Hollywood screenwriter David Koepp, who penned Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel “Jurassic Park,” has revealed that he attempted to cut Jeff Goldblum’s role of Dr. Ian Malcolm from the script.
The mathematician specialising in chaos theory character was a part of the original book and joined Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) to provide an early assessment of John Hammond’s recreated dinosaur attraction on the island of Isla Nublar.
Goldblum quickly became a fan-favourite character who would eventually become one of the franchise’s most recognised faces – leading “The Lost World: Jurassic Park” and showing up in the two most recent “Jurassic World” films.
Speaking on the Script Apart podcast recently, Koepp says he his first draft omitted Ian Malcolm altogether as he found the character so frustrating. It was Spielberg who insisted the character be worked back in:
“My first draft, I didn’t have Jeff Goldblum’s character. I turned it in, and I told [director] Steven [Spielberg] before I started, ‘That guy’s gotta go. I can’t do it, it’s too hard,’ you know? [Laughs]
‘He’s just talking for pages at a time about esoteric scientific concepts, he’s gotta go.’ So, even as I turned the draft in, Steven said, ‘I have my first note already’ — I don’t think he’d read [the draft] — he said, ‘We’ve gotta have Malcolm. Jeff Goldblum came in and just read some passages from the book and [the part] was made for him. We gotta figure it out.'”
The character remains the subject of numerous memes for his work in the film, which helped Goldblum’s career and turned him into a cultural icon with his specific cadence and line delivery.
