would come alive. At first we didn't know what was happening, and then we realised it was the rain. You'd hear people start screaming."
CLOSE CALL
The cast and crew had to literally batten down the hatches on the last day of filming in Kauai when Hurricane Iniki hit the Hawaiian island.
The 130 people involved with the movie huddled in a hotel ballroom for safety as Kennedy desperately searched for a way to evacuate the cast and crew from the island.
Kennedy managed to make her way to Honolulu on a small plane where she bumped into a man she vaguely recognised.
"It was the young man that flew the biplane in Raiders of the Lost Ark," Steven Spielberg recalled to EW.
"He was the pilot that was in our movie and he just happened to be a pilot of a four-engine 707, a cargo plane, and he was between flights. So Kathy arranged with him to send a large plane to the island the next day to take the cast and crew out."
SPIELBERG'S SCHEDULE MADE HIM ANGRY
Jurassic Park started filming in August 1992 on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. Unfortunately for Steven Spielberg, the post production phase of the movie clashed with Schindler's List which he'd committed to starting in Poland a few months later.
"I knew I had to be shooting in January [1993] in Poland, and so it came together awfully quickly, to the point that when I finally started shooting … in Poland, I had to go home about two or three times a week and get on a very crude satellite feed to Northern California … to be able to approve T-Rex shots," Spielberg recalled earlier this year.
"It built a tremendous amount of resentment and anger that I had to do this," he added. "That I had to actually go from what [the Schindler's List cast and crew] experienced to dinosaurs chasing Jeeps. All I can express is how angry that made me at the time."
See the trailer for the upcoming Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, below:
